Tim Curran - Fear Me

The noises could have been explained by a lot of things, but to Jorgensen they were just plain unnatural. That approximation of fear was no longer approximate: it was real. It was a dark river, a rising tide and he felt it overtaking him, crawling up his spine and prickling his scalp, settling into his belly with a fluttering volume.

Scraping sounds now…like nails scratched over the walls or maybe claws.

Now a stealthy shifting as of sheets.

Jorgensen knew he was losing it, sixteen years of this shit and now he was unraveling. He was losing his mind just like they always said it happened to the cons in solitary confinement. But not the guards, never the guards…

He reached up for the bolt that would open the security port, but his hand just wouldn’t obey as something in there started thrashing and he heard a weird, unearthly wailing that cut right through him.

And in the seamless, enshrouding blackness of his cell, Gordo began to scream in a high, tormented voice: “YAHHHH! HELP ME! HELP ME! GET IT OFFA ME! SOMEBODY GET IT THE FUCK OFFA ME-”

Jorgensen stumbled back and fell right on his ass.

The fear was thick and white and ungainly knotted in his belly, spreading out and coiling around his chest in thick bands. He could scarcely draw a breath. It was irrational and immense and suffocating. He was shaking and wet with perspiration. Around him, the corridor was close and cloistral and suffocating. He could feel the walls, the darkness that webbed him to the floor.

There was nothing silent in #3 now.

In fact, it sounded like open warfare was raging in there, but Jorgensen knew it was more along the lines of a slaughter. He sat there on his ass as the other cons started shouting and crying out from their cells. Never had he felt more helpless or hopeless, for that matter. He was shaking, his heart racing, his bladder feeling like an especially juicy melon that was about to blow.

Inside #3, he could hear Gordo screaming, screaming maybe the way his many victims had screamed, but ce ceamht="0"›

Jorgensen seemed to remember that he was, in fact, a corrections officer. He fumbled for his walkie-talkie. Dropped it, picked it up, dropped it again. When he got it in his hands, his fingers were trembling and clumsy and he could not seem to thumb the button to bring up the channel.

And it was at this time that something started slamming into that iron door with the force of a runaway train, making it tremble in its frame. Whatever it was, it hit it again and again, each time putting dents in it, an iron door two inches thick. Boom, boom, boom. It kept coming again and again like artillery shells hitting it from the other side, the dents getting larger and what was striking it sounding moister and juicier until mortar began to fall from the walls and concrete dust rose up in a cloud and blood that was bright and shockingly scarlet oozed beneath the door.

And by then, Jorgensen was on his feet, running, shouting into his box with a high, girlish sort of treble that was the sound of the human mind stripped clean by absolute primal terror.

After Warden Linnard heard what happened and viewed Ad-Seg cell #3 personally, describing it to his wife as looking like “someone had opened Gordo up, fingerpainted the walls with what was inside,” he tried to put a cap on it so the rest of his shitheads didn’t hear about it. But in a maximum security prison with its extremely active grapevine, it was near on impossible. So, deciding he did not make a very effective little boy trying to plug the dike with his finger, Linnard went back to his office and drank half a bottle of Jack Daniels before he got on the phone with the DOC and got his asshole expanded three sizes.

Just as he thought, it was everywhere by noon the next day.

“You heard about Gordo, of course,” Aquintez said to Romero out in the yard, knowing that everybody behind those walls had.

“Who hasn’t?”

Still aching from his dust-up with Gordo, Romero was scanning the yard, trying to see where it was coming from, trying to spot the meat-hungry eyes zeroing in on him so he’d know which group was going to come after him. Thing was, he saw nothing. The ABs and bikers paid him no mind. The La ft wasive gtin gangs clustered together by the wall, ignoring him. The blacks were gathered together in little groups, involved in their own thing.

Ain’t that something, he thought, I’m warned by Black Dog to lay low and I piss all over that warning. Papa Joe should have psychopaths of every stripe closing in on me…but I don’t see any indication of it.

But it was more than that. You survived long enough in max, you didn’t trust your eyes so much as your guts. You got a feeling when danger was coming. It went right up your backbone…but for Romero, today of all days, it just wasn’t there.

“Now ain’t that something?” he said out loud, not even aware of the fact.

“What you saying, home?”

So Romero told him what he was thinking, how he should have had lots of bad boys putting him in their sights but he wasn’t feeling anything and seeing even less.

“They got other things to worry about, home. First Weems and now Gordo…these boys ain’t real smart, but even they’re making the connection between Palmquist and a real ugly death. He’s giving all these lifers and hardtimers bad dreams.”

Romero knew that what was in the kid-and he was no longer believing he had imagined any of that- had been active again last night. But he hadn’t witnessed it because he’d spent the night racked out in the infirmary on sedatives after the doc stitched his face closed from the beating Gordo gave him. So no bad dreams or worse reality for him. But it had happened. He knew that. The kid had fallen asleep and then…

Aquintez told him that he had his ears open and he wasn’t hearing anything about Papa Joe putting money out on a certain con named Romero that wasn’t playing by the rules.

“Not yet.”

“Like I said, people got other things to worry about right now. Besides, home, you’re a living legend in this joint. Going after Tony fucking Gordo open-handed without so much as a shank. Now that takes balls, primo balls.”

“Or maybe just a lack of common sense, JoJo,” Romero said, fingering the bruises and bandages on his face.

Tony Gordo was a walking piece of shit and he got flushed, that’s all there’s to it.

He felt no pity for the man. He was a crawling worm somebody should have stepped on long ago and who does it? Palmquist. Or someth kn›. lt ning inside him. Christ, it was all so buggy, headcase stuff.

He looked around the yard again at all the disinterested cons, but the truth was, though, he wasn’t worrying so much about himself but about the fish, about goddamn Palmquist. Worried that the fear would build and some of the boys would act like the animals they were and kill the kid. That’s what worried him.

“I don’t know what this is about, man, but I think if they just leave the kid alone, they’re gonna be okay.”

“Right now, my friend,” Aquintez said, “it’s gonna take some real dumb motherfuckers to make a play for your boy.”

But prison life was prison life and it didn’t take long before the shit started stirring up again, smelling just as bad as any other day. Three days after Gordo died, Palmquist was put to work in the kitchen with Romero and some of the others. He did his bit all right, doing what the cook told him, stirring a cauldron of brown, greasy meat gravy with a wooden spoon that looked like a broomhandle. Cook said to stir and keep stirring it or it would lump up and the cons wouldn’t be able to keep it down.

So Palmquist was stirring and two black guys, cellies named Heslip and Burgon, were whipping instant potatoes in a big mixer, laughing about something and Romero could tell by the way they were laughing and the way they were casting sidelong glances at Palmquist, that it wasn’t good.