Noble Warrior

by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  So he decided to let Pharmy’s vitals come to him.

  The huge beast set himself up for another immense collapse, but this time, instead of spinning to his right, M.D. broke the pattern, wriggled to his left and bent his leg at the knee.

  Pharmy, with irreversible momentum, slammed down with another huge explosion, but instead of slamming into McCutcheon’s face, he jammed his own testicles into the top of McCutcheon’s knee.

  Upon seeing the impact each of the guards instinctively grabbed their groins and averted their eyes. Pharmy’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he flopped over breathless and immobilized. McCutcheon staggered to his feet and shook the cobwebs from his head, but before he could drop-kick Pharmy in the face, Goblin jumped onto his back and bit him for a second time in the same shoulder from which he’d already taken a huge chunk.

  M.D. screamed in pain and his blood began to boil. Something about being bit snapped M.D., turned him from conscious fighter into primal animal, and a moment later, seething with rage, McCutcheon reached around his back, reversed the position on the dwarf, and grabbed the evil dwarf by the sides of his head.

  Then twisted.

  A crack echoed off the walls. Goblin’s eyes bulged wide, then froze, open and hollow. McCutcheon, shirtless, sweating, blood running down the front of his rippled torso, released his grip and the dwarf fell to the floor.

  Lifeless.

  M.D. took a step backward, sucked some wind in order to get his body the oxygen for which it starved, and readied himself for the next phase of Pharmy’s fury. He expected unprecedented wrath from the beast, a level of ferocity the likes of which he’d never yet seen in an opponent. Collecting his wits he resolved to stay on the outside, on his feet, too, with a plan to dance and strike. Speed and quickness would be the path to victory. When the opportunity appeared, he’d go for the eyes or throat. Maybe even fishhook Pharmy’s mouth or jam a finger three inches deep into his ear hole. Rules were gone. Ethics were out. Survival was all that mattered.

  He’d have to defeat this foe by any means necessary. Nobility in warfare had just become a luxury he could no longer afford.

  Head shots, head shots, head shots were the only thoughts that ran through his mind.

  Pharmy climbed to his feet, but in a move that surprised everyone, did not storm forward. M.D. raised his fists and waited for the rage, but noticed that the look of violence and anger had disappeared from Pharmy’s face. Instead, the giant softly limped to his fallen cell mate, dropped to his knees, and tenderly tried to arouse Goblin from his sleep.

  “Brutha, Wake. Brutha, wake now. Wake.”

  Pharmy poked at Goblin with his thick index finger, but the midget lay motionless on the floor, entirely unresponsive.

  “Brutha, wake now. Wake.”

  Like a puppy trying to lick its mommy’s nose after she’d just been run over by a car, the human beast hunched over the only person on the planet that he’d ever loved.

  Or who loved him back.

  “Wake please, Brutha. Wake.”

  McCutcheon’s heart fell into his stomach. What have I done?

  Mends eyes blinked open and slowly he sat up.

  “You oughtta check those locks a little better next time, crusader,” Krewls said to Mends as he prepared to walk away. “Me and my first lieutenant will each mention it in our incident report how the two inmates must have jimmied the thing during your hallway patrol. And the midget slipping on the wet floor, well...we really oughtta get that leak in the ceiling fixed, too.”

  “Brutha? Brutha?” Pharmy said, confused by Goblin’s unresponsiveness.

  “Here’s your cash,” one of the guards said to Krewls as he handed him a stack of neatly arranged bills.

  “Yep, really oughtta fix that leak,” another of the guards said to Mends.

  Krewls took a deep sniff of the green paper. “Ah, I love the smell of money on a Tuesday night.”

  The guards threw a weary and worn McCutcheon back inside his cell, and as the door locked behind him the words of Colonel Stanzer echoed through M.D.’s head: You’ve been spared so far, but at some point every last one of us who does this kind of work gets bloody with stains that don’t wash off.

  Stanzer always wanted to turn me into a killer, McCutcheon thought. He always wanted me to taste blood, to bury my naïveté, to slay my dragon.

  Well, fuck him. Fuck him for ever dragging me into this.

  Fixer wetted a washcloth and reached out his hand. “Here, try...”

  M.D. snared his cell mate’s throat. “Do not touch me, old man. And do not say a goddamn word, either. I don’t want to talk. Especially about your penis.”

  Fixer lowered his arm, M.D. released his grip and then hopped into his bunk. He wanted to rest, sleep, vanish, disappear. But of course, he couldn’t. Only one thought raced through his head. What have I just done?

  At six the next morning a bell cried out, signaling the start of a new day. Fixer, as usual, remained in his cell, choosing not to go to the cafeteria for breakfast. M.D. stayed, too. There was nothing out there for him anymore. Nothing at all. So he went back to sleep for another three hours. When he woke, he saw the old man smiling and stirring a cup of tea.

  “Oh, the hummingbirds are flapping today.”

  “Fuck the hummingbirds,” M.D. said rolling back over.

  Even before all the oatmeal had been plated in the cafeteria, word spread throughout the entire prison about how McCutcheon defeated Pharmy, snapped the neck of Goblin, and saved a guard. It made for great breakfast time conversation. It also created an incredibly large problem for M.D. Taking the side of a screw over a fellow inmate carried a price.

  The penalty of death.

  When McCutcheon saved Mends he signed his own death certificate, because in the world of prison it was always the convicts versus guards. Anyone who violated this law of life behind bars required swift and immediate payback. In a culture with no values, rules were still rules. Us against them. Always. Saving a guard was worse than snitching.

  “Good still flickers in your heart,” Fixer said admiringly. “Prison extinguishes that in most men.”

  “There’s no good in here, only darkness. I was a fool to come.”

  “You didn’t choose to come. It was your destiny.”

  “My destiny?” McCutcheon still felt numb about the idea he’d taken someone’s life. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “You’re a special one, kid. All my years I ain’t never seen nothing like it. Got me so inspired, I feel forty years younger. Only thing is,” Fixer said as the sound of boots stomping up the hallway grew louder. “I think the games for you have just begun.”

  Five guards stormed to the front of their cell.

  “And perhaps for me as well.”

  The cage door flew open and a black-booted officer slapped the tea from Fixer’s hand, sending the cup of hot liquid rocketing against the wall.

  “Toss this place. Now!”

  After roughhousing M.D. and Fixer out of the cell, the guards, following Krewls’s orders, began attacking every personal item in the small domain. Bit by bit they threw all of Fixer’s things onto the floor. M.D., of course, owned nothing.

  “Contraband!”

  They smashed his cooking ladle.

  “Contraband!”

  They smashed his collection of spices.

  “Contraband! Contraband! Contraband!”

  Each and every item Fixer owned got tossed onto the floor and mashed into fragments by the heel of hard, black, steel-toed boots. From the cache of fresh fruit to the chocolate chip cookies, from the plates to the cups to the spoons. They even destroyed his beloved stinger.

  Krewls nodded approvingly at the dismantling of Fixer’s life. Then, discovering one more thing that required attention, Krewls reached out, removed the pair of black eyeglasses from Fixer’s face, and dropped them to the floor.

  SMASH! His boot slammed down on the spectacles and blasted them to smithereens.

&n
bsp; “I’m sure once we requisition another pair, the order’ll be filled in what, eight to ten months?”

  “Fuck you, Krewls!” Fixer cackled. “You can’t get to me. The kid beat you. The kid owns you. The whole prison knows it, too.” Fixer turned and shouted at the top of his lungs so the entire cell block could hear. “THE KID KICKED YOUR ASS!”

  BAM! Krewls bashed the old man in the gut and Fixer fell to the ground, grabbing his stomach. Just as it wasn’t a coincidence that the guy not named Timmy ended up in Cell One One Three, it also wasn’t a coincidence that M.D. ended up sharing a cell with Fixer. The old guy was supposed to guide the kid. Teach him the rules. Keep his belly full, his body healthy, keep him out of trouble, and make sure the young stud toed the line.

  Saving a guard hadn’t just pissed off the entire inmate population; the guard M.D. saved was a guard Krewls had set up. Hell needed to be paid for the defiance, and the first person to make good on the debt was the old man to which Krewls had granted lots and lots of leeway.

  It took a moment for Fixer to catch his wind but once he did the old man raised his eyes and glared at Major Krewls.

  “You can beat our bodies, but you can’t beat our spirit. And the kid,” Fixer said. “He just reminded us all of that. Reminded the entire population.” After forty-seven years in lock up, Fixer realized he had sold his soul. It never bothered him either, because every last con he’d ever encountered eventually ended up selling theirs, too. Except McCutcheon. M.D. hadn’t and he wouldn’t, and that inspired Fixer to see his world in a whole new light.

  The old man struggled to his feet and began to chant.

  “Long live the kid! Long live the kid! Long live the kid!”

  “Throw him in ad seg,” Krewls said.

  “For what?” the guard asked.

  “Defiance.”

  “But he’s a geezer, Major. Guy ain’t gonna make it through a long bid in solitary.”

  “I said throw him in ad seg!” The officer clearly didn’t want to do it, but like every other guard on the staff, he knew that Krewls ran the ship and he feared the major’s power.

  “Let’s go, Fixer,” the guard said with a soft tug of the old man’s arm.

  “The kid beat you, Krewls. No matter what you do from here, the kid beat you.” Again Fixer began shouting at the top of his lungs. “We are human beings! We are people! You can take our bodies but you can’t steal our souls. Uprising! Uprising! Long live the kid! Long live the kid!”

  Krewls pushed M.D. back inside his cell and locked the door. “Clean this mess up,” he said to M.D. “Or not,” Krewls added. “I don’t care what he says about ‘Long live the kid’ or about how badass you think you are, the chances of you making it to see dinnertime three nights from now fall somewhere between fuckin’ nada and nope-er-rooskie.”

  “Long live the kid! Long live the kid!”

  Fixer’s shouts became more faint as the guard escorted him down the hall and into solitary confinement. A moment later Krewls walked away, but it didn’t escape McCutcheon’s attention that not a single other prisoner on the cell block joined in on Fixer’s chorus.

  Not because the other cons didn’t understand Fixer’s sentiments. Not because they didn’t agree with these sentiments, either. The reason that no single man offered even one peep of support came because of only one thing.

  Fear of retribution.

  A green light had been issued on McCutcheon, a command that called for his death.

  A green light that had been issued by the High Priest.

  Since McCutcheon would have been flying the colors of the Priests in the Think Tank, it fell on the Priests to handle their own man. Otherwise, if another gang had to do the deed of keeping a renegade convict in check, the Priests would be seen as “punk-ass bitches” who’d broken the unspoken code of life behind bars.

  In lockup, all gangs self-regulated their own people. If they didn’t police their own when a code was broken and another gang had to do it for them, rivals gangs would consider this absence of retribution an act of war. The Priests may have been the largest gang in the facility, but if all the other gangs united against them, any battle was sure to be bloody and costly.

  For their part, the Priests had no real reason to stick by the side of M.D. anyway. And there was every reason in the world to sell him out and make him pay.

  All the shotcallers agreed: M.D. had to go. The High Priest concurred, as well. In fact, he even saw it as an opportunity to prove his unrivaled supremacy. D’Marcus would make the hit on McCutcheon more notorious and more infamous than any other hit ever executed in prison. Cons would talk about this icing for decades. Not only would the Priests take out McCutcheon, but D’Marcus decided that he’d make Demon seal the deal.

  “Make a father kill his own son,” D’Marcus boasted. “Now that shit shows POWER!”

  He decreed the order. Word spread through the prison. No one was to touch M.D.

  No one except Demon.

  Later that afternoon, the High Priest handed Demon an eight-inch silver shank fashioned from the leg of a broken bed frame. Its spiked end had been sharpened to a fine triangular point. When Demon was first handed the weapon, he thought it looked like something that could kill a vampire.

  “I have spoken,” D’Marcus said. Demon held the shiv in his hand and felt its weight. With masking tape wrapped around the back half of the shank the weapon owned a firm and solid grip. A strong tool, indeed. Capable of great destruction.

  “We’ll rush as a mob, hold him down and then you’ll strike. Am I clear?”

  “Clear.”

  “You got any reservations about what you’re gonna do?”

  Demon raised his eyes, confident and alert. “None at all.”

  “Good.” The High Priest smiled. “I can’t wait to see this shit. We’ll roll at chow time tonight.”

  But M.D. didn’t go to dinner that night, and though the S.O.S. offered little that he liked, the bag of food that Mends provided got McCutcheon through the evening.

  And the next got him through breakfast, and the next got him through lunch, and the one after than got him through dinner the next day. The Priests didn’t have a chance to get to M.D. out in the open at all, and after twenty-four hours of inaction, the other inmates in prison started getting restless.

  After thirty-six hours, rival shotcallers began to question the intentions of the High Priest. Maybe this was a power play, a way of showing every other con on the yard that the biggest dog in the park got to make its own rules? A big fuck-you to everyone else. The whole prison grew tense and looked at risk of descending into chaos. Something had to be done. Krewls knew it. He understood that the whole facility stood on the edge of anarchy.

  “Mends thinks the guards are in charge,” Krewls told one of his lieutenants. “We don’t take action, this whole place is gonna blow and we’ll be living in a shit storm for months.”

  Of course Mends didn’t live at the jail and couldn’t monitor everything twenty-four hours a day, so on the third morning after McCutcheon had saved the major from Pharmy and Goblin, while Mends rolled on the carpet of his town house with his twin three-year-olds rolling on top of him, Krewls arranged for M.D. to have a little rec time on the yard, whether he wanted to go or not.

  McCutcheon knew he’d been set up. He understood that he’d been tossed into the rec area where the ad seg guys got their daily hour of court-ordered fresh air, a twenty-four-by-eighteen-foot pen, on purpose. There was only one way in and one way out, and after the guards brought M.D. into this rectangular steel cage and told him to enjoy his workout, he knew to expect trouble.

  Twenty minutes after he’d been locked alone in the steel enclosure, no other prisoners around, no other guards on duty, Mends at home spending some time with his family, McCutcheon saw a door open.

  In stepped seven Priests. Night Train first, four other beefy, hardened soldiers behind him, then Demon, and finally the High Priest.

  McCutcheon backed up, took o
ff his shirt, and neatly folded it up before placing it on the ground.

  “This is gonna be delicious,” D’Marcus said with a beaming smile.

  Five Priests fanned out before rushing at McCutcheon, while Demon and D’Marcus held their position in the back. M.D. knew there was no way possible for one man to fight five guys—but he also knew he didn’t need to fight five guys.

  He only needed to fight one guy. Five different times in a row.

  He landed an elbow in the center of Night Train’s face, and re-smashed the nasal cavity he had already hammered in less than a week earlier. Night Train crumpled to the ground, and M.D. knew that after a blow like the one he’d just delivered, Night Train would not be getting up.

  Stay outside, M.D. thought. Fight the guy on the edge and keep pushing him away.

  The huddle grew tighter around him and McCutcheon shot low and outside to the left. His punch landed right above the groin of his second target, and the gangster buckled forward from the impact. M.D., however, instead of following up with a shot to the face, pushed the second Priest to the inside, causing him to block the path of his fellow attackers.

  The obstruction worked, but only for a moment, because McCutcheon ran out of room. The fence behind him cut off the rear, and the fence to his right left him no space to maneuver to the north. A third Priest rushed forward and ate a big fist, but attacker four and attacker five each landed clean, heavy blows. M.D. tried to trade with them, but there were too many assailants and not enough space, and thirty seconds later McCutcheon found himself unable to hold off the assault.

  They had him and they began to make him pay.

  They drilled M.D.’s ribs, face, and head with thunderous blows and then, once wobbled, the Priests held M.D.’s arms up against the fence, laying the center of his chest bare. Demon stepped forth, reached behind his back and withdrew the long, sharp killing device.

  McCutcheon, bleeding from his face, made eye contact with his father. Demon’s gaze looked empty, cold, and soulless.