Fear Me

2

The second day.

The kid was still a virgin and still hadn’t been extorted, but it wouldn’t last. Out in the yard, all the cons were watching him, smelling that new meat, wondering whose punk he was going to be.

Wasn’t going to be long, Romero knew.

First, they’d take his food in the mess hall, then they’d throw him a beating out in the yard, maybe try to rape him in the laundry or showers. That’s how it would begin. Pressure would build. Cons would get randy like starving dogs circling a fresh, juicy bone. Decide who was going to get the first bite. Then some ballbuster would come along, tell Palmquist that he’d protect him for money. Didn’t matter where he got it—mother, father, sister, brother, priest—long as he got it. And if he couldn’t get it? Then he’d be a punk for some hardtimer, sucking the guy’s dick and bending over for him. Because that’s how it worked inside: You weren’t part of a gang or tough enough to do your own fighting, somebody had to do it for you.

And it never came free.

Not at Shaddock Valley.

It was a real hard-time sort of hole. You locked up thousands of guys like animals for months and years, pretty soon even the good ones lost their humanity and showed their teeth. It was a grim, gray concrete world where you buried hope with the biggest shovel you could find and yourself with it. Violent guards, bad food, cramped conditions, loneliness, frustration. Hot in the summer, like an icebox in the winter. Bugs. Rats. Throw into the mix dehumanizing treatment and the constant invasion of privacy, the degradation of strip searches and cavity searches… it took away what was left. Then all you had were predators and prey. Guys with tattoos and dead eyes wandering the yard, sniffing around the block, looking for the stragglers, the weak ones, anything they could bring down, sink their teeth into that wouldn’t bite back.

The inmates at Shaddock robbed each other, fought each other, pushed drugs and booze, smuggled porno and contraband, sometimes even women. They killed for money and sometimes for free. They made weapons and stabbed each other, beat each other, raped each other, murdered each other, snitched on each other. Most of them had absolutely nothing to lose. Shaddock was a bubbling, seething cauldron flavored by the very worst society had to offer—bullies and rapists, serial killers and racists, Jesus freaks and gangsters, psychopaths and fanatics—only in there it was compressed, localized, compacted behind barbwire and high stone walls. Refined, if you will, into a toxic brew that stank like shit and body odor, vomit and pain and blackness and you could smell it the moment they processed you through.

End of the line.

And in such a place, a guy like Danny Palmquist didn’t stand a chance.