Siege of Stone by Williamson Chet

Author:Williamson, Chet [Williamson, Chet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2012-07-01T19:23:26+00:00

Chapter 27

Joseph was immediately remanded to Hixton Prison, which in itself would have been a nightmare of bureaucracy, but was made far worse by the violence that had swept through the facility as the result of the escape of Kevin Brady, the IRA terrorist. Though Joseph did not hear the story of what had happened, he had seen a number of dead and wounded men, guards and inmates alike, carried past the remand area on stretchers to waiting ambulances.

Though no one made reference to it as he was being processed into custody, he knew all too well what had happened. The Prisoner—his Prisoner—the one who they had nearly found in New York and then again in Utah, had been here. Joseph had actually seen him for the first time, down that dark street where the British government's trap had been set. The man hadn't looked in Joseph's direction, but Joseph had known him nonetheless. He had been in profile, standing across the street from the parked van, and in the street light's glow Joseph saw his face, the same Christ-like face he had seen in his dreams.

And then the van had driven around the corner, and the man had walked into the wall.

At first Joseph couldn't believe that he had seen it. He looked at where the man had disappeared, but there was no door, no opening into the thick stone. He felt all around the mortar holding the heavy rocks in place, but there were no crevices at all.

Through the wall? Could the man actually have gone through the wall? Joseph stood there, staring at the solid wall, thinking about Newton's laws of motion and Lavoisier's law of conservation of mass, about entropy and density and the possibility of molecules in one solid object passing through and around the molecules of another, and thinking that maybe he was going crazy and hadn't seen this after all, and that it was just another one of those stupid dreams, when the sirens started blaring, and the soldiers were around the corner and on top of him.

He had tried the bullshit looking-for-sex story, but they hadn't bought it, and now here he was, remanded, fingerprinted, photographed, deloused, and garbed in a prison jumpsuit, being walked to a cell through one of the oldest and grimiest prison halls he had ever had the misfortune to see. The two guards with him were pissed as hell, yet somehow delighted to have gotten their hands on one of the blokes who had aided in the assault on their prison, and possibly left several of their comrades, maybe even their best friends, dead.

"We've got a right special cell for you, Mister John Doe, terrorist extraordinaire," the more talkative of the pair said, giving "extraordinaire" an outrageously phony French accent. "'Cause of all this fuss your goddamn pals made, we can't put you in with the general population, so we're gonna put you in Longneck Peter's cell. Not a soul down in that wing, not in years. You'll be all by your goddamn self, just you and Peter.

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