Utopia: A Dark Thriller: Complete Edition

by Adam Steel

  Max wished he had have known which prison he was being sent to before his phone call. It would have made it easier for Jack to locate him

  CURE Prison North, was located to the north of Coney City. Surrounding the city was Sector Eight which was mostly working agriculture. CURE Prison North resided out in the wastelands, just on the outer perimeter of Sector Eight.

  It took him by surprise when he saw both a male and female guard on duty outside the wire fencing that encompassed the facility. It was apparent that the gender restriction didn’t apply to the staff.

  Marko leered out at the female guard from his place in the transporter. He was blowing her a kiss. If she saw the gesture, she didn’t respond.

  The main prison walls loomed at the crown of the hill and as the truck passed through the main gates he caught sight of the sign above.”

  C.U.R.E PRISON NORTH:

  VIGILANCE

  The prison population was split into two wings – Alpha and Beta. Alpha Wing prisoners were conscripted into CURE Prison’s praised rehabilitation programme: either for drugs, or other minor offences. When their habits and sentences were up, they would be released as an underclass known as Reformers. They would work, doing the menial tasks in Utopia. Their wages would be permanently docked in order to pay for their stays in prison. The Beta Wing prisoners were incarcerated for more serious crimes: murder: grievous bodily harm: armed robbery and similar. Beta Wing was maximum security and kept entirely separate from Alpha Wing where Max would be incarcerated.

  Max lay in his cell thinking about the day he rolled into Vigilance as though he was reliving every moment.

  “As the truck continued Max could see that they were a dangerous crowd: sporting scars and injuries inflicted by each other during their caged existence.

  All five of them were being transferred to Alpha Wing. The CURE officers had tried to pin multiple murders on Marko, but he had been smart and they could not actually prove anything. It had pissed off the station sergeant no end, that Marko had escaped Beta Wing. Max was absolutely sure that Marko was guilty of everything (and more) but he kept silent.

  They were deloused, scrubbed, and lined up in the audience hall with the other new inmates.

  They met the prison governor, whose name was Taskin. Taskin seemed a genuine enough guy to him and it appeared to him that ex-soldiers got some sympathy from Governor Taskin when it came to getting treatment for Apexir addiction. He had learned since, that Governor Taskin’s son had been a soldier, and that he had developed a habit with Apexir. Taskin had found him hanging in his garage. Taskin had blamed himself for not giving him more help.

  They were standing in the prison hall waiting for the next part of the process. Governor Taskin was looking at them with interest and Max thought that he had a sympathetic expression. The prison warden, named Clarke, was standing in front of Taskin.

  Clarke was a brute of a woman, as large as any man.

  Max estimated she must weigh at least twenty stone.

  There was nothing feminine about Clarke. She had a cruel expression on her ugly face. In her hand she twirled a short, heavy baton. Clarke started to address the room, as she did so Governor Taskin seemed to cringe.

  “Alright you maggots! Listen carefully. This is MY prison. All of it! Wherever you’re going. I run it. That means I now OWN you. Your miserable existences belong to me. Step out of line and you deal with me.”

  Taskin stayed mute behind her.

  Marko pulled a face.

  'Yulk! Call da zoo a monkay be missin'!' he snorted in disgust.

  Weeks later, he still had the bruise on his face from Clarke’s response. That’s how the enmity had started between them.

  Max was assigned a cell mate. He was a Russian, called Boris. At first, their relationship had been stand-offish. Boris was covered from head to toe in tattoos. His face was deformed by an ugly scar that ran across the ridge of his nose and either side of his eyes. Soon the boredom had got them talking. Boris spoke in broken English, but it was legible. He told Max about the various Russian prisons he had been in. He had tattoos from the different institutions across his body and he had explained the significance of his facial scar to him.

  “Comrade, have you ever seen a slag pit?”

  Max shook his head.

  “It’s big. Huge. And hotter than fires of hell. They work you there, in the mines underneath. They work you to death. You can’t see shit in the darkness. Not a shiv, nothing,” he grinned.

  Boris pointed at the line across his face.

  “That’s where got this see? It’s a mark of the mines," he declared proudly.

  Max nodded, trying to be friendly.

  Boris gestured around the cell.

  “This? This is nothing compared to the pits back home. We got it so easy here apart from that dog who beats on us.”

  Max nodded in agreement, even though he didn’t agree. Dog? Maybe he means one of the guards, he thought absently.

  He asked Boris how long his sentence in the mines had been, and was rewarded with a barking laugh.

  “How long? Ha! Forever! But Boris is smart. I fucking tunnel way out!” he clapped him on the back heartily.

  Max asked him if he'd mind tunnelling them out of Vigilance.

  Boris laughed again, and assured him there was no need.

  Boris had managed to sneak across into Utopia on an illegal ship, which had avoided the TALOS cutters.

  Max figured he was very lucky: a lot of those ships got sunk every year.

  Boris didn’t seem bothered by his stay in CURE prison.

  “You know how it goes,” Boris said.

  “With us illegals, they just ship us straight back out again. Hey I could use a cruise on Utopiana…work on my tan after being in here you know?”

  Max just nodded.

  It was true.

  When they did catch illegals, they were simply rounded up and shipped back.

  Boris really didn’t have much to lose.

  “Besides,” Boris said, “I’ll be back. Plenty more ships. For enough creds’ you can get a Utopian number supplied, if you know the right people.”

  Maurice and Dud were thrown together in cell 2F, opposite to his cell. Marko was next to him in cell 2E, on the left. Marko was given a cell to himself. Further down the passage, a surly young man occupied cell 2D, next to Marko. His name was Victor. He talked a lot. Unfortunately most of it was babble about his various perverted sexual fantasies.

  In cell 3G (on the right of his cell) was an ageing man in his sixties. In the month he had been there he had hardly spoken. He learned that his name was Alv and he had been busted for fraud, but that was about it.

  The other man that was arrested with him had only gotten worse. They put him a cell on his own, next to Alv, in cell 3H. The first night he had rocked back and forth in his cell, staring wide-eyed at the walls around him. He was ranting on about giant spiders crawling across the ceiling and black dogs growling under the bed, biting at his ankles. He mumbled incoherently all night long about spiders…tarantulas…big fuckers…black dogs…teeth things biting him.

  No one got any sleep that first night."

  Twice a day warden Clarke patrolled the corridors. She prowled the cells of the male population of druggies, pimps and fraudsters like a shark roaming its feeding grounds. Except that her bite was far worse.

  Clarke didn’t give a fuck about rehabilitation. As far as she was concerned prisons were places where people were sent to suffer and she strived to make that a reality in her part of the world. One of her favourite tricks was to decrease or withhold the doses of withdrawal drugs and watch the inmates suffer: especially the new ones. They were the most fun for Clarke. She loved to break them down.

  Max continued to muse about his stay in Vigilance:

  “After three days, ‘Spider Man’ (the man in cell 3H came to be known) was removed. It wasn’t long before he was shipped to Blair Ridge on a gurney. Clarke (and one of the guards) had been watching hi
m be wheeled out.

  “Shame,” the guard had said, “usually the withdrawal drugs work. Oh well.”

  Clarke had nodded, smiling. “Yes,” she had agreed, “not always though”

  Max had seen the nasty gleam in her eyes. He knew Clarke had never given the man the drugs. She’d crushed them under her foot in the corridor in front of Spider Man’s cell after relieving the nurse of them.

  Dud was a nervous wreck and it wasn’t down to the drugs. That first night, Marko had just stared at him all night. Maurice had said nothing. In recreation, Max had seen Marko holding a hushed conversation with Maurice. Dud had not noticed. He had been off, trying to look invisible. The next day (when Warden Clarke’s patrol reached their cell area) she found Maurice sat in cell 2F reading a book called It’s a Wonderful Life. Dud was slumped against the back wall. He had been split open, with a gaping cut across his belly. He was holding his intestines and his tongue had been cut out and removed.

  They never found it.

  Clarke merely glared at the scene. Dudley’s blood, pooling around her perfectly polished boots.

  “What the fuck happened here?” she demanded to know.

  From behind her, Marko answered, 'Dud's stajin' a protest hagainst di prison food Babylon. A sucks.'

  Maurice was transferred out of cell 2F and off to Beta Wing for that little stunt. Clarke had beaten Maurice around the head, until he was unconscious and dragged him bodily up the corridor. Max was forced to scrub the blood streak that Dud had left, all the way up the passage. After Dud’s body was taken away Max and Marko had to scrub the cell clean on their hands and knees. It had taken them hours.”

  That was how it had been, and now Max lay in the cell, thinking about how the weeks had dragged by, and how the cell had been left unoccupied. He hated the empty cell. Somehow it made him feel more alone. Boris continued to regale him with stories of his prison life, but at least he didn’t seem dangerous. He didn’t fancy fighting for his life every night.

  Clarke grew to hate Marko with a passion. She dished out punishments on him on a regular basis. Max knew why Marko taunted her. She could not break him and that made her mad as hell and Marko revelled in that.

  Marko was having it off with one of the women CURE officers. She came in and out of cell 2E late at night, when Clarke was off duty. Max reckoned from the noise they made that she was giving Marko plenty of ‘medicine’ to numb the pain from the warden’s beatings. Marko had offered to hook him up with a 'piece of fun' as Marko put it, but he was not in the running for any more trouble. He came to know (and like) Marko during the weeks they spent locked up on Alpha Wing.

  Marko talked a lot about what he was going to do with Clarke when he got her on the outside. He believed that Marko would do everything that he said he would, and more. He almost (but not quite) felt sorry for Clarke because he knew that if Marko ever got his hands on her it would be torture. Marko’s optimism for being able to get out of the shithole they were in was encouraging, though he wondered why Marko seemed to believe that.

  Max finished counting the cracks in the ceiling of his cell, and recalling the misery of the last few weeks and he sighed deeply. Right now he had his own problems. He had been banged up for weeks and heard nothing from Aya, or Jack. They were not allowed visitors, but he felt like there should be some sign by now. Marko had not mentioned Jack since they had been arrested, but he felt the man was waiting for something. He knew that Aya would do what he asked. He had no doubt of that. He was relieved to think that he had agreed to marry her, otherwise, right now, he would be screwed. He figured that she would be out of her depth, but if she could only get to Jack, he might just be able to get him out of Vigilance.

  He silently hoped that it would be before Clarke did to him, what she had done to one of the inmates that had attacked her. That inmate was now singing in a higher voice and was no longer interested in women. He cringed when he thought of it.

  The substitute drug they gave him took the edge off the addiction, but it only masked his symptoms long enough to exist. He wanted to live again - not exist.

  He thought of his old apartment. It was a dive, but it had been his dive. Now it would have been looted. With no one to live there on a regular basis, it was only a matter of time before someone realised it was empty and ransacked his stuff. He couldn’t care less about the material things in there. He didn’t have much worth looting. There was however, one thing, hidden in a drawer that was irreplaceable. It was a little framed photograph of Sandy and Sophie, gone now, forever. He wondered how long it would take to forget what they looked like without any reminder.

  The squeak of heavy footfalls brought Max back to the present. Flat grey shoes merged into thick grey stockings and disappeared under a longer than average skirt.

  It was Warden Clarke. Her heavy footfalls, squeaked against the polished floor, as they carried her down the corridors of Alpha Block. On either side of the corridor, rows of cells lined the walls, each containing inmates that were trying to avoid her gaze. The inmates stepped back into the depths of their cells as she passed by. Some sported angry bruises and marks: a testament to being in the way of her foul temper.

  Everything was quiet and in order.

  That’s how she liked it.

  Warden Mary Clarke’s perspective was that the world was full of drop-outs and shits. Her hatred of people extended to her own family (which consisted of her useless son Denny) or Denny the Dickhead, as she referred to him. Denny had been conceived with a total stranger during a drunken binge. Clarke was determined that it would never happen again. Denny had the IQ of a microbe and spent all of his time lazing about the house, prison drinking cheap beer.

  Clarke’s biggest regret was that she couldn’t run her house like she ran her blocks. Every little frustration at home was used as an opportunity to punish the inmates. Today was particularly irritating.

  Denny had drunk more than the usual amount of the cheapest beer he could get his skinny hands on. He had in fact, got through at least eighteen bottles, before regurgitating the whole lot back up over her the front room carpet. Now her house smelled almost as bad as Alpha Block after a double dose of medicine and she was in no mood for any crap from anyone. To make matters worse, Denny had passed out over the arm of her settee, stark naked. The first sight that greeted her, when she came down from her bedroom to get ready for work that day, was a spectacular view of Denny’s ass. It merely re-enforced her hateful view of men.

  She pictured Denny. He would be home right now. Complaining of the red mark across his skinny arse, from the punishing slap she had given him with the kitchen spatula. It had left an imprint of a flat spatula, with perfect little drainage holes, across his white arse. I’ll teach that little bastard, she thought, thinks he can loaf around all day, drinking and eating my food. My food, that I pay for. I’ll get rid of that lazy little shit if it’s the last thing I do. Clarke was formulating plans on how to get rid of Denny, as she continued her patrol. She was looking for a victim to take out her especially annoying frustrations on today and slapping Denny’s arse, was nowhere near enough of a satisfaction. It was a mild caress in terms of the punishment that she could dish out.

  Most of the Alpha Block was inhabited by some form of druggie. Some were victims of the designer drug Apexir, others just plain happy to take whatever they could scrounge up on the underground scene.

  Clarke saw no victims: just targets. She was the toughest screw to ever walk the prison and she looked over them like a carnivore judging the range for its next meal.

  Down the end of the corridor CURE prison guards milled around, trying to look busy, as if it were Jesus Christ himself who was approaching. Clarke despised her colleagues almost as much as the prisoners themselves. She thought the other CURE prison women, were little more than chattering whores, who liked it rough, and that the CURE men were about as useful as a limp dick. She suspected one of them was having it off with some of the more attractive prisoners.

  Eq
ual opportunities had seen CURE prison staffed by guards of both sexes, and Clarke had reached the conclusion that all guards under her were the same. Useless. She herself, had personally requested the transfer from the female prison to Vigilance. Vigilance had men to punish and that’s what she was aiming for.

  She glared into the cells as she strode, fingering the handle of her stun-baton. All CURE prison guards were issued with them. The stun-baton was a short solid pipe, jet black, with a leather strap on the handle. At its end, a thin silver strip ran around the circumference of the baton, and a small red switch was built in to the handle of the device. It had been designed to be a cross between a truncheon and a Taser: originally designed for suppressing violent prisoners. It delivered a non-lethal charge. When triggered, the baton unleashed a jolt of electric current through the strip at the end, and when it struck something, it sounded like a small crack of thunder. Hence, the colourful nickname it had been gifted:

  “Bang-Sticks”

  They were usually worn clipped to the belt. Clarke liked to play with her baton constantly as she patrolled. In hushed whispers, the other guards had nicknamed it ‘Scary-Mary’s-Parade’: such was the parody between her, and a majorette twirling a party baton.