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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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The Slab
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I remember my first day here. One of the prisoners, a pedophile and child killer, bit one of the guards on the neck. It wasn't a serious wound, since he bit him on the back, but it was deep and nasty enough. It was a challenge. And I remember watching, frozen, as the guards stomped him to death. It was brutal. They didn't draw batons, didn't even slam him around. It takes a while to kick a man until he dies, even with four guards, because it takes a while to kick through to anything vital, and they weren't trying to kill him, that was just a side effect- they wanted to put him through the maximum amount of pain on the way to dying.
I was new, so I didn't make any move to help, and later, one of them explained to me that in the Slab, these prisoners didn't exist. Their convictions meant they'd lost their citizenship, their names, their rights, everything. But someone who's lost everything has only their life to fear for- it was the only trick left from a bag of carrots and sticks. Of course, in the Slab prisoners only had about a week to act up, because after that they were drooling vegetables. We'd lost our taste for the death penalty, but so long as there are monsters in the world, society's going to want to feel safe from them, so we threw them in dark, dank holes and put them into chemically-induced comas. But even with advances in medical science, the cost of long-term sedation was bigger than we'd budgeted for. The solution came out of desperation, but still it had a certain elegance to it. The first batch of prisoners they leased out were all elderly, and all of them had been diagnosed with chronic cancer. A drug company was to the point of human test trials, but their drugs had shown some peculiar side effects in monkey trials, and they didn't want to risk the massive lawsuit potential of a normal human trial. The Slab's inmates were perfect for the studies, they argued; men who had given up their rights and identities to harm society, finally giving back in a real and self-sacrificing way. The government told itself that the cancer trial was a one-off, but no one believed it would stop; the prison for once was self-sufficient, and philosophically the drug company had a point. Spending time in prison wasn't repaying a societal debt- it was spending more taxpayer money on incarceration of someone too dangerous to let roam free. After the cancer treatments came the AIDS drugs, then a handful of other pharmaceuticals, and from there things got increasingly weird. But the Slab, with its unwitting test-subjects, was saving lives. Some of the redder politicians even argued that it was even deterring further crime (though most statistics I've seen argue deterrence at all, since most crimes are committed without real forethought, let alone thoughts about consequences). Scientists (we were mostly beyond the point of doctors by then) were using the Slab as a hotbed for trans and post-human research, genemod, mutagenic compounds, freaky science fiction stuff. Frankly, they went a little Mengele, freed from informed consent or worries about doing harm. The inmates in the slab weren't people anymore, weren't ever going to be allowed to wake up- so it didn't matter if they lost functionality- hell, it didn't matter if they were in excruciating pain, because they would never wake up to feel it. I used to be a detective. Bodies were starting to pile up around me, and I decided I didn't really need that on my conscience anymore, so I retired. I'd seen enough cop movies to know not to work my last two days, and used vacation to fill the gap. I had a fiance, then, and I think losing out on time with her was one of the many reasons why I left. But once we didn't have my job as an excuse to keep us apart, we realized we didn't like each other very much (or at least that she didn't like me and I was indifferent). I first started working here when I couldn't get another real cop job, when I was still trying to smooth things over with Anna, but it was never a real solution- the genie was out of that bottle. I'm babbling, or maybe dreaming. As I sit up my head is throbbing; I can feel every heartbeat through the seeping hole in my head. I touch it and it comes back moist, which means that I'm not dead, and I haven't been out for too long. The medic is dead on the floor, but I expected as much. The prisoner who should have been strapped down in this bed is lying next to him with a mess of broken glass in his throat, from the syringe that should have put him out, I expect. I don't remember if I was the one who jabbed him, or if the doc managed to before getting his throat cut open, but since he's dead and I'm alive I fucked up somewhere along the way. I look at the chart, and that's when I twig that something's wrong. Medic wrote that he'd given the inmate his sleepy-time dose, but for some reason the patient wasn't responding. Syringe was an additional sedative. One of the wrist restraints has been snapped off, and the rest of the story tells itself. I must have hit my head in the struggle. Fucking cutbacks; time was, we had two guards to an inmate during the chemical sedation- up to five for inmates with a history of violence, but the cost of chemicals... damnit. That's when I hear screaming, and it brings sound back into the world. This is the sedation ward- only new inmates being processed into their chem comas ought to be back here. There shouldn't be any noise, except maybe the low buzz of conversation as guards hit on the couple of female medics- the only women allowed in the Slab (female inmates are housed in a similar facility called the Pad- I shit you not). That's why I know the screaming is serious; and the way the scream ends abruptly, choked off into a moist wheeze, I know she dies, I even know how; still, it doesn't prepare me for the sight of her cut throat, pouring blood out like overflow from a shook up beer. Her patient's dazed; the sedatives have gotten to him enough he can't stand up without keeping a hand on the table, and I don't think he realizes that he's not leaning on her for support, too, because he keeps the same kind of death grip on her, but finally something has to give as he starts to teeter, and he drops her body. He's got the guard's baton next to his hand on the bed; the end of it's bloodied, and I don't bother looking for the guard because I know already I'm not going to find anything useful. He's got a scalpel, but it seems like he's forgotten how to work it; I think getting the medic's throat open was instinct, because he's holding the thing like a knife, now, and he must have seen me, because he's trying to posture at me, like I'm just some kind of gorilla going to turn tail because he stands up straight and squares his shoulders. I charge at him, and he does like he's expected, tries to slice me in the arm with the scalpel, but he's forgetting the blade's less than an inch long and it barely scrapes my bicep. My momentum carries him into the machines that were meant to keep him from dying, and he squeals as each of them jabs sharp metal edges into him. He tries to bury the thing in my neck but the blade gets as far as the collar bone and snaps off in it; hurts like a motherfuck, but it's minimal damage. He's still holding the handle of the scalpel, stoned off his ass enough that he barely resists when I feed it to him, use his own hand to jab the fucking thing up through the roof of his mouth. I start to wonder what else I can use to finish him when he goes limp in my arms; he's bleeding enough that I figure I've hit something important, so I drag him out and drop him into the hall. He's a deterrent now, a stop sign; no point keeping him hidden away in one of the sleep rooms. I check the other rooms. One's empty- which means the inmate must have got out but at least so did the medic and guard. Another's full up, but everybody's dead. The third one there's blood all over the walls- but the inmate's got holes for each splatter, which means the guard must have finished the bastard before getting the medic out. That makes me feel a little better; only one of the guards did his job better, so in the grand scheme of things I'm a B- student, not the abject fuck-up I thought- though that'll come as small consolation to the medic's family; can't for the life of me remember if he had kids. Something is fucked, and I know almost immediately it must be the new thiopental shipment. And if the sedatives are shit here, and they're shared throughout the Slab, it's only a matter of time before the other vegetables wake up. But first, there's a bastard missing from sleep, and the most dangerous area he could be in, at least until everybody else wakes up, is block A, where the unprocessed inmates reside. Block A is just down the corridor, not far at all. I think I can hear noise, way more noise than I should, but before I can be certain I see a footprint in blood, then another, another. From the distance between the missing sleeper must have just stepped in a pool with one foot, but from the gait he was making good time. That's when I'm sure that I hear a commotion, yelling, laughter, anarchy. But above the din, which seems to get farther away the closer to A I get, that insane cackling rises louder. When I get to the end of the hall A is empty, all the cage doors opened, and it's quiet save for one inmate, laughing like a lunatic, running around with his hands out like he's holding two pairs of scissors and wants the world to know it. His head's been shaved in the last month, and he still has stitches from three separate incisions; they rewired his brain, and that means he's come from B block at least. I don't recognize him on sight so I don't know if they made him an adrenaline junkie or if he's always been cuckoo. There's a pole in the middle of the commons, that used to have some kind of structural purpose, thought I can't for the life of me figure what. The A blockers get the commons for a few hours every evening as a way of reacclimating them from the normal penal system. Every once in a while we get one of the prison fem-boys here, and they'll use it for a stripper pole, and it seems like once a week somebody horsing around manages to run themselves into it and get a free trip down to the infirmary. The spastic doesn't seem to even notice me, just continues running and yelling as I walk to the pole, and when he runs too close I reach out to him, make sure his momentum carries him into it. One fell smack and his nose is powdered, and he loses his front teeth and chunks of his gums; he isn't dead yet, and he might make a better deterrent mewling like a dying lamb in the middle of the commons floor, but I'm simply not that cruel, and I shove him again into the pole. His face caves in, as the bones supporting it smash away, but it's still just carnage, nothing vital yet, and I realize I'm going to have to open his skull before it ends, or he'll just bleed out. I take a step back, preparing, like I'm going to throw a pitch, then use both hands and my whole body, though I guess the end result is more like passing a basketball. His head cracks open like a melon; it almost splits in half in my hands, and for the briefest second the metaphor mixes in my head, and I see myself biting into the fruit of his skull before the thought turns my insides. I let go of his head and he crumbles to the floor, not like a body at all, but like an empty jumpsuit, almost floating to the concrete. Sounds seem to be coming from deeper into the Slab. Might mean B block is waking up, or that the A inmates chased after the guards that should have been keeping them under lock and key. I don't even let myself wonder if the rest of B's been sprung. There's another hallway, and I stop a moment; fear's telling me there could be two whole cell blocks of before and after inmates rearing for a fight, but I don't let it lose me more than a second. Odds are the A blockers are everywhere, that the only way out is through, and the less time I spend worrying the better my odds of not dying horribly. But the gods must not thoroughly hate me, because right now most of the doors are closed up. Lights on the control panel by the entrance tell me that they managed to put the block into lockdown, which means only keys can open the cages up. Inmates are awake, which means the whole thiopental shipment was good and fucked. There's a set of keys stuck in one of the open doors- apparently somebody didn't feel like waiting around to be a good neighbor. I'm halfway across the floor towards them when one of the inmates calls me a name I wouldn't repeat in polite company, so I give him my full attention, walk to his cell. “I hear A block's already roaming the halls. It's only a matter of time before somebody lets us out.” He smacks big lips at me like he's hungry and I'm an apple, lips that don't seem they should belong to a scrawny red neck, let alone a man. I don't know him from a hole in the wall, but “Urban” and a number are stitched into his jumpsuit. I lean in close, close enough he could lean in and stick a shiv in me- but this ain't A block, and he's an unsteady vegetable just getting his sea legs back, and he hasn't touched a shiv in months, probably years. “You've got it wrong, meat; those bars aren't keeping you in, they're keeping me out.” I put my keys in the lock, and take a step back. “Turn the key if you don't believe me.” His hand reaches tentatively out, grasps around the chunks of metal on the keyring, tense, then stops as he looks at me. The hand creeps back, slowly. Something's warned him off- proof that he isn't that far gone; if he'd unlocked the cage I'd have grabbed his wrist and used the cage bars to break it, then leveraged against them to snap his elbow, then got the door open just enough to snap his arm off in it. Like I said, brutality is one of the only ways to stop a man with nothing to live for; the other is convincing him that nothing is a relative term, and everything short of dying is something. Rest of the inmates on this block shut the fuck up quick. They don't know what Urban saw in me, what spooked him, but they understand that right now it's still one on one if I want it to be, and those aren't odds they like. They're a pack of jackals, and if they get the chance, if someone does let them out like in A block they'll pile on me until there's nothing but bones, but thinking about the worst thing that might happen doesn't help. I take the keys out of his lock, then walk across and fetch the other keys. No points for being careless. Then I realize that if B is up, then isolation in D is bound to be stirring, too. D is where the real monsters go, the ones that give the other monsters nightmares, the ones that, even chemically unconscious the state demands solitary confinement and a one to one guard ratio for. D runs along the length of the prison, connected at the ends of each block by a high security door, the idea being that it'll let guards lock sections off more easily. When I get there the guards have all been pulled- likely evacuated to the outer ring of the Slab. That means a siege, that they'll hold the prison until they can gas the inmates. Best case scenario is hours- realistically it's days before there's sanity again. If the rest of the coma-cons are jackals, then D block is full of stone cold man-eating grizzlies, and among all the bogeymen here, there's one whose worse than the rest. His crimes are legion and legend; most prominently, he tortured the governor and his family to the point that, at the end, they willingly tortured one another to death rather than let him torture them any more. He was caught masturbating over their bodies as the governor's wife bled out; he told the arresting officers that he was “so close” and that after another couple of minutes he'd have been gone again. The lieutenant governor personally signed the letter that sent him to D block. Since he got here he's lived up to his legend. He got his first guard so riled up he beat up his girlfriend; the second hung himself halfway through his second shift on a coffee break. The third quit, and had a nervous breakdown. That all took a week, while they processed him for the thiopental coma. “Welcome to my parlour,” he says as the door slides open; I barely hear it, because he's at the far end of D block. The only reason I do, is no one else in D is making a noise; in a den of lions, they all know who runs the pride. I walk slow; it's all part of the show, now, and it's a game he plays better than anyone. “Apologies for the mess. I haven't had the time to tidy up.” I stop for a moment, and stare into one of the cells. The lights are down in D save for the emergency lights, one every ten feet down the walkway, so all I can see is a pair of eyes glinting in the dark. I recognize that look, hungry, coyote's eyes- the eyes of a weak animal waiting to steal someone else's kill. Without wanting it to, my lip curls up, revealing my teeth, and the eyes shift away from me, down the block, then back to me, still hungry, but cowed. “Heel, boy, let him through. And no more shitting in the corner- or I'll use the newspaper on you.” The voice is louder, closer; the eyes in the dark look down, and for a moment I'm thankful to that voice, and I realize I don't want be. I think about tazing his mad dog, but the taser's valuable enough I don't want to waste it, so I keep it holstered; let the son of a bitch think I owe him for all the good it'll do him. The sound of my boots echoes down the hall; there's no other noise at all. And suddenly there he is, conscious for the first time in a long time. “You are not who I expected” he says with a grin, “not even the right species.” “Then again, I doubt you're who you expected, either.” His eyes glint in the emergency lighting, and its subtle, but the grin turns sinister. He thinks he's stroking insecurities about being a guard- insecurities I haven't had the time for for a long time. “Prefer to be the strong, silent type? Why is it that those types are always the ones who go home and hit their wives, then cry like children about how awful a world that lets them live is? I've always thought your kind is crazier than mine.” “Of course, one of the craziest things you can be in is denial- so unable to cope with reality that you change it on the fly to coddle your fragile psyche. At least it's amusing, but judging by your swagger your desperately close to verging into cliché territory, melding in with the other hacks, just another brick in the wall of bacon boys in blue. But that's not who you really are, is it? Soul of a poet, maybe, have extraordinarily deep thoughts?” I want to feed him his teeth, but he's staying far enough back that I can't touch him without opening the gate; and I know in my guts he's too dangerous for that. “But even that's a lie you tell yourself, a lullaby to keep the nightmares of mediocrity and insignificance at bay. And the most delicious thing is you just don't know it, do you? You believe you're waging this war on chaos, that you're a knight in the order of the protection of Order, here to kill the crown prince of Chaos.” “Now that you're here, face to face with something remotely resembling real fear, not petty anxieties, you've frozen up, and the only thing that might drive you forward and through is more fear, fear that those anxieties are correct, and that if you do die, at least it won't be the coward's millennial suffering.” I've had enough of this nonsense; I push the key into his lock, then steel myself to stare into his eyes; he doesn't flinch, and I chalk it up as a stalemate I know I haven't earned. I turn the key the wrong way and it clacks; he's cocky, takes that step forward I needed, practically salivating at the thought of me distracted and stupid enough that he can tear out my throat in his teeth. I move fast; he's far enough away that to reach him I have to smash my bicep into the bars, and it hurts, and I only barely get hold of his collar. He bites into my hand and comes back with meat, but he's got no real use for it, so he spits it back in my face; I smile, because it's the only thing for it. I pull him to me, quick and strong, and he smashes his forehead into the flat, horizontal bar between us. He's stunned a moment, and I grab him by his thinning hair and pull; his head smashes full into the bars, and his head's just thin enough that I think it might fit, if I pull hard enough, and I give it another yank. The ringing of skull on metal is deafening, and a clump of his hair comes off in my hands, now slicked with his blood. He laughs, and his bloods mixes with spit over his teeth as he grins at me. “You just don't get it, do you? Apparently the joke's on you- but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least point you towards the punchline. That uniform puts you into the sleep chambers- so I think you 'came to' there, probably just after righteously murdering an unruly inmate. And there's the truth, and then there's the 'truth,' and I'd be curious to see the security footage of that incident- wouldn't you?” He shrinks back, hoping my previous reticence remains intact, but I open wide the door. I find out too late I was wrong as he lunges at me- he's fashioned a shiv out of a chunk of metal he must have torn off the medical equipment in his cell, and must have had it stashed under his mattress. He slices me across the chest, but not deep. He's weak, muscles at least a little atrophied, and his head's probably still ringing from the pounding into the bars. I grab his wrist, pull it behind him, hyper extending his arm until he drops the blade, then I run him with all of our combined weight into the opposite wall. I expect him to be unconscious after that, but he's alert enough to smile at me. “Least I know who I am.” He chuckles, then his head goes limp. I don't know if he's playing dead or if he's lost consciousness, and I don't particularly care. I set his mouth on the horizontal cell bar, and reel back and put my elbow into the back of his skull. The result is quick and fatal. The sidewalk curb equivalent is called a California smile, and I think he'd like that he dies with a smile on his face- not that I'd set out to do him any favors. The body drops under its own weight, and this time it drops like a stone heavier than even a stone ought to be. I stroll out of D block. His dog doesn't look at me- I think it's afraid to even open its eyes after that. Once I get to the main hall I don't know what I should do- safe thing would be to head for the outer gates, or at least to try and prevent the other blocks from getting opened. But that bastard, what he said about the tapes, it nags at me. The security station's on the opposite end from D. The walk down B is quieter than it should be; some more of the cages have been opened, which means somebody's wandering around with keys- which is something I'll have to deal with soon enough, but I feel like for the first time today I've really got a purpose. The security station is all locked down, but the keys get me in anyway. The video review station is already focused on the sleep rooms, which makes sense since that's where this all seems to have started. It's funny that we still call them tapes; I mean, nobody's used tapes in years, it's all digital video recorders, but we just can't shake the vernacular. I know I shouldn't let a madman fuck with my head, but since his brains are still on my boots I think it's only decent to honor his final request. As soon as I switch on the video, my world inverts; I'm standing on the ceiling and the floor's above me and everything else is falling away- it should scare the shit out of me, but somehow it feels like that's how the world's supposed to be. In the video I'm strapped down to a table, wearing a prisoner's uniform. There's a doctor in the room, and he looks nervous as he clears the bubbles from a syringe. There's someone in a guard's uniform, goose stepping around in such a way that I'd swear he must be a skinhead in a stolen pair of pants. He nods, and the doctor tries to grab my arm to steady me for the injection. I freak, pull my arm from side to side. And I don't know why it happens, but the strap comes loose, and I grab the doctor by the collar, slam him against the wall. He slumps, but only just, and I take the syringe and jab it through his throat, and the glass tubing shatters in my hand. The guard makes for me, but the sharp edges of the syringe go into his neck before he gets too close. Blood plorps out onto his shoulder a moment before he falls over my table. I look down, and recognize the bloodstain on my shirt as his. I throw him onto the ground, and undo the rest of my straps. I fast forward through the part where I switch clothes- I remember that part, now, and there's not much point rehashing. Then the anesthetic hits me all at once, and my feet go wobbly. I hit my head on the end of the table on my way to the floor. The rest of it comes back to me, even if it still feels like a dream. I've never been a cop, never worked with corrections. And that's the reason I'm here. I stopped crime- no, I stopped criminals, by the dozens. Criminals the cops couldn't touch, couldn't even find. I wanted to be a cop, I so badly wanted to help- that I got confused. I came in to the station to file my report, but instead they arrested me. I came to the station to try and tell them what I knew, what I was doing, but they put me into handcuffs instead. There were still a few of those drug-pushing yos in my basement the lye hadn't gotten rid of yet, and that probably would have been enough to keep me in prison. Then In holding I got into a few fights, and they went bad; people ended up dead. The judge thought I was remorseless and cold, that I did what I wanted and was beyond saving; but all I ever wanted was to help. He sent me here, to the Slab. I'd gone through my processing. They were finally ready to turn me into a cantaloupe, but... people ended up dead, and I got confused, and when I woke up the world had gone to hell and I just wanted to help set it right. But I'm not confused anymore. I know what I've been doing, and now I know why. And maybe, just maybe all of this happened for a reason, that I'm supposed to be here, right now, that what I did outside was just preparation for what I have to do now. Of course, it's possible I'm a batshit lunatic. But there's one thing certain: I have some more criminally insane nonentity's to stomp into a pasta sauce before I take a detour for self-discovery. |
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