The inmate spat the name as though it were an insult. Earl leaped off his bunk and grabbed Gladstone’s arm.
‘Don’t!’ he snapped. ‘The little shit ain’t worth it.’
‘I ain’t takin’ nothin’ from him exceptin’ his life,’ Gladstone growled.
‘You can take it all right,’ Earl said, glancing down at the smirking inmate. ‘You think that because we’re only on probation, we can’t reach you, don’t you?’
‘It’s a fact,’ the inmate replied, flashing a grin of white and gold-capped teeth. ‘You’s got nothin’ right now, so you’d best keep the peace here or I’ll go squealin’ to the watch about how’s you and your dumb-ass friend here are beatin’ up on us.’ The inmate got off his bunk and grabbed the edge of the metal. ‘All I gotta do is butt this rail an’ you’re goin’ nowhere.’
Earl released Gladstone’s bulging triceps and nodded.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘So go ahead, asshole.’
The inmate’s smirk slipped as he frowned in confusion, but he didn’t move.
‘That’s right,’ Earl repeated. ‘You see, you can’t do nothin’, because if you get us stuck here for any longer than we want to be, how long do you think it will be before James here gets hold of you?’
The inmate’s gaze flicked back to Gladstone’s giant frame as he realized his error.
‘Imagine what will happen,’ Earl said, ‘if we were in this cell with you two assholes for a couple of years ’stead of a couple of days.’
Gladstone smiled as he stepped forward. ‘Ain’t that right, Earl.’
The inmate staggered back against the bunk. ‘You do anythin’, I’ll scream anyways!’
Gladstone loomed over him, placed two giant hands on the inmate’s scrawny shoulders and shoved him down onto his ass on the lower bunk.
‘It’s not me who’s goin’ to be doin’ anythin’ boy,’ Gladstone rumbled. ‘It’s you.’
The inmate looked up at Gladstone in confusion. Gladstone reached up, shoved the inmate there aside and tore the sheets off the upper mattress, then turned and loosely tucked the sheet into the bars of the cell door. The sheet draped down, partially obscuring the cell from the view of others across the block.
‘Don’t disappoint me, boy,’ Gladstone snarled.
Then, with one hand, he unhitched his pants and hefted himself free. The inmate grimaced and turned his head away. Gladstone grabbed his face in one giant hand and yanked it brutally back.
‘Make it good,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll fuck you up fo’ life, you understan’?’
The inmate slowly lowered his head as Gladstone guided him down.
The lights in the cell flickered, shimmering as Gladstone put a hand across the back of the inmate’s head and shoved him all the way down. Earl looked up at the lights as the sound of muted gagging drifted across the cell.
Across the block, a handful of cell lights were also flickering intermittently but others further down the block remained on.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ Gladstone asked, his eyes closed but able to detect the flickering lights.
‘I ain’t sure,’ Earl replied.
Earl walked to the bars of the cell as he looked out across the block. The body heat from a couple hundred inmates coupled with the lousy air conditioning meant that the block was frequently hot and always stank of a volatile fusion of stale sweat, urine and grease. But now the air was cold, bitterly cold, and Earl saw a cloud of his breath condense onto the air in front of him.
‘What the hell?’
Earl was about to turn to Gladstone to ask him over to the bars when something plowed into his guts with enough force to propel him backwards across the cell. Earl hit the wall hard and his right leg smashed across the sink. The bone crunched loudly as his femur snapped under the impact and punched through his orange jumpsuit in a bloodied white stump.
Earl screamed as he slid not down the wall but up it, a terrific pressure collapsing his ribcage to the sound of fracturing bones.
Gladstone yanked the inmate off him and whirled to see Earl crunched up against the ceiling in a fetal ball, blood spilling from his ripped thigh around a jagged stump of white bone poking through his flesh. His voice shrieked across the block in a wail of indescribable agony.
‘Jimmy! Get it off me!’
Gladstone’s brain struggled to comprehend what he was seeing as he dashed forward and reached up for Earl. In an instant, Earl’s body was hurled back across the cell and crashed into the bars loudly enough to ring in Gladstone’s ears. Earl dropped onto the cell floor in a crumpled heap, the bones in all of his limbs smashed and his eyes wide but lifeless.
Gladstone dashed to the bars as whoops and shouts of delight echoed through the block. The mattress sheets were preventing the rest of the inmates from viewing the fight and they were clamouring for Gladstone to rip it down as he appeared at the bars and shook them with both hands.
‘Get me out of here!’ he bellowed.
The inmates, oblivious to his words, cheered and battered their cell doors with anything they could find as they saw the big man standing over his ruined, bloodied cellmate.
Gladstone turned and saw the other two men in the cell cowering on their bunks.
‘How’d you do that?’ he demanded.
‘We din’ do anythin’!’ one of them shouted. ‘Christ man, we din’ move!’
Gladstone took a pace toward them, bunching his fists in rage as he reached out for them. He was stopped in his tracks as a bitter cold wrapped itself around him like a blanket of ice, snatching the breath from his lungs. Gladstone managed a brief cry of what might have been fear before he felt himself lifted off the cell floor and spun by the ankles as though he were a leaf in a gale. His deep voice screamed out above the roaring of the cell block outside.
‘Help me!’
Gladstone’s head smashed across the cell wall violently enough to shatter the side of his skull and spill the contents of his head in a fine spray of blood, bone and tissue that splattered the two cowering inmates nearby. His immense body whipped around, his ruined head clanging against the bars as thick splatters of blood splashed across the hanging sheets.
The raucous cheers in the cell block fell abruptly silent as the light from within the cell was masked by the gruesome splashes of fluid now staining the sheets and the walls of the cell with pink and red blotches. For the first time in living memory, there was no sound in the entire block as several hundred men stared in shock at the terrible orgy of gore spilling from the upper-tier cell.
An immense crash broke the silence as what was left of Gladstone’s huge body slammed into the cell doors, his limbs flailing like torn sails, his head entirely missing and one of his thick legs severed above the knee.
A chorus of ‘Jesus’ and other whispered profanities drifted up through the tiers as Gladstone’s corpse slumped onto the cell floor. As the inmates watched, the sheets hanging from the bars of the cell suddenly billowed as though something had passed through like a scythe through wheat. A shape like a giant, demonic hawk imprinted on the fabric until it fell back down.
The sounds of violence and shouting had not alerted the prison staff to anything untoward.
The deep silence brought them running.
37
‘We’re here to see Earl Thomas and James Gladstone.’
Lopez spoke through the electronic voice system to the desk sergeant behind a Plexiglas-and-wire-mesh screen, as Ethan looked up at a bank of six television monitors wired to cameras in each of the nearby cell blocks.
It only took him a moment to see the medical teams dashing down one of the upper tiers, guards in uniforms standing back from an open cell as the medics dashed inside.