The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Just gotta bide our time,’ he insisted. ‘Ain’t nothing to worry about, long as the suit does his work right.’

  Gladstone sneered at him. ‘Mighty big gamble when we’re looking at twenty-five to life.’

  On the other bunk lay two scrawny prisoners, both wearing the same baggy orange correctional facility jumpsuits as Gladstone and Earl, both wearing the same anxious expressions. Their eyes were fixed fearfully upon Gladstone as he prowled up and down the cell.

  ‘Man,’ Earl said, ‘just cool it, okay? You’re doin’ nothing but causing yourself more grief, gettin’ all worked up.’

  Gladstone’s glare fell upon their two cellmates, who both looked away from him as though they’d caught the attention of a wounded tiger.

  ‘Whatchoo lookin’ at?’ Gladstone boomed, pointing one heavily muscled arm at them like a shotgun. ‘You want some?’

  Gladstone reached the bunks in a single pace. His height meant that he was looking down at the man lying in the top bunk.

  ‘I weren’t lookin’ at you man, ’kay?’

  ‘You callin’ me a liar?’ Gladstone growled, one fist bunching into the size of a football.

  Wearily, Earl dragged himself up into a sitting position on his bunk.

  ‘Dude, seriously, let the kid go. You smash him to pieces, we’ll never get out of here.’ Gladstone’s huge frame trembled with frustration as he realized that there was little he could do to vent his anger. ‘James, stand down, dude.’

  Gladstone backed off, lowering his fist, his jaundiced eyes fixed upon the two cowering inmates. The one on the lower bunk smirked at Gladstone.

  ‘That’s it, do as he says.’

  The huge convict’s eyes flicked down to the inmate as he sat on the bunk. Rage swelled inside Gladstone’s immense frame as he struggled to comprehend what was happening.

  ‘You talkin’ down to me, boy?’

  The inmate’s smirk didn’t slip. ‘Sure I am. You got beef with that, James?’

  The inmate spat the name as though it were an insult. Earl leaped off his bunk and grabbed Gladstone’s arm.

  ‘Don’t!’ he snapped. ‘The little shit ain’t worth it.’

  ‘I ain’t takin’ nothin’ from him exceptin’ his life,’ Gladstone growled.

  ‘You can take it all right,’ Earl said, glancing down at the smirking inmate. ‘You think that because we’re only on probation, we can’t reach you, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s a fact,’ the inmate replied, flashing a grin of white and gold-capped teeth. ‘You’s got nothin’ right now, so you’d best keep the peace here or I’ll go squealin’ to the watch about how’s you and your dumb-ass friend here are beatin’ up on us.’ The inmate got off his bunk and grabbed the edge of the metal. ‘All I gotta do is butt this rail an’ you’re goin’ nowhere.’

  Earl released Gladstone’s bulging triceps and nodded.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘So go ahead, asshole.’

  The inmate’s smirk slipped as he frowned in confusion, but he didn’t move.

  ‘That’s right,’ Earl repeated. ‘You see, you can’t do nothin’, because if you get us stuck here for any longer than we want to be, how long do you think it will be before James here gets hold of you?’

  The inmate’s gaze flicked back to Gladstone’s giant frame as he realized his error.

  ‘Imagine what will happen,’ Earl said, ‘if we were in this cell with you two assholes for a couple of years ’stead of a couple of days.’

  Gladstone smiled as he stepped forward. ‘Ain’t that right, Earl.’

  The inmate staggered back against the bunk. ‘You do anythin’, I’ll scream anyways!’

  Gladstone loomed over him, placed two giant hands on the inmate’s scrawny shoulders and shoved him down onto his ass on the lower bunk.

  ‘It’s not me who’s goin’ to be doin’ anythin’ boy,’ Gladstone rumbled. ‘It’s you.’

  The inmate looked up at Gladstone in confusion. Gladstone reached up, shoved the inmate there aside and tore the sheets off the upper mattress, then turned and loosely tucked the sheet into the bars of the cell door. The sheet draped down, partially obscuring the cell from the view of others across the block.

  ‘Don’t disappoint me, boy,’ Gladstone snarled.

  Then, with one hand, he unhitched his pants and hefted himself free. The inmate grimaced and turned his head away. Gladstone grabbed his face in one giant hand and yanked it brutally back.

  ‘Make it good,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll fuck you up fo’ life, you understan’?’

  The inmate slowly lowered his head as Gladstone guided him down.

  The lights in the cell flickered, shimmering as Gladstone put a hand across the back of the inmate’s head and shoved him all the way down. Earl looked up at the lights as the sound of muted gagging drifted across the cell.

  Across the block, a handful of cell lights were also flickering intermittently but others further down the block remained on.

  ‘What’s goin’ on?’ Gladstone asked, his eyes closed but able to detect the flickering lights.

  ‘I ain’t sure,’ Earl replied.

  Earl walked to the bars of the cell as he looked out across the block. The body heat from a couple hundred inmates coupled with the lousy air conditioning meant that the block was frequently hot and always stank of a volatile fusion of stale sweat, urine and grease. But now the air was cold, bitterly cold, and Earl saw a cloud of his breath condense onto the air in front of him.

  ‘What the hell?’

  Earl was about to turn to Gladstone to ask him over to the bars when something plowed into his guts with enough force to propel him backwards across the cell. Earl hit the wall hard and his right leg smashed across the sink. The bone crunched loudly as his femur snapped under the impact and punched through his orange jumpsuit in a bloodied white stump.

  Earl screamed as he slid not down the wall but up it, a terrific pressure collapsing his ribcage to the sound of fracturing bones.

  Gladstone yanked the inmate off him and whirled to see Earl crunched up against the ceiling in a fetal ball, blood spilling from his ripped thigh around a jagged stump of white bone poking through his flesh. His voice shrieked across the block in a wail of indescribable agony.

  ‘Jimmy! Get it off me!’

  Gladstone’s brain struggled to comprehend what he was seeing as he dashed forward and reached up for Earl. In an instant, Earl’s body was hurled back across the cell and crashed into the bars loudly enough to ring in Gladstone’s ears. Earl dropped onto the cell floor in a crumpled heap, the bones in all of his limbs smashed and his eyes wide but lifeless.

  Gladstone dashed to the bars as whoops and shouts of delight echoed through the block. The mattress sheets were preventing the rest of the inmates from viewing the fight and they were clamouring for Gladstone to rip it down as he appeared at the bars and shook them with both hands.

  ‘Get me out of here!’ he bellowed.

  The inmates, oblivious to his words, cheered and battered their cell doors with anything they could find as they saw the big man standing over his ruined, bloodied cellmate.

  Gladstone turned and saw the other two men in the cell cowering on their bunks.

  ‘How’d you do that?’ he demanded.

  ‘We din’ do anythin’!’ one of them shouted. ‘Christ man, we din’ move!’

  Gladstone took a pace toward them, bunching his fists in rage as he reached out for them. He was stopped in his tracks as a bitter cold wrapped itself around him like a blanket of ice, snatching the breath from his lungs. Gladstone managed a brief cry of what might have been fear before he felt himself lifted off the cell floor and spun by the ankles as though he were a leaf in a gale. His deep voice screamed out above the roaring of the cell block outside.

  ‘Help me!’

  Gladstone’s head smashed across the cell wall violently enough to shatter the side of his skull and spill the contents of his head in a fine spray of blood, bone and tissue tha
t splattered the two cowering inmates nearby. His immense body whipped around, his ruined head clanging against the bars as thick splatters of blood splashed across the hanging sheets.

  The raucous cheers in the cell block fell abruptly silent as the light from within the cell was masked by the gruesome splashes of fluid now staining the sheets and the walls of the cell with pink and red blotches. For the first time in living memory, there was no sound in the entire block as several hundred men stared in shock at the terrible orgy of gore spilling from the upper-tier cell.

  An immense crash broke the silence as what was left of Gladstone’s huge body slammed into the cell doors, his limbs flailing like torn sails, his head entirely missing and one of his thick legs severed above the knee.

  A chorus of ‘Jesus’ and other whispered profanities drifted up through the tiers as Gladstone’s corpse slumped onto the cell floor. As the inmates watched, the sheets hanging from the bars of the cell suddenly billowed as though something had passed through like a scythe through wheat. A shape like a giant, demonic hawk imprinted on the fabric until it fell back down.

  The sounds of violence and shouting had not alerted the prison staff to anything untoward.

  The deep silence brought them running.

  37

  ‘We’re here to see Earl Thomas and James Gladstone.’

  Lopez spoke through the electronic voice system to the desk sergeant behind a Plexiglas-and-wire-mesh screen, as Ethan looked up at a bank of six television monitors wired to cameras in each of the nearby cell blocks.

  It only took him a moment to see the medical teams dashing down one of the upper tiers, guards in uniforms standing back from an open cell as the medics dashed inside.

  ‘Looks like you’ve got some action on D Block,’ he warned the desk sergeant as he gestured to the monitor.

  The sergeant looked up at it and frowned. ‘You say you’re here for Gladstone and Thomas? Well, that’s their cell.’

  Ethan looked at Lopez, and she turned to the sergeant. ‘Get us in there, now!’

  The doors rumbled open as Ethan and Lopez hurried through, two guards appearing as if from nowhere to escort them onto the block. The first thing that Ethan noticed was the silence as they walked, completely different to the catcalls, profanities and insults hurled at them on their previous visit. They reached the cell, where a loose knot of guards were staring at something within.

  Ethan and Lopez stood on the cell-block tier and stared into the now-open cell.

  ‘Christ,’ Lopez uttered.

  The walls of the cell were splashed with what looked like gallons of blood, sprayed in enormous crescents across the walls and soaking thickly into sheets already stained yellow with age.

  Two bodies were being wheeled out of the cell in bags as a blood-pattern analyst stood in the cell door and looked at the carnage around him. It was a measure of the violence within Rikers Island that an analytically trained guard was a permanent member of the uniforms. Homicide was not uncommon, especially on wings that housed the more dangerous inmates. Ethan had the brief impression of a spectator at a gruesome art gallery admiring a masterpiece.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ Lopez asked.

  The analyst shook his head slowly as he looked around the cell, careful not to step inside it.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he uttered.

  ‘Looks like a particularly bad knife fight,’ Ethan said. ‘Are we looking at arterial-blood splatter here?’

  The analyst slowly shook his head as he gestured to some of the wide arcs of blood stretching across the cell’s rear wall. ‘These patterns are consistent with arterial blood, but they’re far too broad and the splatter much too widely spaced to have come from severed arteries. These patterns are more consistent with a wounded body being hurled through the air.’

  Ethan looked over his shoulder at the ranks of cells on the opposite side of the block. Dark faces were watching them in utter silence.

  ‘The convicts here are pretty spooked,’ Ethan observed.

  ‘We’ve got witnesses who say that the two men were murdered right here in front of the entire block,’ a nearby guard said. ‘The cell was locked, but that sheet obscured the interior from the view of most of the rest of the block.’

  The analyst stared at the cell for a moment longer and then turned to them.

  ‘I saw the body of one of the victims before he was bagged,’ the analyst said. ‘What was left of him, anyway. He was a big man, maybe two-hundred fifty pounds. I saw the two survivors when they were being questioned, too. They couldn’t have been more than two-hundred fifty between them.’ He shook his head in apparent disbelief. ‘You want to tell me that they picked that guy up and spun him around in this cell violently enough to tear his head off ?’

  Ethan looked at the bars of the cell. Amid the blood running down the bars and congealing in blackening puddles on the floor, he could see tufts of black hair and splinters of bone scattered across the floor of the cell.

  ‘There’s even small amounts of blood splatter down on the ground floor of the block,’ the analyst said. ‘The far side of the block. Whatever happened here must have been staged somehow. Maybe the guards were bribed to leave the doors unlocked and the whole block came in here, but then there would be clear evidence of their presence and that’s what’s freaking me the most right now.’

  ‘No forensics?’ Ethan hazarded.

  ‘I don’t know about forensic evidence here,’ the analyst said. ‘What I can tell you is that when I arrived here, the guards had kept the cell door locked to prevent any contamination of the scene. The other two men in the cell were huddled together on one of the beds, both of them crying like babies and staring at what was left of the two victims. Both of them were covered in blood, and the guards took that as evidence that they murdered their two cellmates. I can tell you that they couldn’t have.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ Ethan asked.

  The analyst pointed to the floor of the cell.

  ‘Because apart from the victim’s, there are no bloodied footprints on the floor. Whoever committed this crime did so without setting a foot on the ground.’

  Ethan turned away from the cell with Lopez. ‘Let’s talk to the two survivors, see what they have to say.’

  They were led by two guards to the North Infirmary, a low-risk ward where a duty nurse was attending to the two inmates as they sat side by side on a bed. Both were silent and still, staring into the distance.

  ‘Guys,’ Ethan said as he approached.

  Both men flinched as though shot, their eyes flicking nervously up to meet his. ‘We din’ do it,’ one of them almost shouted at him. ‘We din’ do anythin’.’

  Ethan raised his hands as Lopez took over.

  ‘We’re not here to charge you,’ she said. ‘Just tell us what happened, okay?’

  The smaller of the two men shook his head. ‘They don’ believe us. We tol’ ’em everythin’ but they says we’re goin’ down for this.’

  ‘Nobody’s charging anybody just yet,’ Ethan assured them. ‘Just explain what happened.’

  The older of the two men sucked in a quivering lungful of air before speaking.

  ‘Gladstone was pushin’ us around,’ he informed them. ‘Like usual. We were just mindin’ our business, like, when all a’sudden the other one, Earl, gets thrown up against the wall. Broke his leg. Then he’s up on the goddamned ceilin’, man, all writhin’ around, and, before we know what’s happened, he hits the cell gate and breaks his neck. Just falls to the ground, dead.’

  Lopez nodded. ‘And the big guy, Gladstone?’

  ‘Tried to help Earl,’ said the smaller man, his eyes wet with tears that he made no effort to conceal. ‘Got himself fucked up, too. Just floated right up into th’air and spun around like he was riding a bronco. Time it stopped, there was nothin’ left, man. He got smashed to pieces.’

  Ethan turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, and saw Donovan stride into the infirmary.
The chief paused, seeing the interview in full swing, and leaned against the infirmary door as he listened.

  Ethan leaned in close to them, dropping his voice.

  ‘If the guards organized these murders, we can arrange to have you moved out so you can testify against them. This is your chance to come clean, fellas. You see any money change hands, any bribes, weapons, anything?’

  Ethan had no power to pull the two men out of their cell block, although he suspected Jarvis could probably arrange it, if required. If the two men were covering up for a gang slaying or similar, they could get themselves a ticket out of Rikers Island right here and now. It would be like their every Christmas all on one day.

  He saw the two men calculate briefly, and then almost in unison they shook their heads.

  ‘Man, there weren’t no bribes, and I ain’t just coverin’ here y’understand?’ said the older of the two. ‘There was nobody in that cell but the four of us, and we were sitting on the damned bunk watching Gladstone and Earl die, thinkin’ we were next. Jesus Christ, it was like they were killed by thin air.’

  ‘You notice anything else?’ Lopez asked. ‘Anything at all?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the younger inmate. ‘It was cold, cold as hell. It ain’t never felt like that on the block.’

  ‘And the lights kept flickering out,’ said the other. ‘Like there was a disruption in the power supply or somethin’. Jesus, man, don’t let ’em send us back to that cell.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Ethan lied smoothly.

  Ethan stood back and walked out of the infirmary with Lopez. Donovan joined them.

  ‘You want to tell me what the hell that’s all about?’

  Ethan didn’t stop walking as he replied. ‘Everyone involved in the heist is being hunted, and not by a human being.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Donovan uttered. ‘I’ve got a killer to catch and we need hard evidence to—’