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by Richard Stephenson

  With the stench of Tank’s morning bowel movement still lingering in their cell, Richard somehow managed to get dressed and put his running shoes on without passing out. A few minutes later, the guard came around and unlocked the cell doors so they could make the trip to the chow hall for breakfast. Richard and Tank always ran before breakfast so they hit the track instead.

  After breakfast they returned to their block, showered and decided to play some basketball. Some other skinheads already had managed to secure their own court. Tank and Richard sat in the bleachers and joined in a conversation between two other guys named Spider and Head.

  Spider was a skinny little kid in his late twenties. He was always cracking jokes about the guards; he even did passable imitations of a few of them. Richard liked Spider; he was always good for a laugh. He was a complete moron, but his idiotic ideas were fun to listen to and riling him up was one of Richard’s favorite forms of entertainment. Richard had no idea how he got the name Spider and quite frankly didn’t care. The kid was skinny, ugly as sin, and nothing about him evoked the thought of an arachnid.

  Spider had been the typical juvenile delinquent. The high school dropout had a bad habit of car-jacking unsuspecting motorists. When he starting viciously beating elderly black people for their cars, his luck changed. He spent the first six years of his incarceration working his way up the ranks of the Aryans. To the casual observer, Spider might come across as a hyper man-child trying to impress everyone, but underneath, his hatred and anger were eating him alive.

  Head’s nickname, however, was not difficult to figure out. It had nothing to do with intelligence, but rather his enormous skull. Richard had never seen a bigger head on a man in his entire life. It was enormous. You would think that shaving the hair off that boulder would make his head look smaller, but it didn’t. Head was maybe a few years younger than Richard and the same height. The large-headed man maybe had fifty pounds on Richard but was not in the best of shape.

  Head was proud of his nickname. He thought it was because of his signature fighting move, the head-butt. Head’s favorite move was known to knock a man smooth on his ass and end a fight. Richard often wondered if Head would ever figure out that his nickname was not in honor of fighting prowess, but rather served to mock his freak show of a noggin.

  “I’m telling you man, no fuckin way man, not possible!” Head protested.

  “What are you idiots talking about?” asked Tank.

  “Spider is on one of his idiotic conspiracy theories again,” Head replied.

  “Fuck you, Head. You know it’s true,” Spider said with a sheepish grin.

  Head was right; Spider was constantly rambling on and on about every conspiracy theory you could think of. If you were stupid enough to get him going on one of his rants, he wouldn’t stop until you agreed with him (or at least told him what he wanted to hear) about the moon landing being a hoax, aliens at Roswell, and 9/11 being an inside job. Spider proudly proclaimed that he was there and saw the Twin Towers fall, even though he was either an infant or a toddler at the time.

  “So, what is it this time?” Richard asked.

  Head cut Spider off. “Our young friend here is convinced that Hurricane Luther was a conspiracy.”

  “What?” Richard laughed. “How can a natural disaster be a conspiracy?”

  Head continued to speak for Spider. “What was it, Spider? Aliens are out to take ov…”

  “Fuck you, Head!” Spider laughed. “You know that ain’t what I said!”

  “Right, right, right. Spider here thinks that the U.S. government engineered a hurricane to wipe out Florida.”

  “What the fuck the government have against Florida?” Tank asked.

  Spider interpreted the question as interest and saw his chance. “OK, think about it, just hear me out. Luther was just a test hurricane. You just wait, there will be more.”

  “Jackass, you didn’t answer my question. What do the Feds have against Florida?” Tank shot back.

  “It’s all about fear and control, man! Don’t you see it? Just look at what’s going on today. It’s been over a month and they haven’t done shit for those people!”

  Against his better judgment, Richard violated the cardinal rule when dealing with Spider — he engaged him in debate. “What makes you say that? I haven’t seen shit on the news about Luther.”

  “Exactly my point, Killer!” Spider screamed. “What better way to end the Second Great Depression than by wiping out a bunch of people. It cuts down on unemployment by killing off people and giving other people their jobs. Fewer people that the government has to take care of; it makes perfect sense.”

  Richard had underestimated the stupidity of this kid. All he could do was stare at him. The statement uttered by this fool was probably the stupidest thing he had ever heard him say. Richard decided to remain silent like he should have in the first place.

  Spider began to reply to Richard when Tank interrupted.

  “You’re a fucking retard,” said Tank. “No way could the government control a hurricane. Not possible.”

  “Okay. Well then, answer me this, both of you. Why haven’t we seen any news reports from Florida? Not one god damn report. I know they ain’t got no power, but the news people drive around in trucks and beam that shit to a satellite. Why haven’t we seen anything?” Spider directed his question to both Tank and Richard.

  “Big fucking deal.” said Tank. “You know what I think? I think they got…”

  Sirens blaring across the yard cut Tank off mid-sentence.

  Trouble.

  Sirens meant a disturbance. Somewhere on the yard a fight was in progress. Without missing a beat, the four skinheads immediately forgot about the conspiracy talk and sprang into action. Tank ran to the fence and starting looking around. Richard did the same on the opposite end of the fence. Spider and Head dug into the heels of their shoes and came up with homemade weapons in a few seconds flat. The two men stepped up next to Tank and Richard, tapped them on the shoulder and resumed their posts as lookouts. Tank and Richard went through the same routine and produced knives as if out of thin air. Richard had rehearsed this move with the three skinheads and they had performed it perfectly.

  “What do we got?” Richard asked the group.

  “No idea,” Head replied.

  Richard’s eyes scanned across the yard, making assessments of every group, every person, and saw nothing hostile going on. All he saw was a yard full of very confused inmates. Richard was pissed that the Aryans were split up into three groups scattered across the yard and behind different fences. Richard cursed the skinheads for not having more tactical awareness. They would have little chance in a major disturbance if broken up into small groups.

  The siren cut off, only to be replaced by the loud speaker.

  “ALL INMATES ON THE YARD RETURN TO YOUR ASSIGNED CELLS!”

  “What the fuck is going on?” Tank asked.

  “Nothing good, Billy,” said Richard. “It’s only nine o’clock in the morning; they must know that we aren’t going back into our cells without a fight.”

  “Doesn’t make any fucking sense. They want us locked up all they gotta do is wait for the next count and not let us back out,” Tank replied through gritted teeth.

  “What the fuck do we do, Killer?” Spider asked. Richard would know what to do; he always had a plan.

  “We wait,” said Richard. “Wait this out and see what happens. They’re probably suiting up the riot squad right now. Keep scanning the yard and call out exactly what you see and in what direction, remember that the chow hall is due north.”

  Over nine hundred inmates stood on the yard figuring out what to do. In the history of Highland Valley State Prison, any time they tried to lock the facility down in the middle of the day, it meant they were getting locked in their cells and not coming back out for a very long time. The old-timers who had walked the yard for years could attest to the seriousness of a major lockdown. Tank was right, made much more sense to wa
it for them to return to their cells for count. No fighting, no violence. Just a bunch of pissed off inmates who felt like they had been tricked.

  “ALL INMATES ON THE YARD RETURN TO YOUR ASSIGNED CELLS!”

  Richard grumbled under his breath. He had never been on a major lockdown with Tank. The longest lockdown Richard had known up to that point was three days. Weeks or months trapped in a cell with Tank would drive him insane.

  “What the fuck is that?” Spider screamed.

  “What is it, Spider? What direction? I taught you better than that, start talking!” Richard tensed up and scanned the yard to see if he could see what Spider was screaming about. He didn’t see anything. He turned to look at Spider who was gazing skyward.

  Slowly, like a ripple through a pond, every inmate on the yard stopped and looked up at the sky.

  “How the fuck is it snowing in August?” Tank asked.

  Richard stared intently at the sky. Flakes started to slowly drift and flutter out of the sky and land on the rooftops of the cell blocks. Then they started landing on the inmates and then on the ground. Dark, ominous clouds could be seen beyond the mountains to the west of the prison.

  “FUCK!” Spider began to spit over and over. “This snow tastes like shit! Son of a bitch!”

  “ALL INMATES ON THE YARD RETURN TO YOUR ASSIGNED CELLS!”

  “Not happening, mother fuckers!!” Tank screamed at the top of his lungs, his proclamation echoing across the yard. The inmates within twenty feet of Tank almost wet their pants he scared them so badly.

  KAAA-BOOOM!!

  A flashbang had been deployed. It startled the inmates back to reality. The flashbang could only mean one thing.

  The riot squad was here.

  “That was quick,” said Richard.

  “They’re locking us down because it’s snowing?”

  Richard took one more look to the sky and said, “It’s not snow. It’s ash.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Maxwell Harris awoke in excruciating pain. He rolled over to discover it was just past 3am, which meant he had only been asleep for a few hours — if you would call it sleep. Max certainly did not. Sleep was hard to come by for the forty-three year old, even with the aid of prescription sleeping pills, which Max took every night. He rolled over and grabbed his pain meds, popped the top and kicked back two pills. The prescription was for one every six hours, but he was up to two every three. Didn’t bother him in the slightest that he was taking way more than he should, after all, pain is pain, right?

  Realizing that he had no chance of falling back to sleep until the pain meds kicked in, he decided to watch some TV. He turned over, waking up the cat, and spoke out loud.

  “TV. Begin at channel 115 and change channels on my command.” The TV sprang to life and followed his instructions.

  “…believe that Hurricane Maxine will make landfall somewhere near the Texas Louisiana state line…”

  Max pointed up with his right index finger.

  “…rnor Blackmon and Governor Prince are attempting to redeploy the National Guard from their current assignments enforcing curfews in some of their respective states’ major cit…”

  …index finger…

  “…timate that forty-seven were killed in the latest wave of terror attac…”

  …index finger…

  “…many Republicans are harshly criticizing the White House for what they believe to be a lack of support for the citizens of the Florida coastli…”

  “TV, return to channel 115 and increase volume five levels.”

  Since he was the chief of police of a cozy little suburb southeast of Houston called Santa Fe, Max instructed his TV to return to the first channel to see if he could find an updated path for Hurricane Maxine. He watched anxiously to see if the large beast of a hurricane would have any effect on him personally.

  “Thank God!” Max exclaimed out loud to no one in particular. The hurricane was definitely moving east. If Maxine was a true Texas lady and minded her manners, she would make landfall at least fifty miles on the other side of the Sabine River and give some unlucky Louisianans a boot in the ass. Hurricane Maxine would be someone else’s guest, which brought Max some relief. Maxwell was not amused that the hurricane was given the female equivalent of his name. He knew that if she had courted the state of Texas, he would have been the butt of many jokes at the office.

  Max had endured all he could stand of hurricanes. He grew up in South Florida and suffered the wrath of Hurricane Andrew, which demolished his residence and everything he ever knew. Absolutely nothing could be salvaged of his childhood home. It had been completely removed from the slab like it had never even been built. When Max’s family had returned, Max had hoped that he would still be able to run upstairs to his room and play with his toys. Max spent the rest of his childhood hating his home state of Florida because it had so many hurricanes. (Not the most rational of thinking, but he was only eight at the time.) Once he reached adulthood, he left Florida and the killer storms behind only to return on rare occasions to visit his parents. When he was twenty-two he moved to southeast Texas to begin work as a Texas State Trooper. Two years later, he married Darlene, and two years after that a second hurricane kicked him square in the ass.

  Hurricane Ike did not destroy his home; at least he could be thankful for that much. What it did manage to do was lead him down the road to burn out. Max spent three weeks working sixteen hour shifts helping the victims of the Category 3 hurricane. Some days were long and boring, guarding impassable roads, directing traffic on nearly gridlocked highways. Some days, however, were far from boring. Max was absolutely amazed that normal, everyday citizens would ignore an evacuation order and stay behind, clearly in harm’s way. When those stubborn people managed to get trapped in their homes, they called 9-1-1. When they damned near died on their rooftops because they refused to evacuate, they called 9-1-1. One idiot even dialed 9-1-1 complaining that his favorite pizza joint was not answering the phone. The next year the state of Texas passed a law that fined citizens who ignored a mandatory evacuation order and required some sort of emergency service.

  The worst part of Hurricane Ike was the first twenty-four hours after the storm passed. The exits along Interstate 10 in the Beaumont area where closed; many of the roads in the area were covered in downed trees and power lines. The only people allowed to exit off the interstate were law enforcement and first responders. Everyone else was turned away. This made for some furious citizens.

  “You have no right to keep me from my home!”

  “I’m a grown man! I don’t need you clowns to treat me like a baby!”

  Those furious Texans thought the National Guard was a joke and ignored them. They simply jumped the curb and drove around them. The Guardsman would call Max into action, giving him the make and model, and Max would chase the people down. Most were much more intimidated by a State Trooper and cooperated. The ones that really bothered Max were the genuine, kind souls who begged and pleaded with him.

  “I just need to get my dogs; they were in the backyard and I won’t be able to live with myself if anything happened to them.”

  “I haven’t heard from my Dad. He refused to evacuate and I’m worried he hasn’t been taking his medicine.”

  Max heard these stories all day and couldn’t do a thing to help these people. Max was one of two State Troopers assigned to protect a very long stretch of Interstate 10. The only thing they could tell people was to return to the interstate and call 9-1-1 if they had credible reason to believe an emergency was taking place. They just looked at him in shock and disgust. Max had never felt so ashamed in his life.

  Max recalled how agitated he and others had been at the high price of gasoline back then. With gas being close to fifteen dollars a gallon in 2027, evacuating in the face of this latest storm threat would cost a small fortune, money that few people had during the Second Great Depression. Max wondered how residents of the Florida coastline could afford to evacuate last month during H
urricane Luther. He figured that the state of Florida must have evacuated citizens by the busload to get them safely out. Luther made Andrew look like a stiff breeze. Luther went down on record as the deadliest hurricane in the history of the world; that bastard went straight up the coastline like a wrecking ball. Luther would come ashore like Godzilla and destroy everything he saw, go back out to the ocean like he was taking a cigarette break, then travel back up the coast and start all over again. A month had passed, and most of Florida still didn’t have power. Max vaguely remembered something about a quarantine zone but couldn’t recall the details. For some reason, there seemed to be very little media coverage of the aftermath, so details were sketchy. However, even if they had electricity, there wasn’t much of anything still standing that could even do anything with the juice. Max was able to contact his father in South Miami. Luther wasn’t very strong when he came to visit him, only a Category 2. Max’s dad proudly told him when he called: “I don’t evacuate for anything less than a 5!” Most Floridians paid little attention to a hurricane until it made Category 4. Hurricane Luther left Miami and graduated up the ranks very quickly to a Category 5. Luther left all the experts puzzled. They had predicted that he would come ashore, do his damage and go back out to sea to slowly fade away. Luther did no such thing. He came back ashore a total of five times, either maintaining strength or getting a little stronger each time. After his third trip ashore, the public cursed the experts for fools and treated Luther like he was a mythical monster that had developed intelligence.

  Max’s wife and children had evacuated to Oklahoma well ahead of Hurricane Ike to stay with relatives, not really because the hurricane would hit them, but rather because the electricity would probably be out and Max would be working double shifts.

  Once the evacuation order had been lifted, Max wasn’t surprised that his wife decided to stay in Oklahoma for a few more weeks. The water company had shut off the water in Max’s subdivision since the bacteria counts were at toxic levels, they wouldn’t be able to wash their clothes, take showers, or flush the toilets. The water company advised residents to shut off all faucets and bathtubs so when the water did come back on, it wouldn’t cause damage. Max completely forgot to turn off the water when he left the house the morning when water service was restored. He had spent the previous evening cleaning out the freezer into the kitchen sink. The upstairs shower was also clogged and Max had left it on when he attempted to take a shower. When the water came back on, the kitchen sink and the upstairs shower quickly filled and spilled out onto the floor for the better part of forty eight hours before Max came back home.