Blood Cell

by Shaun Tennant

  Mikey Woodcock, the nice guy everyone loved and counted on, who had spread the word to start this thing, was lying dead in a pool of blood, his neck slashed open. He was one of many. The inmates fanned out to take stock of the damage. There were many dead, most from gunshots suffered before the guards were pulled down from the balcony. Others had been killed by the Dirtbags’ shanks, and over a dozen were badly injured, but still conscious. Santos Vega barely noticed them, however, as he slogged through the bodies and the blood.

  He didn’t see a riot that had needlessly killed a lot of men. He saw a riot that had failed to kill the one man who needed killing.

  Leo Jimenez was gone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Santos couldn’t believe it. Over a hundred prisoners go nuts and not one of them puts Leo down? Santos eyed Ox Werden, who was not only alive, but seemed uninjured. Ox still held his shank in his hand, but he stood alone. His lieutenants were scattered around the room in worse shape than he was. Ox grinned at Santos. Santos wondered if the grin meant that the bikers had helped Leo escape. No way had the guards gotten him out before Delman put the pod on lockdown. No way. Santos wanted to believe that. He wanted to order a search of the whole pod, find the bastard, but there were more pressing issues right now.

  Carlos climbed up on a table to address the prisoners. “Listen up! We have just taken control of pod C.” The crowd roared like a rock concert. “It’s all fun and games until a guard loses an eye, right?” It was a joke, but he shot a look in the direction of the two captive guards, tied down on his left. Carlos continued: “A riot means that the other guards from the other pods are gonna come in here in force, I’m talking riot gear and tear gas, live ammunition. They’ll be coming in here soon. Unless you want to give this place back to the screws in the next half hour we need to lock this place up tight.”

  “Why a half hour?” Someone shouted, but Carlos couldn’t see who.

  “Emergency lockdown,” answered Santos, climbing up next to Carlos. “They want the guards to come in like a SWAT team, organized. They’re afraid that if the guards want to save their friends, they’d come rushing in here one at a time. So the lockdown seals the whole pod for an hour, to give them time to assemble their forces before they can come in.”

  “How do you know the guards had a chance to hit the lockdown?”

  “They didn’t. We sent our boy Delman to do it for them.” As Santos said it, he realized that he hadn’t seen Delman since he climbed up to the office.

  “Hey Delman?” He called out. The inmates turned, looking around, but Delman didn’t turn up. Santos turned to Charlie. “Go up to the office, see if he’s still there.” Charlie headed off to find an upturned table he could climb to reach the balcony.

  Santos took a look around. The room was littered with bodies, some of them moving but most not. There were also a hundred still-living men, all of them gathered to listen to him, his soldiers. Even his enemies stood and waited for him to speak. Santos was in charge now, the one and only king of this twisted Camelot. It was time to issue his orders.

  “We need to break into teams. First, we got three points the guards can enter: the door from the yard, the office upstairs, and the hallway along the east wall. That’s the worst, because it has direct access everywhere else, so we need to get in there and block it off right at the central core. Use these tables—they’re good, heavy metal. If you can make a wall using anything from the weight room, do it. We want to be impenetrable.”

  Santos knew that he needed to keep the peace. He had operated on the outside for over a decade before he got busted, and had survived on his ability to appease his allies, his enemies, and the police. So it wasn’t a stretch of character at all when he looked at Ox Werden and said “Ox, you want to run the operation to set up the barricades? Take as many men as you need, whatever tools you need. We want this place airtight.”

  Ox nodded, waved to his crew and started to round up workers. As they broke off, Santos saw that one of the bikers, maybe Paul, was not among them. Then Santos saw him on the floor. Santos turned back to the crowd.

  “Next, we need to clean this place up. Separate the living from the dead and pile the dead up some place we won’t smell them. If we do this right we’ll be here a long time and we don’t want to live with a bunch of corpses. Anything you find, collect it together. Weapons, guard shit like swipe cards and handcuffs, keep it somewhere that it’s easy to get if we need something.” He waved his hand, slicing an invisible line to separate the group in half, and spoke to the half on the left. “You get on that. Go.” They started to walk around the cafeteria.

  “The rest of you, we need to know how long we can hold out in here. I want this thing to last for at least a week. I want to negotiate with the warden, force that fucker to work for us. But it won’t work if we run out of food after breakfast. Go through the kitchen, count the food. Count how many of us there are.” That was all Santos could think of. Carlos added a thought.

  “They might shut off the water later, so fill up every bottle and bucket you can find.”

  Santos nodded. “Go!” The last of the inmates went to work, most of them heading for the kitchen. “You really think they’d kill the water?”

  As he asked the question, the power went out. For a moment, they were in the black, but then the emergency backups kicked in. In the corners of the room, small, dim squares of light came on. It was hardly enough to see by at first, but in time, everyone’s eyes adjusted and the work resumed.

  Ox Werden, Sonny Ramsden, and Frankie Frisby gathered a bunch of men by the door to the service hallway. With a key they got off Norris, they slipped into the hallway. Ox looked around, nervously. The double doors to his left, which headed into the centre of the prison’s star-shape, were shut tight. Ox found it hard to believe that the guards, or cops, would just sit back and wait to come in here. He expected guards to jump out at him, and the dim emergency lights made him even more on edge. He looked at the faces of the men he was with. He had almost twenty guys, and had to strain his eyes against the darkness to see who they were. Not surprisingly, they were all white guys. That’s how Ox liked things and everybody knew it. He waved for the group to come into the hallway behind him. Frankie shut the door, sealing them off from the cafeteria.

  “That cocksucker just got Paulie killed and now he’s giving me orders.”

  “It ain’t right, Ox,” said Sonny.

  “For now, we’re going to do what Santos said. We’re gonna block those doors right there and keep the heat off. Then we gonna take over.”

  “We’re gonna keep fighting?” The speaker was a guy named Eddie Angel who was known for sucking up to the guards and being spineless. Eddie wasn’t wearing his shirt, but rather had it balled up and held to his nose. Ox couldn’t believe how weak this guy was. His nose probably wasn’t even broken.

  “Yeah, you fuck, and you’re going keep your trap shut and help us or you’ll be lying beside Paulie.” Ox didn’t have the patience for this. After a pause, he smacked Eddie in the side of the face. “Breathe through your mouth.” He turned back to the crowd.

  “Everyone, grab all of the tables in the mess hall that are close. Square tables. Leave the round ones.” Then Ox turned to his trusted allies, Sonny and Frankie. “You two take like five guys, go get those heavy cables from the weight machines and anything wires or whatever from the phone company that you can use to tie these tables together. I’ll stay right here and get the tables in the right place.”

  “You got it,” said Sonny, tipping his head to the side to bring Ox into a private conversation. Ox looked to the others.

  “Go!” He walked a little ways down the hall with Sonny, while Frankie opened the door again and pulled a few guys out of the group to go with him. “What you want?”

  “I saw who got Paul. It was that guard, Norris. When he was up top, before they got his rifle, he was just firing into the crowd. I saw him fire.”

  “You saw him shoot Paulie?”


  “Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Okay. Norris isn’t going anywhere. We’ll get him once this is blocked off.”

  “Ox-“

  “What?”

  “Santos wants the guards for hostages.”

  “Think I care what he wants? One hostage is just as good as two.”

  “Alright, man.”

  The pair shook hands, and Ox headed over to the doors to figure out how the hell he was going to build a barricade.

  Half an hour later, the work was done. Ox had blocked off all access from the central core. First, he knocked the control panel off the wall, hoping to screw up the locks. Then he jammed wedges around the door to make it harder to open and tied the doorknobs together. They didn’t have any welding torches to seal the doors completely, but they did have soldering guns, also from the closet, so Ox flooded each of the hinges with tons of solder. Next, they jammed a two-hundred pound steel table, on its side, against the doors to prevent them from swinging in, and then lined the hallway with stacks of tables, three deep and three high, to put thousands of pounds of weight in front of the doors. They wired the tables together with the cables, and even tied them off onto the doorknobs.

  There were similar builds going on in front of the guards’ office and the doors that led outside to the yard. In the office they had the benefit of using the walls, so team carried a table up the stairs to the balcony and maneuvered it through the doorway and into the office. Once the table was past the office doors, it was turned right-side-up again, and its width was wider than the doorway. In the confined space, you couldn’t open the outer door because of the table, and the table butted up against the far wall. They used the soldering gun again, then piled the table with weights from the weight room.

  In the foyer outside the cafeteria, they needed to block the double-doors leading to the yard. This was the widest, most open space they had to barricade. Eventually someone thought to stand tables on end like dominoes and line them from the doors all the way to the far wall. Since the doors swung inward, there was no way they’d budge.

  When Santos arrived at the first barricade to look over the work, Ox was just finishing. He had a few of guys crawling around in the stacks of tables, actually screwing them together with power drills. Even if the cops cut through the doors with torches, they wouldn’t be able to move the barricades, and would have to cut through the front table before they could crawl through fifteen feet of narrow spaces between the stacks. Overall, it was genius. If the cops wanted in, they had to leave themselves exposed, without any space to hold up shields. And only the smallest couple of cops would ever be able to fit through.

  Santos looked it over and nodded. Ox wanted to smack him. Here he was, following that greasy Santos’s orders, and doing a great job, and the guy wouldn’t even say anything. Santos studied the arrangement some more, then turned to Ox. “Screw into the walls, too. Tie it into the concrete.”

  Smartass. “I was gonna,” said Ox.

  “Someday we’ll get caught, they’ll take this place back. I say we make it hard as possible to rebuild.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  The men didn’t have any more to say, and Santos didn’t hesitate to walk away. He had other barricades to check on.

  Charlie emerged from the darkness of the mess hall and closed in tight to Santos, so they could speak quietly.

  “I found Delman upstairs,” Charlie said.

  “And?”

  “He’s dead. And the last anyone can remember is that new guy Josh following him up there.”

  “Josh,” said Santos, “I guess we know what side he picked.”

  It was five o’clock. The hour was up; the lockdown was over. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the warden to send in his dogs.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Maurice Quinn entered the restaurant through the side door. He was hoping to avoid the media. Of course, he didn’t have any reason to think that the media would be staking out La Plaisanterie, but the warden clearly wasn’t thinking straight. Fucking French cuisine restaurant. Quinn didn’t want to eat, he doubted he would have an appetite for the next week. But he’d had a call, and he knew it was best if he did what he was told. A prison warden’s main job is not to maintain the penitentiary; it’s to maintain the status quo for the politicians. A warden who ignores orders from the top is out of a job. A warden who does so after he lost one-fifth of his prison in a riot he may have instigated is out of a job and the target of a Senate hearing. This meeting had been arranged by Neil Banks himself, and it had been more than a year since Quinn had spoken directly to anyone as important as Premier Banks.

  It had been hell getting to town, a drive that usually only takes a couple minutes. Despite the northern location, it seemed like Pittman had been struck by a monsoon. Quinn had been forced to drive at a crawl, and even going that slowly he had still come close to going into the ditch on more than one corner. Quinn’s own inconvenience was irritating, but the storm was also holding up the reinforcements who had been called in to respond the crisis in C Pod. The radio had reports of crashes on several nearby highways.

  Quinn hadn’t brought an umbrella to work, so he pulled his jacket over his head before climbing out of his SUV. He came in through a fire door in the same hallway with the restrooms. From there, he came out into the middle of the seating area and had to go to the maitre d’ and ask for his table. Even though Quinn had always made sure he was in the political loop, he had no idea who this man was that he was supposed to meet. He didn’t even have a name. All he had were instructions from Neil Banks to show up at eight and listen to the man who would meet him there. The reservation was in Quinn’s name. Nice touch, that was. If anyone ever found out that Maurice Quinn had made a reservation at a swanky restaurant only hours after the riot, he’d be up shit creek with the media. Someone probably knew that, and had planned it that way. The maitre d’ took Quinn’s name and guided him to a small table for two, rather isolated in the back corner of the restaurant near the entrance to the kitchen. The other man, whoever he was, was already waiting for him.

  Quinn didn’t know this man. He certainly wasn’t from Banks’ staff, Quinn knew everyone who was in the loop. And he wasn’t from any of the police forces either. This man was a stranger. He had black hair, hard to tell how long, slicked back neatly along his head, running down the back of his neck. He had plain features, nothing particularly ugly or handsome about him. His face was a little gaunt, however, his cheekbones poking out like patio stones that settled on an angle with the corners jutting out. He had dark circles under his eyes, very dark in fact. The restaurant was quite dim, but this man looked like he was being lit for a Universal monster movie. He wore a nice black suit with a blue-grey shirt, and no tie.

  But the thing that struck Quinn most was the colour of the man’s skin. He was without a doubt, the palest person Quinn had ever seen. If not for the garbage-bag-black of the man’s hair, Quinn would have thought him albino. As the maitre d’ brought Quinn to his table, the man didn’t look up. He was studying the wine list.

  “Here you are, sir.” The maitre d’ said, to Quinn.

  “Thanks,” said Quinn, sitting down. Must look polite.

  Only then did the stranger look at Quinn. He looked Quinn straight in the eyes. Quinn was surprised by two things at that moment, two completely distinct thoughts, occurring simultaneously in his mind. One was that the man had an eye colour Quinn had never seen before. They were slate grey. Many people have grey eyes, but they always have traces of other colours, pale blues or greens. This man’s irises could have been made of concrete.

  The second thought, the more unnerving one, was more unconscious, harder for Quinn’s mind to express in a clear and rational thought. It was the sense that this man was reading Quinn like a computer hard drive, scanning and judging him with a glance. He felt invaded by the man’s eyes, penetrated. He was forced to look away from those eyes, look down at the man’s suit again. He had ch
ills in his spine, in the base of his neck. And somehow, he felt like looking down represented a loss, like the man’s eyes and willpower had beaten Quinn’s own.

  “Maurice Quinn? Warden Maurice Quinn?” The man asked. He had a funny accent. It wasn’t very noticeable; he’d probably immigrated as a child. His English was flawless, but definitely not his first language.

  “Yes, and I’m curious as to who you are.”

  “My name is Lupei Negrescu.” Quinn knew that if ended with –escu, the guy was Romanian.

  “And what can I do for you today, Mr. Negrescu?”

  Negrescu smiled, and raised a finger to tell Quinn to wait a moment. Quinn couldn’t tell why. A moment later, the door to the kitchen swung open and a waitress appeared. She came over to ask about their drinks. Negrescu ordered a bottle of 1995 Bordeaux that sounded very expensive.

  “Do you need some more time for your meal orders?” The waitress asked.

  “No, we’re ready,” said Negrescu. “I’ll have the fattest steak you’ve got.”

  “And how would you like that prepared?”

  “Blue.” The waitress did her best to not make a face, and turned toward Quinn, who hadn’t even opened his menu.

  “Mr. Quinn will have the thinnest soup you have, because he’s not very hungry but he’d like to warm up.” Quinn was put on the spot, and just nodded in agreement. The waitress smiled and said she’d be back with the wine. Whoever this man was, he had money. The wine he’d ordered was at the very bottom of the wine list, the best stuff they had. But that made sense. If this man was able to arrange a meeting by going through a man like Banks, he had to be loaded.

  “Mr. Negrescu-“ Quinn started.

  “Oh yes, what I want from you. Tell me, Maurice, what happened at your prison today.”

  “I’m sure you know.”

  “Tell me. From the beginning.”

  This guy gave Quinn the creeps, but Quinn was here on request of his boss, so he figured he had better tolerate the stranger. “It started pretty normal. Halfway through the day, I got some bad news-“