Ain’t Afraid

Speculative Fiction by Mord McGhee

The wall had closed behind me, and the first thing I thought wasn’t that I was going to die. I thought of my mother’s voice telling me I’d wasted too many blessings learning how to survive wars only to let a rotten prison swallow me whole. I thought of Lee outside that impossible limestone box, maybe three feet away, maybe three centuries, and of Durbs waiting in control with his hangover and bad jokes. Then I thought of the body we had just found in Delta, its eyes wide with the same ugly knowledge beginning to bloom inside me.

That was when the words came back to me, soft as breath against my ear: When the inmates run the prison, Justice is stripped of its dignity and becomes a red hand of vengeance. Brilliance, right? Stamp your foot, clap your hands, shout at the heavens. Or maybe it was just me talking to myself again, which is a habit you develop when silence starts sounding hungry.

My name is Raj Warbach. Former warrant officer, ten years served, retired young enough to get bored and dumb enough to take a guard job at Feinberg State. My parents, who live in my head rent free, would call that a natural fit. Feinberg has stood in Illinois farmland since the 1950s, a maximum-security facility built to contain men convicted of violence the courts decided could not be cured. Bad birds. Worse cats. We even housed Dencivich, the Butcher of Chicago, until the state turned out his light less than three hundred yards from where my trouble began. Feinberg already had a nickname by then: the Final.

From an operational standpoint, and not as a prisoner, thank you kindly, the place is a ruin with payroll. Underbudgeted. Decrepit. A gray blight on all that flat farmland. The toilets take four flushes for one sheet of tissue because they’re backed up with decades of who-knows-what. It stinks like sour urine, feces, old fear, and men who need showers somewhere they feel safe enough to let the soap touch skin.

And somehow, that was not the worst of it.

Feinberg is war-era limestone, cracked and leaking. Guests try to escape as often as once a week. The place was designed with all the foresight of a toddler playing blocks in a thunderstorm. They call the layout hub and spoke, though it ain’t like any hub nor spoke this dog ever saw. Dead ends arrive where corridors should continue. Stairs go nowhere. Halls change direction like they’re ashamed of where they started.

All this said, it’s home to us, guards and guests alike. Oh yeah, the clincher is that Feinberg is apparently haunted. Cold spots, night screams, chains rattling where no chains hang. “Ghosts,” they say. I never saw one. True or not, ghosts are just ghosts. That’s why when anyone on the inside sees something weird, we guards say, “Ain’t afraid.” It is a mantra. A reminder. A promise that if, God forbid, anything happens, we won’t get stuck there forever ourselves. I only mention the haunting because what I’m about to tell you has no rational explanation, and if it was a ghost, let me be first to say, “Well. Fuck me seven ways from sunup.”

“You’re mumbling again, Raj,” one of my partners said, hitting me with a projectile tennis shoe. I put a single finger in the air over my head. Okay. Here goes.

The morning of the incident began ordinary enough to insult what came after. I was spinning a fidget and wallowing in coffee our collective pot had been brewing since the Vietnam Conflict, thinking about a slice of pie from Ragazzi’s and a cold pint, when a body cut across the window and stole the light.

Lee Brass was on the bench to the side, pulling on her boots. I guessed it was her shoe that hit me. Durbs sat nearby, still losing a private scrum with last night’s Johnnie Walker. He and I had driven in together, and though it was his turn behind the wheel, I had claimed the keys after he lost the prior evening’s wrestling match with the bottle. The body that broke the light belonged to Bobby Tully, night shift by schedule, who pushed through the swinging door. When our eyes met, I didn’t miss that his face had gone pale as chalk.

“What?” I asked. Durbs groaned and covered his eyes with his hand. Tully turned to Durbs, and I added, “Don’t mind him. A leprechaun pissed in his charms.”

“Thank God you people showed up on time,” Tully said, leaning against the wall bent at the waist as though he were sick.

“What’s the big rush?” Lee asked, stomping her boots to the floor. “Aw, shit. What’d you dip-wits do now?”

“This should be good,” Durbs said with a jilted frown.

“Cellblock Delta,” was Tully’s only reply.

“Shit,” I said.

We all knew that if nightshift had gotten into something in Delta, we were screwed. Cellblocks are supposed to be self-contained… limited bodies, controlled movement, enough supervision to keep daily misery from becoming a trauma event. Most days we managed something close to order. Respect given, respect returned. It sounds naive until you see it work. But Delta was different. Delta was where the worst solitary subjects lived, where doors opened only when policy, force, or the Almighty Himself demanded it. If somebody in Delta had dabbled the dobby, we would be cleaning stitches before first break.

“Catch us up as we walk, Tully,” I replied, stepping to.

Tully passed swiftly down the corridor, past control’s open door, then turned by one of Feinberg’s stairways to non-heaven, as we guards called them. “Where’s your squad, Corporal?” Lee asked.

“In here,” he said, walking into a standing jail cell.

Officers Grits and Inglestein came to attention like we were shift supervisors, then sagged when they saw our faces. Between them lay a guest. My brain registered him in slow, ugly pieces: gray uniform, wet floor, neck tattoos, too much stillness. “Is that…” I began, and Tully cut me off before I could make the dead man real.

“Inglestein found him this way,” he said. “We didn’t have a hand in this.”

Our focus pivoted onto Inglestein. A red smear soaked his uniform from cuff to thigh. I checked Grits. Clean. Tully. Clean. Julio Inglestein looked like he had tried to hug a slaughterhouse and lost.

“Oh no,” I said, showing my palms. “We are not eating this so you can sit down somewhere and order flapjacks. Ownership lies with you, Inglestein.” He came one step closer, shaking. I touched my own nose. “You got some blood here.”

Muffled through his sleeve he said, “Somebody got him. Blade’s over there.”

“Camera?” Lee asked.

“Glitched out, fucking ghosts,” Inglestein grumbled. He reached for Lee, so she jumped back.

“It’s all over your hands, Julio,” Lee said. “Don’t drag me into this bullshit.”

“For twenty-eight seconds the feed went static,” Tully said. “Then he was there. Then Julio was screaming.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Althon D’Angelo,” Grits said.

“How the fuck did he get to Cellblock Delta?” Lee growled.

Durbs and I exchanged a confused glance.

“You don’t just walk from one block to another,” I said, glaring at Inglestein accusingly.

“I swear it wasn’t me,” Inglestein answered defensively. “I know it looks bad, but….”

Lee shushed him with a hiss. “Listen to me, Julio,” she said. “Call your rep. Tell him to meet you at Medical. Right now.”

“She’s right,” I agreed. “Stay with me, Lee.”

“Escort Julio to Medical,” Lee said to the rest of the shift. “Nobody says shit to anyone until his rep is in the house.”

It took five seconds to clear the room of brick-shitting crimefighters. I looked over my shoulder at Lee. “Fuck,” I said.

“They’re gone,” she said, nodding.

The hallway light wasn’t enough, so I torched my link. Pale white filled the cell. The stiff’s skin had gone ashen. Tattoos showed around the prison grays. A two-headed snake on the back of his neck running up over his skull toward the front, where his milky eyes bulged wide. He died recognizing somebody.

“Got jumped in the dark,” I observed. “Dilated.”

“Something on the ground,” Lee said, approaching.

“Hello,” I said flatly, pushing it with the tip of my boot. “Shank.”

“No blood on the blade,” Lee said. “Blood on Julio, but no blood on the blade. Damn him!”

“I’ll set the lighting, you snap the images,” I said. “They’re going to lock us out any second.” They did. We had three decent shots before an Admin named Kuli swept in, shut Delta down, and sent us to control like children dismissed from a room where adults were about to drink and smoke.

“They sent me right down,” Kuli barked at us. “Get out!”

We went to find our shift partners. Wasn’t hard. Durbs looked up at the sound of our shoes. “What’d they do to them?” Lee asked. “Julio.”

Durbs shrugged and looked away.

“We can’t sit around,” I said. “Work don’t stop.” Lee met my gaze and shook her head, eyes darting towards the camera momentarily. “It’s fine,” I told her. “I’ll go first round.”

I strolled through the routine so any Admin watching cameras would see a bored guard doing bored-guard things. I stopped by the locker room. No Grits, no Inglestein, no Tully. That absence sat wrong. Finally, I cut to Cellblock Alpha and D’Angelo’s bunk.

The door hung ajar. His property had already been boxed. Which meant Admin was moving faster than grief, faster than procedure, faster than the truth. His cell was one floor deeper and several hundred yards down a different spoke from Delta. There was no way to move him between blocks without passing the hub, control, cameras, doors, and at least two guards with enough sense to notice a dead man walking. I stepped inside and turned in a slow circle. Not much to note except scratches above the turd-catcher crude little scorpions were carved into the wall, each one with a tail bent toward its own back. A cardboard box sat on the floor, and I poked through it. D’Angelo’s shoes, bedding, all folded neatly. Two library books, a general-interest magazine, and…

“Bingo.”

It was a notebook, black cover softened by sweat and handling, filled line after line in cramped block print. I read the first sentence and felt something cold open behind my ribs. It was one of mine. One of the stupid little wisdom nuggets I muttered to keep from putting my fist through Feinberg’s walls. I had never laid eyes on Althon D’Angelo before seeing him dead, but page after page carried my voice like a confession. On the last page, written darker than the rest, as if the pen had been pressed hard enough to bruise the paper, was the line that had whispered to me in the wall.

When the inmates run the prison, Justice is stripped of its dignity and becomes a red hand of vengeance.

I stuffed the little black square into my pocket and stepped out, running at once into Lee. “All good?” she asked, leaning in to see what I had been up to. “That his?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Anything interesting?” she pressed.

“If there was,” I said, “Admin got to it before me.” I pushed past her and continued my pattern.

“Alright,” she called, not following.

I supposed after I left her, she went in and poked around, too. I whistled softly as I strode past cell after cell, where guests stared back from the dimness within. There was something behind their eyes that I didn’t like that night. Then I reached the far end of Cellblock Alpha.

It happened so fast I did not understand it until pain cracked across my face. One second, I was walking to the end of Alpha with D’Angelo’s notebook in my pocket. The next, I hit a limestone wall that should not have been there. I bounced back, clutched my arm to my chest, and struck another wall behind me. My link shook in my hand as I raised it. Four walls. No door. No bars. No seam. Just cracked limestone sweating cold around me.

“Shit. Lee!”

Banging on the limestone produced no response, though it did hurt my hand.

“What the… Lee! Hey! Lee!” My voice came back thin and strange, as if the room had chewed it first. I put my ear to the stone. Nothing. Then, from somewhere inside the wall came the dry scratch of a pen. That’s the story you’re reading now; in the notebook I found among Althon D’Angelo’s possessions after his death. If you found it in my box, then the system worked exactly as Feinberg intended. Admin will tell you I abandoned post, or ran, or cracked under stress. They may even say I killed D’Angelo. They will not mention the twenty-eight seconds of static. They will not mention the scorpions. They will not mention that every man who vanishes into Feinberg leaves behind a notebook full of words he never wrote, waiting for the next fool to recognize his own voice.

I understand it now. The prison does not haunt us. We haunt it. Feinberg listens until it learns your voice, then it feeds that voice to the next condemned man like bait. D’Angelo had mine. I have someone else’s scratching under my skin. And the thing in the walls… the old justice, the red-handed vengeance, whatever name you want to give it… keeps balance one body at a time. Lee, if this reaches you, don’t come looking for how it happened. Tell Durbs I was right about Ragazzi’s pie. Tell my mother I tried to get out. The ink is gone, so I’ve used what I had left to finish the scorpions on the wall. Their tails all point inward now. So do mine. It is getting colder, and someone on the other side has started knocking back.

---

Bio: Mord McGhee

Author • Producer • Cyberpunk & Speculative Fiction • ASCAP

Early contributor to the cyberpunk genre (since 1988)

Editor, Coreopsis Journal of Myth and Theatre among others, whose film credits include The Man in the White Van, My Dead Friend Zoe, Fade to Black, Fackham Hall, You Can Call Me Bill, Nimrods and more. Novels include The Kirin Enigma series, Murder Red Ink, Old Flames and Heroes, The Tales of Eclipse series or “Ghosts” of San Francisco, Golden Triangle, Girl: Anna’s Odyssey, and more!

🌐 http://www.mordmcghee.com

Cover Photo by: Pexels

Read More Speculative Fiction on The Yard: Crime Blog

Follow Us On:

Looking for a book to read? Try our Bookstore, or True Crime Library