Cell Block Z

by Matt Handle

  Cell Block Z

  By Matt Handle

  Copyright © 2015 Matt Handle

  All Rights Reserved

  Jesse Cavanaugh got up from his cot, took two steps to the door, then turned around and placed his hands behind his back as he’d been trained. A minute later, Wilson opened the door, cuffed his hands, and led him out of his cell and down the hall. Wilson wasn’t too bad as far as screws went. He didn’t take any shit off the inmates and Jesse had seen the redneck high school football star-turned prison guard nearly burn a Rower’s eyes out with pepper spray one night when the idiot tried to run. But if you didn’t give Wilson any grief, he typically didn’t dish out any either.

  Once they reached the cafeteria entrance, Wilson removed the cuffs and gave Jesse a gentle push into the barred and heavily guarded room. Death Row inmates only had 30 minutes to get their food, eat it, and put away their trays before they had to queue up for the return to their cells. Jesse didn’t waste any time. He grabbed a tray and took his place in line. Today was meatloaf and potatoes with a choice of canned green beans or spinach. No one would mistake the food for gourmet fare, but the meatloaf was a hell of a lot better than the cardboard and tomato paste they tried to pass off as pizza twice a week.

  After Jesse filled his tray, he wandered past a pair of the rectangular tables that sat most of Jackson State Penitentiary’s sixteen Rowers until he reached his typical spot. Prison life was hard. Prison life as a loner was even harder. A man without friends on the inside caught significantly more shit than a man with a crew. Jesse wasn’t ever going to be mistaken for a social animal, but he’d found himself some pals early in his jailhouse tenure and he’d stuck with them. He was sandwiched in the middle of two of them now. Jesse’s seat at the table was between Pike and Sam the Slam; both admitted murderers but otherwise as different as two men could be. Dennis Pike was a well-educated, urbane, white southern gentleman in his early 60s. He looked like he could slip out of his prison garb and into a pinstriped suit without missing a beat. Over ten years on death row for plotting the execution of two of his business partners and he still refused to go a single day without a clean shave. Sam Bulloch on the other hand, was blacker than the warden’s wingtips, thickly bearded, nearly 100 pounds overweight, and never got past the 9th grade. He’d spent his youth in the ass-backward suburbs of south Atlanta running drugs for a local gang before spending his adult years in and out of almost every lock-up in the southeastern United States. His propensity for getting caught was what earned him his nickname and his latest conviction was for killing a deputy that was smart enough to track down a robbery suspect, but just a tad too slow on the draw. Jackson State was probably going to be the last penitentiary on Sam’s extensive resume.

  Sam was nearly done wolfing down his food by the time Jesse joined them, but Pike was still cutting his meatloaf into neat little slices per his norm. Even the way the man ate was classier than the rest of the inmates. Jesse had just gotten the first bite of his own lunch into his mouth when Money got up from the next table over and slid into the empty seat across from Sam. Nate Cash, known as Money by anyone that had spent more than a few days inside the walls of Jackson State, was the block’s bookie and its most notorious gambler. He’d take bets on just about anything and in the process, had taken more cash and cigarettes off his fellow inmates than the most corrupt of the screws could ever hope to pilfer.

  Money hunched over the table and spoke as if what he had to say was some big secret only Jesse and his friends were allowed to hear.

  “Tomorrow’s the big night, man. Billy’s gonna take the stainless steel ride to sleep. You guys interested in joining a little wager I got going?”

  ‘Billy’ was Bad Billy Mobley and Billy’s taxpayer paid stay at the luxurious Hotel d’ Jackson was just about over. Billy had been sent to death row for the rape and murder of a college co-ed that besides being a cocaine addict, also turned out to be the daughter of state senator Ed Graxim. Jesse was pretty sure if you Googled “you done fucked up” there’d be a picture of Billy’s frowning black face staring at the judge as he handed down his sentence.

  “If you’re betting on whether that asshole in the governor’s mansion is going to give him a reprieve, you must think we’re even dumber than Sam looks,” Jesse offered as he chewed.

  “Fixing to get your ass kicked,” Sam growled.

  Money shook his head. “No, man. Everybody knows that shit ain’t happening. Bad Billy’s going down for the count. The bet is whether he shits his pants or not when he does.”

  Sam laughed hard enough that he spit the last of his food all over the table. Some of it landed on Jesse’s tray.

  “Fuck!” Jesse complained. “I’m trying to eat, damnit!”

  Sam swiped at the mess and grinned. “Sorry, Jesse. My bad, man.”

  “So you in or you out?” Money wanted to know. “Three cig minimum.”

  “This has got to be one of the stupidest bets you’ve come up with yet,” Jesse told him as he tried to pick through the portion of his lunch that hadn’t just been spit on. “How the Hell you even going to know if he did or not? It’s not like they’re going to let any of us watch.”

  “Alvarez pulled walk duty. He’s going to tell me before lights out,” Money explained.

  “So you want us to trust the word of the dumbest screw on the block?” Jesse asked incredulously.

  “Why not?” Money countered. “He ain’t got no money riding on it. And he don’t know which way any of you betting neither. He get his cut either way.”

  Pike finished a bite of his meal and looked disdainfully at Money. “Are you even remotely aware of how horrendously you just slaughtered the English language?”

  Money raised an eyebrow and then chuckled. “Go fuck yourself, whitebread. This ain’t no classroom. You want to put some of that Swiss bank account of yours on this shit or you wanna shut the fuck up?”

  Pike regarded the skinny gambler like he might be some sort of distasteful bug that had landed on his food then he went back to eating.

  Money looked at Sam. “What do you say?”

  Sam harrumphed as he lifted his prodigious ass off the seat high enough to dig into his pocket. He fished out a crumpled pack of Camels and laid three of them on the table in front of Money.

  “Yeah, he’s gonna shit his drawers,” Sam said. “He gonna eat that last meal, lay down on that table, slip off to see the Devil, and leave a big ol’ Mississippi mud pie to remember him by.”

  Money laughed as he snatched up the wager and quickly made the three cancer sticks disappear. “What about you, Jesse?”

  Just a glance at Sam’s Camels had made Jesse’s fingertips itch. He smoked a pack a day for almost 25 years before he wound up in the joint. He hadn’t smoked one since. Not because he couldn’t score a pack inside if he wanted one, but because of the arrogant prick of a prosecutor that had put him away for a crime he didn’t commit. If the nightly news was to be believed, Jesse’s nicotine habit had been one of the key pieces of evidence that had swung the jurors. An ashtray full of smoked butts with his DNA all over them was sitting just three feet away from his ex’s bruised and bloody corpse. And a dozen cigarette burns were found on her bare ass to match. The only thing Jesse was guilty of was banging his ex-wife long after the divorce went through, but a dozen unbiased citizens decided otherwise. Jesse shook his head. “Count me out, man. You know I don’t smoke and I don’t want to bet on the contents of a dead man’s underwear either.”

  “Look who’s all high and mighty all the sudden,” Money said good-naturedly. Then he turned his gaze back to Pike. “Speaking of high and mighty, you going to get in on this or not, bossman?”

  Pike stopped his fork midway to his mouth and gave Money a look that said “you
must be joking.”

  “Fair enough,” Money said. “Your loss. I gotta split. More customers waiting. Peace!”

  After Money had taken his sales pitch to another table, Sam got a serious look on his face. “If he does shit his pants, who’s gotta clean that up?”

  A tiny smirk appeared on Pike’s lips. “Why, are you volunteering?”

  The three men laughed and then Jesse changed the subject as he and Pike continued their lunch and Sam looked on. Jesse was all for keeping it light, but talk of dead inmates didn’t do much for his digestion.

  Despite his best efforts not to dwell on it, Jesse laid in bed that night staring at the ceiling long after the lights had gone out. He could hear the snoring and the occasional loud fart from his fellow Rowers, but nothing seemed able to sway his mind from thinking about Billy’s upcoming trip to the Death House just down the hall. He’d never been inside the House and neither had any of his fellow inmates, but they all knew they had an appointment there some day. Ol’ Sparky was said to be locked up in a storage closet, too inhumane for the good folks of Georgia in this day and age, but the execution room featured a state-of-the-art killing table with all the trimmings. Lethal injection was supposed to be the kinder, gentler way to rid the state’s taxpayers of convicted murders, but it didn’t sound like a kindness to Jesse. It sounded like cruel fate and the certainty of it weighed on him every day. He tried to tell himself that Billy deserved it, that everyone dies eventually, but the thought of being strapped down on that cold steel table and feeling death creep its way up through his veins made him shiver despite the warmth of his cell.

  Death might wait for us all, he thought. But not like that. Please, not like that.

  Jesse didn’t get much sleep and the next day was a somber one around the block. He spent most of it lying on his cot, trying to read his dog-eared copy of the Bible. He couldn’t seem to focus and found himself still working his way through the Gospel of Matthew when lunch roll call rang out to break up the quiet that had settled over the Row. He and the rest of the inmates trudged to the cafeteria in silence. Lunch was more of the same, every conversation dying almost as quickly as it started. They all had the same thing on their minds. At 6 PM that evening, Bad Billy Mobley was going to die for his crimes. And then one of them would be next.

  A storm rolled in around mid-afternoon and as Billy’s hour approached, thunder began rattling the walls as a hard rain pounded on the roof. Jesse hadn’t seen Mobley in days. They’d moved the condemned man to isolation 72 hours before he was slated to lay down for his final nap, but Jesse found himself wondering what Billy must be thinking right now. Was he filled with regret? Was he praying for forgiveness? Or was he just pissed at being so helpless as his death approached?

  As the hour got nearer, Jesse got up from his cot and walked to the door of his cell where he could look out the small, barred window at the digital clock that hung on the wall down the hallway. There were only 10 more minutes to go. Jesse glanced at the door across the hall and saw Peterson’s pasty face pressed up against his own window. As Jesse looked up and down the hall as far as his limited view would allow, he saw that all of the windows framed a face. Every inmate was watching the red numbers as they rolled inexorably toward Billy’s date with the Devil.

  Just as the clock’s display showed 6:00, the loudest thunderclap yet boomed outside, seemingly directly over the prison’s roof. Jesse jumped in surprise and then looked back out the window in embarrassment. He hoped no one had noticed.

  At that same moment, the warden looked on as Carlos Alvarez stood over Mobley’s supine form and nodded to the doctor that the condemned man was properly immobilized and ready for the first of three injections. The warden watched apprehensively, not because he cared all that much about Mobley’s impending death, but because a good dozen people sat with him in the audience watching the proceedings. One of those sitting right next to him was the ex-state senator whose daughter Mobley had killed. The warden had made it clear to his staff that he wanted this night to go off without a hitch. Important people were counting on it. The doctor was using a new drug for the final stage of the procedure and the last thing the state needed were complications.

  As the doctor made his final preparations, Alvarez raised his voice loud enough for the audience to hear and asked Billy if he had any last words.

  The big black man turned his head slightly so that he could look directly into Graxim’s eyes. Then he flared his nostrils and growled, “The bitch was tight as a drum, senator. TIGHT AS A DRUM!”

  The crowd gasped in horror and Mobley seemed to watch with relish as the former politician’s face turned beet red while his eyes blazed with fury. The warden took a deep breath and tried to maintain a professional demeanor. So much for going off without a hitch, he thought.

  The doctor walked up to the edge of the table and inserted the first needle into one of the tubes sticking out from Mobley’s right arm. Billy blinked twice and then closed his eyes, apparently losing consciousness. The warden relaxed a little. At least he isn’t going to spout off anything else I’ll have to apologize for later.

  The doctor tapped a second needle with one gloved finger and as a drop of liquid beaded on the needle’s head, he slid it into the second tube that extended from the same arm. The warden had witnessed dozens of executions during his tenure at Jackson State so he knew what was supposed to come next. Billy’s heartbeat would soon begin to slow and after the third needle, it would stop completely. The whole process was fairly quiet and was usually over in less than 20 minutes.

  As the warden and the rest of the audience watched, the doctor injected the final needle and stood back to wait for the toxic agent to take effect. At first, everything went as expected. Mobley remained still, his eyes closed and his chest rising and falling slowly as the drug entered his blood stream and began to work. The room was deathly silent, each audience member awaiting word from the doctor that the ordeal was at an end.

  Then something strange happened. Mobley’s body jerked hard against the restraints and then flopped back down on the table. The guard exchanged a look with the doctor and the warden saw concern etched on the medic’s graying features. The new drug had supposedly been thoroughly tested and the condemned man wasn’t supposed to react like that. The warden swallowed nervously and kept his seat. Maybe it was just a slight miscalculation on the dosage.

  Mobley’s body heaved again. This time, his eyelids flew open and the warden saw that the whites of his eyes had turned blood red. The rest of the audience noticed too. Several of them moaned and one woman, the warden thought she was a local reporter, screamed in fright. The warden began to get out of his seat, thinking that he needed to do something, although what, he had no idea.

  Before the warden had taken his first step into the aisle, Mobley jolted upward again. This time, his restraints broke. The warden heard them as they ripped and he stood frozen in amazement. This isn’t happening.

  Mobley scrambled off the table and got to his feet. He yanked the tubes out of his skin and turned to look in Alvarez’s direction. The guard’s bladder let loose. The warden saw the stain spread across the front of Alvarez’s pants as piss ran down the man’s legs. Alvarez couldn’t seem to move. The warden had known Bad Billy Mobley since the rapist and murderer from Tupelo, Mississippi had first arrived to begin his sentence. The warden had seen the man angry. He’d seen him sick. He’d even seen him laid up in the hospital with a shank wound in his side. Whatever was ambling toward Alvarez now, red-eyed and groaning, it wasn’t Mobley. It wasn’t even a man; it was a thing. Blood dripped from the corners of its eyes and drooled from its open mouth and down its chin. It held its black arms out in front of it like some sort of monster out of an old horror movie. The warden noted in revulsion that the thing had a boner. What looked like a foot-long penis strained against the front of the thing’s hospital gown as it moved toward the frozen guard.

  The warden saw Alvarez try to reach for the canister of pepper spra
y on his belt, but the guard’s hands were as useless as his feet. They remained gripped into tight fists at his sides. The warden yelled at the petrified man to move, but then the Billy-Thing was upon him. It grabbed Alvarez by the neck. Its hands were large enough that they wrapped completely around his throat. Alvarez managed to utter one strangled cry before the thing wrenched his head around in a 180 degree turn, snapping his neck and killing him instantly.

  As Alvarez’s body dropped to the floor, the Billy-Thing maneuvered its way over the partition that separated the killing room from the audience section and began to lurch toward the warden and ex-senator.

  Graxim screamed, “Do something!” and tried to exit the row of seats in the opposite direction from the monster’s approach, but his fellow witnesses were in his way. Each of them was as panicked as poor dead Carlos had been. The warden raised one arm and took a swing at the former inmate, but the Billy-Thing savagely grabbed him by the wrist and wrenched his arm from the socket. The warden howled in pain and stumbled backward as the monster continued its pursuit of the senator.

  Unable to run, Graxim turned to face his enemy and looked up into the dead eyes of what had formerly been the man that had killed his daughter. Screaming in rage, he launched himself at the Billy-Thing’s face, trying to poke out those terrible red eyes. The monster grabbed both his hands and squeezed. The pain was unbearable. Graxim thought it felt like his hands were being crushed in a vice. He dropped to his knees and looked up at his destroyer, whimpering despite himself. The Billy-Thing bent forward, almost as if it were going to give the older man a kiss, and then bit into the senator’s face. The warden heard the grinding of bone and then Graxim’s screams went up an octave as the monster bit off his nose and tore off one flap of cheek. As Graxim struggled to get away from the thing that was eating him alive, the warden turned tail and ran. One arm hung limply at his side, but his legs still worked fine and he’d seen enough to know that he was ill-equipped to save the doomed politician.