Noble Warrior

by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  “Guard!” M.D. cried out, praying that someone would finally answer his calls. “Guard!”

  Suddenly, the sound of boot steps could be heard walking up the corridor.

  “GUARD!” M.D. yelled. “HELP!!”

  A gnawed sunflower seed landed in the pool of dark red liquid and swirled around in a concentric circle, like a leaf after the wind had blown it into the stillness of a quiet, tranquil pond.

  “What’s all the commotion, sugar pie?” Krewls tilted his head sideways to inspect the damage. “Ooh, that little scratch might need it a Band-Aid. Hell, might even bleed out unless we get him to the infirmary.”

  “How much do you want?” M.D. asked.

  “How much can you get?”

  “Don’t give him shit,” Demon sputtered.

  “Bet on me. Bet it all!” McCutcheon said. “And do it twenty times over. I’ll come through each and every time, I promise.”

  “I believe you will,” Krewls replied. “But I also think that’s gonna be true whether a bed opens up in the infirmary right now or not. Survival instincts and all.” The major spit out another shell. “That’s assuming you’re still around after you get sent back to g-pop. You ain’t got many friends back that way, you know. This right here,” Krewls said, nodding at Demon’s leg, “this a favor I’m doin’ for one of ’em. Me and the man who wants to be the new High Priest, we already got us a new, whatchya call it, business arrangement. I help him, he helps me; that’s how things work ’round here.”

  His inspection over, the major began to walk away.

  “Krewls, please. I am begging you.”

  “Don’t beg that scum for nuttin’.”

  “Perhaps when your friend Mends returns for his next shift the occupancy rate in the infirmary will have changed.” Krewls looked at his watch. “Only ’bout four more hours to go.”

  “Fuck you,” Demon said to Krewls.

  “Die slow, Mister Daniels. And know one more thing before you go to your final destination.”

  “What’s that?” Demon said defiantly.

  “Your little boy is next.” Krewls laughed. “I just wanted to give him a front-row seat to your demise. And now that I hear these words leaving my mouth, you know what else? I’m thinking, ‘Ouch. That’s gotta hurt.’”

  M.D. looked down the hall to see if perhaps another guard could be located, someone whose humanity might still remain accessible.

  But no one else was around.

  “I told you whose prison this was, sugar pie. Ya shoulda listened.”

  After popping yet another seed into his mouth, Krewls ambled away.

  “KREWLS!” M.D. called out. “KREWLS!”

  “Forget him, son, he’s gone,” Demon said. “And…” Demon took a moment to catch his breath. “So am I.”

  “No you’re not, Dad. You’re not!”

  “Just listen to me. I gotta tell you something.”

  “Don’t talk. Save your strength. GUARD!”

  “You were always righteous, M.D.”

  “GUARD!” he called again, and the tears McCutcheon had held back for all these years started to flow.

  “And I believe you were born to do something special with your life,” Demon said. “To make things right.”

  “Save your energy, Dad,” McCutcheon said, crying. “Someone is going to come any minute now, I know it. GUARD!”

  “Don’t matter no more.” Demon swallowed, but little saliva existed in his throat. “My destiny is to die in here, a forgotten piece of shit. I’ve done too many bad things in my life to count.”

  “Don’t talk, Dad.”

  “But your destiny is to make shit right in this world. That’s your fate, McCutcheon. Go make shit right.”

  “GUARD! Where the fuck are they?”

  “Listen close to me now, son. There’s a house. Seven seventy-five Fenkell Avenue. It was bulldozed ’cause it used to be a crack house. But they ain’t bulldoze the cellar. Find that house. That’s where my buried treasure is.”

  “You’re gonna get your buried treasure, Dad. Don’t give up.”

  “Listen to me, son. Seven seventy-five Fenkell Avenue. Repeat it.”

  M.D. repeated the address. Not because he believed anything actually existed at the location, but rather simply to please his father.

  “Seven seventy-five Fenkell Avenue.”

  “Good,” Demon said. “Now, go to the house that’s no longer a house when you get out of here—I know you’ll find a way—and take this buried treasure.” Demon stammered, the light in his eyes beginning to dim. “Take this buried treasure and go make shit in this world right.”

  “Hold on, Dad. Please, I’m begging you.”

  “I’m proud of you, son, and always remember one thing.” Demon smiled, peace shining in his eyes. “I’ve always loved you.”

  His eyelids closed. Forever.

  When Mends saw McCutcheon cradling his bloody, lifeless father, tears still running down M.D.’s face, his stomach sank.

  “What’s this, an assault? A full investigation must be launched right away.”

  Krewls popped into the hallway and spit out the shell of a roasted seed. It was as if he’d been waiting for Mends to show the whole time. “I’ll get my officers on it,” he said. “After I make arrangements for the morgue truck to stop by tonight, that is.” A cackle escaped from his sideways smile.

  Krewls spit another shell onto the floor, his message clear: My jail. And he’d just proved it yet again.

  Mends considered himself scrappy. Resilient. A fighter. No one got the better of him. Not in the high school locker room. Not in his college fraternity house. Not while pursuing his multiple graduate degrees. Mends fought for what he believed in. He knew who he was and he knew what he stood for.

  Until he arrived at the D.T. He’d almost quit after the incident with Pharmy and Goblin, but after lying to his wife about how he sustained his injuries and screwing up his courage, he returned to work determined not to be scared off from the immensity of this task so quickly.

  Yet now, seeing this, Jentles State Penitentiary had just proven every assumption Mends held about his own identity wrong.

  I came here to change the system, but the system has beaten me. I can’t do this.

  Mends dropped his head, defeated.

  Krewls reached for the radio mike he wore on the upper left shoulder of his uniform and barked out a command. “We gotta a D.B. on Cell Block F,” Krewls said. “Send a table, but first we’ll need the X team before we can remove the body.”

  “An extraction team? Why?” Mends asked. He didn’t like the idea of six guys in full body armor storming the cell to subdue an already subdued McCutcheon.

  “Because we’re dealing with an extremely violent offender,” Krewls answered. “I mean, who do you think committed this horrible crime? That D.B. didn’t slip by the sink. This is clearly a homicide scene, cell mate on cell mate.”

  Krewls pulled a plastic bag from the inside of his jacket and held up the bloody shiv Fixer had used to murder Demon.

  “Found this over there. He musta tossed it.”

  “You’re serious?” Mends asked.

  “Absolutely,” Krewls replied. “And the moment we open this door to extract the D.B., this prisoner might go berserk. We need to be prepared. Officer safety, as I think you know, Major Mends, is always a top concern around here.”

  M.D. remained on the floor, cradling his father, dazed, drained, and sopped in blood.

  “Look at him,” Mends said. “This inmate isn’t a threat. This is a person with no more fight left in him.”

  “Just like a black widow,” Krewls replied. “They lull their victim to sleep and bam! They pounce. Can’t take that chance.”

  Krewls smiled at McCutcheon with a smirk that said, That’s right, son, the bad guys have won.

  M.D. did not reply.

  “Nah,” Krewls repeated. “Ain’t gonna take the chance at all.”

  When the black-booted X team arrived
with their helmets, clubs, and high-octane attitudes they expected a heated fight, but McCutcheon offered no resistance and submitted to being cuffed without incident. Standard procedure for X team extractions meant a set of full restraints, including cross-arm tiebacks and leg shackles, like the kind worn by Banger when McCutcheon first arrived at the intake room.

  With each step M.D. took forward, chains rattled.

  “The D.B. goes to the infirmary for storage until the morgue truck arrives later tonight, and the prep goes to the hole,” Krewls ordered. “Unless you have any complaints you’d like to register about the manner in which we are serving due process, Major Mends.”

  All eyes turned to Mends. After a pause, he answered softly.

  “No complaints at all.”

  “Good,” Krewls said. “You men get the body and you men take this scum away.”

  Three guards with helmets began leading M.D. toward ad seg, but before they rounded the corner, Krewls added a final word.

  “My shift’s over, sugar pie. And tomorrow is a day off for me. But I’ll see ya soon, and then you and I can have some more fun. Don’t miss me too much.” Krewls spit a sunflower shell that landed on the side of M.D.’s cheek, the wetness from Krewls’s spit causing it to stick to M.D.’s face.

  McCutcheon slowly turned his head. His eyes blazed. For a moment, though entirely restrained and protected by six other guards in riot gear, Krewls felt a cold shiver run up his spine. Something about McCutcheon’s glare let Krewls know he’d messed with the wrong person; and even though the major knew he held almost every card in the deck, and owned no logical reason to be afraid, he swallowed an involuntary gulp of fear.

  As long as McCutcheon could still breathe, Krewls knew this story was not over, and his instincts told him that the kid’s situation would need to be addressed sooner rather than later. The longer M.D. lived, the more dangerous he became, and if heaven forbid McCutcheon ever did manage to get free, Krewls understood the young prisoner’s liberty would be his own end.

  Krewls shook off his fright because logically it made no sense. This was his jail. His command. He owned the kid’s ass outright.

  Yet still, something gnawed at him.

  “All right, let’s go,” Krewls barked. “Take him away.”

  On the outside Krewls projected strength and conviction in his orders, but McCutcheon understood what Krewls was really feeling on the inside. And with good reason, too, M.D. thought, as the guards marched him away.

  Because as all who walk the earth know, no one can escape their destiny.

  In the early 1800s the United States of America led the world in the innovative practice of incarcerating their most violent inmates in isolated cells. Authorities believed that by denying prisoners human contact or any external stimulation, the state’s most troublesome offenders would discover the error of their unlawful, antisocial ways. Solitary confinement, the system assumed, would lead to rehabilitation.

  They were wrong, and the results were disastrous. With overwhelming evidence condemning the practice as inhumane, the strategy of using solitary confinement was all but abandoned by the U.S. government for the next one hundred years.

  However, in the latter part of the 1900s, solitary confinement made a comeback, but with a new twist. Instead of torturing prisoners by tossing them into dark and dingy holes, inmates were placed in well-lit, sterile boxes. Cramped, concrete, windowless cells outfitted with a sink, a shower, a toilet, and a slot in the door wide enough for a meal tray to slip through was the new version of solitary confinement. Prisoners, deprived of phone calls, commissary privileges, and family visitations, would remain in their unit for twenty-three hours a day, their only break being rec time, which involved being escorted in shackles to another solitary pen, where convicts could pace alone for an hour before being returned to their original cages.

  The psychological damage proved to be exactly the same. Correction officials, however, defended the practice as necessary to protect guards as well as other prisoners. A new category of inmate was born: the V-S-Ps.

  Violent Super-Predators.

  This became McCutcheon’s new classification in Jentles: a V-S-P.

  Some V-S-Ps had spent a decade in solitary, their minds slowly rotting away.

  Time itself evaporated. And with it, an inmate’s sanity.

  A loud SLAM! locked the box and McCutcheon, free from his restraints but restrained from his freedom, took a seat. Not on the bed, but cross-legged on the floor.

  Is there any reason for hope, he asked himself. Any reason at all?

  No was the obvious answer. But M.D. knew a strong mind would look for the positive, the hidden unknown. McCutcheon, determined to find a satisfactory answer, repeated the question to himself.

  Is there any reason for hope, he asked himself again. Any reason at all?

  A small but clear inner voice told him that there was, and although the thought might be far-fetched, the whole idea that hope still existed brought M.D. all the relief he needed at the moment. Instead of succumbing to panic, M.D. simply reminded himself to breathe in and breathe out and accept his new circumstances one moment at a time.

  Fear, he reminded himself. Welcome it. Do not push it away. Make the energy of fear a friend instead of a foe.

  But where was the hope? What possible reason could M.D. find to still believe in a future beyond blackness?

  The answer, McCutcheon realized, stared him directly in the face, and once he realized it, it even caused him to laugh. In a world so strange as to deliver me to this destination, the world could still prove strange enough to deliver me out of it, too.

  Perhaps it would take a week. Perhaps a month. Perhaps a year. Maybe a decade. But M.D. knew he would not spend the rest of his life locked in this box. Therefore, he told himself, it was not a matter of if he’d ever be released from solitary confinement, it was only a matter of when.

  His moment came at midnight on his very first evening.

  “I thought you’d like some closure,” Mends said opening the cell door. “You know, view the body and say good-bye.”

  Mends tossed McCutcheon a set of clothes.

  “After a shower, that is.”

  M.D. looked down at the bag he’d just been passed. It wasn’t a prison uniform; they were the clothes from when he first arrived at Jentles.

  He raised his eyes.

  “Come on,” Mends said. “We don’t have much time.”

  McCutcheon blasted on the water, quickly cleaned the blood off of his body, and carefully followed Mends through the winding prison halls down to the room where the penitentiary burned their trash.

  Raging heat from the fire blasted the two men in the face as they stepped inside the incinerator room and closed the door behind them. Next to the furnace door a body lay on a gurney covered by a white sheet.

  “I myself have always felt I’d rather be cremated as opposed to buried anyway. You?” Mends asks.

  “Never gave much thought to it.”

  “Seems purer in a way,” Mends said. “Like a funeral pyre for a Viking or something.”

  McCutcheon shook his head. Leave it to Demon Daniels to exit this life like a gallant Viking.

  Mends opened the incinerator’s cast-iron door and the two men stared at the fire, its hypnotic flames dancing and flowing and waving as if to supernatural music.

  “What about the morgue truck?” M.D. asked.

  Mends removed the toe tag off Demon’s foot and handed it to McCutcheon.

  “They say there’s only two ways out of the D.T., parole or the morgue truck. Looks like this guy just found the third.” Mends pulled back the sheet and reached underneath Demon’s arms. “Come on, help me lift the body.”

  McCutcheon put two fingers to his lips, kissed them, and then touched his father’s chest, right over his dad’s heart. Without words or tears or any other sign of emotion, McCutcheon lifted his father by the feet, and on the count of three he and Mends tossed Demon’s corpse into the fire.


  Mends closed the furnace door as the flames began to eat Demon’s flesh.

  “Jump on. I’ll cover you up and I’ll roll you out to the loading dock.”

  M.D. ripped off his shoes, hopped up on the gurney and placed the toe tag DANIELS, DAMIEN PRISONER ID #475S869LZ on the big toe of his right foot.

  “Here,” Mends said, passing M.D. a final gift. “You might need this.”

  McCutcheon reached out and accepted the offering. It was an Al Mar S2KB SERE combat knife, 8.5 inches long butt to blade, designed for the Special Operations Command Units out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The acronym SERE stood for Survival–Evasion–Resistance–Escape. Mends had just passed McCutcheon a blade that could battle a bear.

  “I’m transferring out, tomorrow,” Mends confessed. “Thought I could make a difference here. I can’t.”

  He hung his head, sad, defeated, and shamed. M.D. opened the folding blade, fingered the razor-sharp edge and then reached out and grabbed the major by the arm.

  “You can still make a difference,” McCutcheon said. “And you are. Don’t surrender your power.”

  The two men looked one another in the eye.

  “And never give up,” M.D. added. “We all have our destiny.”

  A surge of inspiration suddenly began to flow through the major’s veins. Maybe he still could make a difference? Maybe he still could reform a system that cried out for healing? Maybe there were other paths, other roads he could try? Perhaps one closed door would lead to an open window, he thought.

  Maybe I shouldn’t give up, he told himself. I never have before. He’s right, why now?

  “Thank you,” Mends said. “I don’t know what your story is or how you got here, but you’re certainly not a middle-aged man named Lester Rawlins, and I definitely owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  M.D. closed the blade of the SERE and hid the knife in the lining of his pants.

  “You just paid it,” McCutcheon said. “Now it’s time to go make shit right.”

  “Who, me?” Mends asked. “Or you?”