Charges

by Stephen Knight

  “Take it easy,” Blackie said, stopping short. “This is for you.” He turned the shiv around and handed the weapon to Roth handle first.

  Roth took it and turned away from the greenhouse’s open door so he could inspect the weapon quickly. It was a simple sharpened blade covered by a liberal patina of rust, with a black duct tape handle. Roth touched the blade and found it sharp enough to part skin and tissue easily. He tore a piece of cardboard from an opened case of motor oil and wrapped it around the shiv then dropped the blade into his pocket. Not exactly a pistol but better than nothing.

  It was another warm day out on the yard. Roth hung with the rest of the guys, feeling uncharacteristic butterflies in his stomach as he waited for something to happen. Rollo had looked at him only once and favored him with a curt nod so subtle that Roth wondered if he had imagined it.

  Roth took a quick count of the guards keeping watch. Both towers were occupied, and four other guards were inside the pen, watching the convicts through the wire mesh. If something were to go down, they would establish control over the situation, first with tear gas and nonlethal rounds, then with warning shots from the guard towers. If those failed to invoke compliance, then the next rounds would be fatal ones.

  “Feels like things’re gonna get hot,” Harley said.

  “Well, yeah, it’s gotta be in the eighties at least, with high humidity,” Toombs said.

  Harley glared at the skinny man. “I wasn’t talkin’ about the weather, you idiot.”

  Toombs shrugged. “Oh.”

  “Harley’s right,” Roth said. “Everyone needs to stay on their toes.”

  “How do you think it’s going to go down?” Harley asked.

  “Only way is to start a fight,” Roth said, “unless Rollo has something else planned.”

  “The niggers gonna start a fight with us?” Chester asked. He cracked his knuckles loudly. Sweat made his tattooed skin glisten despite the breeze.

  “If they do, try not to kill any of them,” Roth said. “Fight defensively. Wait for the guards to respond. They’ll have to come in, and when they do, we’ll go after them.”

  “They have guns, boss,” Blackie said.

  Roth fingered the shiv in his pocket. “And if everything goes well, so will I.”

  Harley grunted. “Well, if they’re going to do something, they’d better start it soon. We’re runnin’ out of opportunities.”

  A flock of crows descended and alighted on the strands of razor wire stretching across the tops of the tall fences. Roth gazed up at them. The black birds regarded the prisoners below with emotionless, obsidian eyes.

  As if on cue, a peculiar energy resonated through the yard. Not far away from Roth and his group, a crew of Latinos converged on the blacks. The blacks met them with a charge of their own. The crows cawed as if urging the combatants on.

  “Shit’s going down!” Chester said.

  “Let’s get in there,” Roth said. “Not too close. Watch out for the tear gas.” He hurried across the yard, the others close behind.

  The guards were already responding, blowing whistles and giving voice commands to stop. All were ignored.

  As they drew closer, Roth could see some of the combatants were really going at it, throwing real punches that drew real blood. Several blacks clustered around one Latino man who was clearly in the process of dying. Apparently, Rollo was interested in getting a little payback in the middle of the escape attempt. The reedy black man sank a shiv into the Latino again and again, his eyes wide, his lips pulled back in a feral grin.

  Canisters bounced across the yard, but the breeze carried the tear gas away. None of the prisoners paid any attention to it. When the nonlethal projectiles starting whizzing through the crowds, Roth stepped closer to the rest of the guys. It was preferable that one of them take a beanbag round to the back. And sure enough, a white guy yelped and crashed to the ground, clutching his shoulder. Nonlethal rounds weren’t designed to kill, but they sure hurt a hell of a lot, and they could even break bones in certain circumstances.

  “Roth, what are we doin’?” Harley yelled.

  “Wait for the guards to come in the yard,” Roth said.

  A rifle cracked, and dirt exploded into the air as one of the guards in the tower fired the warning shot. The prisoners all heard it and knew the guards meant business. Playtime was over. The next rounds would be deadly, and no one wanted to wind up dead. The convicts fell to the ground amid the roiling clouds of tear gas, Roth and his crew among them. As he stretched out on the warm grass that he had cut not so very long ago, he reached into his pocket and shook the shiv out of its makeshift cardboard sheath.

  Covered by the gunners in the towers, the officers stormed into the yard. There were only six of them, not enough to play patsy and wait for the prisoners to be compliant. They had weapons drawn and gas masks on. The weapons were a concern, because no matter what Rollo had promised about keeping the ground clear, Roth had no doubt that some people were going to die that day. He turned his head, looking away from the guards, and saw Rollo spread out on the ground thirty feet away. There was blood in his thinning afro, and his eyes were wide and bright.

  “You up, Roth,” Rollo said. “You up.”

  The guards didn’t move into the crowd but stayed along the edges, commanding the convicts to rise group by group and head back to the main building. When they ordered the whites to rise, Roth stayed on the ground.

  Harley nudged his foot. “Dude, time to rise and shine.”

  Roth didn’t move. He kept the shiv hidden under his body.

  “Get up!” one of the guards yelled from behind his mask.

  “Looks like he’s hurt, boss,” Blackie said helpfully.

  The guard stepped toward Roth and kicked him in the leg. “I said get up!”

  With a roar, the blacks hopped to their feet and charged, fifty or more in a single rush. The guards in the towers opened up, sending actual bullets through the sprinting bodies. The guard standing over Roth pivoted, bringing his pistol to bear on the tide of convicts streaming toward him.

  Roth waited for him to fire his first shot then grabbed the man’s leg and yanked it out from under him. As the guard fell, he turned his pistol toward Roth, but Roth had been anticipating that. With his left hand, he slapped the firearm down, pressing it into the grass, while his right hand, clenching the shiv, arced over the guard. He buried the point in the back of the man’s neck and gave a brutal twist, rocking the rusty blade back and forth, severing bone and tissue and, most importantly, the top of the spinal cord. The guard made a hitching, mewling sound then went limp.

  Roth spun away from the man, leaving the shiv where it was and picking up the pistol instead. The weapon’s weight felt right in his hand, a Glock 17 without any special adornments, just plain and functional. Roth rolled to his feet as the remaining blacks rushed into the fray, slamming into the guards, who fired back, sending bullets tearing through flesh and bone. Roth narrowly missed getting shot as a bullet snapped past his right ear, but he ignored it, turning his gaze to the nearest guard tower.

  A guard stood at the railing, aiming his rifle into the writhing mass of prisoners and corrections officers below. Roth raised the pistol and fired twice, striking the tower guard in the face and neck. The man fell back against the wall and slumped to the metal deck.

  Roth turned to the second tower, which was farther away and probably the bigger threat. The sniper there was mowing down the crowd, panning his Mini 14 rifle back and forth like some sort of magic wand, obviously looking for the shooter of his buddy. Roth hunched over, trying to make the task a little harder. At the same time, the wind changed, and a pall of tear gas moved toward his position. Roth cursed the luck. Not even he could shoot straight with a snoot full of tear gas, so he stepped out of the crowd and raised the pistol. The guard in the tower snapped his rifle around. It was a race to see who could shoot first.

  Roth drilled the man three times. The third round hit the guard’s left hand and
traveled through it, splintering the Ruger’s wooden forestock as the man slumped backward, blood pouring from his mouth.

  “Shoot the others, you white fuck!” one of the black convicts screamed as a guard gunned him down.

  Roth pivoted and began firing. He had intended for one shot to kill each guard, but the press of bodies was thick, so he just fired through anyone who got in his way. He wasn’t shocked or saddened when one of those was poor Blackie, his pale eyes wide with fright. Blackie died soundlessly as Roth fired right through his body, killing the guard on the other side in the process.

  Seconds later, it was over. The guards were dead. So were several dozen convicts, but that didn’t matter to Roth. For the first time in years, he felt that surge of exultation, that soaring, prideful glee that murdering men and women in uniform created inside him. It felt as if his heart was four times too big for his chest, and he had trouble catching his breath. It was ten times the euphoria he’d felt even when basking at the apex of intense sexual pleasure.

  Still a demon with a firearm. Still have the knack for killing cops.

  After the shootout, there was still the problem of getting out of the prison. Plus, there were more guards inside the fortified walls. But the prisoners were armed, having seized the weapons from the fallen guards. Roth had found five magazines of nine-millimeter. It felt good to be armed again, substantially armed, even though what he really fancied were lying on the ramparts of the towers—the Ruger Mini 14s. But getting to them was going to be problematic.

  Harley came up with the idea to use the prison transit bus. They knew it still ran, since the guards had still been using it.

  Making their way over the fences that separated the yard from the motor pool took time. Many men got slashed trying to navigate the razor wire until someone finally managed to loosen one of the mounts, relieving the tension enough for the prisoners to crawl under the wire. When Roth’s turn came, he was sweating heavily. He wasn’t worried as much about getting cut, though that was a concern, as he was worried that the rest of the guards might choose that moment to counter-attack, when he was nothing more than a sitting duck clinging to the fence like an oversized mosquito holding onto a sheer drape after feeding so much that it was too fat to fly.

  As he pulled himself onto the top of the fence and felt the sharp edges of razors gently kissing the fabric of his prison uniform, Roth thought he might lose his grip and fall. But he managed to haul himself over and, keeping a firm grip on the fence, spun around so that he could find purchase with his feet. He scampered down the other side, and when the soles of his shoes finally touched the ground, he ran to the nearest wall and flattened his body against it. The next prisoner managed to get hung up in the razor wire and, while trying to release himself, lost his grip. He fell to the cement on the other side of the fence. Roth heard bones break. The man wailed and writhed on the hard surface. No one bothered to help him. It was every man for himself.

  The keys to the bus were kept inside a lockbox in a locked office. While that might have stymied the convicts under ordinary circumstances, two blasts from a shotgun ripped off the door and peppered the room with a mass of shrapnel.

  One shot made short work of the lockbox, and Rollo seized the keys, his eyes practically bulging out of his head. “Come on, fuckahs! Let’s go!”

  The prisoners who had made it over the fence joined him as he ran toward the bus. Roth motioned for Harley and the others to follow. Rollo unlocked the vehicle and pulled open the door. He was about to jump into the driver’s seat when Roth stepped up and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Let Harley drive,” Roth said. “He was a bus driver back in the world.”

  Rollo hesitated, looking at Roth with suspicion. “That so?” he asked Harley.

  “Yeah,” Harley said. “That’s so.” He cradled one of the liberated shotguns.

  Rollo looked back at Roth. “You did your part,” he said. “You really do know how to use a gun, man. But like I said before, we’re done. You ain’t gettin’ on this bus. You and your white trash can walk.”

  As he spoke, Rollo’s crew drew nearer. They had weapons too, but they hadn’t bothered to do the math. There were currently more whites in the group, and the lion’s share of the weapons belonged to them.

  “That’s too bad,” Roth said then shot Rollo between the eyes.

  Harley fired the shotgun at almost point-blank range. The blast took down a hulking black guy from California named Leeks and two more Roth didn’t know. Roth pivoted, firing at each black man who had a weapon. His rounds landed with incredible precision, a product of countless hours of range time and training, as well as an extraordinarily successful multi-state murder spree.

  Most of the blacks who didn’t have weapons fled, but a few remained. They were the outcasts, physically weaker than the usual convict, but Roth knew they had skills. He considered taking them out, but he needed to conserve his ammunition.

  “Are you coming with us?” he asked them. He focused his attention on a young, very dark-skinned kid who showed no fear even though he was all of twenty years old, at most. “You, there... what’s your name? Tyrone, right?”

  “That’s me,” the kid said.

  “You with us, Tyrone?”

  “Got nothin’ else to do. No family. What’s the plan?”

  Roth bent over and pulled the bus keys from Rollo’s dead hand. The thin black man lay on the ground, thick lips parted, eyes knocked askew by the bullet that had passed right between them. Flies buzzed around the body, brought in by the smell of blood and the stench from Rollo’s bowels emptying into his pants. Roth handed the keys to Harley, who climbed in behind the wheel of the bus. The diesel engine caught and fired up, cackling away as a cloud of black smoke emerged from its tail pipe.

  “We’ve got a nation to take,” Roth said. “Want to be a founding father?”

  Tyrone smiled thinly. “You kiddin’ me, right?”

  Roth shook his head. “I don’t do standup, boy. You and your pals in, or are you walking?”

  Tyrone looked around at the five or six black men interspersed amongst the whites, Asians, and Latinos that were joining the group. No one said anything, so he cut his eyes back to Roth and nodded. “Yeah. We wich you.”

  They used the bus to ram through the gates, which parted without causing any real damage other than scratching paint and gashing fenders. Harley pulled the vehicle around to the first guard tower. While the prisoners waited, Roth exited and climbed into the tower, where he retrieved the Mini 14 and all the ammunition he could find. He knew the weapon well. He’d used one just like it in the past.

  “Together again, old friend,” he told the rifle as he slung it over his shoulder. “We’ve got work to do.”

  17

  Vincenzo stuck with Route 46 for the next several days, passing through small towns and cities. He avoided most of the people he encountered, and they returned the favor. His new hiking pack, which had started out quite heavy, was getting lighter and lighter by the day. He replenished his water whenever and wherever he could, but that was becoming more problematic. Water was a resource for which demand was already surging, especially as the summer heat continued to increase. The folks he saw seemed to have a quiet desperation about them that could give rise to violence at any time. As he tracked through shuttered business areas and more active residential neighborhoods, he felt the mounting discontent as if it was a palpable thing.

  While children still played—with each other, as opposed to with smart phones or tablets or other electronic doodads—they were hovered over by parents who were suddenly more protective than ever. And a lot of those parents watched Vincenzo with suspicious eyes. As the hours of putting one foot in front of the other turned into days of the same, Vincenzo also realized he was seeing more evidence of people arming themselves. And for good reason—there were signs of violence, even in the residential neighborhoods, where garbage was beginning to pile up and meals were cooked over open fires in backyards. S
ightings of police were becoming rarer, though when he did see them, they were less interested in a single traveler than those farther east had been. But where the police presence was missing, bands of citizens had sprouted up in their place. Sometimes, they formed checkpoints at the entrances to neighborhoods, and Vincenzo skirted those whenever he came across one. He didn’t want any trouble, but he also didn’t want to run the risk of the truly desperate helping themselves to what little he had.

  He began to regret letting the Ackermans take the Glock. A backup piece would have been a handy thing.

  In the evenings, he veered off the road and bedded down in wooded areas. Every night, he heard the distant reports of gunfire, usually just intermittent shots, but twice he heard what appeared to be protracted battles. Getting a good night’s sleep was a luxury he no longer had, since he was constantly awakened by voices or the passage of other travelers moving through the night. There were more people on the roads than he’d expected, but it made some sense to travel at night and avoid the oppressive heat of the day. He wondered if there was a chance he could find a pair of night vision goggles. Such things were likely as valuable as water, so the opportunity to come into possession of a pair was probably so low that it didn’t even register on the scale of probability.

  On the fifth day after his separation from the Ackermans, the skies were full of murky, gray clouds. While the clouds helped block the heat of the sun, the humidity was still high, which meant Vincenzo had another sweaty day ahead of him. After a meager breakfast capped off with another dose of Tylenol and the last of the water in his Hydro Flask, he cleaned up his campsite and refilled the vessel with one of the bottles of water in his pack.

  He took Route 612, which doglegged to the south. As he walked past a large mall, he heard the sound of machinery. Curious, he slowed and looked down the street. He was surprised to see several large Army trucks parked along the curb. They were much bigger in person than on TV. Uniformed men and women moved through the area inside a set of orange traffic cones that had been set up along with metal barriers. Civilians stood in neat queues, as if waiting for something. Vincenzo figured it was the National Guard handing out supplies. The thought of getting to stock up was tantalizing.