Fear Me

10

Next day, it was all you heard about.

Didn’t matter where you were or whom you were with, the topic of conversation was always the same. The prison became a rumor mill and awful, unbelievable stories began to circulate in that close, sullen atmosphere like disease germs, infecting anyone with a set of ears. Some of the stories were darkly humorous, others like something yanked out of a horror comic or a campfire ghost story. But they kept making the rounds, from the carpentry shop to the craftshop, the mattress factory to the library and the metal shop where license plates were stamped out.

And it was funny, but all the groups and gangs that hated each other on site, mellowed incrementally, seemed to realize that they were all in the same boat together, running the same risk of sinking in the night like Reggie Weems. Sometimes, a common enemy or common fear could do wonders at a place like Shaddock Valley.

Out in the yard that afternoon, Romero was sitting with his usual bunch—Riggs and Aquintez, a few Latin gangsters and white criminals that had been around the block a long time—discussing the shit, sifting fact from fantasy whenever possible. But it all kept circling back like buzzards on the trail of roadkill: what had happened to Weems was a lot like what had happened to those cons over at Brickhaven. And that got a guy to thinking, maybe trying to make some connections where there weren’t any or where they were strung so thick they’d trip you right up.

Romero’s crew was joined by a shifty, bearded black guy in a wool hat called Beaks because of his sharp, Roman nose. Beaks was doing all-day for murdering his wife and her lover while he was on a coke binge: life without parole. Beaks was locked in the cell across the corridor from Reggie Weems, so people were listening to what he had to say.

“Heard that scream, fuck yes, shit… how could you have not heard it? Weems… motherfucker was screaming like something was tearing his balls off. Never did hear nothing like that before.” Beaks pulled off his cigarette, watching some cons playing a game of pick-up in the distance. “Weems, shit, ya’ll know Weems, big ape-ugly motherfucker what ate his meat raw… I thought right away, somebody was in there, got to him. Shit, but you know that motherfucker, nobody play tag with his black ass.”

“What’d you see?” Aquintez wanted to know.

“It was dark and shit over there, but I heard something, something wet and sliding… I don’t know what the fuck it was… making funny-ass sounds or something, squealing or hissing or some such shit. That’s what I hear first and I think: Shit, what the fuck going down over there? Then Weems lets go with that scream. Man, it was crazy hoodoo bullshit, way I’m remembering it.”

And that was as close as he could get to it.

In the joint, murders were common place. Guys got shanked or piped, thrown off railings or had their food laced with Decon. Now and again, you had something more creative like an electrocution or what was known as a “down-home barbecue”: gas dumped through the bars while some con was in lock-up, his cell and himself drenched with the stuff, then a match tossed in there.

But what the forensic team that went into Cell #17, Weems’ cell, found was unpleasant even for a prison killing. More than unpleasant, but vicious and psychotic and unexplainable. Houle, the hack who first found Weems, said he’d been ripped apart, mutilated, but that didn’t begin to cover it. He had been dismembered and eviscerated, his bowels strung around the cell like streamers of crepe at a kiddy party. His spinal column had actually been pulled out of his back, his head severed but not before his genitals were sheared free and shoved so far down his throat the pathologist had to open his esophagus to get them out. And that was only part of it. Besides the blood and macerated organs, some of Weems’ bones had been yanked through the skin and were riddled with teeth marks.

And then there was Porker, Weems’ cellmate.

They had to take him out in a straight-jacket after he was held down and shot full of Thorazine, the entire time babbling and moaning and whimpering crazy shit about “monsters” and “things that looked like people without bones.” He was taken to the state hospital that morning for intensive psychotherapy.

“All I know for sure, man,” Beaks was saying to them, “is that something got in there, something I don’t want to be thinking about. Whatever it was and whatever the fuck it wanted, they had to take Weems’ ass out in bags and buckets, had to mop the floor to get the rest of him.”

Romero listened and didn’t say a thing.

But he was thinking plenty.