During the 1980s heyday of the bathhouses some guys would have anything up to ten encounters per night. The bathhouses catered for all tastes what with the notorious glory holes, where you could be the giver; oral, accepting a penis pushed through the hole cut into the WC cubicle partition or the receiver, where you put your erect penis through the gap to be fellated anonymously by a giver. It meant that anyone could get or receive a blowjob, meaning that there was even a place for the fat, misshapen or downright ugly; that they too could a have a full and promiscuous sex life. There was even talk of a sub-culture for the unattractive. Still today, some guys hunting bears, they adored their men covered in hair, or chubby chasers, whose tastes led to the corpulent, there was even a part of the bathhouse designated pig-alley, for the truly foul and unattractive.
Not that any of these groups would have interested Big Mary, and this was before the days of AIDS. Big Mary had made it a point to learn all the statistics concerning the AIDS epidemic. Better forewarned he’d thought. Although the western media ignored the Aids problem, it still had a terrible effect in Africa, particularly in the sub-Saharan region, where one in twenty adults had contracted HIV and over seven hundred children were dying from the disease each day!
Mind you, that was through their mother’s breast-milk not their lifestyle choice. In fact, sixty-nine percent of adults suffering with the HIV virus lived in the sub-Saharan area. It was incredible that the western world had buried it’s head when it came to AIDS, probably due to information overload during the 1980s and 1990s, what with the bombardment of charity gigs, and infomercials from minor celebrities joining the cause. It did not concern most of the American population as they had little or no chance of catching the ‘gay’ plague, and they quickly tired of the news items and tuned them out. Even today nearly forty million people worldwide suffer from the disease and an astonishing 1.6 million sufferers would die horribly each year from the syndrome, only to have 2.3 million newly effected victims replace them.
Big Mary would check his nightly conquests thoroughly, no point in taking chances, he’d thought. A rash or any sort of skin blemish would have him running for the hills, as would anyone severely underweight. He would check carefully for herpes-like symptoms around the mouth; blistering or evidence of cold sores would have him find a different partner. Flaky skin was another indicator, not that he would entertain sleeping with a guy with flaky skin however gorgeous he was. Flaky skin? Urgh, heaven forbid. He’d always give anyone with fever or flu-like signs a wide berth naturally enough. Big Mary was overcautious. He’d also shun a guy with a cold. He'd look elsewhere because there would always be more guys willing to spend the night, thank goodness, plenty more.
Only the best, most gorgeous, fittest – and healthy - guys were good enough for him, like Dave, Daniel or Danny. He was sure it began with a ‘D’. He wished he could remember, he wanted to wake him and send him on his way, he had things to do, people to see, fish to fry. He was a sailor, he remembered that much, there was a submarine in town and the clubs were brimming over with muscular sailors, who after months at sea playing it ‘butch’, could finally let themselves go.
And boy did they let themselves go.
He shook the guy under the sheets, he’d have to wing it regarding his name. “Hey wake up.” He shook the guy’s shoulders. No reaction. Kevin flipped back the sheets and gasped. Black lesions covered the guy's torso.
“Holy shit, he’s got Aids!” Kelvin leaped from the bed and paced the room, No, no, no, this could not be happening. The lesions weren’t there last night. He checked, he always checked. Yet these lesions looked different. His torso was black from where the ring-like lesions had multiplied. There also appeared to be lumps under the skin. He wrinkled his nose and detected the stench of feces. Christ, what had they done the night before? This wasn’t normal. He edged back the covers further to see the guy was laying in a pool of excrement. Kelvin felt tears running down his face and realized that through his carelessness the night before, he’d signed his own death warrant. He grabbed the guy and recoiled, as he was stone cold.
Stone cold to the touch and stone cold dead.
10: 30 AM
Trooper Stanley Willis pulled away from the scene of the accident in his Miami-Dade Police Department dodge charger. He’d contained the situation and he needed to get to see his mother. She’d get agitated if he was even more than a few minutes late on his weekly visit. God he hated the visits and God he hated her and these goddamned inconvenient trips. If she didn’t hold the purse strings, he would have said; sayonara to the old bitch years ago.
His mother had put him down and belittled him all his life; he lived in constant fear of the domineering old bat. She had made his childhood miserable with her endless harping that nothing he ever did was good enough for her. He’d remembered when he told her he was gonna be a baseball star and she’d scoffed at him calling him a fool. He told her the Coach had told him he had a natural aptitude for the sport, but his mom had sneered and mocked him. Telling him, he’d amount to nothing, like his bum of a father, a feckless, work-shy bigot, who’d blamed the Negros for all his woes. Even when Stanley graduated from the police academy, she taunted him that they must’ve lowered their intake standards and that he’d always remain in uniform.
However, in spite of her he’d enjoyed police work and the comradeship of his co-workers. They had a bond, brought together by the events they experienced, that civilians could not comprehend, like having to attend to the aftermath of a murder. Be it a stabbing, shooting or plain old barehanded, cold-blooded strangling. The slaughtering of one another with whatever came to hand, pots, pans, toasters, needle, or scissors, it amazed Stanley. The murder, nearly always committed by one family member upon another family member; it was still by far the number one category of homicide.
Stanley could sympathize with them. God, he wished he’d had the guts to kill his mother years ago. Of course, now that she WAS dying he hoped he could prolong her life so that he could watch her die in painful agony for even longer. She’d often catch him smirking when the pain got too much. Yet a smile would cross her face and he knew, just knew, that she’d leave all her money to a cats’ home to spite him.
Yet, each week she’d summon him and each week he’d attend like the obedient slave he always had been. Roll on when the old nag was dead. He’d immerse himself in his job during the day and spend his nights in cop hang-out bars, maybe date a cop groupie – yes, there was such a thing - girls who loved to hang around cops, they even had websites. He’d give it a go soon, after the old hag had gone.
Tonight though, he’d have his regular bar cronies hanging on his every word, with his latest yarn, his story of the RTA - road traffic accident, he’d just left, that was a baffling case if there ever was one.
When he’d arrived at the scene of the accident, the paramedics were already there and had pronounced the motorcycle rider dead. He’d been decapitated so no argument there. Yet Sergeant Stanley Willis still had to go through the rigmarole of finding the cause of the accident. He crouched by the torso of the Hells Angel with ‘death or Glory’ tattooed on his arm. It didn’t matter how many corpses Stanley saw it still made his gag reflex kick in some, like this one, as fluid oozed from the raggedy stump of his neck.
He questioned the witnesses, who explained that the Hells Angel on the Harley Davidson fat-boy jumped the lights on red and had been sideswiped by a truck carrying industrial grade plates of glass, which had shot forward and decapitated the Hells Angel. His body continued on its journey until the motorcycle ran out of steam and toppled over. Even more gruesomely, the head smashed through the picture window of a Mexican diner where it spun on the floor spraying the diners in blood.
Unbelievably, none of that was the startling part of the tale, the kicker being that the Hells Angel's body was white and his head was black!
Stanley had spent the best part of an hour looking for another body, unable to believe the witnesses protestations that ther
e was only one person on the motorcycle. He’d never seen anything like it in all his life. He had no explanation for it - a lily-white body with jailhouse tattoos pledging Aryan gang affiliations, yet with a face as black as coal. God image what Stanley’s Pa would’ve made of that!
He pulled up at his mama’s remote clapboard house and was apprehensive to see the front door ajar. He had his hand on the butt of his service weapon and approached gingerly. He pushed open the heavy front door, checked out the dark corners of his childhood home. He knew every nook and cranny, but there was no one there. He called out to his mama, gaining no reply, he quickly checked around and found it empty. He scratched his head. She was unable to get about on her own anymore, and if the home-help had taken her out, she would have locked up. He pushed open the rear door and went out onto the stoop, maybe she’d be back soon.
He spotted a black woman laid face down in the yard. “What the hell?” He marched over to the elderly woman. “What in god’s name do you think you are doing in my Mama’s house?”
She grabbed the cuff of his uniform pants, repulsing him. “Get off me, nigger. What the fuck have you done with my mama?” He kicked her hand away, crouched on his haunches and rolled her over. “Tell me, where is she? I demand to know!”
“Stanley it’s me . . .” she croaked.
He shivered in fright and crabbed backward across the yard, he fixated on her pox-ridden face, as she struggled to open her eyes. And when Stanley saw her baby-blues that he’d known so well for the first time in his life he wet himself.
10:45 PM
Jenkins Forest or prisoner 850416 to give him his official title, fiddled with the faucet of the metal sink, but once again no water came out.
“Goddamnit!” he said. What was wrong with this picture? How in the name of all that’s holy had this happened? He gagged for a drink. His dried, parched throat ached. He been on the john most of the night with the runs and was severely dehydrated. He marched over to the front of the cell that took him all of four paces, and banged against the bars of his cell. “Hey, there’s a man dying of thirst in here!” His voice echoed up and down the sixth floor of cellblock E.
The E block was for category A offenders, the habitual murderers and other life sentence prisoners with no hope of release. The sixth floor housed the worst of the worst, the uncontrollable, the scum of the earth. Proudly at the apex of this mound of human filth was Jenkins Forest, boasting that he was the king of the block, as if it afforded him some kudos amongst his fellow prisoners. Jenkins had been in and out of correctional facilities his entire life, first time as a mere boy in juvenile hall, where he killed another kid in an argument over a game of pool.
He had cheated though, Jenkins thought, justifying the slaying. He rarely thought of the game that had cost a boy his life and him his freedom. He’d never had much time for dwelling on his incarceration. He was like a shark, he had to keep moving forward, looking for something to eat and to survive another day.
Jenkins had killed many a man, mostly for money, sometimes for fun. It had no meaning to him, he’d snuff out a person for the most insignificant slight, as he’d done over the pool game all those years ago. Now incarcerated for life, having received four life sentences to run concurrently, totaling eight hundred years. You’ve got to love the Southern judges and their whacky sentencing. Eight hundred years, why he could be out in five hundred years with good behavior he thought with a smile. Not that good behavior was in his DNA. He’d killed at least three inmates since his last and final incarceration, and had the tattoos to prove it. Teardrop prison tatts dripping down from the corners of his eyes like tears, one for each verified death. The slaying needed witnessing by a reliable source though; you couldn’t go around having teardrop tattoos all willy-nilly trying to boost your standing in the jailhouse community. No, you had to have some sorta code.
Jenkins banged on the bars again. “Hey, where is everyone?” It was gone seven in the morning. That was when the lights came on with a bang, to start another monotonous day of drudgery. He started to get hungry; he could normally smell the food, for what it was worth, drifting up from the kitchens. However, this morning, not a thing. No food cart with the wonky wheel, pushed by Albert with the wonky eye, who dispensed the rancid lukewarm breakfasts to the killers on the sixth floor.
“Come on, let me outa here, I need water.” He slumped and rested his head against the cool metal of the bars. It was gonna be another broiling hot day. His dried throat hurt something rotten and he was already sweating like a pig. To top it all, the new prisoner they’d stuck in with him last night stunk to high heaven. “Hey, get me outa here. There’s something wrong with the new meat. I think he’s dying! You gotta get me away from him.”
He looked over at his new cellmate, Winston Kincaid, a serial killer sent down for five confirmed kills but rumored to be more, and up to twenty women if you could believe Winston himself, but then who’d exaggerate something like that? Killing women then molesting their corpses - why brag about that. Fucking pervert. He’d been dead against sharing a cell with him, put up all sorts of protests. Jenkins was a killer for sure, but he weren’t no twisted pervert. The dude should be in the nuthouse not in with them - the elite of the murderers. If he weren’t insane then execute him instead of wasting the taxpayer’s money and fouling up Jenkins air.
“Hey, you motherfucker.” He slapped Kincaid on the rump. How could he sleep so soundly? First night too, most new inmates spent the first night booing like a little baby. “Hey you,” he croaked, and swallowed hard, trying to make moisture for his aching throat. “Move to the back of the cell would ya? You’re stinking up the place, Jesus.”
The cell was only six foot by twelve foot and designed for one man; the stacked bed took up half of the width of the tiny cell and over half its length. The stainless steel sink and john took up the rest of the space.
Jenkins had spent most of the first decade of incarceration having the cell to himself and that’s the way he liked it. Since the government cutbacks, the authorities had installed the stacked beds and forced him to share the tiny floor space with a succession of murdering dross. However, this latest inmate was absolutely the pits. At least the previous tenants had the honor of being honest to goodness badass cutthroats not this twisted degenerate stinking up the place. He seemed to be suffering from some sorta ailment. He huddled into the corner of his upper bunk, seniority stated Jenkins took the lower one, and had coughed and hacked all night. Already on Jenkins shit list for keeping him awake all damned night, his chances of survival on the sixth floor were slim to say the least. His life was gonna be hell amongst the guys on E block, they had no time for rumored pederasts, they had their code where suspected child molesters were at the bottom of the pile - lower than bottom if there was such a place. As soon as the cell-door opened the guys would be lining up to inflict their justly retribution.
He didn’t hold out much hope of Kincaid lasting the next twenty-four hours. They could rely on the guards to look the other way. Especially the latest batch of new recruits, who to a man were only there for the paycheck, none claiming a vocational pull towards the prison service. Nope, they were on minimum wage and couldn’t care less what happened to the dregs, like Kincaid.
Jenkins throat felt constricted, he ran his tongue over his dried lips. Man, this was intolerable. He was dying of thirst, the blast furnace heat was something rotten and what was that stink?
The only source of the stench could be his new cellmate. “Hey, you, Kincaid, get outa ya bunk. Jesus, what is that smell? Have you shit yourself?”
He took a tentative step towards the recumbent figure. Kincaid stirred, rolled over to face him. Jenkins took a step back in shock when he saw Kincaid’s face covered in black rings of weeping pus. His bloodshot eyes swiveled to face him, and black blood oozed from his nostrils. His body shook and convulsed. Jenkins backed away, but bashed into the bars in no time, when to his utter horror Kincaid projectile vomited, and thick, foul smelling
vomit ejected from him, covering Jenkins in puke.
Jenkins hit the bars frantically making as much noise as he could to get attention. “Guard!” he croaked. “Help me!” He slid down the bars, his eyes popped out on stalks, as he stared at the wretched, living corpse in front of him.
Jenkins Forest the meanest badass to have ever entered the Florida state correctional system started to blub.
10:55 AM
The dyed-blond Submariner Pete Williams sighed, thinking it would be months until he breathed fresh air again. He’d sailed from the port of Miami early that morning on the USS Amarillo, a nuclear powered submarine, which had a payload of forty-eight cruise missiles, the one vessel alone having enough power to wipe out half the population of the earth.
Ten of the submariners out of a complement of one hundred and twenty had failed to return and they were in all sorts of trouble. Ten no-shows was a record by nine. He could only remember one no-show before; you went AWOL on pain of death, which is what had happened as it turned out, as the no-show had died.
This was about the only reason for going AWOL, ‘Absent With-Out Leave’, and then only just, but ten? He’d seen Donny, one of the no shows, leave the Fairy Grotto with Big Mary, but no one ever doubted he wouldn’t be back for the subs departure. He and Donny both knew that the other was gay, along with many other crewmembers who were half-in or half-out of the closet on the vessel, yet even today in the 21st Century; it paid to keep their sexuality hidden.
Now they were off on a six-month tour. He sneezed and wondered if he should have seen the doctor and got himself signed off from the trip. The last thing you needed in the claustrophobic metal tube was a submariner with a contagious bug; it would spread like wildfire throughout the vessel and overwhelm them in no time. He sneezed again so violently that it made his nose bleed. It must have been the guy on the Metrorail he’d bet. That guy hacked up and sneezed right in his face. He’d wanted to punch him out for that, but managed to control himself, not wanting to waste precious shore leave detained by the police.
The Doomsday Infection Page 6