Drawing Dead Read Online Free Page A

they are, they’re not from here. And I don’t mean Chicago.”
    “You still think it’s this…tribal thing?”
    “Only way I could reason it out, girl. I’m not saying I
did
reason it out, just that I couldn’t come up with anything that made more sense. Ever since I got out of that basement in the MCC, it’s been there. Like a brand, only it’s…alive, somehow. I can feel it when it burns. And when I look, I can see it, too. But I’m the only one who can.”
    “Except for me.”
    “Except for you,” the urban mercenary agreed. “And I have a guess about that, too.” He touched one of a series of buttons on the underside of his desk. “Just wait a minute….”

    TRACKER ENTERED the squid-inked back room as sure-footed as if it was a patch of sunny daylight.
    “Yes,” he said, answering an unspoken question.
    “But you can’t…I don’t know…read it?” Tiger asked.
    “A tribal symbol, maybe,” the Indian answered. “But no tribe known to me.”
    “Tracker saw it first. That’s how I know it has to mean
something.
Remember Buddha’s speech about OGs? He wasn’t wrong. There’s a five-man core—you and Tracker have your own work, and that comes first for each of you. So you don’t get a vote on what we do, but you’re not bound by any vote we take, either. You sign on or you don’t, job by job, always your choice.”
    “Just because you’re late to a party, that doesn’t mean—”
    “It is not the timing,” Tracker interrupted, managing to do so with an ingrained courtesy that stopped Tiger from being offended. Stepping closer, the Indian said, “You and I, we each have our own tribe. Our loyalty is first to our tribe, always. Is that not so?”
    Tiger flipped her striped mane in silent agreement.
    “Perhaps this is why only the two of us can see that strange blue brand. It
must
be tribal, but not from this earth.”
    Cross surprised them both by slowly nodding his agreement. “I don’t know exactly when it was…put on me, but I know it had to be when we were down in that prison basement, trying to trap that…thing, whatever it was.”
“Goon squad,” Banner side-spoke to Cross, while looking in the direction the guards were running. “Must be some weird stuff going on over there again.”
    “What’s ‘over there’ mean?”
    “That whole block,” Banner answered, nodding his head in that direction.
    “Upstairs, it’s PC. Middle is for the psychos. Down is the Death House. Two rows of twenty cells each…with the Green Room in the middle.”
    “Green Room?”
    “Used to be the gas chamber, long time ago. Now it’s just an empty room. No executions here. For that, they have to move you to a Level Seven.”
    At the words “Death House,” a concrete-colored blotch semi-materialized high up on the wall behind the two men. As the goon squad moved in, “Death House” was repeated at below-human-threshold. Then…
    “Hit!”
    The guards began to club a prisoner repeatedly on his unprotected head, continuing even after the man slumped to the ground, blood running out of both ears.
    A mural flashed on the overlooking wall. The ace and jack of clubs appeared, then immediately vanished, leaving some convicts blinking. And the TV monitors blank.
Cross sat next to Banner at the mess table. His mouth barely moved, but his body posture was so intense and urgent that other convicts moved as far away as possible.
    Finally, Cross stood up. Slowly and deliberately, he walked into the traditional No Man’s Land of cleared space between whites and blacks. A guard started to step forward but stopped in his tracks as Nyati arose from the black table and moved toward Cross.
    The entire mess hall was silent. Dead silent. The guards froze, knowing that if a full-scale race war jumped off in that enclosed space, they weren’t going to make it out alive.
    When Cross and Nyati were close enough to bump noses, Cross started to speak, his words inaudible to all but the leader of the United