Fear Me

23

The riot began the next morning.

The blacks started it. Fed up with conditions and mistreatment and bullshit promises from lawyers, they seized the moment and took over the yard, disarming about twenty hacks and dousing them with hidden cans of kerosene, holding matches in their hands and calling out to the machine gunners and snipers in the towers to back off or they’d torch them.

That’s all it took.

The hacks didn’t like it, but they weren’t about to see their brother hacks toasted like wienies, so they withdrew. First thing they did after slipping back was to get on the bullhorns and promise the prisoners that the payback for this one was going to be of biblical fucking proportions.

Those guys, you had to love ’em. Good to the last drop.

Just as the blacks were the catalyst in the yard, the whites and Hispanics were the catalysts just about everywhere else. They grabbed maintenance workers and administrative personnel and hacks on break, took over the armory and the warden’s office and pretty soon, the fight was over before it had even begun.

Shaddock Valley belonged to the inmates.

Romero was in the metal shop when it started. He could feel it in the air, tensions rising like a barometer before a hot, violent storm. Every con knew what was happening. Every con felt it, every con understood the body politic of what was coming next. By the time Romero got his head full of that stink which was the smell of freedom, baby, and the labor pains it would take to bring it to term, the three hacks in the metal shop had been beaten to the floor and the siege began.

One of them, a big hairy fellow named Knapp who looked like maybe he spent his free hours in bearskins hunting mastodon, spit out a mouthful of blood and said, “Fucking animals, you fucking animals, your time’s coming and when it does, they’ll kill every one of your baby-raping asses—”

But that’s all he got out because a wiry black guy called Skinner cracked him in the mouth with the business end of a lead pipe and Knapp the ape-man gagged out most of his teeth. He was in pain, godawful pain, but still you couldn’t get that hate out of his eyes, that leering demented hatred for the men brutalizing him. So Skinner split his head open with the pipe and a biker named Skaggs shoved him aside, and slit Knapp’s throat with a straight razor.

Blood.

Sure, there was blood running out in the yard and administration buildings, rec rooms and prison industries… pools and creeks and glistening iron rivers… but for the boys in the metal shop this was their first real taste of a hack’s blood, his death-blood and its smell was raw and meaty and metallic. They all started hollering and hooting like a pack of slat-thin dogs drooling over a joint of beef. They rushed in and kicked and stomped and pounded Knapp until he was broken and crushed and mangled, pissing red like a water balloon full of crushed cherries. His head looked very much like a ripe tomato, its juice leaking everywhere.

The cons saw that, too, of course.

Saw how spoiler’s bled, how hacks went prostrate and shattered to their gods just like anyone else. Just like they all would when the governor lost his cool and told the cops, take those fucking animals down, crush ’em like goddamn insects and shovel what’s left into the trash. Any still crawling when it’s done, kick ’em into their cages and lock ’em down, dirty murdering animals, the day of reckoning is at hand for their filthy asses…

So the cons stood around the wreckage of Knapp while the other hacks moaned and swore and called their mothers whores. They stood there, eyes bright and feral, tongues wetting lips and hands clenched tightly on pipes and wrenches and shards of metal wrapped in duct tape.

Romero had seen mob ugliness before.

He knew its smell, its taste, the way it got down inside your belly and unwound the coils of your guts with cold fingers. But this… this just wasn’t acceptable. If they were going to show the DOC and the media that they were just human beings scratching for decent treatment and not blood-hungry savages, then this was not how it was done.

“You can’t do it like this, you fucking morons!” he cried out at them. “Don’t you see? Don’t any of you see? This is exactly what they expect and it’s what they want. You’re playing into their hands…”

But the cons didn’t seem to see at all.

They were all staring at Romero and that mob mentality was all over them like poison, seeping through their pores and into deep places, contaminating things and making others rot black. These were bad boys. Here were your white supremacists and Black Muslims, Hispanic triggermen and redneck sociopaths. Race had ceased to exist and the dawn-call of savagery was their inheritance. Hell’s Angels and ABs, Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples, Spanish Cobras and Nuestra Familia, all standing shoulder to shoulder, breathing in each other’s hate and exhaling a communal atavism. Their teeth were bared, spit hung from their lips, their fists were white-knuckled on weapons and in their bellies was the rumble of blood-hunger and death-hunger. Romero took a step back because, God help him, he thought they were going to drop on him in a pack. Stun him like a cow in a Chicago stockyard, hoist him up by his ankles and yank his goodies out, go charging down the corridors in an ensanguined posse, his severed head held high on a pole.

But it didn’t happen.

Skaggs stepped forward, Skinner at his side. The chief and the tribal medicine man, both splattered with blood and bits of tissue.

“You wanna stay alive, you fucking mite,” Skaggs said in a voice just as rough as scraping gravel, “then you better shut the fuck up. You better decide if you’re with us or with them, because if you ain’t with us…”

“Like he say,” Skinner piped in. “You ain’t with us… ha, ha, your death gonna be one scary motherfucker.”

Romero held his hands out. It was an ancient gesture, showing you carried no weapons. Worked good with rabid dogs and men who weren’t much above them on the evolutionary scale. “All I’m saying is that this is what those cocksuckers expect of us. They expect us to kill hacks and rape the weaklings, burn and loot and pillage… we gotta show ’em that we’re above that, that we just want decent treatment.”

“You don’t know cock,” Skaggs said and pushed past him.

The others fell in step, brushing past Romero and staining him with blood as they passed. When they hit the outside air, they all started running. Running and shouting and looking for something or someone to bring down.

Romero sighed, looked over at the two hacks who were still alive, beaten severely, but alive. They were tied to lathes. This was the point in some shitass Hollywood flick, he knew, where the lone convict helps the hacks that would never help him.

Yeah, right.

“Just keep your fucking mouths shut,” he told them. “And maybe they’ll forget about you. It’s the best you can hope for.”

Then he turned and went to see a riot first hand. Figured he better get a good look before the police and army brought them all down and smashed them to cider like apples rotting under trees.