Slow Burn: Zero Day, Book 1 Read online

  “When did you smoke the weed?”

  “It was just weed!”

  “When did you smoke it?”

  “The night before, like I said.”

  “When the night before? Zed, it may have been laced with PCP, or something worse. Surely you’ve heard of that before. PCP makes some people lose their shit, Zed. That may have happened to you.”

  I shook my head again and weakly said, “No.”

  “Where did you get the weed, Zed?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t even my weed.”

  “Who did you smoke it with, Zed? They may be having problems too. They might be in worse shape, Zed. They could be dead for all you know.”

  I gave him the names of my buddies.

  Chapter 5

  The jail was old, like a hundred years old. The section I was in had been built in the late eighteen hundreds. It was dirty. It was smelly. Every surface was sticky beneath aged layers of oral ejecta and other human secretions.

  I was in a holding cell about seven feet deep and thirty feet long. One long wall was brick. The other three were comprised of iron bars with layer upon layer of flakes, painted over by more layers of flakes. Two rows of bunks, one on the top and one on the bottom, hung from the wall for a total of eight. A single commode stood at one end, covered in stains and lumpy smears.

  With my photograph taken and black ink on my fingers, I was shoved into the cell that already held twenty-five other guys, laying and sitting in the bunks and on the floor. At least a few of my fellow inmates were mentally unplugged. They stared blankly at the wall. Some paced across the spots of floor where a foot would fit. One very animated guy bounced around the cell like a chimp, screaming Tourette’s-like profanities and gibberish. Most looked drunk, hung-over, beaten up, or some combination thereof.

  “I need to see a doctor,” I told the jailer, as he slammed the door shut.

  He headed back to the end of the hall as though I’d said nothing at all.

  “Hey, I need to see a doctor!”

  Nothing.

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  The jailer stopped and glared at me. “Look, bud, you can see we’re having a busy day. So lighten up, would you?”

  “But I need medical attention for my arm.”

  “After you get assigned to a cell, you can ask your guard for permission to go to the infirmary.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” The guard turned and ignored further protests.

  The Tourette’s guy shrieked at the ceiling from his perch on a top bunk. Nobody paid him any mind.

  I looked around…there was no bunk space available. There was barely any floor space either, the only exception being a few feet next to a comatose giant of a black man leaning on the bars near the commode.

  I stood, holding the bars of the door and looking up and down the short hall. Two long halls branched off at either end and led to rows of cells in the new section of the jail. I heard the rowdy noise of hundreds of other prisoners coming from down those halls.

  Tourette’s guy shrieked again. “I’m hungry!”

  I leaned my face against the sticky, flaky iron bars and closed my eyes. The bite on my arm throbbed noticeably but didn’t hurt. Infection was sure to set in. I worried about that, and about what Wolsely had said about drugs in the weed my buddies and I had smoked on Saturday night.

  I wanted to feel angry about the lazy incompetence of the police who’d locked me up, but all I felt was drained and frustrated.

  I wondered how long I’d have to wait for my inevitable release. I flexed the fingers of my left hand again, checking for loss of movement.

  The lighting in the jail was too stark, unnaturally bright. It bothered my eyes. I longed for a pair of sunglasses.

  I was mere minutes into my incarceration and I was already bored.

  An old tube television hung from the ceiling across the hall from the cell. There was something on about riots again, something about the new flu virus. Having grown up with Mom and Dan’s addiction to the repetitive ravings of the non-stop cable news faces, I possessed a high tolerance for hysterical speculation. Football, baseball, even bowling would have been a better choice for than news on the TV.

  I looked down at my feet. “This place sucks.”

  Off to my right, I heard Tourette’s boy start bouncing on his bunk.

  “Man, shut up,” somebody over there said.

  A few more voiced agreement.

  I looked over. Tourette’s boy was getting more aggressive.

  Then, he surprised everyone by bounding off of the top bunk and onto one of the sitting prisoners.

  A frenzy of fighting exploded from the far end of the cell. There was screaming, yelling, kicking, punching, and biting, lots of biting. The wave of pandemonium pushed toward me, and I decided the safest place in the cell was in the stinky muck in the corner behind the commode. I stepped quickly over the big black guy who was just starting to get up and wormed my way into the corner.

  Yelling from outside the cell told me that the guards already knew what was happening in the cell.

  There were arms and legs and fists. There were guys on the ground and guys clambering into the bunks. The big black guy had his back to me and pretty much blocked all access to my end of the cell. I’m sure that defending me wasn’t what he intended. He just didn’t see me as a threat.

  Suddenly, Tourette’s boy came flying out of the melee and landed in some sort of monkey grasp around the big guy’s head and shoulders. As the big guy grasped at him to pull him off, Tourette’s boy caught me with the craziest eyes I’d ever seen, opened his mouth wide, and chomped down on the big guy’s neck.

  A canister clinked in through the bars. Smoke exploded into cell, burning my eyes.

  The heavy metal door swung open and the guards, dressed in riot gear, bulled their way in.

  Chapter 6

  Thirty minutes later I was sitting on one of the lower bunks with my hands cuffed behind me, shoulder to shoulder in a long row of cuffed, bloodied, coughing prisoners.

  Tourette’s boy was gagged. His hands were cuffed and attached to the bars of the cell behind him. His feet were bound. He slumped forward, motionless. He had an enormous gash across his scalp. A couple of the guards had beaten him mercilessly after he’d bitten them during the fight. And just because they were covered in riot gear and pissed off, they beat several more of us into unconsciousness. Three of those were cuffed alongside Tourette’s boy, slumped forward and dripping blood into small pools on the crusty floor. Two of my former cellmates were bleeding so severely that they were dragged out of the cell –— to the hospital, I presumed.

  Of the rest of us, I was in the best shape, at least in terms of fresh wounds. I still had a scabby bandage on my arm that oozed red.

  Again, I flexed my left hand to make sure it still worked. The next link in my chain of new habits was to worry about my need to get some medical attention.

  From around the corner, I heard noises of another cell erupting in violence. Not long after, a half-dozen guards in their gear clomped past us up the hallway.

  The jail was exploding in craziness.

  As luck would have it, the big black guy who’d been my shield during the scuffle was sitting right next to me on the bunk. Apparently more bored than me, he looked my bloodstained clothing up and down and asked, “So, what’d you do?”

  “How am I supposed to answer that?” I asked.

  “Most guys like you make something up to seem all badass, you know, so they won’t get no shit while they’re in here.”

  I laughed, and so did the black guy on the other side of me.

  “What do you mean, guys like me?” I asked. “Is this a white thing?”

  “No. You just don’t look like a thug. You look like a suburbanite or a cube farmer.”

  “A cube farmer?”

  “Somebody who sits in a cube all day,” the big guy explained.

  The guy on the other side laughed and
added, “Like a nerd.”

  “A nerd?” I asked.

  The big guy looked me over and nodded.

  After their laughing subsided, I asked, “So do you want the truth, or a lie?”

  “Man, you pick. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just tired of staring at that damned yellow wall. I can barely see the TV from here, and besides, all they want to talk about anyway is that flu, like they know what’s going on. They don’t know anything.”

  I shrugged, “I killed my stepdad.”

  The big guy looked down at me again. “With all that blood all over you, I guess I’d buy that.”

  The guy on the other side said, “He probably got arrested while trying to steal some cherry syrup from a jellybean factory.”

  That got some laughs from the guys nearby.

  “I wish.”

  “What’d you do him with?” the big guy asked.

  “A knife,” I answered.

  “I guess that explains the mess on your clothes.”

  “That’s not actually his blood…I don’t think,” I said.

  The guy on my left said, “I suppose you killed somebody else, too.”

  “It’s a long story,” I told them.

  The big guy asked, “How many times did you stab him?”

  I looked down, ashamed for a moment though I didn’t know why. “The cops said thirty-seven times.”

  The guy to my left said, “Man, that’s bullshit.”

  “You must have been pissed. What’d he do?” asked the big guy.

  “You wouldn’t believe me,” I said. “What’d you do?”

  “Just fighting.”

  “Fighting? Like a bar fight?” I asked.

  “Exactly like a bar fight,” he answered.

  I nodded. “By the way, my name’s Zed Zane.”

  “Murphy Smalls,” the big guy answered.

  “Murphy Smalls? That’s not a very appropriate name for big guy like you.”

  “Well, at least you didn’t make a stupid joke about it,” Murphy said.

  The guy to my left said, “That’s why we’re in here, one too many small jokes. I’m Earl Walker.”

  “Good to meet you, Earl. Good to meet you Murphy.”

  Earl asked, “So, did you really stab your stepdad?”

  I nodded.

  Earl said, “He must have done some crazy shit for you to go stabbing him thirty-seven times.”

  I nodded. “Some pretty crazy shit.”

  “Looks like you and me might as well become good friends, because we’re both going to be here a while,” said Earl.

  “For fighting?” I asked.

  Murphy said, “He’s on probation. They’ll probably violate him and send him back.”

  “That sucks,” I said.

  “You got that right,” Earl agreed. “All because Mr. Smalls is sensitive about his name.”

  “Man, you know it’s not like that,” Murphy said. “Don’t you be starting any shit.”

  Earl said no more on the topic.

  After a few minutes of listening to the inmates around the corner go nuts, Murphy asked, “So what’d he do? I’m curious now.”

  “My stepdad?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  I thought about those gruesome Sunday morning images stuck in my mind. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure he killed my mother.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was going over to their house for lunch for Spam pie on Sunday.”

  “On Sunday?” Murphy asked.

  “Yeah, on Sunday.”

  “Spam pie?” Murphy asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s gross.” Murphy replied.

  Earl said, “Man, that was three days ago. Why are you still covered in blood? Dumbass white people don’t know shit about getting away with doing criminal stuff. No wonder you’re in here.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “What?” Earl asked.

  “He attacked me and bit my arm.” I tried to pull my left arm around front to show the guys.

  Earl said, “Man, that’s nasty.”

  “Anyway, I think I was bleeding so bad that I passed out.”

  “No shit?”

  I nodded.

  “And the cops found you like that?” Earl asked.

  “When I woke up, I called them.”

  “And they arrested you?” Murphy asked.

  “They must have thought you were black under all that blood,” Earl added.

  The sound of three quick gunshots blasted through the corridors, opened every eye wide, and snapped every head toward the intersecting hallway. Tourette’s boy was no exception. He immediately started to squirm and grunt.

  “Shit,” Earl muttered.

  The echo of running footsteps came up the hall to our left.

  Seconds later, two officers hurried past, followed by four crazed inmates in torn, bloodied clothes.

  The sound of another scuffle erupted, followed by more gunshots.

  “This is not good,” Murphy told anybody who was listening.

  I looked from left to right.

  I heard the sound of…well, it sounded like wild animals.

  More gunfire.

  An inmate rounded the corner and ran at full speed in front of us across the length of our cell.

  Another inmate rounded the corner, shoeless, shirtless, and screaming like an enraged baboon. He leapt up on the bars of our cell as if he were the one in the cage. He reached through the bars, seemingly focused on Earl. We all pressed our backs to the wall.

  He screamed again as more crazed prisoners, spattered in blood, rounded the corner and flowed freely through the hall.

  Several tried to reach in and grab at us before moving past the wall behind us.

  Gunfire rang with alarming frequency.

  More prisoners spilled from the hall at our right. They looked relatively normal, but understandably terrified.

  What followed close behind them was another bunch of the wild-eyed, screaming men.

  “This is gonna get ugly,” Earl said.

  “I think you’re a little late on that newsflash, Earl,” I said.

  Smoke billowed out of the halls from behind us. My eyes started to burn. We all started coughing again.

  “I guess this is a prison riot,” Murphy coughed out.

  “In the county jail?” Earl asked, shaking his head.

  Tourette’s boy ripped out an earsplitting wail of victory as he freed one bloody hand from the cuffs that secured him to the bars. He spun and tore mercilessly at the hand that was cuffed to another bar.

  Guys in the cell got up off of the bunks and moved away. Nobody wanted to be near the crazy guy. Only the unconscious guys, cuffed to the bars, didn’t move.

  Another scream of triumph ripped through the violence as Tourette’s boy tore his other hand free, slinging blood across the ceiling, walls, and us.

  Several of the inmates cursed.

  Tourette’s boy yanked the gag out of his mouth and with teeth gnashing pounced on an inmate not smart enough to have moved out of the way. His teeth found flesh before the inmate could squirm away. Blood erupted from the wound.

  In a flash, Murphy was on the move and ran a dozen steps to the far end of the cell, leaned his shoulder forward and slammed Tourette’s boy in the side. All three hundred pounds of Murphy smashed his body into the bars.

  When Murphy pulled away, Tourette’s boy lay on the floor, twitching and stunned.

  Everyone in the cell was staring at Murphy and the downed psycho when the door buzzer sounded in three long, loud blasts, shifting everyone’s attention to the cell door as it sprang open.

  We were all frozen in disbelief and indecision. Run out of the cell and into the riot, make a break for freedom, or stay put?

  With mayhem raging through the jailhouse, safety was my first thought.

  Pounding feet and animal sounds rang up and down the halls, mixing with jubilant cries and fearful screams. Tourette’s boy s
quirmed and pushed himself up from the floor. He shook his head and made a loud, angry noise.

  Earl yelled, “Let’s go, Murphy!”

  Everyone piled through the door, out of the cell, and into the melee.

  “I’m with you guys,” I declared, and followed Earl.

  Murphy fell in behind us.

  We made the left turn down the smoke-filled hall we’d all come in through.

  Bodies lay everywhere, both sheriff’s deputies and prisoners alike. Men ran both in front and behind us. The crazy-eyed screamers were among us, attacking anybody, tearing at flesh with their hands and teeth.

  “Move!” Murphy yelled from behind.

  Earl picked up the pace and ran blindly into the thickening teargas.

  We coughed, struggled, and fought our way toward where we remembered the exit to be. Each barred door we encountered was unlocked and swung open. The rioting prisoners had seen to that.

  We stepped on and over men until we burst into the entrance lobby, where we saw daylight through the glass door and three windows of equal size, all shattered.

  Gunfire popped in the street outside and in the halls and cells behind us. To run into the street was to risk being gunned down. To go back seemed like certain death by fire, or mauling in the teeth and tearing hands of the screamers.

  Earl hesitated and glanced back at Murphy for a decision. I looked back as well. It was so far beyond any situation I’d ever imagined. I was decidedly in follow mode no matter what course Murphy chose.

  Whatever Earl saw in Murphy’s silence was enough for him. He spun and bolted through the door. Murphy and I hurried behind.

  We came out near the southwest corner of the detention center into thin clouds of teargas drifting in the smothering air and blistering sun.

  Across the street, to the south of the detention center, a hilly park filled a city block. To our west lay an old neighborhood that had been converted to condos and offices for attorneys and bail bondsmen. Parked cars lined the streets. To the south and east, police cars blocked the roadways. Policemen and sheriff’s deputies were everywhere, but the eight hundred prisoners spilling into the streets dwarfed their numbers.