Page 44 of The Way We Rot
“What the hell is going on?” I asked the nearest CO, a young woman by the name of Alicia, who looked stressed to fuck, her hair half out of its bun, her eyes red. It was clear this had been rolling on for hours, whatever it might be.
I’d never seen anything like it. In all the years I’d spent working toward this prison, doing my time in others, the inmates had never been so… organized.
Alicia looked at me with open relief. The night crew brought more bodies to her side. “We let them out of their cells an hour ago after they had been lockedin all day. The warden said the state insisted they not be kept from their daily rights, that he’d spent all day arguing it.” She yanked on her hair, messing it up even more. “But now they won’t go back in. That one.” She pointed at the loudest inmate, one Amanda Mooreland, who was commanding most of the room. “Stood on the rec table and started chanting, and they all joined in.” Alicia spluttered and threw her hands up. “They haven’t got any proper demands or anything, just…”
“We want food! We want food!” they all chanted, red faced, tired and damned angry. On tables, exhausted and raging, caged animals with a lick of freedom using every single inch of it to get their voices heard.
I’d be pissed too, to have my rations cut so significantly. To be locked away even more than I usually was because someone else had done something so heinous it was almost unheard of. It wasn’t their fault they lived with a psychopath. And she wasn’t even here now, confined below, probably listening to the commotion with a smile on her face and her hands down her pants.
I huffed a breath through my nose, trying to parse out the situation, take measure of it and fix it. Icouldn’t see anyone in control from our end. Only Inmate Mooreland cawing at her masses.
“Where’s the warden?” I asked Alicia, already guessing the answer. He wasn’t here. Neither was useless Saggy Sal. Both tucked tail and escaped this mess, ready to shoulder no blame tomorrow.
“He already left,” Alicia said before turning from me with a steadying breath and striding to the middle of the braying group. On her own. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated a female CO and what they could do, but this wasn’t the time or place for a slight thing like her to be diving into the fray by herself. So I followed her with a muttered curse under my breath.
“Inmate!” I shouted at Ms Mooreland, hoping I could command her attention. Instead, she shrieked something incomprehensible and dove off the table, landing on Alicia.
That did it.
The thin elastic snapped.
With that one move, it was no longer a peaceful protest, loud but harmless. It was a riot.
Twenty
Penny
Ihummed and patted my fingers together one by one, rocking a little, trying to let the crazy hit big so I could go off into imagination land for good.
Maybe another few slams of my head against the wall would do it.
“Ten green bottles of beer on the wall…”I sang, leaning into the nutcase I wanted to be. If I faked it for long enough, maybe it would become reality.
It was hard to have any more hope inside me, hard to pretend things might work out for the better if I just tried more. My one cause for anticipation, for some fun, was gone. He’d proven himself as someone not worth my time, again and again; he’d betrayed what I thought we were growing.
I suppose that showed my insanity for the truth it was. My mind must have been fading; my marbles lostlong ago. To think a person like CO Adrian Darling, sweet in name alone, could ever be manipulated.
I was shit out of luck.
Sighing, I slumped against the wall, tapping the side of my head against it to pass the time. A crash, or something like it, from somewhere else in the prison echoed and tried to snag my attention, but I didn’t let it. I kept singing my stupid little song and swaying my stupid battered body.
But it just wouldn’t let me go. Reality clung on in there like a curse that refused to break.
Frantic shouting grew louder, with banging, crashing, and footsteps pummeling the floor above our heads, down the stairs, all around us. Chaos was bleeding out down here too; the other sad saps, so deprived of anything, started pounding on their doors, getting all rowdy, feeding off the energy seeping through the cracks.
Whatever was happening, though, wasn’t my business. For once, I wasn’t in the middle of it. For once, I was glad to be far away, locked in my shitty solitary cell with only the brain I was trying to addle for company.
Randal’s death hadn’t been my fault either. He raped me. Adrian sent him in to do so. It was him, that man, the one under my skin when he wasn’t supposed to be. It was his fault. All of this was, I decided, as I paced my cell and pushed away the bellows from my fellow solitarily confined.
But then the door at the end of the hall opened and closed, and my attention piqued, sharp and sudden.
“Keep them all locked in, stay and watch,” a stressed voice sounded, cracking through a radio. Someone pounded down the length of the hall, ignoring all the pleas for mercy or what the shit ever. Heat prickled under my skin, a sense of doom making the back of my neck tickle. Something big was happening.
There was a groaning, creaking kind of noise that I’d never heard before, and yet more shouting. Okay, maybe this was worth paying attention to. I leaned into the dread and played with it. An emotion beyond boredom, beyond fatigue and irritation.
Something like an explosion sounded above our heads, but that wasn’t possible. Why the hell would there be explosives in here? It must have just been a crashing or banging that my brain couldn’tcompute. But it made me jolt, raised my blood pressure to painful throbs in my head.
“Fuck yeah!” the woman in the next cell over to me screamed, her joy curious enough in this situation that I moved, ready to peer out of the door my damn self.
