“Let’s move,” Caxton said, and Gert nodded eagerly.
They made their way slowly back toward the gate that led to the Hub. There was a thick crowd around the warden’s body back there—it seemed more than a few prisoners had enough of a grudge against Augie Bellows to want to defile her corpse. The very thought sickened Caxton, but she knew there was no way she could stop so many of them. She also had more important things to do.
“Did you see Malvern leave?” she asked Gert. “Do you know which way she went?”
Gert shook her head. “I was too busy trying not to get killed.”
Caxton sighed and pointed at the ceiling. “Clara was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear her. Let’s get someplace quieter so she can try again.” The two of them headed deeper into the prison, toward the Hub. Rioting prisoners filled the hallway, but they didn’t seem organized or dangerous. Some of them actually looked like they were having a good time.
Then Caxton saw the flames, and she knew there was going to be trouble. Up in the Hub someone had found a bunch of filing cabinets and dragged them into the center of the room. Caxton had no idea what the cabinets contained, but she knew any facility like SCI-Marcy had to be stuffed full of paperwork. Prisoners were pulling out files and setting them alight, maybe with the intention of burning down the prison—maybe because they just wanted to see them burn. They’d built up a couple of pretty good bonfires already. Craning her head around to peer through the massed bodies there, she saw others filing in and out of the armory. They must have been disappointed to find the guns all destroyed, but they were arming themselves anyway with batons, with pepper spray, and with stun guns. More women were streaming into the Hub all the time, coming from the other dorms, and despite the smoke from the fires the central room was rapidly filling up. It would be next to impossible to get through there.
“Come on,” she told Gert. “We’ll try another way.”
She turned—and then stopped. Because there was a woman, a huge woman with a butch haircut, looking right at her. One of her former cellmates from when she’d been housed with the general population.
“Hey, I know you—you’re that ex-cop,” the woman said. She didn’t sound particularly unfriendly. She and Caxton had never bothered each other much. Caxton nodded, tried to smile pleasantly, and pushed past.
She was not surprised, though, when the crowd noise died around her, or when some of the women in the hallway started moving toward her, very nonchalantly, with no obvious violent intent.
Every woman in the prison had a reason to hate the police. They’d all been arrested, after all, by cops. A sizable fraction of them were willing to do something about that resentment.
“Run,” she shouted to Gert. She started to follow her own advice—and then a pair of thick arms grabbed her from behind. She managed to break free, even with only one good arm, but someone else tripped her and a third convict grabbed her bad arm and twisted it behind her back.
All around her women were moving in, shanks appearing in their hands, or just bare fists drawing back to hit her. She tried to fight her way out, but the pain searing through her arm kept her from making any headway. Already she could smell nothing but unwashed bodies, and the light was growing dim—
Then she heard a hissing sound and a meaty thud and Gert was spinning through the crowd, causing screams. Her pepper spray flicked across half a dozen eyes and her baton crashed down on wrists holding shanks, sending the makeshift knives clattering on the floor. She pushed her way in and got her shoulder under Caxton’s good armpit, then levered her up out of the mass of bodies.
“Get the fuck back or you’ll be looking at a whole thirty-one flavors of this shit,” Gert growled, her voice low and angry. Even Caxton shrank back from that voice.