Bounty Hunter

Chapter 30

Joe noticed two things as soon as he woke. First, every muscle ached. Second, someone was kicking him. He swung out with his hand and grabbed his attacker's ankle and rolled, knocking the person off their feet and onto the floor with a resounding thud.

"Hey!" a man yelped.

Joe ignored his protesting muscles and pushed himself to his feet. Well, he tried. The room around him spun so badly, he had to settle on a knee. When his double-vision aligned into a single view of his world, he focused first on the man shoving away from him.

"You didn't need to knock me down. I thought you were dead," he said, rubbing his butt.

"Take a pulse next time," Joe growled, and looked around. He was in a dark room, lit only by sunlight coming through small square holes positioned high in one wall. The other three walls were comprised of bars. He counted four other people in the cell with him, all watching him.

"Where am I?" Joe commanded with more vigor than he felt.

"You're in the Devil's Playground," the man said.

The name was familiar, but it took a few seconds for his thoughts to bubble up through his mucky brain. "I'm in Shiprock."

"Of course. Where else would you be?" the man said.

Joe took a deep breath and made a second attempt at standing. His legs wobbled, and he reached out for a bar to stabilize himself.

"Don't touch—"

Electricity shot through Joe's hand and through his body. He fell back, landing hard on the floor.

"—that," the man finished. "The bars are electrified."

Joe shot the prisoner a hard glance, and pushed himself to his feet once more. As he found his footing, he cracked his neck from side to side, remembering how he'd ended up here. After stunning him at Sara's, they'd shot him again every time he'd awakened. He remembered they shot him in the arms and legs for fun. Blasters set on stun wouldn't permanently maim, but it didn't mean getting shot didn't hurt like hell, and the entry wounds left nasty burns. If his captors had any sort of decency, they would've knocked him out with a sleeper's patch, which would've kept him out until they removed it. Clearly, the Sloan brothers and their murcs didn't know what "decency" was. They needed an introduction to Rex's dictionary and Joe's fists.

How long had Joe been out? Were Sara and the kids still okay? He knew Nick was as wiry as they came, which meant the kids should be safe as long as they stayed hidden. But Sara...there was no telling what Sloan would do to her because of her friendship with Joe. He had to get back to Cavil and break her free, assuming she was even still alive.

And then there were the Sloan brothers...he would see them both dead. He had a plan: save the Swintons, then kill the Sloans. He just needed to figure out how to get out of this cell and back to the Midlands first.

His first steps were small and shaky. The movement made his muscles burn, but the pain receded with each step, and soon he found his body responding to his commands. Joe eyed each of the other prisoners as he walked by them in the cell. These men were the dregs of society. One had gang tattoos on his neck. Another had the calloused knuckles of a professional brawler. One had the telltale needle marks of a druggie.

The man who'd kicked Joe awake walked alongside him. He was the scrawniest of the four but had shifty eyes. Likely, a card shark or professional thief, not that there was any real difference between the two professions. "I'm Terry. What's your name?"

"Hav—" He remembered he wasn't wearing his exoshield, and these men looked of the sort that Havoc often brought to face justice. "Call me Joe."

"What're you in for, Joe?" Terry asked.

"I ticked off the wrong person," Joe replied.

"Yeah, me too," Terry said.

"Me, too," the druggie added.

"Same," the other two prisoners chimed in.

Joe looked up at the small windows, which were placed about nine feet off the floor. He walked up to them and jumped. He fitted two fingers into one hole, reached out and placed two fingers into another, then pulled himself up so that he could look out. The sun was blinding, but when his eyes adjusted, he recognized the labor camps outside. He'd delivered more than a few targets to the Devil's Playground, an area so deep in the hot bowels of the Shiprock zone that the only folks who lived there were the murcs who managed the workers in the copper mines.

He dropped down and walked around the cell, searching for weak points in the bars. The Devil's Playground was rumored to be the only prison with no successful escape attempts. It wasn't because the camp was impossible to break out of—quite the contrary. They didn't even put up fences around it. Rather, it was because the prison was surrounded by a dry desert that reached temperatures of one hundred and thirty degrees during the day. A person would die of thirst within ten hours in that kind of heat.

Joe turned to Terry. "How long have you been here?"

"Three days myself. I was the newbie until they dragged you in today."

"How often do they send us into the mines?" Joe asked.

Terry frowned, confused. "I've never been in the mines."

"We're not going to the mines," said the tattooed prisoner glumly. "We're fodder for the mutants on the dance floor." He nodded down the hallway.

Chills climbed Joe's spine when he realized exactly where he was. He wasn't just in the Devil's Playground. Sloan had sent him to the Devil's Dance Floor.