Tim Curran - Fear Me

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.

The riot.

It was quite a picture.

Cons roaming in gangs and posses with knives and pipes and razors, guns from the armory. The whites out in force along with the blacks and Hispanics. Everyone on a rampage. Three guards were dead within the first hour as long-simmering hatreds boiled over and the men found weapons in their hands. The offices were demolished. The prison industry buildings set on fire. The Ad-Seg and protective custody cells were opened and all the rats and weaklings and celebrity inmates were torn to pieces by roving mobs.

Romero made it out into the yard and it was chaos.

Utter chaos.

Helicopters were in the air and the state police were assembling outside the walls with SWAT units and tear gas and sharpshooters. The National Guard had been mobilized. The authorities were calling out over loudspeakers for the cons to surrender, for the hostages to be released. A bunch of outlaw bikers tossed the corpse of a guard over the wall in response.

But through it all, there was a loose sort of unity amongst the convicts themselves. The whites were led by Mafia soldiers and bolstered by the ABs, biker gangs, and hundreds of renegade criminals just itching for a fight. The blacks were led by a cocaine trafficker doing life who had managed to cement together all the street gangs and drug dealers and pimps. The Hispanics were led by a high-ranking member of the Mexican Mafia. Out in the yard, the whites assembled along one wall, the blacks another, and the Hispanics yet another.

But in the center, with the hostages, there were some of each.

By nightfall, these three leaders had calmed the mobs and began making demands over the loudspeakers. At first, they were ignored, but when they announced they’d kill one person for each hour this went on, they were flooded with responses.

The negotiating went on well into the night.

The prison was swept by searchlights, cordoned off by police and National Guard units. The news media was out in force, but the cops wouldn’t let them within a mile of Shaddock.

Around midnight, the authorities broke off negotiations.

Then they turned off the water.

Then the lights.

Romero was on the far side of the yard, watching the bonfires and the smoke billowing up into the night sky from burning buildings. The cons were still agitated, but many were drunk and stoned, laughing and cheering and talking freedom and brotherly love. Romero had been listening to speeches and crazy schemes all day. But unlike many of the others, he wasn’t naive enough to believe any of it.

Sooner or later, this was going to meltdown and the body count would be high. Either the cons would go after each other or the cops would storm the place and take care of business.

It could come from any direction, but Romero was only concerned about Palmquist.

“I found him,” Aquintez said, out of breath from running across the yard and wherever it was he’d come from. He pulled Romero away from a group of cons smoking a joint. “I found the kid.”

“Where?”

Aquintez told him. Down in the hole. The cons had piped him, cracked his head good. He was out cold and they couldn’t revive him. They brought him up to the infirmary.

“He’s in a bad way, man,” Aquintez said. “If he ain’t dead, he’s gonna be soon. In a coma or something. You gotta see that infirmary. Fucking bodies everywhere. Some blacks are running the place, they got a couple hacks tending to the wounded.”

Romero sighed. The kid was still alive then. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? He tossed his cigarette. “This could be real bad, JoJo. That thing in him…his brother…it’s already pissed off about the beating the kid got and now this.”

“And it’s dark out,” Aquintez said. “Pitch fucking black.”

A chill went up Romero’s spine. “I’m going up there.”

But Aquintez said that wasn’t a good idea. As he passed through the yard on the way to the administration building where the infirmary was, he could hear the cops out there. It sounded like maybe they were scaling the walls, positioning themselves.

“I’m going anyway.”

Aquintez clapped him on the shoulder. “Ah, Romero, the original Latino James Cagney. Heart too big and balls twice that size. Okay, I go with you, my friend.”

But what they were going into, they had no idea.

It started right away.

With sirens moaning and hostage negotiators working the loudspeakers, nobody realized it until maybe it was too late. The SWAT teams were beginning the engagement, the spearhead of a larger force that would crush anything that stood in their way. By the time Romero and Aquintez got around the chapel, got a look at the administration building, they saw black forms running along the tops of the, thiod in twall like scurrying spiders and the tear gas started dropping. Canisters were fired into the air, exploding on impact. There were bright flashes and popping, hollow explosions like the compound was under mortar attack and the gas detonated with rolling, noxious clouds. Not just outside the administration building, but out in the yard, on rooftops and walkways, just about everywhere.

And more canisters were dropping by the moment.

You could hear cons screaming and firing weapons, the reports of sniper rifles taking out prisoners at strategic points and the answering volleys of small arms fire from the convicts themselves. But in the darkness with only bonfires to see by and most of the cons drunk and stoned and confused, it was a turkey shoot. The SWAT teams had night-vision goggles and the cons had stick matches, some flashlights, and a variety of crude torches. Water cannons were hoisted atop the walls at the same time the snipers fired their first shots, many from silenced weapons. Before the enraged cons could even think of setting the hacks on fire, gouts of water hosed them down, wetting the hacks and knocking their abductors flat with high-pressure streams of water. Then tear gas. Stun grenades.

The troops moved in for the deathblow.

By that time, Romero and Aquintez had made the administration building, coughing and gagging and rubbing their eyes, steering themselves through the maze of corridors and climbing sets of steps with nothing more to see by than a penlight and the strobing flashes from outside.

“They’re tearing ’em up out there,” Aquintez said, panting.

And they were. You could hear screaming and shouting and cons begging for mercy. And the police were answering this with salvos of plastic bullets fired from automatic weapons and light machine guns.

But the screaming wasn’t only outside.

It was above them, too: on the fourth floor where the infirmary was.

They looked at each other in that churning darkness, the smell of death and teargas blowing in from outside and combining into a vile aroma with what was coming down from the fourth floor stairwell: a rancid, hot stench of blood and misery.

They started up.

More screams ringing out like church bells and just as high and low, as brassy and inhuman. They vaulted up the steps, hearing sounds and smelling things and feeling something like sheaths of needles unfolding in their bellies. In the corridor at the top, they could hear a wild, spiraling voice shattering like glass: “Help me! Help me! Get it off me! GET THAT MOTHERFUCKER OFFA ME OH CHRIST OH JESUS YAAAHHHH-”

But it wasn’t just that voice or the sound of something being squeezed out like a dishrag full of soapy water that stopped Romero and Aquintez, it was that screeching, strident noise that echoed out, seemed to make the windows shake and rattle in their frames. It wasn’t an animal sound or a human sound really, but maybe a little bit of both and neither. A raging, deranged shriek that faded into something like scratching black laughter, laughter filled with contempt and appetite and-Romero was thinking-a certain evil pleasure, a childish sound of glee.