Page 185 of Red Rooster

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“Hold the bars with both hands, like that, yes. I believe all the metal’s connected. Conducive, that way,” Val had said. “And just wait. This might take a moment.” He’d wrapped his own hands around his bars, as well as he could, so his thick cuffs were touching the steel.

“Wait for what?”

“You’ll know it when it happens.”

That had been…how long ago? He didn’t know.

He’d never been electrocuted before.

Fuck.

As awareness returned, he realized that he’d let go of the bars at some point during his fit. Seizure. Whatever it was.

Rooster blinked open blurry eyes and saw that extra lights had been turned on overhead, so bright they hurt – or maybe that was the aftereffects of electrocution.

Voices echoed off the stone walls. Shuffle of feet, clank and creak of his cell door opening.

He lifted his hands and saw they were trembling. Not only that, but the shock seemed to have reversed Red’s pain-suppressing magic. His entire left side was alive with hurt.

Still, it wasn’t the worst off he’d ever been.

His vision finally settled in time to see that three guards had come down; two were headed for the cell on the end, and one had come in to see why he was spasming on the ground.

“Shit,” the guy said, leaning low over Rooster, not protecting his sidearm at all. “Do you think…agh!”

Not his most impressive performance, and it hurt like hell, but the guard ended up unconscious on the floor, and Rooster got shakily to his feet with the man’s gun in his hand. He bent down to retrieve the stun baton from his belt, too. Armed it…and caught the first of the other two guards in the face with it when he turned to see what all the noise was about.

He turned the gun on the other.

“Wait,” Val rasped. He’d pushed himself up to a sitting position from his electrified sprawl on the floor, but he shook like a newborn foal. The crazy fuck was smiling, though. “Leave them alive. P-p- damn it.Please.” He gave a few wheezy coughs. “I need to…to…”

Rooster cracked the man across the temple with the gun instead, and he dropped like a bag of hammers to lay beside his twitching colleagues. “What’s the plan here?” He ached all over, and it felt like his teeth were vibrating, he couldn’t stop shaking, but adrenaline was as powerful a drug as any. And as his head cleared by the second, Rooster knew the urge to move. If they were making a break for it, it had to be now, and it had to be fast.

“Cuffs,” Val panted, with a gesture that was either meant to jangle them, or was just a spasm.

“Keys?”

“Check them.”

Unsteadily, hurrying and clumsy, he did, and hit pay dirt.

“The collar first,” Val instructed when Rooster knelt in front of him. “Watch the electrodes.”

Therewereelectrodes, he saw, more than a dozen, tiny round things trailing green wires, stuck down the back of Val’s neck, across his shoulders, and down his chest. And inside the cuffs and the collar, there were spikes too, he saw, leaving bloody scratches on Val’s pale skin.

“Jesus Christ, what is this?” It was mostly rhetorical. And partly a reaction to the smell. Up close like this, it became readily apparent that no one had allowed Val to bathe in averylong time.

“It’s a shock collar,” Val explained with a weak laugh. “Like for a dog.”

“Yeah. I got that.”

The metal was new, untarnished, and it opened with a quick turn of the key. Val hissed as Rooster drew it away, and they didn’t havetime. This was taking toolong.

“Here.” Rooster moved one of Val’s trembling hands up to the guy’s own collarbone, and the electrodes there. “Pull those off while I get the cuffs.”

He complied with a soft grunt of effort.

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