Part 24 (1/2)
I struggled to get out the words.
”He's dead, I think.” I looked over at Cutler's slumped body, the red puffiness on his head like the plumage of some exotic bird. ”Alvin Cutler is dead. We have an intruder. We were compromised.” I didn't know the words.
Another voice came on. I heard a tone of recrimination in the follow-up questions and could not seem to make myself understood.
”What happened to Cutler?” the voice asked me.
”Cutler was. .h.i.t with his own baton. The reporter. Stone. I killed him, I think.”
I knew I wasn't making sense, but the absence of any response drove my frustration higher.
”Droune did it! Droune opened the G.o.dd.a.m.n gates!”
No response again.
”Maintain your control.”
It came as a disjointed command, something I wasn't sure I heard properly, and the radio went dead.
I gave up, and peeked above the deck to look at the consoles and through the gla.s.s. A torrent of freedom all around. Each monitor told a different story. Men running along the tiers in the cellblocks, crawling down fences, ripping away railings, ramming, wrenching, pounding at the walls and gates. A maelstrom of violence. This was not reparable. This was the book of Revelation. I felt numb with shock and helplessness. I could not put the genie back in the bottle. None of the gate switches worked. None of the doors would respond. They'd blocked and jammed everything, securing their exits and entrances. There was no battle out there, no shots being fired, the war already won. The COs had fallen back to the perimeters. Maybe there were pockets of them trapped in the blocks, the infirmary, or dis, but I was alone in the bubble. Then the monitors started to go blank, the cameras out on the blocks and in the tunnels covered up or knocked violently from their perches. I gripped the baton in my hand and squeezed my eyes shut.
43.
When the others ran from their cells, Josh stayed inside. Screen Door appeared, arms braced on both sides of Josh's suddenly opened entranceway, and told him the block was inmate land now. ”What do you think?” she asked, with a hand sweeping along her front, and Josh realized that Screen Door had fas.h.i.+oned a prison jumpsuit into some kind of evening dress, low on her smooth caramel-skinned chest, tight around the hips, trailing at the ankles. Then Screen Door waved and tottered off, and Josh was alone.
He thought he'd known the level of noise that could be generated by the men within the block, but he'd underestimated the depth of human arousal, the furious glee of sudden freedom, the expansiveness of its rage and joy. There was the bellow of many voices shouting and whooping, the pounding of running feet, the crash of steel toilet units smashed into warped fragments on the concrete floor below, the wrenching away of metal railings set in concrete and stone like dinosaur fossils. He braced within his cave and thought about how he might rip his own cot from the wall, set it up as a barricade, even as he wondered if that would provoke or protect. Then, after too many men running by slowed to look at him suspiciously, he lunged up from his squatted stance and stepped out.
He spotted Roy at the end of the tier, whooping to the men above and below, shouting commands. Whether anyone could hear or was bothering to listen didn't seem to matter. Roy acted like a maestro conducting an orchestra, coaxing some rage here, dampening some anger there, engorged by the hysteria. He saw Josh watching from afar and waved him forward. ”Come on, Joshy! You're needed!” It was impossible to disobey such a direct command, so Josh made his way down the range, squeezing tight as others ran by, stepping over chunks of concrete and twisted pipes, careful not to edge too close to the gaps, the railings dangling like fragments of broken bridge over open s.p.a.ce.
Roy slapped a heavy arm over Josh's shoulder and squeezed him close to his side. ”Now you'll know what human beings can do when the lid's off, Joshy. You may never witness anything like it again for as long as you live.”
They watched. Then water suddenly poured down from the railings above and curtained across the tier. Josh fought a sense of vertigo, as though he stood on the lower deck of a s.h.i.+p that had just rolled in a great swell and got swamped. The men yelled their surprise first, then their questions, and then their hearty appreciation. Toilets and sinks had been plugged, he supposed, and the water allowed to overflow until it made an impressive waterfall. The flood ended after several minutes, and someone yelled that the water was cut off.
”Beautiful.” Roy smiled. ”There goes the water. As if we wouldn't need to have a drink over the next few days. They'd burn their own clothes just to see a bonfire, and then complain that it was cold.”
The television signal was next, all the small TV screens in cells lost in a sudden blink. In their place, boom boxes with batteries fought for audio room, the thumping rap rhythms and heavy rock colliding in a pileup of noise with the shouts and the bangs and the crashes and cries.
He was in on it but not part of it, hanging near Roy's shoulder, only occasionally noticed. The men played their parts so earnestly it almost seemed like a game, a fantasy gone delusional and b.l.o.o.d.y. Roy was the only one who seemed even remotely self-aware. He did and said everything, even the most violent things, with a mocking tone, terrifying and humorous at once.
”Let's review the troops,” Roy announced, and they left their perch and walked the tiers together.
Wherever they went, Roy was the locus of a moving storm. He answered questions and received adulations and expressions of support. He made decisions like Napoleon, though they seemed random and sometimes contradictory to Josh. He cast words of encouragement or scorned and mocked men who were doing stupid or self-destructive things. He told the men to set up the barricades. Count and secure the hostages. Police the tiers to protect the helpless from the wolves and a.s.sa.s.sins. Establish communication. Build the traps, find the food, and have b.l.o.o.d.y fun. On several of the tiers the men were knocking holes in the drum walls, connecting drum to drum, creating a crooked tunnel you could walk from end to end, the concrete chunks piled up in front of the gate and along the tier fence like a construction site. It looked as though an earthquake had twisted the entire building in its powerful hands.
A few of the men acted like wannabe lieutenants and community leaders. They asked for permission to set up food search committees, radio transmission committees, dome watch committees, so many committees that it became comical, a bizarre play at democracy. Roy blessed them as though he'd been waiting for exactly such virtuous knights to step forward and do his bidding. Men told him about the stores of pipes they'd collected, the spears and machetes they'd fas.h.i.+oned, the flashlights, radios, cans of coffee, notepads, and coils of rope they'd squirreled away. The industriousness was impressive. Roy stirred their flames with one breath and muttered his contempt as soon as they'd hustled off. ”You'll all be in chains by morning, you idiots. Jump and holler and let your worst out. Leave no urge or want behind.”
As per another of Roy's commands, the hostages were secured in the drums at the back of B-4, despite the ease-some argued-with which a single group could be rescued in an a.s.sault. The diddlers and skinners were crammed like a freezer truck full of illegal immigrants in the two last drums, eyes wide in fear. Eight jacks were s.p.a.ced across the next three drums, their uniforms torn, their arms pinned back by their own zip cuffs. Brute men stood guard at the drum entrances, their orders from Roy clear and precise: keep the men alive and safe, no matter how much verbal sport got made. Those with a curiosity or an urge for wanton cruelty sauntered by and peeked in, mocked and challenged, sometimes tried to squeeze through, and got thrust back. Roy encouraged them all, the attackers and the defenders, and he a.s.sured the captives that they were safe and their every need would be taken care of. The COs, Josh thought, looked weary and defiant but very very afraid. An inmate whispered in Roy's ear, and he nodded sagely and announced a new command. The hostages would have their uniforms stripped and be changed into green inmate garb. What's more, the homemade napalm bombs (a stack of capped soda bottles in the corridor) would be transferred to the drums containing the COs. That way, when the a.s.sault teams came or the snipers fired, they'd be picking off their own kind or blowing them up, and they could think about that when the counting of dead bodies was going on later.
”Make a flag,” Roy told Josh. ”Give us something we can rally around.”
So Josh and Screen Door got to work on a white sheet, found some black paint and outlined a skull on it, and duct-taped it to a broomstick. When Josh brought it out to the gallery railing, Roy told him to hold it up high and wave it back and forth. The men loved it, cheering, whooping, and Roy barked harshly through a bullhorn stolen out of the block nest.
”In all my years I've never seen the jacks run so fast. You're excellent soldiers, even if no army in the world would ever take you.” He roared with laughter and caused the others to laugh, too.
Then to Josh in a low, casual voice with the bullhorn lowered, ”Look how scared they are.”
”They don't look scared to me.” He'd seen too much madness in the past few hours to think of them as scared.
”It's plain as mud,” Roy said. ”In any riot there's five or six men who got the will, and the rest follow like a herd of mad horses.”
Josh saw Jacko make his way down the tier toward them. He'd been wondering where Fenton, Cooper Lewis, and the others were and what they were doing. Jacko looked determined, busy, like an office manager with a to-do list.
”We've got a visitor,” Jacko announced when he stood with them.
”Already?” Roy said. ”Tell me the warden is here, please.”
”It's Keeper Wallace,” Jacko answered.
Roy shrugged. ”No surprise there. And not much fun either. Oh well, let sourpuss come in.”
A single CO was led out of the tunnel and onto the block by two inmates. Everyone hushed, seeing the Keeper below, awed by the audacity of his presence, the calm poise he showed. Then the shouting started again. They scorned him. They wanted to tear the Keeper to pieces.
”Wave the flag, Jos.h.!.+” Roy urged him. ”Wave it with all you've got. We need a truce!”
From the third tier Roy shouted through the bullhorn until the men finally calmed themselves.
Keeper Wallace looked very alone, and Josh was tight with guilt at the sight of him. How brave did you have to be to walk into a cellblock full of loosened inmates? There was an obstinacy to it, a declaration of the Keeper's rightful place in a stolen kingdom. This was Wallace's domain, his presence said, no matter how overturned the world had become, and he was there to serve justice to the despoilers.
The inmates crowded the tiers like spectators in a Roman gallery. With Josh at his side, Roy lifted the bullhorn again and made his speech, a show for the Keeper's benefit and the inmates' rea.s.surance.
”This uprising is a call for justice and better conditions.”
The announcement roused a tremendous thunder among the men.
”It was inspired by the systematic mistreatment of our brothers.”
He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, and Josh saw many of the men nodding.
”No one feels safe with all the brutality, oppression, and revenge that permeates this inst.i.tution. We want to investigate the outlaw guard criminals among your ranks-”
The noise became impossible to withstand. Josh cringed and looked for the roof to fall, the walls to cave in.
”To end the practice of turning inmates into snitches! We want better living conditions and more free time outside the ranges! We want an inmate justice committee with the authority to investigate abusive and corrupt guards and staff. All the way to the top! We want immunity for all the crimes committed in the launching of this justified revolt.”