Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz

by David James Keaton

  Only when they clear the room does the Man in Black realize his hands are still strumming the guitar strings on autopilot, the chords echoing off damp concrete and steel. A long sprint down the cellblock ends at the doors that lead to the armory, a squad of panicked guards and administrators joining the flight to freedom, a wave of inmates on their heels.

  The guards in the towers lay down some covering fire as the band bursts into the sunlight and sea air. Grant falls to his knees in the dirt and praises Jesus. The Man in Black looks around and realizes Perkins is nowhere to be seen. He hears the doors behind them slam shut.

  “I’m going back in,” the Man in Black tells the warden.

  Blackburn shakes his head. “There’s no chance. They’ll take you hostage. And they already captured four of my guards in there.”

  “He’s my friend,” the Man in Black says. He needs all the friends he can get these days.

  “I hear you. I do. But you’re going to leave this to the professionals.” The warden raises his arms, framing the scene. A small army of guards and San Francisco cops are swarming the parade ground below the cellhouse. More officers stream in from the dock, a few doing double-takes when they recognize the Man in Black, then pausing to ask for autographs before disappearing down the path that leads to the powerhouse on the other side of the island.

  The inmates have cracked the gun lockers, and every few minutes a wild-eyed face appears in one of the small windows above, followed by the pop! of a pistol or the boom! of a rifle. Whenever this happens, the law returns a hurricane of fire, the prison walls bursting with rock and dust. As the warden murmurs about professionalism and duty, the Man in Black angles his ears to the pair of officers standing a few yards to his right.

  “We’ll cut a hole in the roof and toss a grenade or two down,” one of the cops says. “Just like we did the bunkers in Korea.”

  His friend seems intrigued by the idea. “Think they’ll let us do it?”

  The first cop snorts. “Someone’s gotta do something. Come on.”

  The Man in Black knows if this plan happens, the chances of Perkins surviving drop to zero. He turns and scans the rows of nervous cops loaded with rifles, pistols, and clubs. He glances down at himself, pale and trembling, his beautiful black suit speckled with dust and blood.

  Grant walks over, the recording boys trailing behind him, their dreams of the ultimate live album erased and taped over with thoughts of self-preservation. “What we gonna do, boss?”

  As if on cue, the Man in Black bends over and vomits a hot load onto the gravel between his feet. Wipes his mouth clean and stands again, head throbbing like a rotten tooth. Not from pill withdrawal, although that beast is surely coming if he doesn’t score soon. No, it’s guilt over splitting up the band.

  “You’re all to stay down here and do nothing,” the warden tells Grant. “Do you understand?”

  Finally responding with his middle finger, the Man in Black turns on his heel and marches back down the road that leads to the cellhouse. Cops holler at him to halt and take cover, but nobody moves to stop him. Maybe they know a divine mission when they see one.

  Lord, he thinks, if you’re listening, you better protect me in there. Otherwise you’re gonna have my ugly ass belting out hymns for you real soon.

  Gray smoke fills the narrow corridor like ghosts, rendering the world muffled and indistinct. The Man in Black hears shouting in the distance, sometimes broken by high-pitched squeals and flashes of orange flame. It’s like staring into the depths of a volcano.

  The tunnel feeds into the concrete immensity of the cellblock, and here the air is a little clearer. The cell doors stand open, the tiers empty. Bits of flaming paper dance on the ocean breeze from the shattered windows.

  “Hey.”

  The Man in Black cranes his head and spots a lone inmate on the second tier, leaning on a railing: a kid, relaxed, his eyes far older than his face. Too many young ones in places like this. It makes the Man in Black’s heart break just thinking about it. He’d write a song right there if he had more time.

  “I know you,” the inmate says, and grins.

  The Man in Black returns the grin he knows so well. “And I know you.”

  “You should be outside.” The kid’s lips tighten, his face a hard mask again. “It’s safe out there.”

  “My guitarist’s in here somewhere,” the Man in Black says. “Never leave a friend behind, son. First rule of life. Especially if the show ain’t over.”

  The kid nods and reaches into his waistband, pulling out a ragged strip of metal with a crude wooden handle. “You want this? It’ll reach the heart.”

  The Man in Black shakes his head. “Not my style. That big fella with the tattoos, the one who started this whole ruckus, who was he?”

  “That’s Oates. In for murder. They put him in solitary for a couple years, then he comes out crazy as a shithouse rat, preaching about the devil. Guess you saw a bit of that.”

  Gunfire slaps the outside of the building. Glass shatters somewhere above their heads. Time is running out. “Where is everyone?” asks the Man in Black.

  The kid shrugs. “Nobody’s moved from the Mess Hall. Easier to defend. Me? I’m just looking for anything good.” His left hand disappears behind his back, before reappearing like a magic trick, full of white and crimson pills.

  Sweat bursts from the Man in Black’s forehead. A monkey twists his stomach into a knot, reminding him of some very basic needs, and his most important meal of the day.

  “Toss a couple of those vitamins down here, son.”

  Sweet Lord, the bennies or black beauties or bug juice or whatever else that con had been peddling make him feel ten feet tall, add four hundred pounds of muscle to his chest and arms. He imagines his guitar exploding in his hands if he tried to play it. The ravens are no longer trapped inside his head: now they flutter around his shoulders, hovering in his vision, content to witness rather than provoke. At the entrance to the Mess Hall, the lanky inmate with the red hair leaps forward for round two, unleashing a short jab that only whiffs air before the Man in Black’s right boot sends him flying into the wall with the greatest of ease.

  The Man in Black stops in the doorway, looks down at his feet. A bright orange glow seeps from the gaps between the tiles. When he sniffs the air, he smells sulfur. Hell is right beneath them, he realizes, pushing through like magma. He takes a deep breath and lets its heat fill him like a balloon, inflating him another two feet taller, his shadow even taller than that, looming monstrous on the concrete, as he prepares to face his last audience.

  In the center of the room, the inmates have pushed together the tables. Atop that wide platform sits a chair, and in the chair sits Oates, naked, his eyes practically pinwheeling, his skin coated with dry, dark blood. His crusted right hand holds four leather leashes, which collar the necks of four naked guards kneeling before him.

  “Having a little party, huh?” the Man in Black says, catching the panicked gaze of one of the guards. The tough guy from the ferry, in fact, trembling now, his cheeks glistening with tears. The Man in Black gives him a wink.

  Behind Oates stand two hundred inmates in various states of undress. They hold knives and rifles and pipes ripped from the walls. In the flickering red glow from the floor, they look like spooked cattle anticipating their slaughter. The Man in Black feels an incredible sadness for the men, like a lead weight pushing through his guts. A need to sing their stories. He buries it for now. His band is his concern.

  “I’m here for my man,” he says.

  Oates bares yellow teeth, and sweat stings the Man in Black’s eyes. In the haze of the riot and the glut of pills, he’s convinced he sees Oates’ forehead bulging until it splits. Horns pushing out, black and gleaming.

  The Man in Black licked a frog once when he was a boy, then stared at the sun to burn away the hallucinations. He’s convinced that those horns drip the same poison.

  “We’ll trade,” he says. “A life for a life. Want him t
o walk out? You stay behind.”

  “Why don’t we all walk out?” The Man in Black feels his legs start to quake. The pills can conjure up a fearsome adversary, but they can pump only so much courage into his bloodstream. “Nobody wants to die today.”

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Oates growls, and one of the guards at his feet whines with fear. “Those of us who die today are on the first boat to Valhalla, the paradise for warriors. Do you believe that? You’d better. I saw it in a vision. In the hole.”

  “No shit?” The Man in Black finally spots Perkins in the crowd, his hands pinned behind his back by an inmate but otherwise looking okay. The sight of his guitarist trying to smile through the apocalyptic mayhem sends a pile-driver into the Man in Black’s doubt, shattering it for good. We can do this, he thinks. We can finish this show.

  Standing tall in the spot where, an eternity ago, he kicked off what he thought would be the first of his farewell tours, the Man in Black fills his chest with the burning wind.

  When the strength hums in his veins, he tells the men kneeling before him, “I know a lot of you get told by everyone that you’re in here because you did a bad thing. That you crossed a line. I’m not here to moralize at you. I can only tell you there’s a better path because I’ve been in your shoes. I’m the biggest sinner in this building, bigger than this goddamned pretender.”

  It works. His voice moves the universe, or at least the ceiling, which bursts open with a crack that makes the inmates cry out like churchgoers in the grip of grace. Bright sunlight spears down. The Man in Black hovers between the hellfire of the riots below and the heavenly glow above, and he raises that deep voice made magic by a thousand hard nights in concert halls and prisons, and he preaches to those men:

  “As a sinner and a pill-popper and a boozer and a fighter, I know how good it feels to be bad, but that’s the wrong road. It gets you nothing. It leads to nothing. But there’s a better path. It starts right here in this Mess and goes out those doors. It leads right to the light. So come with me now. Let’s try and be better human beings in the eyes of the Lord.”

  At this, Oates rises from his throne, eyes wide, horns flashing red and black like a railroad crossing as he jabs a finger at the Man in Black and bellows so loud it would have done an Arkansas preacher proud. Stepping forward, he trumpets about cleansing blood and Valhalla again. Threads of drool dangle from his lips as he offers to cut the Man in Black’s liver out and wring the whiskey from it as a favor.

  Only none of the inmates are listening. Every eye in the room has locked on heaven above, from which an offering descends: an egg, that symbol of rebirth, shining, holy.

  Not exactly an egg.

  A grenade.

  Perkins breaks free and runs for it, the Man in Black pushing him along as they both sprint down the corridor that connects Times Square with the blessed outside. Birds swirling through the smoke, an infernal cocktail of chemicals and adrenaline powering the Man in Black’s feet like car pistons. They reach the armory just as Oates roars, followed by a muffled explosion that shakes the building and their feet.

  They stumble into sunlight, cops rushing forward to help, and a moment later out come the naked guards with the mad-dog collars still around their necks, followed by dazed and bloodied prisoners in a panicked parade. Cut and bruised and broken but not a serious injury among them. It’s a certified miracle.

  Or maybe not. Before the guards drag him away, the kid from the cellblock grips the Man in Black’s elbow and yells, “Oates threw himself on the grenade!”

  Six ounces of explosive sent the devil straight home, he thinks. His Earthly meat absorbing most of the shrapnel in the process, thank God.

  The Man in Black notes the white wings over the kid’s shoulder before he disappears into the crowd, or maybe it was the egret flapping to balance itself on the rocks in the distance.

  Egret, he thinks, already writing another song. Rhymes with regret . . .

  “I like a man who’ll die for his beliefs,” the Man in Black tells his guitarist, who chuckles and pulls a pack of cigarettes from his gritty coat pocket. They have a few minutes to stand and smoke, admiring the scale of the chaos, before the warden strides over, face screwed in confusion.

  “I ought to have you arrested,” the warden says, a neck vein throbbing like a ticking bomb. “But I suspect my bosses will want to throw a rug over this whole incident. If you keep quiet about what happened here, I believe they would be content to let you walk away.”

  The Man in Black sighs, knowing his final prison concert album will never see the light of day. Maybe everyone seeing the light will just have to do.

  “Bossman, you shoulda stuck with ‘thank you,’” the Man in Black says. “But just this once, I’ll do you a favor and keep my fat mouth shut.”

  The warden shields his eyes from the dust and kicks at some rubble, still grappling with the situation. “This is the worst day of my life.”

  The Man in Black shrugs and looks out over the water toward that red bridge on the horizon, that shining Golden Gate, and the lights of civilization beyond.

  “Can’t help you with that. But we gave them all one hell of a show.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Glenn Gray’s stories have appeared in a wide range of print and online publications and anthologies. Beyond his writing career, Glenn is a practicing physician specializing in Radiology. He lives in New York. His debut story collection, The Little Boy Inside and Other Stories, (Concord ePress) was released in 2013.

  Amber Sparks is the author of The Unfinished World and Other Short Stories, as well as the collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and co-author of The Desert Places with Robert Kloss and Matt Kish. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and journals. She lives in Washington, DC with two beasts and two humans, and she lives online at www.ambernoellesparks.com or @ambernoelle. She’s almost certainly seen more Godzilla movies than you.

  Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including the San Francisco zombie apocalypse The Last Weekend, and the murder mystery I Am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, West Coast Crime Wave, and many other anthologies and magazines.

  Les Edgerton is an ex-con, matriculating at Pendleton Reformatory for burglary (plea-bargained down from multiple counts of burglary, armed robbery, strong-armed robbery and possession with intent). He was an outlaw for many years, involved in shootouts, knifings, robberies, high-speed car chases, drug-dealing, was a pimp, worked for an escort service, starred in porn movies, was a gambler, and other misadventures. Work of his has been nominated for or won: the Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award (short story category), Derringer Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Jesse Jones Book Award, Spinetingler Magazine Award for Best Novel, and the Violet Crown Book Award, among others He holds the MFA in Writing from Vermont College.

  Rory Costello is, as one might expect, a Civil War buff. His crime fiction has been published in Out of the Gutter Online. He also contributed to Waiting to Be Forgotten, the anthology of stories inspired by the songs of The Replacements.

  Jedidiah Ayres has some books and a blog.

  Michael Paul Gonzalez is the author of the novels Angel Falls and Miss Massacre’s Guide to Murder and Vengeance. A member of the Horror Writers Association, his short stories have appeared in print and online, including Lost Signals, HeavyMetal.com, Drive-In Creature Feature, Gothic Fantasy: Chilling Horror Stories, 18 Wheels of Horror, and the Booked. Podcast Anthology. He resides in Los Angeles, a place full of wonders and monsters far stranger than any that live in the imagination. You can visit him online at MichaelPaulGonzalez.com.

  Carrie Laben grew up in western New York and earned her MFA at the University of Montana. She now lives in Queens. She blogs at 10,000 Birds, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such venues as Montana Naturalist, The Dark, Indiana Review, Okey-Panky, and the anthology Mixed Up! In 2015 she was selected for the Anne LaBastil
le Memorial Writer’s Residency.

  Johnny Shaw is the author of the “Jimmy Veeder Fiasco” series which includes the novels, Dove Season, Plaster City, and Imperial Valley, as well as the stand-alone novels Big Maria and Floodgate. His short stories have appeared in Thuglit, Plots With Guns, Shotgun Honey, Crime Factory, Blood & Tacos, and numerous anthologies. Johnny has won the Anthony Award and two Spotted Owl Awards. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Mark Rapacz’s stories have appeared in a number of publications, including Plots with Guns, Revolver, Thuglit, Dark Corners, The Booked. Anthology, Water-Stone Review, East Bay Review, Martian Lit, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and many others. His latest novel, Boondoggle, is out now from 280 Steps. He and his wife live in Minneapolis where he continues to write stories.

  Joshua Chaplinsky is the Managing Editor of LitReactor.com. He has also written for the popular film site Screen Anarchy and for ChuckPalahniuk.net, the official website of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. He is the author of Kanye West—Reanimator. His short fiction has appeared in Zetetic, Motherboard, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Thuglit, Dark Moon Digest, Cracked Eye, Pantheon Magazine, Fabula Argentea, and multiple print anthologies. More info at joshuachaplinsky.com.

  Nik Korpon is the author of The Rebellion’s Last Traitor (Angry Robot, 2017) and The Soul Standard, among others. He lives in Baltimore.

  Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Zero Saints (Broken River Books), Hungry Darkness (Severed Press), and Gutmouth (Eraserhead Press). His reviews have appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, 3AM Magazine, Marginalia, The Collagist, Heavy Feather Review, Crimespree, Out of the Gutter, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, HorrorTalk, Verbicide, and many other print and online venues. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.