The Eternity Project

36

RIKERS ISLAND, NEW YORK CITY



‘Ain’t no talkin’ me down!’

The bars of the cell were too solid to rattle as James Gladstone tried to shake them in fury, the guards nearby taking no notice as they patrolled the block.

‘You’re wastin’ your time, man,’ said Earl Thomas from behind him. ‘We’ll be walkin’ from here soon enough, but those dudes –’ he pointed to the guards with a cynical smile – ‘they’re the ones doin’ life.’

Gladstone turned away from the bars to face back into their eight-by-twelve-foot cell. White-washed cinderblock walls, two bunk beds with reed-thin mattresses, a shared sink and latrine stared back at him.

‘Man, I hate this shit.’

They had been incarcerated in the federal jail for little more than twenty-four hours, but Gladstone was already pacing up and down like an enraged, cornered bull. Six foot three and two-hundred forty pounds, he wasn’t good with confined spaces. His glossy black face was bunched up like a prune, predatory eyes searching for someone, or something, to take out his frustrations upon. Earl, on the other hand, was half Gladstone’s weight and barely five-nine. He rested back on his bunk and shrugged.

‘Just gotta bide our time,’ he insisted. ‘Ain’t nothing to worry about, long as the suit does his work right.’

Gladstone sneered at him. ‘Mighty big gamble when we’re looking at twenty-five to life.’

On the other bunk lay two scrawny prisoners, both wearing the same baggy orange correctional facility jumpsuits as Gladstone and Earl, both wearing the same anxious expressions. Their eyes were fixed fearfully upon Gladstone as he prowled up and down the cell.

‘Man,’ Earl said, ‘just cool it, okay? You’re doin’ nothing but causing yourself more grief, gettin’ all worked up.’

Gladstone’s glare fell upon their two cellmates, who both looked away from him as though they’d caught the attention of a wounded tiger.

‘Whatchoo lookin’ at?’ Gladstone boomed, pointing one heavily muscled arm at them like a shotgun. ‘You want some?’

Gladstone reached the bunks in a single pace. His height meant that he was looking down at the man lying in the top bunk.

‘I weren’t lookin’ at you man, ’kay?’

‘You callin’ me a liar?’ Gladstone growled, one fist bunching into the size of a football.

Wearily, Earl dragged himself up into a sitting position on his bunk.

‘Dude, seriously, let the kid go. You smash him to pieces, we’ll never get out of here.’ Gladstone’s huge frame trembled with frustration as he realized that there was little he could do to vent his anger. ‘James, stand down, dude.’

Gladstone backed off, lowering his fist, his jaundiced eyes fixed upon the two cowering inmates. The one on the lower bunk smirked at Gladstone.

‘That’s it, do as he says.’

The huge convict’s eyes flicked down to the inmate as he sat on the bunk. Rage swelled inside Gladstone’s immense frame as he struggled to comprehend what was happening.

‘You talkin’ down to me, boy?’

The inmate’s smirk didn’t slip. ‘Sure I am. You got beef with that, James?’

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, a*shole.’

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 a*sholes 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 f*ck 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.