Farmington Correctional

by Sean M Thompson

  You have to stay in control. You’re here with a guard. He might have access to a gun. The front gate isn’t that far off. Keep it together.

  “Can you get a gun?”

  “No. They’re in the station outside the gate.”

  “Okay. Well, let’s get going. Do you have a key on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we please leave?”

  “Okay. But I need to get someone to watch-”

  “Terrence, get me the fuck out of here.”

  The fog seems to lift, and Terrence finally understands the gravity of the situation. He’s a guard, has been trained for this type of scenario. She is 5’5’’ and a hundred pounds soaking wet.

  “You’re right. Let’s go.”

  Terrence yells at the prisoners to stay put, or he will personally beat the shit out of them. Normally Sarah would take him to task, but under the circumstances she lets it slide. She just wants to get going.

  They slowly make their way out into the hall, hearing prisoners all around them.

  “Please don’t let anyone hurt me,” she says, whether to Terrence or to a higher power, she’s not sure.

  The sounds of chairs smashing, shouts of expletives and flesh smacking flesh echo off the concrete walls. Terrence has the flashlight beam dancing in front of them, pepper spray in his other hand. Not a gun but at least it’s a weapon. He has combat training. Sarah has protection.

  It’s going to be fine. Stay calm. It’s going to be fine.

  They hug the wall as they make their way forward, the hall gradually curving. The sounds of the prisoners dies away. Sarah is thankful.

  Moving without any lights is extremely disorienting. She’s reminded of driving through the desert on a road trip from New Mexico to Vegas, years ago with her ex, Mark. How at night everything off the desert highway disappeared into blackness. All you could see were the headlights in front of you. The rest of the world might as well have been the cold vacuum of space.

  Sarah’s breathing slows, knowing safety is only a few minutes off. It’s been a terrifying ordeal, but she’s almost home free. She thinks when she gets out of here she’ll wrap her arms around Terrence and kiss him. She’s felt like doing this for weeks, but the adrenaline pumping inside her now makes her ravenous for his touch.

  A noise to her left, then. A man rushes from the shadows to slam into Terrence, knocking him off his feet.

  “Terrence!”

  Sarah hears the prisoner slam Terrence to the ground.

  NO!

  He cries out in pain, but Sarah can’t see what’s happening. The flashlight beam trails a schizophrenic arc to the ground, briefly illuminating the large inmate, dreadlocks whipping as he swings his fists hard into Terrence’s face. Terrence extends his hand, the mace can rolling to a stop beside Sarah. She grabs the can, makes to move forward, then stops.

  Shit, I can’t see!

  She runs, grabs the flashlight, aims the beam at the two shapes merged as one on the cold concrete.

  “Run!” Terrence shouts to her, and she can hear the pain in his voice.

  So she runs, in the opposite direction of where Terrence is being beaten. She runs without thought, the flashlight beam cutting through this new world of black.

  Sarah hears a man moaning from a cell, points the flashlight beam in that direction; the inmate’s being sexually assaulted. She yells, picks up the pace to try to find a hiding spot, some sort of safety. Off to her right she hears a group of men fighting, hears racial slurs yelled alongside fists.

  Think damn it, where’s somewhere you can hide!

  “Keep runnin’!,” a man yells behind her, and begins to laugh. Sarah doesn’t respond. It occurs to her the flashlight, while helping her see, is also illuminating her for all the rioting inmates. But if she shuts it off, she’ll be blind, feeling around who knows where.

  Suddenly, it occurs to her. The infirmary. The door has a lock.

  The flashlight beam slices through the pitch. The door to the infirmary appears, across the room. If she’s going to do this, she should do it without calling attention to herself.

  Reluctantly, she clicks off the flashlight. Without the light, scant though it was, it’s as if she’s taken off Kevlar padding. The fear begins to scream inside her like a rabid coyote.

  You can do this. One foot in front of the other.

  Sarah creeps forward in darkness, prays no one hears her approach. Prays she can just cross the cellblock to the infirmary without drawing attention to herself. So close she thinks, almost there. Please God.

  Then, out of the black: “Well aren’t you a pretty little thing.”

  Sarah shines the flashlight on the prisoner. His head is shaved, and his arms are covered in swastika tattoos.

  “Stay away from me,” Sarah says, with as much conviction as she can muster. The man is easily a foot taller than her, and all she has is pepper spray. Her keys are in her pocket, but she can’t hold them while training the flashlight on him and holding the mace.

  “It’s been a while since I was with a woman,” the prisoner says, his hand yanking at his crotch through his pants. “Especially one with such beautiful Aryan features.”

  “Stay away from me. I mean it.”

  The prisoner laughs.

  “Oh honey, you’re rich. Or what? What can a tiny girl like you do to me? Other than the fun stuff.”

  The prisoner takes a step forward.

  “Don’t take another fucking step.”

  The large man laughs, takes another step forward.

  “Fuck you,” the prisoner says. He approaches until he’s close enough she can feel his hot breath on her face. Her options are limited. None are good.

  Whatever happens, I will go down fighting.

  Even if Sarah has to use her car keys to blind him, she will. If she’s going down, she’s spilling as much of his blood as she can. Sarah will hurt him, no matter what.

  The beam of the flashlight quivers, she can’t control the tremors going through her body. She doesn’t know if Terrence is still alive. Sarah needs to get the keys from him, to get out of here and get him help.

  “Why don’t you just go ahead and get on your knees, bitch.“

  At this moment she sprays the mace at him. Direct hit, the stream splashes against his eyes. The inmate screams out in pain and rage, swings wildly. Sarah makes a run for the infirmary.

  “I was just going to fuck you, but now you’re fucking dead!”

  Sarah reaches the door to the infirmary, and tries to yank it open.

  The door won’t budge. Locked.

  The inmate charges at her, and Sarah screams. The man reaches his hands out to grab her, and she tries to ready herself for the coming assault.

  Right as he’s within range to grab her, hands reach from the darkness, big arms wrapping around torso. This new prisoner lifts her would be attacker from the ground. Her would be attacker cries out, as he’s tossed into the wall.

  Sarah frantically swings the flashlight in the direction of the fight. To her shock she sees Chuck, blood staining his shirt, his hands, his face. He hammers his fists into her would be attackers body. The inmate cries out. Sarah can hear the cracks as the man’s ribs break, can hear the terrible thuds of Chuck’s fists as they do their damage.

  She begins to feel queasy. Chuck lifts the man from the ground, and she sees him slam the man crotch first into his swinging knee, and swears she can hear his testicles pop. Sarah has never heard a sound like the one that escapes the man’s lips, and it does nothing to quell her nausea when she sees him screaming and vomiting, blood visible in the vomit.

  “Chuck, stop…”

  Chuck lifts him again and slams him crotch first into his knee, and she can hear a noise like a meat tenderizer smashing against raw chicken. Sarah retches again.

  Chuck drops the man to the concrete, continues to kick him when the bruised and bloody man crumples in on himself like a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. He continues to vomit blood, open
ly weeping.

  “STOP IT!” she screams.

  Chuck turns to look at her. He doesn’t respond. He kicks the man one last time in the face. The man on the ground stops moving. He’s out cold.

  “He was marked,” Chuck says.

  “What?”

  “The fire burned away his false skin, showed me the demon beneath.”

  Holy. Shit.

  “Chuck, I need you to listen to me. I think you’re having a psychotic break.”

  “No, I am doing God’s work.”

  One of the cardinal rules of mental health: arguing with a mentally ill person is often useless.

  “Chuck, I need to get out of here. I don’t think you’re well, though. You should really wait here until the state police show up.”

  “What the state police?”

  “The ones who will be here once they hear about the riot.”

  “Oh, the warden told them not to come. Said it was under control.”

  “He what?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I heard over Terrence’s- Oh my God, Terrence!”

  In the chaos, she’s forgotten Terrence, who’s most likely in bad shape lying unconscious by the front gates. She prays he’s still alive.

  “Can you walk me to the gates?”

  “You are one of God’s children. Unmarked.”

  “Does that mean-“

  “Yes, I will escort you to the gates.”

  The walk back through the prison Sarah feels a complex series of emotions. Anger at the prisoner who wanted to rape her. Fear for Chuck, so clearly down the rabbit hole of insanity. Fear for herself, still not home free, still stuck inside. And guilt over abandoning Terrence, even if there was nothing she could have done.

  After what feels like hours Sarah sees Terrence’s body in the beam of the flashlight. The other inmate that attacked him is gone. She rushes over to Terrence’s unconscious body, grabs the keys from his key ring.

  “Can you help me move him?” Sarah asks.

  “You shouldn’t move him. He might have a neck injury.”

  “Damn. That’s a good point.”

  Chuck starts to walk away.

  “What are you doing?”

  “The guard will be fine. The Lord has not chosen him, or you.”

  “Chuck what are you talking about?”

  “Get out of here, Sarah.”

  She’s very torn. The mental health professional in her is screaming that she can’t just leave Chuck the way he is. The compassionate woman inside is telling her she can’t leave Terrence here. Yet the woman that knows she was just moments away from being brutalized and sexually assaulted has no doubt.

  That woman is leaving. Now.

  “Chuck, be careful. And please, stop hurting people.”

  “I have work left to do,” is his only reply.

  Her patient, this prisoner covered in blood stares back at her, eyes shining in the gloom.

  Sarah’s done all she can.

  He’ll be fine. Assuming the cops don’t shoot him. Oh God…

  Behind her, she hears Chuck cry out. She turns to see a guard with night vision goggles tasing him, blue sparks at the point of connection.

  “Hey!”

  A needle punctures the skin of her neck, and she thrashes about, flashlight catching another man in night vision goggles, a needle in his hand.

  “You can’t-” she says, then feels woozy, falls to her knees.

  The last words she hears before losing consciousness, the voice of the Doctor, Osmond.

  “Leave her. We only need this one.”

  Chapter Six

  In the center of the room a weathered goat skull with crimson sigils rests atop an enormous rock in the shape of a dagger. This stone marks the medial point of a pentagram crafted in human blood, mixed with the bones of missing inmates. Black candles drip wax to the dusty concrete floor, while tiny flames writhe in the near darkness, hungry serpents feeling the vibration of vermin.

  Men stand in a circle about the altar, adorned in black robes with cowls obscuring faces. The congregation chants in Latin over and over, and Chuck catches the words diabolus, sacraficium, mortem.

  He’s tied with nylon rope to the stone. The air smells of old pennies and mildew.

  This will not be my death.

  Chuck attempts to loosen the rope, working his arms back and forth, expanding and contracting his muscles. All the while the robed men chant, in praise of the fallen one, the one cast out of Heaven.

  The enemy is before me.

  “I’ll untie you,” Amy says, her voice coming from behind the stone.

  Chuck merely nods. He’s still woozy from whatever they injected him with. But he’s quickly gaining strength.

  He hears her whisper, “You’re free.”

  I shall be the Sword.

  A mighty battle cry erupts from him as he bursts from the floor to sink his teeth into the closest throat. The hood falls from the face, reveals the warden, screaming in pain and terror. His screams sustain Chuck as he begins to shout, darting about the room, fists flying, teeth falling from mouths in gobs of bloody saliva.

  “The Lord is my God and he has marked you as his enemy! Your deaths will cleanse these grounds, and I will act as his warrior!”

  Chuck grabs a limb, hears the satisfying snap of the forearm cracking, the arm going slack as the demon wails in pain. His fist finds a throat, and the trachea collapses on impact.

  The gasps of the wicked become one wonderful song. All of the violence blends in his mind, and he forgets what he does to who, as he’s overcome with bliss.

  …

  Sarah wakes on the wet ground. There are pine needles and fallen leaves underneath her. A soft stirring of rain patters on the trees. Wind blows cold water onto her cheek.

  There are a few moments Sarah’s unsure what happened, only a few more moments for the confusion to set in. Why am I in the woods? Someone knocked me out in the prison, so why am I in the woods?

  Her eyes adjust and her brain attempts to correlate the sight before her. Concrete walls to either side, yet the ground is of mud, twigs, small rocks. Pine trees stretch for miles, and rain falls heavy from a clouded night sky. Sarah’s in Farmington Correctional, yet simultaneously outside. It’s as if she’s stepped into an enormous mural.

  Screams echo from some impossible distance through the trees. She runs in in the direction of the cries.

  “Hello?” she calls out.

  Sarah slips in the mud, rights herself, and the screaming goes quiet. Her movements in a daze, she feels like she’s dreaming. The cold is authentic enough, though. Sarah can see the chill of her breath as she exhales.

  Around a bend in the path, an aperture is formed in the wall.

  “Hello?”

  Sarah slowly closes the distance to the opening in the concrete. From outside she can see the glow of light dancing in the room. She steps through the threshold, and the smell of death hits her immediately.

  Before she throws up, she absurdly thinks this looks like some teenager’s favorite death metal album.

  She falls to her knees in spilt blood, evacuated bowels and bladders, throwing up until she thinks she’ll pass out. With effort she settles her stomach. She leaves the room, heads back to the pines, to the storm. The rain falls harder now, hammering the limbs above her in a wet staccato.

  In the distance, Sarah sees movement in a copse of trees.

  “Wait!”

  The man is large, has a t-shirt soaked in blood. Sarah runs to him, desperate to achieve some sense of normalcy through human interaction. She can ask him what’s going on, if he knows what happened in the room with the Satanic altar.

  When she gets a better vantage point, she recognizes him.

  “Chuck!”

  Sarah runs with all her might, but somehow can’t seem to catch the big man, who walks at a modest pace. She uses every ounce of strength she can muster, but his stride is too long. The chase seems endle
ss, as if time has slowed to thick syrup.

  “Please, Chuck! Stop!”

  The trees give way to a clearing. A man steps from the shadows, gaunt frame, age indeterminate save that he is old. His body is surrounded by a darkness that seems to swim about him.

  Sarah locks eyes with the old man. In his gaze she sees power, terrible regency as of some ancient monarch living outside the trappings of reality. His smile freezes her in place, for it is one of amusement: the smile of a sociopathic preteen burning ants in the yard with a magnifying glass.

  They connect across this distance and Sarah feels the true weight of the seemingly frail and elderly man. The magnitude of it threatens to crush her.

  She thinks of anglerfish and their lure of dangling flesh in lightless depths. How must a tiny fish feel in its final moments as it sees the form of its end?

  Sarah realizes she now knows exactly how it feels.

  He’s not an old man at all.

  The thing masquerading as an old man shakes Chuck’s hand, and they move across the clearing, rain soaking them. Sarah tries to break the distance, to reach the field, and she realizes the walls of the prison have completely disappeared.

  The two seem to pass through some kind of invisible barrier as they enter the tree line on the other side of the field. They blur out of focus, their shapes dissipating like oil in water.

  She tries to follow, but as she goes to step into the field she’s knocked to the ground. Sarah stands, tries to step forward again, and finds her hands hitting some force she cannot pass through.

  The last images Sarah sees will haunt her for the years to come. Years in which she stops seeing prisoners and opens her own private practice; in which she courts and falls in love with Terrence, who will have a permanent limp from the riot. Years in which she marries Terrence, and has two beautiful children with him, a boy and a girl. Years in which Farmington Correctional is investigated by the justice department, and ultimately closed on the grounds of abuse, the prisoners shipped to other state prisons. And years in which, despite an extensive manhunt and the help of the FBI, Chuck McDougal is never seen again.

  But this moment in particular will haunt her, long after she wakes to find herself in the spot near the entrance of the prison where Terrence is unconscious. And she would write it all off as a dream, all of it, except she’s soaking wet when she comes to, her shoes covered in mud. Except she’s able to lead police to the basement of the facility, to the bodies of the warden and the doctor and the four other guards in various states of evisceration around the Satanic altar.