by Dermot Davis
Andrew followed the eye line of Billy who was now looking at something to his left. “Just concentrate on your food, shithead,” Duke told him menacingly as once again, Andrew felt a sharp instrument press against his left side, just below his rib cage.
Finding it hard to chew and swallow, Andrew felt increasingly terrified about what was going to happen. “What’s goin’ down?” Andrew asked as casually as he could.
“What did I say, shithead?” Duke snarled and poked him again in the side.
Andrew heard loud voices shouting at each other and as he looked to his left, bodies began milling about in a cluster. Punches were now being thrown and more and more inmates joined in. Like a wild fire it spread to the rest of the dining hall, prison guards running in from all angles, their truncheons raised, some of them yelling. “Lock down! Lock down!”
Duke and his posse stayed put, however, as if he waiting for the right time to move or get involved. He now held onto Andrew’s collar, as if wanting to keep him close. Terrified that he was going to be knifed then and there, Andrew didn’t know what to do. It would be useless calling out for help. If he was the target, it would be so easy for Duke to run his weapon through him and not be seen or get caught.
“Whatever it is you want,” Andrew said, then was suddenly pushed forward by Duke who looked like he spotted something.
“Move!” he told Andrew, pushing him in front of his own body like Andrew was to be his human shield. Guiding Andrew’s direction with his hand on his collar, Duke controlled his speed by prodding him in the ribs with what felt like a knife.
Cutting through the mass of fighting bodies wasn’t easy but the more Andrew was being stabbed, the more aggressive he became. “Move! Move!” Duke kept shouting, pushing Andrew forward, his buddies tucked in close behind. Pushing him through the kitchen doors of the cafeteria, they were now in the kitchen, which was eerily deserted.
“This way,” Duke pushed Andrew, not slowing his frenzied pace. Andrew quickened his own step when he heard gun shots going off in the main mess area. Are they shooting inmates, he wondered?
Looking left and right, Andrew quickly considered that if Duke and his gang didn’t knife him, there was a good chance that he would get shot by a guard. In fact, that’s probably the reason why Duke and his gang “recruited” him in the first place: so that he would take the first hit and provide cover.
“To the right!” Duke shouted, pushing Andrew out into a corridor where they had no way of knowing if guards would be present or not. Heaving a sigh of relief at the absence of anyone, Andrew raced down the empty corridor. “Next left, no right!” Duke yelled and for the first time Andrew realized that Duke didn’t perfectly know what their exit strategy was. Duke was trying to remember the exact route.
Andrew felt relieved that what seemed to be happening now was not going to be his murder but a daring prison escape, instead. If he could stay alive, and not get shot by a prison guard, the nightmare may soon be over. Coming to the end of another long corridor, Andrew faced a door which looked like it opened to the outside. An alarm went off which probably suggested that the riot had gotten bigger. Even though it made a terrifying sound, Andrew was happy to think that the more guards that were needed in the canteen, the less would be hanging around where they were.
As they ran past a crossing corridor, two guards yelled and ran right at them. “Keep moving!” Duke shouted as he pushed Andrew even harder. Andrew couldn’t see but it sounded like the guards and a few of Duke’s posse got caught up it. It felt like it was just him and Duke and maybe one other inmate behind Duke as they raced to the door.
Pushing Andrew right up against the door, Duke pushed something into the lock and frantically tried to turn it. Did he have a key? How did he get that? Andrew wondered, unable to look down as his face was being smashed up against the door. “Come on, come on!” Duke yelled as he jiggled and tried to turn the lock, positioning the key this way and that.
The lock turned and the heavy door moved. As the door swung open, Andrew saw daylight. A scurry of feet quickly approached and Duke got pulled off of Andrew by a beefy prison guard. Momentarily stunned, Andrew stood in the open doorway as Duke and the prison guard tussled fiercely. Free of his captor, an air of calmness descended upon Andrew. Time seemed to slow down as he perceived everything as if it were moving in slow motion.
Looking out the open door, Andrew could see the outer prison wall, beyond which was the freedom of the outside world. Rolled up and leaning against the wall was a dumpster. Above that a whole mass of blankets was strewn over the razor sharp wire, presumably for Duke and his men, and maybe others before them, to make their escape.
Andrew looked back into the corridor where the guard was getting the better of Duke. Wrestling him to the ground, he had Duke by the throat. Looking up at Andrew, Duke’s pleading eyes said, “Help me!” Andrew could easily have picked up the guard’s truncheon that lay at his feet and take out the guard, thus helping Duke to escape.
Instead of doing that and without any kind of clear, calculated thinking, Andrew held up his right hand. Forming a cartoon mouth with his hand, he moved his fingers up and down and waved “bye, bye” to Duke and closed the door behind him.
Once out in the yard and the fresh air, Andrew climbed up on the dumpster and scaled the wall. He crawled over the wad of blankets which protected him from getting cut by the sharp coils of wire. He looked down from the top of the wall. A delivery bread van was deliberately parked by the wall. Scaling down the wall, he landed onto the roof of the van. Uninterested to didn't stick around to see who might be sitting inside of it, if anyone, he jumped to the ground. He then quickly ran down the nearest side street that he came across.
When he felt safe and stopped running, he realized what he must look like wearing a bright orange jumpsuit. His outfit screamed escaped prisoner. Peeling off the top part of the uniform, he folded it down and tucked it into his pants. Acting like he was a regular guy in a white t-shirt and orange pants, he reckoned that, this being LA, he would blend right in.
Suddenly out walking in the free world again, he couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Seeing a phone booth, he knew the first person that he needed to talk to. Asking some passersby if they could spare some loose change, he soon had enough coins to make a phone call. Dialing the number with excitement, Andrew couldn’t wait for the call to get answered. As soon as Fiona said, “Hello?” he laughed with glee. “Guess what?” he asked.
Chapter 5
Hand in hand, Andrew and Fiona lay together, on their backs, on the cliff in the Pacific Palisades. They watched as the sun set and created a sky of majestic blue-green-orange blended colors. “When I’m with you like this, everything seems right and I don’t have a care in the world,” Andrew said.
“You just read my thoughts; I feel exactly the same way,” Fiona smiled and said.
“When I look up at the sky like this, the vastness of space, I think, how can one person’s problems compare to such… infinity, you know?” Andrew asked.
“Has prison turned you into a philosopher?” Fiona teased.
“I know it was just a short while but I do feel changed as a result. Battle hardened and wiser,” Andrew said thoughtfully.
“You are going back, aren’t you?” Fiona asked. “I mean… you’re not planning to be on the run forever or something?”
“I can’t go back there, Fi,” Andrew said, a hint of terror in his voice. “It’s the worst place you could possibly imagine.”
“But that’s the law, Andrew. You did break the law; you can’t just shirk off… I guess it’s none of my business, but you do have some responsibility over what happened,” Fiona said.
“You think I don’t know what happened, Fiona? My best buddies dead?” Andrew said angrily. “Of course I take responsibility for that; it kills me inside, every time I think about it…”
“Four years is not such a long time. I’ll be with you.” Fiona said softly.
“You don’t
understand, Fi. The place is a hellhole; full of gang members and killers and psychos… If I don’t get killed or beaten to a pulp, I could very easily lose my sanity. I may not make it past two weeks. Seriously.”
“Andrew, no matter what happens, I’m with you. I’ll always be with you,” Fiona said.
“I think you’re the only reason I’ve made it this far and I mean that,” Andrew said, pressing her hand even tighter.
“I did come see you,” Fiona said warmly, “at night.”
“How do you mean? That astral traveling thing?” Andrew asked.
“I figured out that sitting on the floor and leaving through the top of the head wasn’t working so I—”
“You seriously left your body?” Andrew asked, astounded, “and traveled to see me?”
“I called your name but you didn’t see me,” Fiona said as Andrew shot his body up to a sitting position.
“I heard you!” he exclaimed. “I heard you call my name once but I thought I was going nuts! You could see me?”
“It’s not the same, like, it’s not as clear, everything’s fuzzier. It might get better the more times I—“
“You saw me in the prison cell?” Andrew asked, excited and confused. “What do you see, exactly?”
“It’s a small room with a bunk bed and you were on the top one,” Fiona recalled.
“Yes!” Andrew almost shouted.
“There was someone on the bunk beneath but I didn’t get a good look; it was dark and things weren’t that clear,” Fiona said.
“OMG,” Andrew said, clearly flabbergasted. “What else? What else did you see?”
“There was like a small desk and some clothes folded up and a clock and some books. The book sitting on top had a yellow cover—”
“O-M-G,” Andrew said. “That’s Henry’s book about healing, the yellow Chinese something…” he said, his mind racing.
“Then I got pulled back, I think there was like a noise outside…” Fiona said, trying to remember.
“How can you do that?” Andrew asked. “How do you know all this stuff and all the things that you sense and see, all the invisible, psychic stuff? Does that all just come natural or what?”
Fiona hesitated and thought hard, as if trying to articulate the best possible response. “What?” Andrew asked. “That’s a fair question to ask, right? I don’t mean anything; I think what you do is radically cool...”
“No, it’s not that, I’m not offended or anything,” Fiona said, clearly stumped for a reply. “Come on,” she then said, pulling him up by his hand. “Let’s walk.”
As they stood and dusted the earth off of themselves, Fiona led him by the hand towards the cliff face. Although not a full moon, the lunar body was a powerful presence in an evening sky filled with tiny, soft, baby clouds. The moonlight glistened brilliantly among the waves of the ocean below, which they could only see but not hear. “I need to tell you a bit about my dad, I guess,” Fiona finally said.
“What about him?” Andrew asked.
“My father is a student of the occult,” Fiona said and paused.
“Okay,” Andrew said, not understanding but allowing her to talk.
“You’ve heard of the occult, right? The unseen realms, the supernatural, mystical, and magical and stuff?”
“Sure,” he said although he was flabbergasted by her statements and somehow had always generally associated the word occult with evil.
“He belongs to this group, this secret group that do all that kind of stuff; the Order of the Wise Serpents,” she continued and paused to think.
“That’s pretty wild,” Andrew said.
“When I was born, they had a ceremony, a ritual. He does rituals all the time; you can influence things in the world that way, like in business and politics and stuff, I guess,” Fiona said, annoyed with herself that she can’t explain it any better. “It’s like if you want something, you can do a ritual to get what you want like maybe it’s a job or a car or something…”
“Okay,” Andrew said, holding off all the burning questions in his head.
“Or if it’s something bigger, like a business merger or something; most of the members are big business people, then several members will get together; you know that room in the house you asked about?”
“At the bottom of the stairs, yeah,” Andrew remembered.
“That’s his ritual room; he treats it the same way like you’d act in a church or if you had a chapel in your house, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, with reverence and silence and everything,” Andrew said.
“Anyway, when my mom was pregnant they did a ritual so that my mom would give birth to a Moonchild. Me,” Fiona said, like she just got something major off her chest.
“You’re a moonchild?” Andrew asked.
“Yeah,” Fiona answered.
“No, I mean, what is that, exactly? A child of the moon? What does that mean?” Andrew asked.
“Okay, the short answer is that a Moonchild is born with certain powers, certain gifts from the other side, magical gifts or powers, for want of a better word.”
“Magical powers?” Andrew asked.
“Yeah, well, that’s the theory behind it, no one really knows, okay? I don’t think my dad actually knew what he was doing,” Fiona said, sounding exasperated. “Anybody that messes in this stuff, I don’t think any of them know for sure what they’re doing. They read and study these old books like they contain the lost secrets of the world and stuff and then they do these rituals and they think that they’re sublime wizards or rulers of the world or something,” Fiona said.
“Wow, I’ve never seen you like this before,” Andrew said, smiling. “No, I mean, it’s good. I’ve just never seen you this riled up about something, it’s like, wow, I don’t even know you! Who is this girl? I like it,” he said.
“I never knew I was any different from anybody else till I start hanging out with other kids; not that I’ve done much of that, I’ve been like a prisoner of the house my whole life…”
“Is that how you feel… how you’ve felt?” Andrew asked, shocked. “Like a prisoner?”
“Only sometimes,” Fiona said in a more reasoned tone. “It’s just that I’ve been cooped up my whole life and it’s like I’ve been watched all the time and smothered, yeah, smothered is how I’ve felt most of the time. My father loves me, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I’m not so sure if he loves me for me or if he treats me the way he does like I’m some kind of priceless, ongoing experiment that’s going to make him even more rich or powerful or something.”
“Wow, wow, wow, wow,” Andrew said and kicked a pebble off of the cliff.
“Don’t mind me,” Fiona then said. “I don’t mean to lay all this stuff on you.”
“I had no idea, Fiona,” Andrew then said, gathering her into his arms. “I had no idea.”
“Are you hungry?” Fiona asked.
“Starving.”
“Let’s go eat,” Fiona said, smiling like she was back to her old self.
As Fiona drove down the quiet residential streets towards Palisades village, Andrew tried to focus on the drive and the surrounding view. His head was bursting with questions but he knew better than to bombard her with question after question. From his past experience with her, he knew that Fiona would feel overwhelmed and then clam up altogether. It was always best to give her space to be and breathe, to wait for it, and have her volunteer information in her own time.
“What about your mom?” Fiona asked.
“What about her?”
“Won’t she be worried? Have you contacted her? Won’t the police go question her, looking for you and stuff?” she asked, concerned.
“That’s exactly why I didn’t contact her,” Andrew said. “I didn’t want to put her into the position of having to lie to the police.”
Fiona looked sideways at Andrew, her look calling him on his bullshit.
“Look, my mom is so checked out most of the time, she doesn’t even
know I’m not there in the evenings,” Andrew said, hiding his hurt.
“Your mom totally loves you and, yes, she absolutely cares. I saw her every day at the trial and I don’t think I ever saw her where she wasn’t crying. She was a mess, Andrew. Seriously.”
“Well, I can’t go home, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” Andrew said sullenly. “First place they’ll look. Probably have a black and white parked outside, day and night.”
“A black and white?” Fiona asked, breaking into a grin.
“A police car.”
“I know it’s a police car, but come on? A black and white?” she teased. “Have you gone all gangsta now that you’ve spent some time in the pen?”
“I’m on the run from Johnny Law, baby doll,” Andrew joked.
“Ooh, baby doll,” Fiona gushed, slapping him playfully on his shoulder. “I like being your baby doll, gangsta homeboy!”
“I love how street you sound, talking all tough,” Andrew joked. “Not.”
“I’ll be your Bonny, Mr. Clyde. Let’s take these mofo’s down!” Fiona said in an unconvincing tough voice.
“You just gave me chills, homegirl!”
“We’re gonna take this place down,” Fiona said, like she was a rapper, “all the way to Chinatown!”
“That’s what I’m talking about, beeyatch,” Andrew said encouragingly.
“We’re the troubled kids from the Palisades,” Fiona rapped while Andrew provided sound effects. “You can’t keep us trapped behind no barricades,” Fiona continued, trying not to make herself laugh. “We gonna come mess you up, coz we don’t truck with no cover up…”
“What?” Andrew said and laughed.
“All those cops don’t know no better,” Fiona continued, sounding like she’s struggling.
“Know no better?” Andrew teased.
“Just because we eat bread without butter,” she sang and laughed.
“Oh, yeah, baby, that’s some tough shit right there,” Andrew joked and laughed. “We’re so tough we eat our bread commando style!”