Noble Warrior

by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  “Daddy brought you into this world,” D’Marcus said. “And now Daddy’s gonna take you out.”

  The four Priests restraining M.D. smiled.

  “I seen a lot of men die,” D’Marcus continued. “But this memory is gonna last a lifetime.”

  Demon raised the shank, its edge poised to strike.

  “Die, motherfucker!” His heart filled with rage, Demon struck with all his might and nailed his target exactly where he aimed, driving the metal spike five inches deep into the soft flesh of his victim’s neck.

  The High Priest staggered backward and gagged, blood gushing from his jugular like an uncapped oil well spouting a red stream of liquid gold high into the air.

  Stunned by the sight of their leader being stabbed in the neck, the four Priests restraining McCutcheon instinctively relaxed their grip. Demon led with an overhand right and then followed with a crisp left cross, landing two stone cold shots, just like he used to do back during his days as a professional boxer. Each blow hit its mark, and the Priest holding McCutcheon’s right hand crumpled to the ground. With a newly freed arm, M.D. smoked an elbow that cracked a Priest on his temporal lobe, and the man on his left crumpled, too.

  Four on two turned to three on two and three on two quickly turned to even odds.

  Son fought by father, side by side, and before another two minutes had passed, the Daniels men were the only ones left standing inside the steel cage.

  Demon and his son stepped over a fallen enemy and headed for the door, leaving a gaggle of bodies bloody and battered in their wake. D’Marcus spasmed as he tried to pull the spike from his neck, but it had been lodged too deep, and with each passing moment he lost more and more blood.

  Demon slapped M.D. on the back as they exited through the doorway and smiled.

  “Good to see ya, son.”

  When Demon and M.D. stepped out onto the main courtyard where all of the general population inmates took their daily free time, Krewls’s mouth fell open. He’d been expecting D’Marcus and his crew of felonious henchmen to walk through the ag seg door he’d opened for them fifteen minutes earlier. Instead, he saw McCutcheon and his father and no one else.

  “A few of dem guys musta slipped back there,” Demon said as he sucked a small stream of blood running from the knuckle of his right hand. “I myself didn’t see much but I can only imagine a fall like that gotta be mighty painful.”

  McCutcheon and Demon continued forward and walked over to an unoccupied cement bench far away from every other con on the yard. Moments earlier eighteen hundred prisoners had been doing push-ups, playing checkers, or shooting the breeze, but the sight of M.D. still on his feet after all the bragging and boasting the Priests did about how they were going to orchestrate a father taking out his very own son, caused man after man on the yard to stop, stare, and wonder.

  If McCutcheon was here, then who was in there? Eyes scanned the ad seg entranceway, but no one else appeared. Suddenly small huddles began to form across the yard. Krewls popped a sunflower seed into his mouth and tried to project a calm, in-control demeanor, but his fellow officers felt tension seize their chests, and they started making small and nervous moves like re-tucking in their shirts and adjusting their belt buckles. High-stakes political strategizing began to take place right in front of all the officer’s eyes, each gang recalculating their level of status and power on the yard.

  It wasn’t the formations of small scheming teams that unnerved the guards; it was the knowledge that after their strategy sessions would come action.

  A fight broke out over by the pull-up bars where the Priests took their rec, and Krewls watched as a swarm of convicts formed a large circle around two warring men. Perhaps the two bulls would be the only ones to go to battle, Krewls thought, so he let the fight go on without interference. The major’s highest hope was that once the conflict ended, a new leader would emerge, assume control of the Priests, and everything else would remain status quo on the yard.

  It didn’t happen that way at all.

  Inside the wall of bodies, legs kicked and punches got thrown, but mixed loyalties led to multiple Priests taking sides and jumping into the fray, and a single fight turned into a medium-sized brawl.

  Then a few more Priests jumped in. Soon the crowd surged to forty people. This was much more than a personal conflict; this was civil war.

  Sensing their opportunity, the East Side Mobsters rushed at the Priests. The E-S-M had been getting punked by the Priests for far too long, and when they saw the weakness in their enemy, they decided to take a crack at hitting back at the soldiers who’d taken so many unfair shots against them.

  Then the Princes of Mayhem attacked from the flank, taking their cue from the E-S-M, but the Princes’ biggest enemy, Hellz Reaperz, saw a chance to move up the totem pole with the Priests, so they jumped in to help their part-time allies. In less than one-hundred and twenty seconds, hundreds of men were fighting. A fallen prisoner took a stomp to the side of his head. Four men beat on a guy’s open face. An inmate’s eye socket had been broken open so badly that his optic nerve dangled from his head like a white yo-yo on a chunky, bloody, fleshy string.

  Krewls blew a whistle, waved to the tower, and shots rang through the air. Per prison protocol, the guard in the sky fired a series of warning rounds high in the air, but since the rubber bullets were not aimed at anyone, the inmates kept fighting, more blood flowing with each passing moment.

  Horns blared. Sirens screamed. Guards, fearing for their own lives, counted the moments until reinforcements arrived. More shots rang out and rubber bullets flew. The inmates fought on.

  Then came the tear gas.

  Scores of men began to gag and then fell to the ground, lying on their bellies spread-eagle in a sign of submission. Striving to cover their eyes and mouths with their shirts, they moved from battling to one another, to battling the vile fumes.

  Despite the gas, the fighting raged on.

  A dozen guards dressed in riot gear raced toward the action sporting helmets and masks that prevented the tear gas from affecting their breathing. Wielding shields, batons, stun guns, and pepper spray, they began unleashing every tool in their arsenal against any man who remained on his feet.

  More shots ricocheted off the ground, but as the situation escalated from Level Orange to Level Red, the snipers moved from shooting the earth to shooting at prisoners. Convicts began taking rubber bullets to the chests, arms, and legs. Even the ones lying down. The shooters didn’t care. Neither did the guards. With the institution in such disarray, no one was safe and no amount of force would be deemed too excessive.

  A slug hit a Priest in his ear and he fell to the ground, permanently deaf on the left side of his head. Another bullet hit an E-S-M in his testicle and caused it to swell to the size of a grapefruit. The prisoners on the yard lay in a fog of fumes and smoke, praying for a strong gust to whisk the chemicals away. Demon and M.D., far away from every other person, huddled close together and made sure no one attacked. Both knew they were targets. Both also knew that from this point on, they would only have each other.

  As the gas, bullets, and batons began to take effect, the number of convicts continuing to war diminished, and the number of men fighting dropped from thirty to twenty and then to ten. After another hailstorm of clubbings, Tasers, and pepper spray, the guards regained control of the yard, and every inmate out for rec time lay spread-eagle on the ground.

  All choked, many bled, but nothing had been settled, which, as Krewls knew, could mean only one thing.

  There was more war yet to come.

  It took the guards more than three hours to get all the prisoners securely locked back in their cells. Not long after everything settled down, McCutcheon had a visitor.

  “You just fuckin’ up my whole little enterprise, ain’t ya?”

  M.D. didn’t reply.

  “Well, Puwolsky did tell me to feed ya to the birds once your work was done. Guess it’s now time to put some pepper on ya.” Krewls
spit out a seed. “Pepper up both you and your dad.”

  M.D. sprung up at the mention of Puwolsky.

  “What, you thought he was coming to save ya? Shee-it, he and his partner, they set you up from the get-go, and once we get some order restored ’round here, your ass, sugar pie, is all mine.”

  Krewls popped another sunflower seed into his mouth and ambled down the hall. “This is my prison, hero. You seem to have forgotten that, but I’m gonna make you remember.”

  Every inmate in the institution spent the next four days on Level Red lockdown without access to a shower, the commissary, the phones, or the rec yard. Especially not the rec yard. Administration canceled all family visitations, eliminated the high school equivalency classes in the library, and even prevented cons from going to Sunday church service. On day five, after yet another round of S.O.S. bags for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, McCutcheon’s heavy door slammed open. Being the first prisoner to see a hallway in over one hundred and twenty hours didn’t make M.D. any new friends. Most of the cons, in fact, blamed him for the lockdown in the first place.

  Why don’t he just die like a regular bitch? was the question most asked. Who’s he kiddin’? Everyone knows that at some point he gonna get got.

  McCutcheon, of course, held a different opinion.

  “Come with me,” a voice said. “And grab your stuff.”

  A long walk through a winding series of buzzers and locked doors led McCutcheon to a distant wing of the facility he’d not yet seen.

  “This is you and there’s your new cellie.” Mends knew that easier ways existed for a man with his credentials to earn a paycheck, but money, he tried to remind himself, didn’t drive his actions; living a purposeful life, one marked by integrity and self-respect, did.

  “For the time being,” Mends added. “The two of you should be out of harm’s way in here.”

  “With the fuckin’ Cho Mo’s?” Demon snapped.

  “It’s the safest unit on the grounds,” Mends replied. “This wing has been specially designed to keep inmates from being attacked by fellow inmates.”

  “But the Cho Mo’s?” Demon said again and then he yelped out at the top of his lungs. “I get my hands on any one of y’all and I am gonna BEAT YOUR ASS!”

  The words BEAT...YOUR...ASS echoed through the corridor.

  “Calm down, Demon,” Mends said. “The child molesters are serving their time just like the courts ordered them to do. They’re paying their debt.”

  “Fuck ’em!” Demon said. “Ain’t nothing burn me worse. YOU SICK FUCKS!!!”

  McCutcheon and his father had been placed in Cell Block F, a tier that demanded highly restricted access in order to keep its residents, mostly reserved, middle-aged men, safe. These were not the thugs of the main yard; Block F was home to scores of inmates with non-calloused hands and slouching shoulders who knew how to do things like fill in Excel spreadsheets or calculate amortization rates on home mortgages. Few knew how to street fight—at least before coming to prison—but perhaps that was why they preyed on young, defenseless children in the first place.

  “I’LL SMASH ’EM UP!” Demon said yet again, making sure his words rang out loud and clear. Though at least fifty other prisoners were within earshot, not one of them dared to reply.

  “I’ll be back,” the major said after double-checking the cell door. No one stood lower on the totem pole of incarceration than child molesters. Even serial killers looked down on them as unworthy moral scum.

  As Mends walked away, McCutcheon tossed his gear on the high bunk and stretched his arms out wide. No, he could not touch each of the opposing walls at the same time.

  Only the government, he thought, would build a system where child molesters got more space than people who committed insurance fraud.

  Behind him, M.D. felt his father’s eyes burning a hole in his back.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Why you in here?”

  “Why are you?” M.D. snapped, in no mood to hear a damn word from Demon about how to live an honorable life.

  “Hey, I’m still your father. Speak to me with respect.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you back,” M.D. said. McCutcheon already fought his father a little less than a year earlier and kicked his ass, and he knew he could do it again at the drop of a hat, too. After all the years of his dad slapping him around, treating him like a servant, punching his mother in the face, and threatening his little sister, M.D. felt more than ready to crack his father’s jaw at a moment’s notice. In fact, he itched for a reason to do it.

  “Aw, I can tell this is about to be a whole lotta of fun,” Demon said, running his mouth. “It’s like father-son camping, Detroit style.”

  A surge of anger swelled in McCutcheon.

  “Why’d you even do it?” M.D. said, in reference to Demon saving him.

  “You gotta ask?” his father answered. “Sheee-it, I’m hurt by the question.”

  “You know, the only goddamn reason I’m in here is because of...” M.D. stopped midsentence before uttering his next word. He was about to say Because of you, but then McCutcheon realized this might not actually be the case.

  “Lemme ask you a question,” M.D. said, changing directions.

  “Yeah?”

  “Were you and the Priests ever going to kevork my girl?”

  Demon cocked his head. “What the fuck does kevork a girl mean?”

  M.D. exhaled a deep sigh. “That’s what I thought.”

  Krewls told him the truth: he’d been set up from the get-go. Kaitlyn was never in danger; the Priests hadn’t summoned him to the D.T. to fight on their behalf, and Puwolsky wasn’t ever planning on coming back to yank him out of Jentles.

  It was all a trap. A ruse. Deception. But who ambushed him? And why?

  M.D. started pacing the cell trying to figure out the riddle. Only one explanation made sense.

  Stanzer set him up.

  The more M.D. kicked the idea around, the more he realized it was just like Puwolsky said to him when he emphasized how McCutcheon’s entire existence posed a gigantic threat to Stanzer’s whole career. If the colonel got caught using underage soldiers to participate in covert missions, the politicians would roast him like a duck on Chinese New Year, and then serve him up on a polished platter.

  Stanzer, his barrel chest and bold, patriotic tattoos, practically brushed his teeth with the American flag, so losing his career would feel like more than merely being fired from a job and publicly humiliated; he’d be losing his entire identity. The guy never took a wife, never had kids, and never viewed his personal destiny as anything other than that of being a wartime soldier, even during eras of peace. Wearing a uniform stood as Stanzer’s sole reason for living, and to lose that right would mean losing his life’s purpose.

  Who is he if he is not this? M.D. wondered. McCutcheon couldn’t find an answer, which led him to believe that Stanzer didn’t have one. The whole enigma began making more sense.

  Stanzer got desperate. He found his back against a wall with a well-armed enemy closing in. People go to great lengths to protect what’s most important to them when push comes to shove. McCutcheon knew that. M.D. also knew he was always an experiment. A trial. A research project to see if future operations such as these were viable. Stanzer had told him all this a thousand times. Clearly, the experiment had gone awry somewhere, and the whole scheme was simply a way of burying M.D. in a manner by which no one would ever find him.

  The fake papers, the false IDs, the back door into a state penitentiary far off the grid where anarchy ruled and the law’s long reach seemed practically nonexistent. All of it bore the markings of Stanzer.

  McCutcheon collapsed on the bed and realized he was nothing more than a pawn. Adults had been playing chess with M.D. his whole life. His dad. The Priests. Now the colonel. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

  M.D. started from the beginning and began replaying all
the events in his mind that led him to the D.T. in the first place. It all made sense. The hostility between Colonel Stanzer and Colonel Puwolsky when Puwolsky first showed up to inform M.D. about the threat to Kaitlyn.

  All lies. Collusion. All made up.

  The reverse psychology of Stanzer’s visit to Bellevue to convince McCutcheon not to take the mission.

  All lies. Schemes. All made up.

  The “slay your dragon” talks about the girl he thought he loved. Those conversations were never about trying to convince M.D. to let Kaitlyn go; they were about constantly reminding M.D. of his affection for her. They needled him, poked him, kept him edgy. By constantly telling McCutcheon to forget his feelings for Kaitlyn, Stanzer was actually reminding M.D. how crazy he was for her.

  How could I be so stupid? he thought. And then a final realization came to him, one that crashed like thunder.

  Kaitlyn is gone. She is totally and entirely gone.

  McCutcheon wanted to kick himself for being so naive. Kaitlyn was hot, rich, smart, and talented, and her boyfriend disappeared like a ghost ten months ago. A line of guys from Detroit to Texas would be vying for her attention and, truth be told, if the tables were turned and a chick had dumped M.D. as coldly, cruelly, and inexplicably as M.D. had dumped Kaitlyn—no words, no explanation, no contact in nearly a year—he would have moved on, too.

  With a “Fuck her” attitude to boot.

  Stanzer said it many times: “If we gotta cut you loose, we will.” McCutcheon had always taken it as a joke. A little ribbing. Some good-natured camaraderie.

  Turns out it was the truth.

  Everyone knew the military functioned as a cold, impersonal machine that calculated all of its decisions on a plus/minus basis. When M.D. represented a benefit to the machine, they kept him on and kept him well fed. When he became a liability they severed their ties and burned their tracks. The math didn’t add up any more for Stanzer to keep his little pet project alive, so Stanzer took the necessary steps in order to save his own ass.

  The colonel had even taught him that in warfare doing the unthinkable to your opponent is one of the surest ways to attain victory. It was unthinkable that Stanzer would set him up and sell him out.