Blood Cell

by Shaun Tennant

  The fight had drawn all the inmates away from their own tables. The inmates were now piled into the far corner, circling Leo and the guards, shoving each other in a rush to see what happened. Terminal Thomas was by far the biggest man in the stew, and the inmates respected his ability to put on a show. But tensions were high, and the grouping of inmates was leading to a lot of shoving and elbowing. The guards upstairs on the balcony looked ready to fire into the crowd.

  Josh followed Santos’ crew as they tracked down their leader in the crowd. The guards were aiming their shotguns into the crowd, and the four guards holding Thomas off Leo were screaming for the inmates to disperse. Santos was busy getting everyone to do the opposite.

  “Santos, what you thinking?” asked Eli.

  “Mikey’s working the crowd. We gotta keep Leo here long enough to figure out a plan.”

  “Santos you gotta think this through,” said Carlos, “we got no play here that doesn’t end in the hole.”

  “Fuck the hole, Leo dies!”

  An inmate with a goatee overheard and screamed “Leo dies!”

  Then Frankie Frisby’s arm shot out of the mob of inmates. And his razor-sharp shank buried into goatee-man’s neck. Blood sprayed across the crowd and suddenly the jostling crowd turned on each other.

  The Eighteenth gave each other a quick ‘oh shit’ look, and started brawling. Four white guys armed with identical shanks came out of the woodwork, looking to take down the generals of the Latino gang.

  Above, a guard fired a warning shot into the shot box on the ceiling. The crowd didn’t stop brawling. With so many weapons in the crowd, to stop fighting was to die.

  Santos punched one of the attackers in the throat, and tripped him so he fell with the side of head hitting the edge of a table. He picked up the shank and came to Josh.

  “You still got that key card?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give it to Delman.”

  Josh handed over the card. Santos leaned in to explain something to his cellmate. Delman nodded in approval of the plan, and disappeared.

  “What is he going to do?”

  “The card’ll work in the office upstairs,” said Santos, looking up at the guards with the rifles.

  One of the inmates sprinted for an old enemy, and started to settle a score with his fists. Another took a run at a guard and met a baton with his face.

  “And that conversation was about how we’re going to handle...” he took a breath, then finished his sentence while stepping up on top of a table screaming at the top of his lungs, “...the RIOT!”

  As the word echoed off the walls, the inmates went insane.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  There are two types of prison riots. The first is like a stick of dynamite with a long fuse—it sizzles for weeks with a stockpiling of weapons and heated tensions between gangs and races before finally exploding. The second type of riot is more like a grenade—somebody pulls the pin and within a few seconds everybody is dodging shrapnel. This one was, somehow, both.

  Josh Farewell had never seen a riot before.

  Chow time turned into the kind of brawl that was exclusive to prisons and European soccer games. A hundred men dove into brutal, fist-on-skull combat almost immediately after Santos said the word. As the leader of the Eighteenth climbed down from his table, Josh grabbed his shirt and screamed, “Aren’t you forgetting that I’m a non-violent offender?!”

  Santos shoved Josh aside, slamming him into the steel table, then buried his shank into the back of one of Ox’s soldiers. “That just means you haven’t tried yet!”

  And with that, Santos vanished into the crowd, throwing fists and elbows as he faded into the churning sea of uniforms and skin tones.

  Josh was utterly terrified. All around the cafeteria, inmates were having fistfights, throwing each other, tackling each other. The Eighteenths were in a five-on-four brawl against the skinheads. Elsewhere a group of men were in a circle around someone on the floor, all of them kicking the same man. A lanky man with cornrows ran across the tabletops, for the entire width of the room, to make a leaping tackle on a different skinny guy with cornrows. Everywhere in the room, grudges were being settled. Every score was evened, every long-simmering drop of bad blood was spilled. Josh watched in horror as twenty feet away, Ox Werden grabbed one of Santos’s soldiers and sliced across his belly. Ox looked up from his prey and saw Josh standing still, mouth agape, the only man not moving in the entire room. Ox pointed his shank at Josh, then mimed slicing his throat.

  Ox started to stalk toward Josh, his head on a swivel as he moved through the mob. Josh spotted a lane between rioters and ran. Before Ox could follow, a guard swung at him with a baton. That diverted his attention, and Josh ducked underneath a table twenty feet away from the brawl.

  It was anarchy.

  More than anything else, the inmates were fighting the guards. The two unfortunate souls who had come to save Leo were in the centre of a giant, undulating mob of bodies. The other two, who had been with Terminal, he couldn’t see at all. Josh couldn’t even make out individual people in that din, just the occasional arm pulled back to cock a punch, before plunging back into the group. Around the perimeter, tables were being dragged and stood up on their sides, creating walls of protection from the guards’ gunfire. The guards with shotguns were firing indiscriminately, the sounds of their shots punctuating the din of the riot. Even with the deafening sound of a hundred men screaming in anger and pain, the shots rang out clearly. These guards had to keep moving, though, keep sidestepping and readjusting because the inmates were climbing for the balcony now, looking to grab the guards, and pull them, or at least their guns, down to the cafeteria floor.

  As Josh watch this, nobody touched him. Maybe it was because he was new and nobody hated him, maybe it was because he wasn't instigating anything, but Josh was alone for five feet in every direction. Josh was a nonviolent man, he’d never even been in a fight before. As soon as he realized that he was really, truly, in the middle of a prison riot, He hid under the table, hands over his head, slowly turning to watch the riot around him.

  As he watched the guards up top, trying to keep their feet underneath their bodies and their rifles away from the inmates, he remembered that Santos had said something about the office. It was less than a minute since Santos had spoken to him, but the mess hall would need days of repair, and there were almost certainly men already dead in this room. Santos had said the key was for the office. Josh traced the balcony with his eyes, crawling around on his knees beneath the table, until he spotted Delman hanging from the bottom of the balcony like a jungle gym. He had both hands on a bar, and his legs pulled up so they were on the same bar, his body horizontal along the railing.

  The safety railing on the balcony was about three and a half feet high, made of five horizontal bars spaced about eight inches apart. Delman was hanging from the bottom one. Josh couldn’t understand why he was just hanging there, unmoving. Then he caught on—the nearest guard was grabbed by an inmate from below and was half-way pulled down, the top railing digging into his armpits. Once he was down, Delman sprang into action, swinging up and over the rail, and flipping the guard down to the crowd below. There were still only two guards up there now, and one of them was fighting for his life. There was nobody to stop Delman from reaching the office.

  But what was the point? Santos hadn’t said. Maybe they had this planned—in the event of a riot do the following. Maybe there was some common sense idea that Josh wasn’t grasping because he was so new here. What would be inside a guard office? Guns, of course. There would locker after locker, an entire armory. Was that the idea? Santos wouldn’t seriously give guns to the inmates, would he? Everyone getting a few punches in the jaw was one thing, but if they had guns, half the population would be shot by the other half. Maybe there was something else. Maybe they were going to kill the cameras after all, then trample Leo to death. That made sense. Whatever it was, Josh prayed that the swipe card he’d stolen didn’t
come back to haunt him.

  As he watched Delman, approaching the office door, something caught Josh’s eye. In the doorway, barely visible, there was something red. He could only see half of it, but it was unmistakeable. It was the one thing that he almost never got to see, and yet thought about constantly. There was a girl in that office, a girl in a red dress with long black hair.

  ‘Jesus,’ he thought, ‘that’s Quinn’s secretary.’ Delman was almost at the door. Shit, what would Delman do to her? What kind of a criminal was Delman? How would he react to the sight of a woman? Josh tried to fool himself, tried to convince himself that it wasn’t so bad—but he remembered exactly what he had been told when he met the gang the day before. Delman was a rapist.

  *****

  Sally Peoples didn’t know what she was getting into. When she got dressed for work that day, she had put on a sexy red dress. She usually dressed very plainly, especially on days when she knew the warden would be seeing inmates. She hated how they looked at her, hated their eyes. But on this day she was dressing for John Norris, the man she’d been sleeping with for the last few months. John was going to take her out after work, for a real date in a real restaurant. They’d never done that before and she wanted to wow him. She wanted to give him a reason to call it off with his wife. Sally hated being the other woman, but then again she was falling for Norris. She was starting to resent that he was still with his wife, treating Sally like a booty call, like a disposable girl on the side. Sure, he got her a birthday present, and a lovely one at that, but she was starting to need more. When he agreed to go on a real date, she saw it as the first real sign that he was serious about her. She wanted that, to an extent that she was surprised at herself for being so excited. Hence the dress.

  And then, Norris had gotten stuck with the crappy walkie. Everyone knew that one of the walkie-talkies was busted, that it was inaudible, but due to the budget it was still in use, and every day one of the guards was unlucky enough to get stuck with the bad one. Today it was Norris. The warden put up with not being able to reach Norris for most of the day, but eventually his patience wore out, so he told Sally to head down to the office in C pod and bring Norris back with her. Quinn sounded quite upset with John, although she couldn’t guess why. So, Sally had made her way across the prison, to the entrance to the second-floor guards’ office. She had to pass through the locker room to get to the office, and both of those doors are reinforced steel. She couldn’t hear the sounds on the other side. When she opened the door to the office, the sounds of screaming and gunshots filled the air, sounds so loud and harsh it shook her. From where she stood, she could only see empty tables below, at the far side of the cafeteria. In front of her, outside the office door, she saw one of the guards grabbed by the inmates on the floor below. They yanked on his arms, trying to pull him down among them. They took his rifle.

  She watched, as this man was fighting for his life, and she couldn't tell if it was John or not. She watched, transfixed, as this man who might have been her lover fought with everything he had to stay on the balcony and stay alive. She heard the heavy steel door behind her slam itself shut, and realized that in her need to see who the guard was, she had stepped forward, just a few steps, into the office. The closed door didn't scare her; she was still holding her swipe card and could get out within seconds. What did scare her was the idea of John being dragged down into a hundred angry prisoners. She planned to leave the office, in just another second, as soon as she knew if that guard was John. She didn’t get a chance to see.

  A hulking black man, sweating and panting, came into the office. And he wasn’t a corrections officer. The inmate’s frame filled the doorway, blocking her view of the guard she had been so worried about. The man was surprised to find her here; obviously he had come to the office for something else and the sight of a woman had thrown him off. But now, this man looked her up and down, his gaze revolting her, and he sneered at her. She was a worm on a hook; a gazelle before a cheetah. She knew, feeling his eyes on her, what he wanted.

  Sally turned, frantic, and tried to swipe her card through the reader beside the door. First she missed, knocking her card into the top of the panel, almost hitting it out of her hand. She tried again, and again, before she got the card to slide through. Without waiting, she grabbed the door handle and pushed it down, but the door was still locked. She forced the lock with all her strength, but got nothing. She willed herself not to look back, not wanting to know how close he was, how long she had left to escape. In reality, he should have been on her already. The office was a tiny room, this guy could cross it in less than a second. Sally swiped her card again, and again. The panel still showed a solid red light.

  ‘Your fucking card is backward,’ she scolded herself. She flipped the card over, so the stripe faced the other way, and swiped it. The light turned green. She reached for the handle again, and pushed. The light on the panel turned red again. This time, the red light flashed over and over.

  “You ain’t getting out now.” Said the man behind her, in a deep voice.

  Sally cried out, tears running from her eyes, and turned to face the man.

  To her surprise, the man was holding a swipe card of his own, and had his hand was on the control panel.

  “Emergency lockdown, sweetie. Ain’t nobody getting in here now.” He licked his lips, “and ain’t nobody getting out.”

  Sally screamed. The muscle-bound stranger stepped to her, grabbing her by the arms. His sneer was crueller and more pronounced than ever.

  “Scream all you want to, baby. Nobody hears you, nobody’s coming to help.” He didn’t even try to cover her mouth to muffle the screams. The man shoved her against the door, knocking the wind out of her, making her silent. She fell to the floor, her dress flying up past her knees. She tried to push it back, tried to catch her breath. She screamed again, hurting her lungs. She screamed so hard she tasted metal. The man towering over her started to open his fly.

  And then was knocked forward, his head slamming hard into the steel door. Sally saw a pair of hands grab the man’s head from behind, and ram it repeatedly into the door. Each impact rang out loudly, even over the sounds of the riot. Seeing a small opportunity, Sally scrambled across the floor, ducking into the corner, in a small space between the desk and the wall. The side of the desk narrowed her view, so all she could see was her attacker.

  The black man fell to his knees, dazed and blinking. He turned to the doorway, to see what was behind him. He didn’t seem to register it. And even after the hits he had taken, the rapist started to stand up. He leaned over, placing a hand on the desk to support himself, leaning over Sally. For a moment, Sally thought that whoever had saved her was gone and she was alone again with this monster. But then she felt, more than heard, footsteps pounding hard, and saw a man leap into view, above the rapist, and tackle him down again.

  The side of the rapist’s forehead caught on the edge of the desk, and he crumpled. Both men’s heavy, sweating bodies tumbled down on Sally’s legs. She screamed again. The second man stood up, but the rapist, unmoving, still lay on her legs. She tried to pull her legs out from under him, but she was pinned. Then the second man came back into view, and looked her in the face. It was that new inmate, he one who had come to see Quinn. The escape artist. He offered a hand.

  Sally grabbed onto him and he pulled her out from the corner, her legs coming free of the rapist’s prone body. For a second, they just looked at each other, catching their breath. The escape artist looked down at the rapist. She followed his eyes. The black man was lying in a puddle of blood, his head gaping open where he had hit the desk. He had struck the desk with his temple, taking the full impact of both men’s weight. Neither Sally nor her new saviour said it, but they knew that the rapist was either dead or dying.

  “What are you doing here?” the man asked.

  “I... I... ” Sally couldn’t think of a very good reason. Sally couldn’t think clearly at all.

  “Can you get back out?
” Sally still couldn’t think straight. The man shook her shoulders and shouted at her. “Can you leave?”

  “No, he, he, put it in lockdown. It can be opened from the outside, in an hour. There’s no way out of the pod until then.”

  “Then you might be in trouble.”

  The escape artist looked around the room, anxious. He seemed to be searching, but couldn’t find anything.

  “Do you know your way around here? Is there a place you can hide?”

  “If the inmates have swipe cards, they can go anywhere within the pod.” As she said the words, she realized how much trouble she was in now. “We have to find John. Officer Norris. He’ll protect me.”

  “If Norris is a guard, he’s either dead or captive.”

  “I can stay up here, out of sight.”

  “That’s no good. Delman...” he said, looking down, “had a crew. A very big, very powerful crew. They know he came up here, they’ll be looking for him.”

  “I can go down the stairs, to the secure hallway. It runs the whole way down, has access to the TV room, the weight room, the temporary holding cells. I can find someplace.”

  “No good. This place is full of a lot of violent, sexual offenders and a woman like you is not going to be safe hiding in the weight room.”

  “You mean you’re not a violent sexual offender too?”

  “Fraud over a hundred thousand. Money laundering. And a couple escapes. Nonviolent.”

  The escape artist was thinking again, staring at the security camera feeds that showed a riot in the mess hall, and empty rooms everywhere else. He studied the different rooms but didn’t seem to know what he was looking for. She realized that this guy was new here, and he didn’t know where to go. Finally, he pointed to one of the screens. “That hallway, does it go to solitary?”

  “Yeah that’s all the way at the other end.”

  “That’s where we’ll go. That’s where you’ll be safe.” He nodded at her, forced a reassuring smile.