Fear Me

20

At Shaddock Valley, there weren’t many people Romero trusted.

Surely, not the hacks and precious few prisoners. But JoJo Aquintez was one of them. The state had dropped him for eight years on an armed robbery conviction. He was a tough boy and his little vacation at Shaddock was the second time the state had sent him away to college. But for all that and for all the swindling and menacing he’d done in his time, Aquintez was all right in Romero’s way of thinking. He was a good guy to have at your side. When you were his friend, you could trust him absolutely. He wouldn’t steal from you, snitch on you, or try to ram a homemade knife into your back.

And in a maximum security prison, man, that was saying something.

Romero was being up front about what he knew, exhuming all the demented little secrets from the black soil of his soul, rattling yellowing skeletons from closets he would just as soon have left bolted. “I know it’s fucking jiggy crazy stuff, JoJo, but I swear to it on my mother’s grave. Palmquist… Jesus… he ain’t like other people. That shit he was saying about his brother, well, it’s true.”

“I believe it. I think we all believe a lot of things we didn’t believe before, don’t we?” Aquintez said quietly as was his way. “Things have a way of adding up. Even things we’d rather not let ourselves believe.”

Aquintez was about 5’6 with shoes on, but stocky and powerful from working the iron pile in the gym. He wore glasses, slicked his thinning hair straight back from his high forehead, and was into Medieval history of all things. Had read every book in the prison library on the subject and had read about a hundred more through inter-library loans and purchases.

He wasn’t your average con.

But then, as Romero had learned in his many wasted years in lock-ups and hard-time state joints, there was no such thing as your average con. Some were jailhouse lawyers and some were artists, others were poets and still others were farmers at heart. And many others, of course, were just plain hoodlums and bullies and homicidal maniacs. One thing you could never put in a box were cons… figuratively, anyway.

“I gotta tell somebody this shit,” Romero said, “so it might as well be you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Palmquist… you see… he had this twin…”

Aquintez just smoked a cigarette and listened, patiently, absorbing every word and weighing them out carefully in his mind. And it was a good mind. One that easily picked out implications, subtle nuances, and unspoken possibilities. So he smoked and listened and watched the cons out in the yard playing their games, strutting around like randy males with no females to impress.

“He’s really a good kid, JoJo,” Romero finished by saying, his face sweaty and his eyes blinking rapidly as if he were trying to blink away some image he couldn’t bear to look upon. “We could have made him into a good con, one that knew the ropes but wasn’t like those guys out there. I really believe that. What happened to Weems and Gordo and Heslip and Burgon—”

“Those pricks deserved what they got and we both know it,” Aquintez said, just stating a fact that was widely known.

Romero nodded. “I guess what I’m saying is that we can’t blame the kid for any of that, he’s not really responsible for… for his brother.”

“Of course not. Man, the tales people have been telling around here—about the kid having a demon guardian and shit, about him being some kind of antichrist, having psychic powers like those little blonde bastards in that English movie there—well, what you’re telling me now ain’t any harder to swallow.” He shrugged. “In fact, it’s a lot easier. As far out and implausible as it might seem, at least we have something of a scientific explanation… shit, straight out of the Outer Limits, but it’s at least something we can get our hands on.”

“Don’t make me feel much better,” Romero said.

Aquintez smiled thinly. “At least it’s not ghosts and demons here. You’ll never get those dumb shits out there to believe it, but I do. Let me get this straight,” he said, crushing out his cigarette. “The kid’s twin… Damon, you say? When the kid is asleep, this twin that somehow never died but crawled deep inside him can externalize himself physically?”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking unbelievable.”

“Scares the shit out of me,” Romero admitted, not ashamed to do so. “If you had heard it…”

“What… what did you hear?”

“Oh, it was crazy, I thought I was going to scream,” Romero said in a high, squeaking voice. “I was laying there and I heard movement. I smelled something like rotten fruit but bad enough to gag you. And those sounds… it must have been pulling itself out of the kid, coming out of his head and I heard it, I fucking heard it… like somebody was pulling the guts out of a pig, wet and slopping. And that stink, the sounds it made sliding along the wall, oh Jesus and Mary…”

“But you only heard it the night Weems was put down?”

“The night it got Gordo I was in the infirmary and when it got Heslip and Burgon, I took enough Seconal to drop a bull elephant. I slept right through it. I knew what was going to happen and I just couldn’t bear to hear it…” Romero clutched his hands together to stop them from shaking. “Something has to be done, JoJo, but I just don’t know what.”

Aquintez shook his head. “Nothing we can do but stay on that kid’s good side. You know what’s coming here, I think we all do…”

Romero did.

And if it came down, well the kid wouldn’t survive it. Because they were talking riot here. It had been whispered about for years, but now it looked like it might happen. The four brutal murders at the prison had acted as sort of a catalyst and now everyone was talking about it, black and white and Hispanic. For once they were all together on something.

And when it came down, not if, the cons would take over the place. One of the first things they’d do after taking control of Shaddock, as all cons did in a riot, would be to storm the PC units where the snitches and weaklings were kept. Then they’d liberate prisoners from Ad-Seg.

And Danny Palmquist? They’d kill him on sight.