by Tim Curran
Insane as it all was, Romero could see it happening, that hideous brother hiding inside, coming out to protect the only thing in the world he really loved. If such a thing could love. “That girl…the one he killed and got you here—”
“That was the first time he murdered anyone,” Palmquist said with complete honesty. “I swear to God, it was. Then came Brickhaven…and, well, I suppose you know the rest. He’s part of me just as I’m part of him. I’d wish him away if I could, you know? But it’s not that simple.”
The guard opened the slot in the door. “All right, Romero, you two can suck tongue another time.”
The slot closed.
As Romero made to rise, Palmquist put a hand on his arm. “Those guys who did this to me…Damon will hunt them down one by one. Do you understand, Romero? Keep away from them. Especially at night.” Palmquist released his arm. “He’s afraid of the light. Remember that, okay? And tell the hacks to leave the lights on in here or things are going to happen.”
Romero nodded. “Tell me something, kid. We’re okay, you and me…right?”
Palmquist managed a smile. “Of course we are. You’re a good guy, Romero. I knew the moment I saw you that you wouldn’t let anything happen to me. Not if you could help it.”
“Maybe you know me better than I know myself.”
“And that thing with Gordo…man, that was really something.”
Romero just shrugged.
“You made us feel safe,” Palmquist told him. “I know you’ve been through the system and had it tough all the way…but you’re one of the good ones. You really made us feel safe, feel protected…”
And then the hack opened the door and dragged Romero out and Romero felt a lump of something in his throat, quickly swallowing it down as he remembered who he was and where he was and that this was no place for such things.
“Keep the light on in there,” he told the guard.
But the hack just laughed. “Your boyfriend afraid of the dark, Romero?”
“No, but after tonight, I bet you are.”
20
At Shaddock Valley, there weren’t many people Romero trusted.
Surely, not the hacks and precious few prisoners. But JoJo Aquintez was one of them. The state had dropped him for eight years on an armed robbery conviction. He was a tough boy and his little vacation at Shaddock was the second time the state had sent him away to college. But for all that and for all the swindling and menacing he’d done in his time, Aquintez was all right in Romero’s way of thinking. He was a good guy to have at your side. When you were his friend, you could trust him absolutely. He wouldn’t steal from you, snitch on you, or try to ram a homemade knife into your back.
And in a maximum security prison, man, that was saying something.
Romero was being up front about what he knew, exhuming all the demented little secrets from the black soil of his soul, rattling yellowing skeletons from closets he would just as soon have left bolted. “I know it’s fucking jiggy crazy stuff, JoJo, but I swear to it on my mother’s grave. Palmquist…Jesus…he ain’t like other people. That shit he was saying about his brother, well, it’s true.”
“I believe it. I think we all believe a lot of things we didn’t believe before, don’t we?” Aquintez said quietly as was his way. “Things have a way of adding up. Even things we’d rather not let ourselves believe.”
Aquintez was about 5’6 with shoes on, but stocky and powerful from working the iron pile in the gym. He wore glasses, slicked his thinning hair straight back from his high forehead, and was into Medieval history of all things. Had read every book in the prison library on the subject and had read about a hundred more through inter-library loans and purchases.
He wasn’t your average con.
But then, as Romero had learned in his many wasted years in lock-ups and hard-time state joints, there was no such thing as your average con. Some were jailhouse lawyers and some were artists, others were poets and still others were farmers at heart. And many others, of course, were just plain hoodlums and bullies and homicidal maniacs. One thing you could never put in a box were cons…figuratively, anyway.
“I gotta tell somebody this shit,” Romero said, “so it might as well be you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Palmquist…you see…he had this twin…”
Aquintez just smoked a cigarette and listened, patiently, absorbing every word and weighing them out carefully in his mind. And it was a good mind. One that easily picked out implications, subtle nuances, and unspoken possibilities. So he smoked and listened and watched the cons out in the yard playing their games, strutting around like randy males with no females to impress.
“He’s really a good kid, JoJo,” Romero finished by saying, his face sweaty and his eyes blinking rapidly as if he were trying to blink away some image he couldn’t bear to look upon. “We could have made him into a good con, one that knew the ropes but wasn’t like those guys out there. I really believe that. What happened to Weems and Gordo and Heslip and Burgon—”
“Those pricks deserved what they got and we both know it,” Aquintez said, just stating a fact that was widely known.
Romero nodded. “I guess what I’m saying is that we can’t blame the kid for any of that, he’s not really responsible for…for his brother.”
“Of course not. Man, the tales people have been telling around here—about the kid having a demon guardian and shit, about him being some kind of antichrist, having psychic powers like those little blonde bastards in that English movie there—well, what you’re telling me now ain’t any harder to swallow.” He shrugged. “In fact, it’s a lot easier. As far out and implausible as it might seem, at least we have something of a scientific explanation…shit, straight out of the Outer Limits, but it’s at least something we can get our hands on.”
“Don’t make me feel much better,” Romero said.
Aquintez smiled thinly. “At least it’s not ghosts and demons here. You’ll never get those dumb shits out there to believe it, but I do. Let me get this straight,” he said, crushing out his cigarette. “The kid’s twin…Damon, you say? When the kid is asleep, this twin that somehow never died but crawled deep inside him can externalize himself physically?”
“Yeah.”
“Fucking unbelievable.”
“Scares the shit out of me,” Romero admitted, not ashamed to do so. “If you had heard it…”
“What…what did you hear?”
“Oh, it was crazy, I thought I was going to scream,” Romero said in a high, squeaking voice. “I was laying there and I heard movement. I smelled something like rotten fruit but bad enough to gag you. And those sounds…it must have been pulling itself out of the kid, coming out of his head and I heard it, I fucking heard it…like somebody was pulling the guts out of a pig, wet and slopping. And that stink, the sounds it made sliding along the wall, oh Jesus and Mary…”
“But you only heard it the night Weems was put down?”
“The night it got Gordo I was in the infirmary and when it got Heslip and Burgon, I took enough Seconal to drop a bull elephant. I slept right through it. I knew what was going to happen and I just couldn’t bear to hear it…” Romero clutched his hands together to stop them from shaking. “Something has to be done, JoJo, but I just don’t know what.”
Aquintez shook his head. “Nothing we can do but stay on that kid’s good side. You know what’s coming here, I think we all do…”
Romero did.
And if it came down, well the kid wouldn’t survive it. Because they were talking riot here. It had been whispered about for years, but now it looked like it might happen. The four brutal murders at the prison had acted as sort of a catalyst and now everyone was talking about it, black and white and Hispanic. For once they were all together on something.
And when it came down, not if, the cons would take over the place. One of the first things they’d do after taking control of Shaddock, as all cons did in a riot, would be to storm the
PC units where the snitches and weaklings were kept. Then they’d liberate prisoners from Ad-Seg.
And Danny Palmquist? They’d kill him on sight.
21
If ever there was a prison that was inviting an uprising, it was Shaddock Valley.
It was an ancient place, dating from the early 19th century and precious few improvements had been made in all that time. It was cold as a mountain ice house in the winter and hot enough to make paint run in the summer. A drafty, leaking, bug-infested hellhole that was old by the time of the First World War and positively decrepit as the millennium approached and then passed. As Shaddock limped into its third century of existence, it remained what it had always been: a dump where the state stowed away its garbage and then turned a blind eye when the rats and maggots started coming out.
Prisoners complained about everything from the food to sanitation to accommodations and were answered by stony silence. Same went for improved medical care and visitation rights, simple things like better mattresses and access to a dentist once every third year.
The guards were vicious and beatings were commonplace…as were weeks spent in the hole over minor and often manufactured offenses. The white boys had it hard and the blacks and Hispanics just a little bit harder. The guards were corrupt and would smuggle in anything from bone movies to drugs if you paid them to do so. But what cost a white man $20, cost a Latino $30, and a black $50. The guards encouraged snitches, even paid inmates to rat on each other…which they did with unsettling regularity. The guards also believed in divide and conquer. Sometimes, out of the blue, they gave certain black prisoners privileges, while denying them to whites, thereby increasing race hatred and encouraging violence which always came sooner or later, usually in the form of blacks and whites going at each other out in the yard with sawed-off pipes and shanks. Sometimes the guards gave special treatment only to certain individuals within a racial group, then made bets on how long it would be before his friends threw him a beating…or worse.
The guards spread rumors, routinely told prisoners lies about their wives and family, anything to stir the pot and make their rodents run the maze. On any given day, inmates could expect their cells to be tossed. Personal belongings were confiscated, drawings made by their children ripped up, pictures of girlfriends taken away and sold to other inmates…and particularly if said girlfriend was wearing a bathing suit or a sexy outfit.
The guards were, for the most part, country boys.
Big, brutal rednecks who hated anyone darker than white on sight. The blacks were beaten on a regular basis and the Hispanics just barely tolerated…unless their English wasn’t real good, then they were officially made prime targets. White criminals such as organized crime types were fawned over and idolized by the guards who waited on them hand and foot, bringing in food from Italian delis for them, wine, fresh fruit and select cuts of meat. Black organized crime figures of no less stature could expect to be thrown in the hole or beaten if it looked like they might try to unify the loose collection of black gangs into a single entity.
Jailhouse lawyers were also hated by the guards.
Starvation rations were commonplace for so much as hinting at filing a writ. Country music was tolerated, but rap and hard rock would get your radio or boombox confiscated and particularly if the guards fancied having it for their own. Letters from home were stalled if you were considered a troublemaker and any outgoing mail was read before being posted. And any tidbits of a personal or intimate nature they could glean from your mail were used to harass you with.
Such was life at Shaddock Valley.
The DOC liked to talk prison reform, but it was yet to be seen at Shaddock. And like old sores that have never been properly treated, only allowed to scab over, the bile and poison built up until it contaminated every nerve ending and strand of muscle, made the blood run toxic, and the entire diseased body of the prison was filled with infection.
And it was only a matter of time before somebody lanced it.
22
It was a bad night.
There were never any truly good nights at Shaddock when you didn’t have a prisoner going after another or vomiting in his cell or throwing piss at a passing guard, but some were just plain worse than others. And some guards just seemed to pull the worse duty night after night.
Leo Comiskey was like that.
He seemed to be on permanent duty down in the hole, watching the Ad-Seg prisoners, hearing their endless gripes and complaints, listening to them scream in the dark and beg for the lights to be turned on. Even through those iron doors, you could hear them…but muffled and tinny like a voice coming from a buried box, filtered by soil.
There were seven guys in Ad-Seg at present and they were all nervous and scared. And the reason for this was that an eighth prisoner had been added: Danny Palmquist. Way they were acting, you would have thought he was maybe the Devil or something that had oozed into the joint to suck their blood and lick their brains out of their skulls. Because there was no getting around one thing: they were frightened, terrified even. And these were big boys, tough boys, kind of boys you didn’t dare turn your back on unless you wanted a razor across your throat.
Comiskey didn’t care for it.
For he knew what was going on with Palmquist and it wasn’t just the cons that were afraid of him. The guards, even the warden…they all got a funny look about them when the kid’s name was mentioned, like maybe they needed to get sick and couldn’t find a good place.
And what surely wasn’t helping anything was the yellow crime scene tape over the door to cell #3 where Tony Gordo had died. No, that didn’t help at all.
Two of the cons down there were newbies, both had swallowed drugs it was suspected and both were on shit watch. And that was a real treat for any guard, having to check a con’s stools. Jesus.
It was maybe midnight when the sounds started coming from Palmquist’s cell. Funny, high-pitched squealing sounds that went right up Comiskey’s spine and echoed around in the back of his head like screams heard in the dead of night.
Comiskey called it in, went over to the door to #14 where the kid was.
He reached up for the bolt that would open the little security port. But like Jorgensen days before, that’s about as far as his hand got…because something inside him was hearing those sounds in there and it had literally pulled his hand back. Like a man taking a swan dive off a ten-story building, it wanted him to think very carefully about what it was he was doing here. Because there were things in life, you did them or you saw them, there was no going back.
So Comiskey stood there, shivering like something yanked from a deep-freeze, remembering with an almost vibrant clarity the stories the other guards were telling about what they’d heard and—in the case of a few unlucky correctional officers—had actually seen.
There are some things in life, Sergeant Warres had told his guards in an ominous whisper, that you get in your craw and they don’t never leave you. Things that’ll turn your hair fucking white and make you sleep with the lights on. You boys seen what I saw, you got a look at it and had that smell rubbed in your face, you got all you can do not to stick your service pistol in your mouth…
And there was truth to that, Comiskey got to thinking. Maybe Warres was a bossy, brutal asshole, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. All you had to do was ask Jorgensen…except he’d had a nervous breakdown and wouldn’t be doing any talking for some time to come.
These were the things bouncing around in Comiskey’s head like stray bullets, chewing up everything in their path. He was hearing that shrill, mournful wailing like the kid had given birth to something seeded in Hell, and his fingers were on that bolt, shaking, cold, colder than cold. So goddamned cold he could barely feel them.
Do it for chrissake, he told himself, just do it.
He threw the bolt and a blast of air came out at him, hot and yeasty and offensive and his guts tried to crawl out his ass or up his throat. And that stink, worse by the second, b
oiling and sulfurous, hitting him full in the face like tear gas, making his eyes water and his throat constrict and his nostrils burn.
He clicked on the light.
Palmquist was lying on the bed, dead asleep maybe, and he was covered in a net of white, cobwebby material like ectoplasm. It was coming out of his mouth and ears and eyes and trailing from his fingertips in ropy, pulsing tendrils that seemed to be alive. The netting was undulating as if it were breathing, trailing up to the ceiling and there, right there, connected to that stuff and splayed out was something pale and bloated and spider-like—
Jesus.
It was getting larger, swelling up like rising bread dough.
And that’s what Comiskey saw.
He saw it for maybe a second, no more than two, and then the thing shrieked and hissed and scrambled over the ceiling, tangled up in that white goo that looked oddly like silly string.
Comiskey screamed and shut the port.
In there, that grotesque horror squealed and roared and whined like metal on a grinding wheel. Then…slowly, slowly, it began to subside. There were awful sounds coming from inside the cell. Things like cement poured into buckets, wet laundry slapped against the walls, someone pissing on the floor. Then Palmquist began to moan and then…nothing.
After that, Comiskey left the light on.
23
The riot began the next morning.
The blacks started it. Fed up with 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.