goddamn insects and shovel what’s left into the trash. Any still crawling when it’s done, kick ‘em into their cages and lock ‘em down, dirty murdering animals, the day of reckoning is at hand for their filthy asses…
So the cons stood around the wreckage of Knapp while the other hacks moaned and swore and called their mothers whores. They stood there, eyes bright and feral, tongues wetting lips and hands clenched tightly on pipes and wrenches and shards of metal wrapped in duct tape.
Romero had seen mob ugliness before.
He knew its smell, its taste, the way it got down inside your belly and unwound the coils of your guts with cold fingers. But this…this just wasn’t acceptable. If they were going to show the DOC and the media that they were just human beings scratching for decent treatment and not blood-hungry savages, then this was not how it was done.
“You can’t do it like this, you fucking morons!” he cried out at them. “Don’t you see? Don’t any of you see? This is exactly what they expect and it’s what they want. You’re playing into their hands…”
But the cons didn’t seem to see at all.
They were all staring at Romero and that mob mentality was all over them like poison, seeping through their pores and into deep places, contaminating things and making others rot black. These were bad boys. Here were your white supremacists and Black Muslims, Hispanic triggermen and redneck sociopaths. Race had ceased to exist and the dawn-call of savagery was their inheritance. Hell’s Angels and ABs, Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples, Spanish Cobras and Nuestra Familia, all standing shoulder to shoulder, breathing in each other’s hate and exhaling a communal atavism. Their teeth were bared, spit hung from their lips, their fists were white-knuckled on weapons and in their bellies was the rumble of blood-hunger and death-hunger. Romero took a step back because, God help him, he thought they were going to drop on him in a pack. Stun him like a cow in a Chicago stockyard, hoist him up by his ankles and yank his goodies out, go charging down the corridors in an ensanguined posse, his severed head held high on a pole.
But it didn’t happen.
Skaggs stepped forward, Skinner at his side. The chief and the tribal medicine man, both splattered with blood and bits of tissue.
“You wanna stay alive, you fucking mite,” Skaggs said in a voice just as rough as scraping gravel, “then you better shut the fuck up. You better decide if you’re with us or with them, because if you ain’t with us…”
“Like he say,” Skinner piped in. “You ain’t with us…ha, ha, your death gonna be one scary motherfucker.”
Romero held his hands out. It was an ancient gesture, showing you carried no weapons. Worked good with rabid dogs and men who weren’t much above them on the evolutionary scale. “All I’m saying is that this is what those cocksuckers expect of us. They expect us to kill hacks and rape the weaklings, burn and loot and pillage…we gotta show ‘em that we’re above that, that we just want decent treatment.”
“You don’t know cock,” Skaggs said and pushed past him.
The others fell in step, brushing past Romero and staining him with blood as they passed. When they hit the outside air, they all started running. Running and shouting and looking for something or someone to bring down.
Romero sighed, looked over at the two hacks who were still alive, beaten severely, but alive. They were tied to lathes. This was the point in some shitass Hollywood flick, he knew, where the lone convict helps the hacks that would never help him.
Yeah, right.
“Just keep your fucking mouths shut,” he told them. “And maybe they’ll forget about you. It’s the best you can hope for.”
Then he turned and went to see a riot first hand. Figured he better get a good look before the police and army brought them all down and smashed them to cider like apples rotting under trees.
24
The riot.
It was quite a picture.
Cons roaming in gangs and posses with knives and pipes and razors, guns from the armory. The whites out in force along with the blacks and Hispanics. Everyone on a rampage. Three guards were dead within the first hour as long-simmering hatreds boiled over and the men found weapons in their hands. The offices were demolished. The prison industry buildings set on fire. The Ad-Seg and protective custody cells were opened and all the rats and weaklings and celebrity inmates were torn to pieces by roving mobs.
Romero made it out into the yard and it was chaos.
Utter chaos.
Helicopters were in the air and the state police were assembling outside the walls with SWAT units and tear gas and sharpshooters. The National Guard had been mobilized. The authorities were calling out over loudspeakers for the cons to surrender, for the hostages to be released. A bunch of outlaw bikers tossed the corpse of a guard over the wall in response.
But through it all, there was a loose sort of unity amongst the convicts themselves. The whites were led by Mafia soldiers and bolstered by the ABs, biker gangs, and hundreds of renegade criminals just itching for a fight. The blacks were led by a cocaine trafficker doing life who had managed to cement together all the street gangs and drug dealers and pimps. The Hispanics were led by a high-ranking member of the Mexican Mafia. Out in the yard, the whites assembled along one wall, the blacks another, and the Hispanics yet another.
But in the center, with the hostages, there were some of each.
By nightfall, these three leaders had calmed the mobs and began making demands over the loudspeakers. At first, they were ignored, but when they announced they’d kill one person for each hour this went on, they were flooded with responses.
The negotiating went on well into the night.
The prison was swept by searchlights, cordoned off by police and National Guard units. The news media was out in force, but the cops wouldn’t let them within a mile of Shaddock.
Around midnight, the authorities broke off negotiations.
Then they turned off the water.
Then the lights.
25
Romero was on the far side of the yard, watching the bonfires and the smoke billowing up into the night sky from burning buildings. The cons were still agitated, but many were drunk and stoned, laughing and cheering and talking freedom and brotherly love. Romero had been listening to speeches and crazy schemes all day. But unlike many of the others, he wasn’t naive enough to believe any of it.
Sooner or later, this was going to meltdown and the body count would be high. Either the cons would go after each other or the cops would storm the place and take care of business.
It could come from any direction, but Romero was only concerned about Palmquist.
“I found him,” Aquintez said, out of breath from running across the yard and wherever it was he’d come from. He pulled Romero away from a group of cons smoking a joint. “I found the kid.”
“Where?”
Aquintez told him. Down in the hole. The cons had piped him, cracked his head good. He was out cold and they couldn’t revive him. They brought him up to the infirmary.
“He’s in a bad way, man,” Aquintez said. “If he ain’t dead, he’s gonna be soon. In a coma or something. You gotta see that infirmary. Fucking bodies everywhere. Some blacks are running the place, they got a couple hacks tending to the wounded.”
