Doomsday Rebirth novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Cage

The cardigan had a hole in the left elbow.

Someone had pulled it from the shop's laundry line, or from a pile in the census van, and set it on a pillow for a man they had not caught yet.

The young guard stood in the corridor behind me, shifting his weight.

"The Commissioner says it's only a precaution," he said. "He says you'll understand. For the sick."

"Does it lock from the outside?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Who built it?"

"The deputy ordered it. Mr. Kellington."

I picked up the cardigan and folded it over my arm.

Then I walked back up the freight stairs, through the white door, past six cooks who were pretending not to watch me.

My axe was still on the steel table.

I took it, and I went down again.

"Ma'am," the guard said. "Ma'am, I don't think you should."

"You can tell him I did it. I'd like you to."

I put the blade against the lock, where the hasp met the frame, and I swung.

It rang through the whole sub-basement.

It took six swings.

The lock went first, then the hasp, and then I wedged the edge under the hinge pins and drove them out one at a time, until the barred door hung off its frame and fell across the cot.

The guard had not moved.

He was nineteen, maybe, with a county vest too big for him.

"You didn't stop me," I said.

"No, ma'am."

"Why?"

"My little brother's rain sick," he said. "They put him in the sick ward on the second night." His voice cracked. "They won't let me see him."

"What's your brother's name?"

He told me.

I wrote it on my wrist with the grease pencil from my apron pocket, and I said I would ask.

The van took me home in the dark.

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