The Four Stages of Cruelty (28 page)

My legs gave out, and Stone allowed me to slump into the chair, the baton tucked under my chin, pulling me back so that my feet splayed, toes stretching akimbo. When I reached up to pull the baton down for relief, it bit harder and my hands fell away.

“What are you doing, Droune?” I choked through my damaged air passage at one of the moments I could breathe. I’d never liked the man. I’d always despised this ass-kissing bully. But I couldn’t hold back the startled question. At my words, as though released from a spell, Droune stood, gave me a frightened look, then ran by us both. Stone was just as surprised as I was, but he didn’t reach out—as though not realizing he could release the ends of the baton wedged into my neck. Droune stumbled at the door and fell, splattering onto the floor of the hub. Stone jerked me around with the baton, nearly tearing my head off. He yelled to Droune to stop, but Droune kept going until he broke through the hub doors and disappeared into Keeper’s Hall.

The abandonment was primal, every worst nightmare come true. I had been left alone with a monster, a beast in safari clothes kicking at the console desk.

“All right, we deal with it.” Respite over, he tucked the baton under my chin again and lifted up. “You’ll have to do it, you cunt.”

Do what?

We walked like a shambling four-legged beast to the console.

“Open everything, every goddamn thing!”

And when I didn’t reach out or obey, I felt one of his hands
release the baton while the other kept it tight, and his fingers reach under my vest and through my shirt as though it were a flimsy curtain. His breath was hot on my neck. So this was the rape arriving. He scooped in past my bra and grabbed my breast, and I shut my eyes, expecting the hands on my belt next, the downward tug of my pants. Instead, a charge of electricity shot through my chest as he twisted my nipple with his thumb and finger like he was turning a dial hard. Then he slammed my face against the console, hissing in my ear to open everything. I couldn’t move, and he threw me down. Released and stunned, I collapsed to the ground.

He pounded the console deck, furious that he didn’t know how to operate it. He wanted to open the gates into the hub, but those switches were located off the deck, in a special panel below the central monitor. I tried to squirm away, to follow the path Droune had taken out the bubble door and into the hub, but that seemed to raise his anger again.

“Open it up, you fucking skank.”

He walked over the stone floor and kicked me in the face. I realized, as my head bounced back, that the kick wasn’t that hard, more shocking than injurious. Twisted away, I lay on my back, my forearm over my eyes. His viciousness had peaked. Then his boot stepped onto my crotch—softly at first, as though testing the thickness of lake ice—before pressing down with all his weight, drawing the breath out of my body in a single whoosh.

“Don’t you fall asleep on me.”

When he released the pressure, all the agony surged skyward at once and I rolled into a ball, hands wedged tight
between my thighs. He kicked me again, in the ass this time, my tailbone exploding in a rosy bloom of pain that shot up my spine and spread to every hair follicle. “Open it!” he said. All resistance was over, and I mumbled through snot, and told him where the switches could be found, and heard him flick them rapidly, then the winching screech of the iron gates.

He was back in the next second, stepping past me, showing utter indifference. The disdain was gone, only arrogance left. I did not want to draw his wrath, to remind him that I was alive or that I had even a scrap of defiance within me. But the shock kept walloping my grasp of what was happening. He had knowledge of this place. He knew what he was doing, and he moved urgently and economically, part of something larger, something coordinated. Not a reporter. Not a guided tour. But an invasion. A tight crew. A suicidal urge came, and I grabbed the bottle of cleaner on the floor, rolled onto my side, and aimed the nozzle up toward him.

I saw him smile, looking at the stupid bitch with a bottle of Fantastic. Maybe he didn’t believe it would hurt. I squeezed the trigger and kept pumping.

Little aspirating canisters of pepper were no good when you faced more than one man, or when you just wanted to douse a room and stick some wet cloths under the door to keep the bad air in. But the pump action of a bottle of household cleaner had the close-range velocity and volume of a Super Soaker. The sharp spray hit him directly in the face.

Never before had I been in an enclosed space with so much spray. The air around us became acid, but it must have felt like hellfire to him, ruining his eyes, wrecking his throat. The
overpowering instinct was to claw your face and run from the vapor, but our training made you grind yourself low and restrain the gasping. Stone collapsed to the floor, helpless in his choking. I crawled toward the door, coughing hard, wanting out of the bubble. I got up on one knee, ready to sprint for it, when I saw the inmates running toward me.

A single inmate in bare feet and sweatpants with no shirt reached the outside of the door as I reached the inside. We stared at each other. He looked as startled as a teenager who had crept into an abandoned house and found a uniformed policeman waiting in the kitchen. I must have looked horrible to him, all red-eyed and leaking mucus, some lurching zombie come back to life, because he turned his back on me and fled. I hauled the gaping door closed and cranked the locks over. Then I scrambled under the desk below the windows.

Outside, an avalanche of noise. I heard the din at first like an echo of fireworks mixed with screams, maybe bombs exploding over the distant part of some city, the voices of people fleeing wrath from the sky. Then I felt the first rock or brick hit the wire caging and shatterproof glass of the bubble, and the pounding began on the door. The noise was deafening, the world caving in on top of me. The air was still acid with chemicals, as though we were sealed in an industrial vat. I wanted to hide below the deck like a child, but then I saw Stone rise to his knees and start to crawl away. It seemed impossible that he could still breathe, impossible that he was still alive. I lurched toward him with my fuckstick and slammed it down on his back with all my force. I clubbed him again and again, out of murderous fear. Then, to be sure, I wrenched his heavy, lifeless
arms behind his back and zipped his wrists and his ankles before scrambling back to my hiding place.

I dragged the handset down below the level of the console to make radio contact. I got no reply for a minute, and repeated myself. When a response finally came, I felt as though I’d appeared suddenly before a roomful of startled people, some party or meeting called without me. The voice demanded I repeat, that I cite my position and provide my status.

I told them my name. I told them my status was very fucking bad. “I am in the bubble. I’m injured and alone.”

A silence, a hesitation, then a different voice, one I didn’t recognize.

“What’s going on in there? Where’s your shift partner?”

I struggled to get out the words.

“He’s dead, I think.” I looked over at Cutler’s slumped body, the red puffiness on his head like the plumage of some exotic bird. “Alvin Cutler is dead. We have an intruder. We were compromised.” I didn’t know the words.

Another voice came on. I heard a tone of recrimination in the follow-up questions and could not seem to make myself understood.

“What happened to Cutler?” the voice asked me.

“Cutler was hit with his own baton. The reporter. Stone. I killed him, I think.”

I knew I wasn’t making sense, but the absence of any response drove my frustration higher.

“Droune did it! Droune opened the goddamn gates!”

No response again.

“Maintain your control.”

It came as a disjointed command, something I wasn’t sure I heard properly, and the radio went dead.

I gave up, and peeked above the deck to look at the consoles and through the glass. A torrent of freedom all around. Each monitor told a different story. Men running along the tiers in the cellblocks, crawling down fences, ripping away railings, ramming, wrenching, pounding at the walls and gates. A maelstrom of violence. This was not reparable. This was the book of Revelation. I felt numb with shock and helplessness. I could not put the genie back in the bottle. None of the gate switches worked. None of the doors would respond. They’d blocked and jammed everything, securing their exits and entrances. There was no battle out there, no shots being fired, the war already won. The COs had fallen back to the perimeters. Maybe there were pockets of them trapped in the blocks, the infirmary, or dis, but I was alone in the bubble. Then the monitors started to go blank, the cameras out on the blocks and in the tunnels covered up or knocked violently from their perches. I gripped the baton in my hand and squeezed my eyes shut.

When the others ran from their cells, Josh stayed inside. Screen Door appeared, arms braced on both sides of Josh’s suddenly opened entranceway, and told him the block was inmate land now. “What do you think?” she asked, with a hand sweeping along her front, and Josh realized that Screen Door had fashioned a prison jumpsuit into some kind of evening dress, low on her smooth caramel-skinned chest, tight around the hips, trailing at the ankles. Then Screen Door waved and tottered off, and Josh was alone.

He thought he’d known the level of noise that could be generated by the men within the block, but he’d underestimated the depth of human arousal, the furious glee of sudden freedom, the expansiveness of its rage and joy. There was the bellow of many voices shouting and whooping, the pounding of running feet, the crash of steel toilet units smashed into warped fragments on the concrete floor below, the wrenching away of metal railings set in concrete and stone like dinosaur fossils. He braced within his cave and thought about how he might rip his own cot from the wall, set it up as a barricade, even as he wondered if that would provoke or protect. Then, after too many men running by slowed to look at him suspiciously, he lunged up from his squatted stance and stepped out.

He spotted Roy at the end of the tier, whooping to the men above and below, shouting commands. Whether anyone could hear or was bothering to listen didn’t seem to matter. Roy acted like a maestro conducting an orchestra, coaxing some rage here, dampening some anger there, engorged by the hysteria. He saw Josh watching from afar and waved him forward. “Come on, Joshy! You’re needed!” It was impossible to disobey such a direct command, so Josh made his way down the range, squeezing tight as others ran by, stepping over chunks of concrete and twisted pipes, careful not to edge too close to the gaps, the railings dangling like fragments of broken bridge over open space.

Roy slapped a heavy arm over Josh’s shoulder and squeezed him close to his side. “Now you’ll know what human beings can do when the lid’s off, Joshy. You may never witness anything like it again for as long as you live.”

They watched. Then water suddenly poured down from the railings above and curtained across the tier. Josh fought a sense of vertigo, as though he stood on the lower deck of a ship that had just rolled in a great swell and got swamped. The men yelled their surprise first, then their questions, and then their hearty appreciation. Toilets and sinks had been plugged, he supposed, and the water allowed to overflow until it made an impressive waterfall. The flood ended after several minutes, and someone yelled that the water was cut off.

“Beautiful.” Roy smiled. “There goes the water. As if we wouldn’t need to have a drink over the next few days. They’d burn their own clothes just to see a bonfire, and then complain that it was cold.”

The television signal was next, all the small TV screens in cells lost in a sudden blink. In their place, boom boxes with batteries fought for audio room, the thumping rap rhythms and heavy rock colliding in a pileup of noise with the shouts and the bangs and the crashes and cries.

He was in on it but not part of it, hanging near Roy’s shoulder, only occasionally noticed. The men played their parts so earnestly it almost seemed like a game, a fantasy gone delusional and bloody. Roy was the only one who seemed even remotely self-aware. He did and said everything, even the most violent things, with a mocking tone, terrifying and humorous at once.

“Let’s review the troops,” Roy announced, and they left their perch and walked the tiers together.

Wherever they went, Roy was the locus of a moving storm. He answered questions and received adulations and expressions of support. He made decisions like Napoleon, though they seemed random and sometimes contradictory to Josh. He cast words of encouragement or scorned and mocked men who were doing stupid or self-destructive things. He told the men to set up the barricades. Count and secure the hostages. Police the tiers to protect the helpless from the wolves and assassins. Establish communication. Build the traps, find the food, and have bloody fun. On several of the tiers the men were knocking holes in the drum walls, connecting drum to drum, creating a crooked tunnel you could walk from end to end, the concrete chunks piled up in front of the gate and along the tier fence like a construction site. It looked as though an earthquake had twisted the entire building in its powerful hands.

A few of the men acted like wannabe lieutenants and community leaders. They asked for permission to set up food search committees, radio transmission committees, dome watch committees, so many committees that it became comical, a bizarre play at democracy. Roy blessed them as though he’d been waiting for exactly such virtuous knights to step forward and do his bidding. Men told him about the stores of pipes they’d collected, the spears and machetes they’d fashioned, the flashlights, radios, cans of coffee, notepads, and coils of rope they’d squirreled away. The industriousness was impressive. Roy stirred their flames with one breath and muttered his contempt as soon as they’d hustled off. “You’ll all be in chains by morning, you idiots. Jump and holler and let your worst out. Leave no urge or want behind.”

As per another of Roy’s commands, the hostages were secured in the drums at the back of B-4, despite the ease—some argued—with which a single group could be rescued in an assault. The diddlers and skinners were crammed like a freezer truck full of illegal immigrants in the two last drums, eyes wide in fear. Eight jacks were spaced across the next three drums, their uniforms torn, their arms pinned back by their own zip cuffs. Brute men stood guard at the drum entrances, their orders from Roy clear and precise: keep the men alive and safe, no matter how much verbal sport got made. Those with a curiosity or an urge for wanton cruelty sauntered by and peeked in, mocked and challenged, sometimes tried to squeeze through, and got thrust back. Roy encouraged them all, the attackers and the defenders, and he assured the captives that they were safe and their every need would be
taken care of. The COs, Josh thought, looked weary and defiant but very very afraid. An inmate whispered in Roy’s ear, and he nodded sagely and announced a new command. The hostages would have their uniforms stripped and be changed into green inmate garb. What’s more, the homemade napalm bombs (a stack of capped soda bottles in the corridor) would be transferred to the drums containing the COs. That way, when the assault teams came or the snipers fired, they’d be picking off their own kind or blowing them up, and they could think about that when the counting of dead bodies was going on later.

“Make a flag,” Roy told Josh. “Give us something we can rally around.”

So Josh and Screen Door got to work on a white sheet, found some black paint and outlined a skull on it, and duct-taped it to a broomstick. When Josh brought it out to the gallery railing, Roy told him to hold it up high and wave it back and forth. The men loved it, cheering, whooping, and Roy barked harshly through a bullhorn stolen out of the block nest.

“In all my years I’ve never seen the jacks run so fast. You’re excellent soldiers, even if no army in the world would ever take you.” He roared with laughter and caused the others to laugh, too.

Then to Josh in a low, casual voice with the bullhorn lowered, “Look how scared they are.”

“They don’t look scared to me.” He’d seen too much madness in the past few hours to think of them as scared.

“It’s plain as mud,” Roy said. “In any riot there’s five or six men who got the will, and the rest follow like a herd of mad horses.”

Josh saw Jacko make his way down the tier toward them. He’d been wondering where Fenton, Cooper Lewis, and the others were and what they were doing. Jacko looked determined, busy, like an office manager with a to-do list.

“We’ve got a visitor,” Jacko announced when he stood with them.

“Already?” Roy said. “Tell me the warden is here, please.”

“It’s Keeper Wallace,” Jacko answered.

Roy shrugged. “No surprise there. And not much fun either. Oh well, let sourpuss come in.”

A single CO was led out of the tunnel and onto the block by two inmates. Everyone hushed, seeing the Keeper below, awed by the audacity of his presence, the calm poise he showed. Then the shouting started again. They scorned him. They wanted to tear the Keeper to pieces.

“Wave the flag, Josh!” Roy urged him. “Wave it with all you’ve got. We need a truce!”

From the third tier Roy shouted through the bullhorn until the men finally calmed themselves.

Keeper Wallace looked very alone, and Josh was tight with guilt at the sight of him. How brave did you have to be to walk into a cellblock full of loosened inmates? There was an obstinacy to it, a declaration of the Keeper’s rightful place in a stolen kingdom. This was Wallace’s domain, his presence said, no matter how overturned the world had become, and he was there to serve justice to the despoilers.

The inmates crowded the tiers like spectators in a Roman
gallery. With Josh at his side, Roy lifted the bullhorn again and made his speech, a show for the Keeper’s benefit and the inmates’ reassurance.

“This uprising is a call for justice and better conditions.”

The announcement roused a tremendous thunder among the men.

“It was inspired by the systematic mistreatment of our brothers.”

He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, and Josh saw many of the men nodding.

“No one feels safe with all the brutality, oppression, and revenge that permeates this institution. We want to investigate the outlaw guard criminals among your ranks—”

The noise became impossible to withstand. Josh cringed and looked for the roof to fall, the walls to cave in.

“To end the practice of turning inmates into snitches! We want better living conditions and more free time outside the ranges! We want an inmate justice committee with the authority to investigate abusive and corrupt guards and staff. All the way to the top! We want immunity for all the crimes committed in the launching of this justified revolt.”

And who, with concrete dust in their hair and wrenched pipes in their hands, could deny the virtue in that?

“In return,” speaking to the lonely figure below, “I give you my solemn promise that for as long as I am the voice of these men, none of the hostages will be harmed.”

The enthusiasm petered out, and there was a discordant confusion of banging and shouts. Josh could even hear some
men protesting Roy’s list, adding bullet points of their own, questioning his authority.

“And now,” Roy said, still into the bullhorn but in a quieter voice, “I will meet you in the tunnel to present you with a written list of our terms—” And he gave up, lowering the bullhorn and looking to Josh. “Maybe I should have spoke from the higher level, do you think?” Josh didn’t know what to say. “Fuck it, let’s get down there and get this over with.”

Josh left the flag leaning against the railing and walked alongside Roy to the stairs. His pulse flickered wildly with the dread he felt facing the Keeper.

When they reached him, Roy nodded thanks to the inmates who’d handed the Keeper over, and gestured to Wallace to follow him back into the tunnel.

“Join us in the shadows if you don’t mind, Keeper.”

Wallace stepped closer. He glanced at Josh, disdain in that pinched mouth. “Keeper,” Roy said, passing a folded piece of paper over. “I’ve always respected you for the way you run a fair shift. I only wish the majority of COs in this shit-hole did the same, or we might not be in this position.”

Wallace said nothing, just waited him out with grim disdain, and the tactic drove Roy to be hasty and anxious in his words.

“You know how the boys are,” Roy confided. “Their blood’s boiling, and God knows what they’re capable of doing. It’s a struggle to keep the lid on, and I’d appreciate some help. The better you make me look in meeting some of our more reasonable demands—for food, TV, etcetera—the more cred I get. Otherwise, there’s ten guys waiting to take my place,
each motherfucking one of them less reasonable than yours truly. If you could start with some sandwiches and coffee for the boys, that would go over well. We’re starving already, and I don’t put cannibalism past half of them.”

He laughed at his own joke, but Wallace didn’t smile.

“Here are my terms, Roy,” Wallace said. “This ends now. Every inmate returns to his cell until we secure the hub and the blocks. Then we will assess what happened and who instigated it, and charge and prosecute each and every man for his part. No discussion.”

Roy scratched his chest and gazed past Wallace down the tunnel beyond, as if checking for the arrival of some delayed train. When he looked back, he seemed disappointed and grim.

“Why, that’s hardly the kind of response I can bring to the boys without causing upset. Keeper, you want me in this position, believe me. Every minute goes by, old Roy’s power diminishes just a little bit more. That’s the way the game gets played. But as you can imagine, I’m going to go back and sell them on some bullshit story, same as you will on your end, and all of this is going to be a bloody mess no matter what we say to each other.” He tapped his wooden leg on the stone floor. “There are a couple paltry things you could do for me, though, if you want to avoid a hostage being executed before the night is out.”

Josh had heard nothing of an execution, but there was a harsh honesty in Roy’s tone that led him to believe it was truly in the plans.

“We want the comic book Crowley drew in Brother Mike’s art class.”

Wallace blinked. Josh could tell he was surprised. “What comic book? What are you talking about?”

“We know you have it. That Brother Mike gave it to you.”

“That’s not true. I don’t know what you mean.”

Roy laughed. “Then Brother Mike must still have it. And he says I have a lying problem. What a scoundrel. Here’s the deal, then. Tell him we want it. And make sure he delivers it, personally and alone.”

The Keeper’s dark eyes opened wide. “Are you out of your mind? I can’t ask a civilian to walk in here.”

“Chief, you and I both know Brother Mike would be willing to exchange himself for a couple of tired, hungry, scared COs. If he brings it, we’ll release a hostage or two in his place. Be thankful I’m not asking for an airplane to Cuba. Just take care of my urgent needs, and I’ll take care of your hostages and inmates. On that, I’m not fucking with you even a little. There are some among us eager to slit a throat.”