Undercover Prison King novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Night Shift

Sawyer did not wake the boy in cell 31 gently.

He put a hand over the boy's mouth, bent down, and said in his ear, "Not a sound. I'm moving you."

The boy's eyes went wide and wet.

"I'm not here to hurt you. Get your shoes."

The grey-haired man in cell 9 was already sitting up in the dark with his coat on.

He looked like he had been expecting the knock for weeks.

Wicks only sighed and set down his book.

"Took you long enough," the old man said.

They went in a line down the dark corridor, Sawyer in front with the laminated pass held up to every camera.

A guard glanced at it and looked away.

The pass opened the infirmary wing, and the red-cross door was already unlocked.

The doctor stood in the middle of the dim ward with her arms folded, still in her white coat.

Her glasses reflected the one lamp.

"You brought all three," she said.

"Sallow wanted them dead."

"I know what he wanted. I have the certificates in my pocket."

She pulled out three typed forms, each already signed with her name.

"I've carried these every night for a week, waiting for someone to bring me the men instead of the bodies."

"You made a scene in the hall."

"The camera made a scene. I was keeping you alive."

He stared at her.

"If I'd talked to you in front of the captain like a friend, you'd have been Dellis by morning," she said.

"You're quick."

"You're late." She turned to the others. "Isolation room. Move."

The isolation room was a steel-lined cell at the back of the ward with a lock only she held the key to.

She wrote QUARANTINE: SUSPECTED TB on three charts in her quick square hand and taped a biohazard sign to the glass.

"Nobody comes in without a mask and my signature," she said. "Captain Hargis has never read a chart in his life."

The boy was crying silently into his sleeve.

Wicks put a hand on his shoulder and steered him toward a cot.

"Count's at one and two," the doctor said to Sawyer, low. "The orderlies are on break until the second round. You have an hour."

"For what?"

"For your back."

She took him into the glass-walled office at the end of the ward and locked the door.

He peeled off the grey shirt.

Welts ran across his shoulders and ribs, five dark bars already turning purple.

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