Fear Me (8 page)

23

The riot began the next morning.

The blacks started it. Fed up withdivoudiv he conditions and mistreatment and bullshit promises from lawyers, they seized the moment and took over the yard, disarming about twenty hacks and dousing them with hidden cans of kerosene, holding matches in their hands and calling out to the machine gunners and snipers in the towers to back off or they’d torch them.

That’s all it took.

The hacks didn’t like it, but they weren’t about to see their brother hacks toasted like wienies, so they withdrew. First thing they did after slipping back was to get on the bullhorns and promise the prisoners that the payback for this one was going to be of biblical fucking proportions.

Those guys, you had to love ‘em. Good to the last drop.

Just as the blacks were the catalyst in the yard, the whites and Hispanics were the catalysts just about everywhere else. They grabbed maintenance workers and administrative personnel and hacks on break, took over the armory and the warden’s office and pretty soon, the fight was over before it had even begun.

Shaddock Valley belonged to the inmates.

Romero was in the metal shop when it started. He could feel it in the air, tensions rising like a barometer before a hot, violent storm. Every con knew what was happening. Every con felt it, every con understood the body politic of what was coming next. By the time Romero got his head full of that stink which was the smell of freedom, baby, and the labor pains it would take to bring it to term, the three hacks in the metal shop had been beaten to the floor and the siege began.

One of them, a big hairy fellow named Knapp who looked like maybe he spent his free hours in bearskins hunting mastodon, spit out a mouthful of blood and said, “Fucking animals, you fucking animals, your time’s coming and when it does, they’ll kill every one of your baby-raping asses—”

But that’s all he got out because a wiry black guy called Skinner cracked him in the mouth with the business end of a lead pipe and Knapp the ape-man gagged out most of his teeth. He was in pain, godawful pain, but still you couldn’t get that hate out of his eyes, that leering demented hatred for the men brutalizing him. So Skinner split his head open with the pipe and a biker named Skaggs shoved him aside, and slit Knapp’s throat with a straight razor.

Blood.

Sure, there was blood running out in the yard and administration buildings, rec rooms and prison industries…pools and creeks and glistening iron rivers…but for the boys in the metal shop this was their first real taste of a hack’s blood, his death-blood and its smell was raw and meaty and metallic. They all started hollering and hooting like a pack of slat-thin dogs drooling over a joint of beef. They rushed in and kicked and stomped and pounded Knapp until he was broken and cr brandushed and mangled, pissing red like a water balloon full of crushed cherries. His head looked very much like a ripe tomato, its juice leaking everywhere.

The cons saw that, too, of course.

Saw how spoiler’s bled, how hacks went prostrate and shattered to their gods just like anyone else. Just like they all would when the governor lost his cool and told the cops,
take those fucking animals down, crush ‘em like goddamn insects and shovel what’s left into the trash. Any still crawling when it’s done, kick ‘em into their cages and lock ‘em down, dirty murdering animals, the day of reckoning is at hand for their filthy asses…

So the cons stood around the wreckage of Knapp while the other hacks moaned and swore and called their mothers whores. They stood there, eyes bright and feral, tongues wetting lips and hands clenched tightly on pipes and wrenches and shards of metal wrapped in duct tape.

Romero had seen mob ugliness before.

He knew its smell, its taste, the way it got down inside your belly and unwound the coils of your guts with cold fingers. But this…this just wasn’t acceptable. If they were going to show the DOC and the media that they were just human beings scratching for decent treatment and not blood-hungry savages, then this was not how it was done.

“You can’t do it like this, you fucking morons!” he cried out at them. “Don’t you see? Don’t any of you see? This is exactly what they expect and it’s what they want. You’re playing into their hands…”

But the cons didn’t seem to see at all.

They were all staring at Romero and that mob mentality was all over them like poison, seeping through their pores and into deep places, contaminating things and making others rot black. These were bad boys. Here were your white supremacists and Black Muslims, Hispanic triggermen and redneck sociopaths. Race had ceased to exist and the dawn-call of savagery was their inheritance. Hell’s Angels and ABs, Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples, Spanish Cobras and Nuestra Familia, all standing shoulder to shoulder, breathing in each other’s hate and exhaling a communal atavism. Their teeth were bared, spit hung from their lips, their fists were white-knuckled on weapons and in their bellies was the rumble of blood-hunger and death-hunger. Romero took a step back because, God help him, he thought they were going to drop on him in a pack. Stun him like a cow in a Chicago stockyard, hoist him up by his ankles and yank his goodies out, go charging down the corridors in an ensanguined posse, his severed head held high on a pole.

But it didn’t happen.

Skaggs stepped forward, Skinner at his side. The chief and the tribal medicine man, both splattered with blood and bits of tissue.

“You wanna stay alive, you fucking mite,” Skaggs said in a voice just as rough as scraping gravel, “then you better shut the fuck up. You better decide if you’re with us or with them, because if you ain’t with us…”

“Like he say,” Skinner piped in. “You ain’t with us…ha, ha, your death gonna be one scary motherfucker.”

Romero held his hands out. It was an ancient gesture, showing you carried no weapons. Worked good with rabid dogs and men who weren’t much above them on the evolutionary scale. “All I’m saying is that this is what those cocksuckers expect of us. They expect us to kill hacks and rape the weaklings, burn and loot and pillage…we gotta show ‘em that we’re above that, that we just want decent treatment.”

“You don’t know cock,” Skaggs said and pushed past him.

The others fell in step, brushing past Romero and staining him with blood as they passed. When they hit the outside air, they all started running. Running and shouting and looking for something or someone to bring down.

Romero sighed, looked over at the two hacks who were still alive, beaten severely, but alive. They were tied to lathes. This was the point in some shitass Hollywood flick, he knew, where the lone convict helps the hacks that would never help him.

Yeah, right.

“Just keep your fucking mouths shut,” he told them. “And maybe they’ll forget about you. It’s the best you can hope for.”

Then he turned and went to see a riot first hand. Figured he better get a good look before the police and army brought them all down and smashed them to cider like apples rotting under trees.

24

The riot.

It was quite a picture.

Cons roaming in gangs and posses with knives and pipes and razors, guns from the armory. The whites out in force along with the blacks and Hispanics. Everyone on a rampage. Three guards were dead within the first hour as long-simmering hatreds boiled over and the men found weapons in their hands. The offices were demolished. The prison industry buildings set on fire. The Ad-Seg and protective custody cells were opened and all the rats and weaklings and celebrity inmates were torn to pieces by roving mobs.

Romero made it out into the yard and it was chaos.

Utter chaos.

Helicopters were in the air and the state police were assembling outside the walls with SWAT units and tear gas and sharpshooters. The National Guard had been mobilized. The authorities were calling out over loudspeakers for the cons to surrender, for the hostages to be released. A bunch of outlaw bikers tossed the corpse of a guard over the wall in response.

But through it all, there was a loose sort of unity amongst the convicts themselves. The whites were led by Mafia soldiers and bolstered by the ABs, biker gangs, and hundreds of renegade criminals just itching for a fight. The blacks were led by a cocaine trafficker doing life who had managed to cement together all the street gangs and drug dealers and pimps. The Hispanics were led by a high-ranking member of the Mexican Mafia. Out in the yard, the whites assembled along one wall, the blacks another, and the Hispanics yet another.

But in the center, with the hostages, there were some of each.

By nightfall, these three leaders had calmed the mobs and began making demands over the loudspeakers. At first, they were ignored, but when they announced they’d kill one person for each hour this went on, they were flooded with responses.

The negotiating went on well into the night.

The prison was swept by searchlights, cordoned off by police and National Guard units. The news media was out in force, but the cops wouldn’t let them within a mile of Shaddock.

Around midnight, the authorities broke off negotiations.

Then they turned off the water.

Then the lights.

25

Romero was on the far side of the yard, watching the bonfires and the smoke billowing up into the night sky from burning buildings. The cons were still agitated, but many were drunk and stoned, laughing and cheering and talking freedom and brotherly love. Romero had been listening to speeches and crazy schemes all day. But unlike many of the others, he wasn’t naïve enough to believe any of it.

Sooner or later, this was going to meltdown and the body count would be high. Either the cons would go after each other or the cops would storm the place and take care of business.

It could come from any direction, but Romero was only concerned about Palmquist.

“I found him,” Aquintez said, out of breath from running across the yard and wherever it was he’d come from. He pulled Romero away from a group of cons smoking a joint. “I found the kid.”

“Where?”

Aquintez told him. Down in the hole. The cons had piped him, cracked his head good. He was out cold and they couldn’t revive him. They brought him up to the infirmary.

“He’s in a bad way, man,” Aquintez said. “If he ain’t dead, he’s gonna be soon. In a coma or something. You gotta see that infirmary. Fucking bodies everywhere. Some blacks are running the place, they got a couple hacks tending to the wounded.”

Romero sighed. The kid was still alive then. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? He tossed his cigarette. “This could be real bad, JoJo. That thing in him…his brother…it’s already pissed off about the beating the kid got and now this.”

“And it’s dark out,” Aquintez said. “Pitch fucking black.”

A chill went up Romero’s spine. “I’m going up there.”

But Aquintez said that wasn’t a good idea. As he passed through the yard on the way to the administration building where the infirmary was, he could hear the cops out there. It sounded like maybe they were scaling the walls, positioning themselves.

“I’m going anyway.”

Aquintez clapped him on the shoulder. “Ah, Romero, the original Latino James Cagney. Heart too big and balls twice that size. Okay, I go with you, my friend.”

But what they were going into, they had no idea.

26

It started right away.

With sirens moaning and hostage negotiators working the loudspeakers, nobody realized it until maybe it was too late. The SWAT teams were beginning the engagement, the spearhead of a larger force that would crush anything that stood in their way. By the time Romero and Aquintez got around the chapel, got a look at the administration building, they saw black forms running along the tops of the >00d in theirwall like scurrying spiders and the tear gas started dropping. Canisters were fired into the air, exploding on impact. There were bright flashes and popping, hollow explosions like the compound was under mortar attack and the gas detonated with rolling, noxious clouds. Not just outside the administration building, but out in the yard, on rooftops and walkways, just about everywhere.

And more canisters were dropping by the moment.

You could hear cons screaming and firing weapons, the reports of sniper rifles taking out prisoners at strategic points and the answering volleys of small arms fire from the convicts themselves. But in the darkness with only bonfires to see by and most of the cons drunk and stoned and confused, it was a turkey shoot. The SWAT teams had night-vision goggles and the cons had stick matches, some flashlights, and a variety of crude torches. Water cannons were hoisted atop the walls at the same time the snipers fired their first shots, many from silenced weapons. Before the enraged cons could even think of setting the hacks on fire, gouts of water hosed them down, wetting the hacks and knocking their abductors flat with high-pressure streams of water. Then tear gas. Stun grenades.

The troops moved in for the deathblow.

By that time, Romero and Aquintez had made the administration building, coughing and gagging and rubbing their eyes, steering themselves through the maze of corridors and climbing sets of steps with nothing more to see by than a penlight and the strobing flashes from outside.

“They’re tearing ’em up out there,” Aquintez said, panting.

And they were. You could hear screaming and shouting and cons begging for mercy. And the police were answering this with salvos of plastic bullets fired from automatic weapons and light machine guns.

But the screaming wasn’t only outside.

It was above them, too: on the fourth floor where the infirmary was.

They looked at each other in that churning darkness, the smell of death and teargas blowing in from outside and combining into a vile aroma with what was coming down from the fourth floor stairwell: a rancid, hot stench of blood and misery.

They started up.

More screams ringing out like church bells and just as high and low, as brassy and inhuman. They vaulted up the steps, hearing sounds and smelling things and feeling something like sheaths of needles unfolding in their bellies. In the corridor at the top, they could hear a wild, spiraling voice shattering like glass:
“Help me! Help me! Get it off me! GET THAT MOTHERFUCKER OFFA ME OH CHRIST OH JESUS YAAAHHHH—”

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But it wasn’t just that voice or the sound of something being squeezed out like a dishrag full of soapy water that stopped Romero and Aquintez, it was that screeching, strident noise that echoed out, seemed to make the windows shake and rattle in their frames. It wasn’t an animal sound or a human sound really, but maybe a little bit of both and neither. A raging, deranged shriek that faded into something like scratching black laughter, laughter filled with contempt and appetite and—Romero was thinking—a certain evil pleasure, a childish sound of glee.

Sure, that’s it,
he thought,
that’s it exactly. Damon’s on the loose and he’s having a good time just like some wicked little boy lighting cats’ tails on fire or pulling the wings off of flies.

Except it wasn’t cats or flies…but people.

Damon’s playthings.

With Aquintez behind him, they made for the infirmary door at the end of the passage. It was ripped from its hinges. And tossed like broken toy soldiers and gutted ragdolls were inmates and guards, some alive, but most dead. Some of them out of their minds, their eyes like shining ball bearings in the flashlight beam. They had seen something. Romero was sure of it and whatever it had been, it had sucked their minds dry, wrung out thought and memory and sanity in an oily slag that ran from their ears. They were mumbling and making empty sobbing sounds, staring blankly.

“Jesus,” Aquintez said. “It wasn’t like this before…it wasn’t this bad. Something…I guess something must have happened…”

Outside the entrance to the infirmary, they found the body of a con.

His head had been nearly twisted from his shoulders, both arms snapped off at the elbows, and as a humorous gesture from a bored child, his tongue and everything that held it in place had been yanked out of a chasm below his chin where it hung like a pink and bleeding necktie. They stepped over him and, oh Christ, it was even worse inside. The infirmary was a long, narrow room like a hospital ward in an old movie and this one predated even the silents by nearly a century. You could see the looted drug cabinets and supply closets.

But that had happened before Damon went on his tear.

Now the walls, the beds, the ceiling were red with splotches and streaks of blood. There were bodies and parts of them everywhere. It was a study in ghoulish creativity and the mind of a jaded, degenerate child knew no earthly bounds. Men had been dismembered. Men had been beheaded. Men had been skinned and plucked and disemboweled. Men had their bones pulled right through their skins and stacked in red, tidy heaps next to their boneless shells. Men were strung from light fixtures by ropes of their own viscera and their skins were tacked up over the windows with shards ofwit to bone driven into the plaster. A slaughterhouse and butcher shop and dissection room laid bare and ugly and stinking.

But there was one bed untouched.

One form sleeping beneath a crisp white sheet that was wet with slime, but not so much as a drop of blood had stained it or the man who slept there.

Palmquist.

Romero got close to him, close enough to touch. He found a flashlight on the floor and put it on him. The kid did not stir. His head was bandaged and the bandages were dyed red. Using Aquintez’s penlight, Romero examined the kid’s eyes. One of them was dilated like a black marble and there was no response from the light. The other pupil was the size of a pinhole.

“He’s got a concussion and probably brain damage,” Romero said in a weak voice, the stink of blood and meat and voided bowels choking him. “He could be in a coma for a day or two weeks and every night—”

That’s when Aquintez screamed.

Romero felt something swing by him like a bell rope and then Aquintez was screaming. A pink tentacle covered with tumorous suckers pulled him right off his feet and into the air.

Romero put the light up there.

He’d brushed aside spiderwebs when he first got to the bed, but now he saw they weren’t spiderwebs but wire-thin gossamer filaments of something connecting the kid and what was above him, spread over the ceiling.

Damon.

Romero let out a tiny, involuntary cry.

Aquintez was dangling up there, looped by Damon.

Palmquist’s nocturnal brother was bigger than three bed sheets strung together. Just a roiling gray mass of tissue set with a coiling network of white, fibrous growths. Dozens of opaque tubes and feelers and bloated fleshy tentacles were writhing and snaking from that miasmic horror, roiling like flatworms and maggots and corkscrewing like the tails of hogs, searching along the ceiling and tapping the individual tiles like fingers.

It was obscene. It was positively obscene.

Romero just looked up at it, empty and numb and stiff, playing the light along that mass that reached out in every direction and seemed to be growing by the moment. Those tentacl Tht ies were made of a gelid flesh that was transparent like the skin of deep-sea shrimp. You could see fluids flowing through veins and collecting in capillaries. Some of those tentacles ended in hooks and others in black depressions like mouths that dripped an acrid juice.

Romero wasn’t sure where he found the strength.

Outside, the war went on and on, but it was very distant like something heard playing from a neighbor’s TV on a summer night. Quite calmly and lucidly, Romero said, “Damon, put the man down. You know my voice, you know you can trust me…”

The thing up there surged and squirmed, its flesh broke open with blisters that weren’t blisters but flat yellow eyes set with red-slit pupils. At least two dozen of them and more opening all the time.

“Damon,” Romero said, droplets of that juice hitting him now and burning holes in his skin. He flinched, but did not waver. “Please, put the man down.”

And of all the crazy, unbelievable things, the creature did.

It set Aquintez back on his feet and Aquintez’s mouth was locked in a crooked, silent scream and his eyes were black as tidal pools. You could see where those hideous suckers had touched him, the red welts they had left, the bruising beneath the skin as blood vessels were burst from that awful suction.

Romero looked at the thing.

It looked back at him.

He tried to tell himself not to hate it, not to let his skin crawl and stomach boil with the absolute disgust and revulsion that it inspired. His aversion to it was more than physical, but spiritual. It made something in his soul wither and blight. This then was the hidden brother, the externalized other, the crawling, creeping monstrosity that swam in the scummy pools and dirty, polluted backwaters of Palmquist’s soul. A thing born of childhood terrors and nightmares, spawned in some invidious lagoon of primal human terror.

But Romero thought he maybe could control it.

Then something like a huge central mouth ringed with yellow curving fangs opened up and the beast that was Damon let go with a screeching howl of pure anger. It took Aquintez and pulled him apart, all those tentacles and tubers moving in him and through him, investigating and prodding and rending.

And that’s also when Romero moved.

He pulled a shank from inside the back of his pants and put it into Palmquist’s throat, sawed and cut until his hands were warmandheig and wet with blood and tears ran from his eyes.

Oh, Danny, oh Jesus, kid, I’m sorry…

Damon dropped what was left of Aquintez.

He let out an echoing, bone-rattling roar: freight trains and tornadoes and cluster bombs and wailing sirens, an explosion of raw, shrill noise that put Romero to his knees, made his eardrums implode and his nose bleed and his heart seize up and filled him with a manic need to claw out his own eyes.

And then Damon fell.

Fell and blanketed Romero, wanting to crush and kill and squeeze and tear…but as Palmquist died, so did his brother. Damon came apart in a rain of filth and blood, scum and offal and squirming, squealing things and then was nothing but a slimy, gelatinous pool.

And then the lights came on.

What was left of Damon steamed and bubbled and evaporated.

Romero shielded his eyes as the SWAT team came through the door. Maybe they saw the carnage and maybe they saw the knife in his hand. Regardless, they did not hesitate.

Romero opened his mouth.

And about thirty bullets went through him, dropping him dead next to Palmquist’s bed. He let out a final, wracking breath and died. And with what he had seen, it was almost a blessing.

The riot was over.

And so was Damon.