Against the Wind (45 page)

Fuck, man. I have to remind myself: you’re in prison, there’s no ideology here, just the quick and the dead. Don’t romanticize this, not for a second.

Flanking Lone Wolf are several other inmates. I immediately pick out Goose, seated directly to Lone Wolf’s left. He smiles at me, peeling off his bandanna, leaning across the table to shake my hand.

There are nine of them, seated in a row on one side of the table, waiting for me. The prison council, the men in charge, the ones I’ll be negotiating with.

It’s marginally cleaner in here, the air is less foul. They’ve kept the ugliest part of it away from this area, because this is where the bargaining will take place and they don’t want me to be constantly reminded of what’s happened. It’s a smart move, the conditions in this place couldn’t help but color my judgment, no matter how impartial I want to be. I am a lawyer for men such as these, yes, but I’m also part of the establishment, I’m on the other side of the fence, the other side of this table, I make no bones about that. I am not their buddy: we’re not in this together except inasmuch as we have a common problem to solve.

Even so, I’m glad to see Lone Wolf and Goose. I’m glad they’re alive. I wasn’t sure.

“We got us a situation here,” Lone Wolf says.

“I can see that,” I answer. He’s cool; I can be cooler.

We look at each other. I can’t help it, I smile. Relief, someone I know I can talk to. Then I turn and look at all of them across from me, each in turn. We take each other’s measure in deliberate doses.

How they perceive me, how straight they think I’ll be with them, will in large part determine how successful I can be. How successful this will work, without it becoming a war.

Lone Wolf looks up and down the table at his confederates.

“We’ve prepared a list of grievances,” he says, shoving a sheaf of lined papers across the table towards me.

I let it lie there.

“Certain things come first,” I continue, “before any of this.”

“Like what?” one of the men on the other side asks.

“The condition of the hostages,” I tell him.

“They’re okay,” Lone Wolf says.

“I want to see them.”

“That can happen.”

“Privately,” I say.

He shrugs as if to say ‘I knew that.’

“Yeh, we can do that. Something I want you to see first, though. I’ll take you myself.”

He strides around the table, heads for the door. I follow closely. My black escort accompanies us. Everyone else waits. Something they’re good at.

We’re down in the old hole, the solitary unit. It isn’t so wet down here, the courts decreed this area off-limits a few years ago, too cruel and unusual, so there weren’t men down here to stop the toilets up. The smell is just as bad, though, it’s a different smell, not rank and sour like human shit, but sweeter somehow, more pungent. It’s hot as hell, even hotter down here than up in the cellblock. We’re all dripping sweat now, it’s coming off us in buckets.

The doors along this corridor are solid. One small opening in the bottom to push the food-trays in and get them back.

“Prepare yourself,” Lone Wolf cautions me. He pushes open a door.

Armed to the teeth, and now in possession of high-tech tools, tools strong enough to knock over the so-called impregnable walls of the control center in less than five minutes, a core group of rioters made their way to the protective custody wing.

There was one group of prisoners that lived in dread of a successful prison uprising. When they heard that the revolt had succeeded they collectively started saying their prayers. They knew an assault on their wing was coming but they didn’t know when; all they could do was wait, and hope that the bars which kept them locked in would safeguard them against those who would want them out from behind those bars. They didn’t know who would be coming—the faces—but they knew of the inevitability of it. It was a chance they’d all taken when they’d agreed to turn on their fellow inmates. It seemed like a reasonable risk, because the prison system had a strong vested interest in the safety and welfare of these men. They would be protected against almost everything.

The inmates taking over the asylum was one of the few things they couldn’t be protected against.

When the men inside these cells saw who was coming they started screaming for real, a high-pitched hysterical wail, like women or castrati. This was their worst nightmare come true. That the guards despised them, they knew. Everyone despised them, it came with the territory, as did the up-side, which was having their own sentences knocked down dramatically, which in some cases in the past had been as dramatic as a life-without-parole magically turning into time-served and
adiós, amigo.

They also knew, these bottom-feeders of the system, these lowest of the low, that no matter how much they were hated, despised, and reviled, by prisoners and authorities alike, not even the guards could touch them, because of their special status. They were hated and needed at the same time. Without them, some of the men in here wouldn’t be: they’d be out on the streets, free. Most of those men were guilty, yes, but they couldn’t have been convicted without the testimony of the snitches. A select few (not the bikers specifically, but men like them, in here under different circumstances) were actually innocent of their particular crime. They had been framed by the testimony of one or more of the men in this wing.

The men that the snitches had turned were among the leaders of the takeover. Now these same men were facing their accusers, their reasons for being in this hole, and now they were armed with their shanks and other home-brewed weapons, as well as the blowtorches and high-tech tools. The only things separating them now were locked prison bars and doors; big fucking deal at this point.

The rioters could have killed the snitches right away. They could have set the cells on fire and let them burn to death. But that wouldn’t satisfy the blood need, the rage that had been festering for years. These men wanted their accusers’ deaths to be slow deaths, as slow and as painful as possible.

So instead of putting the stoolies out of their misery in a fast and (relatively) humane fashion, they did it the long way. The long, slow, psychologically torturous way, building an appetite with the taste of sweet revenge.

What they did was cut through the bars of the snitches’ cages with their newly-liberated high-tech acetylene torches and metal-cutters. It was long, hard work, but they didn’t mind. On the contrary—they relished it.

As they cut they taunted the men on the other side of the bars, telling them all the slow, horrifically painful ways they were going to use to kill them.

You could hear the screams all over the prison. Even the bikers, isolated on Death Row, could hear them. The cellblock was a natural amplifier, the screams carried all over, echoing off the walls.

“Poor bastards,” Goose commiserated.

“They really deserve our tears, don’t they? You forgetting it was bastards like them put us in here?” Lone Wolf reminded him, pitiless. “You gonna live that life you got to be ready to die it.”

They made no move to intervene. No one did. It was something that had to be done.

The rioters finally cut through the snitches’ cages. They dragged them out, kicking and screaming, onto the corridor floor. They were in one section of the top floor.

The first two were killed the most mercifully; they were tossed off the tier to the floor a hundred feet below, shattering against the concrete, their blood splashing all over the walls.

“One, two, three, heave!” The rioters laughed uproariously as they tossed them like sacks of potatoes.

After that, they got more creative. One rioter pulled a snitch out of his cell—it took some doing, the snitch had torn up his mattress and tied himself to the bars with batting and wire, literally wired himself to his cell. He’d done such a good job that his tormentor had to cut him loose with bolt-cutters; it pissed him off royally, ‘have the balls one time to die like a man’ his tormentor said. He was disgusted at the lack of heart in the snitch. Heart was important, if it was your time to check out you should check out like a man, with dignity. The snitch didn’t give a shit about dignity, he cried like a baby.

It didn’t matter. He got to play, now he was going to have to pay. Using the same blowtorch with which he had painstakingly cut the bars of the snitch’s cell, his liberator now used it to burn flesh. The snitch’s screams were unlike any sound a human had ever screamed, the flame from the blowtorch dancing over his body, paying particular attention to his private parts. Burnt that lying jailhouse sack of shit to a crisp.

His fellow rioters cheered him on. Then they tossed what was left over the side to join the remains of his companions.

That killing liberated their blood-hunger. It became butcher’s theater. Several men held each snitch down in turn while one of them would cut off his testicles as slowly and as painfully as possible, talking to him all the while, ‘How does it feel to get fucked instead of doing it, you ain’t gonna have nothing to fuck with no more, turkey.’ Then a shotgun blast to the face, a rifle bullet in the back, or in one case, a steel bar driven through the temple.

They did each snitch one at a time. It took a long time. After it went on for a few hours the men who were doing it, who had been dreaming of such a day for years, even they got sick of it, but they had to finish the job. The luckiest ones were the last few; by then no one had much stomach for it, so those fortunates were executed gangland-style, a bullet behind the ear, and then their equipment hacked off.

After that it got quiet for awhile; everyone, even the most crazed, needed breathing room. But there was an undercurrent of rumble, of electric rumble, that an experienced man could detect, like animals know an earthquake’s coming before it does. Lone Wolf was a man experienced in that.

He got up and walked out the door of his cell to the railing and looked out. He could see virtually the whole cellblock from here. There were men everywhere. Some were starting the fires, others were starting the flood. Soon, he knew, it would be total chaos, unless he did something about it. Anarchy, every man for himself and none for all, half the men could be dead if they didn’t create something of order.

“Where’re you going?” Roach asked.

“Check the lay of the land,” Lone Wolf said. “Let’s go together. Ain’t nobody gonna fuck with the four of us together.”

By now enough time had passed so that men were getting scared. First the snitches; then who? Everyone has a grudge in the joint, everyone has someone they’d like to off if given the chance. Now everyone had the chance.

The masks went on. A few men got the idea, they ripped up their sheets and covered their faces with them and ventured out into the corridors, brandishing their weapons as shields, and the others saw it and picked up on the idea, soon everybody was masked from everybody else. By this time the fires were going good, the oil-drums had been brought in earlier, the air was so thick with smoke you couldn’t see five feet in front of you. Someone would suddenly appear out of the smoke and your scrotum would get tight, because you didn’t know who he was, he could be the cat who sounded you in the yard last week, the one who accused you of hogging the weights, who vowed payback. Or someone who had a grudge against you you didn’t even know about. The cat you thought was your best asshole buddy and pal secretly hated you for a million imagined slights.

Lone Wolf knew this was in their minds, that paranoia feeds on itself like a tapeworm. And he knew that his only chance to ever walk out of here alive was to get some order going, so that it could end. Otherwise, when the authorities finally did get back in, the inmates would have done the job for them. There would be nothing left but the burials.

They went first to where the women hostages had been sequestered. Lone Wolf had his suspicions that stuff might go down there first, and he was right. Now that the snitch-killers had had a meal of blood they were ready for the next course, which was pussy. Half a dozen of them had ripped the clothes off one of the women when Lone Wolf and the other bikers stuck their heads into the door.

“Come for sloppy seconds?” the head rioter snickered. “I hear all are boss studs.” He was ready for action, so hard was his member in anticipation of his first piece of female ass in ten years that the veins were pulsating.

The women were screaming like banshees.

“Don’t be doing her that way,” Lone Wolf said softly to the man. It was a line he liked to use, from his favorite movie,
One-Eyed Jacks
. Marlon Brando had used it on Ben Johnson’s sidekick in a Mexican cantina before he blew him in half for coming on to a barmaid the wrong way.

“What the fuck you saying, dick-brain?” the man queried, turning back to the business at hand.

Lone Wolf cold-cocked him twice with his shotgun butt, the first time in his balls, doubling him over in unexpected pain, then across his jaw, smashing it. The others stared at him, stunned.

“Anyone else?” Lone Wolf had asked. The victim of his attack lay writhing on the floor. The others looked from him to the other bikers, who formed a phalanx around their leader.

“It ain’t gonna happen this way,” Lone Wolf told them. “You did what you did and that’s how it had to be. But this ain’t. Now get the fuck out of here.”

After the predators left, dragging their unconscious mate with them, and the woman had dressed and they had been calmed down, he left Dutchboy there to guard them. Then they went out into the population.

Within three hours the prisoners had formed a council. Lone Wolf assumed the head; there was no argument. They started acting responsibly, for them. The women and guards were put off-limits. They drew up their list of grievances, and started debating about who among the authorities they’d be willing to talk to.

THE BODIES ARE STACKED
the length of the floor, piled haphazardly, arms and torsos of some on top of legs and feet of others. Heads on top of asses, vice versa. They are all naked, and the decomposition is something fierce to see. Unbelievable: I could never imagine something this horrible, let alone the idea that I’d actually be looking at it. This is where they brought them, so they’d be out of sight. They’re bloated beyond recognition. A couple of the more advanced cases have exploded, there’s flesh and cartilage and shards of bone splattered on the walls.