The urge to talk to anyone, even Stimson, the need to unburden herself of her troubles, was compelling, even maddening. And yet she’d blown that chance, too, hadn’t she? Because she could never reach out to another human being without screwing it up somehow. Stimson had offered her kindness, and companionship, even friendship of a warped kind. And she’d pushed it away.
Caxton climbed up on her bunk and lay back. She closed her eyes and tried not to sob. It took some work.
Dinner came and went. She ate, but without paying much attention to what was going in her mouth. When she was done she got back up on the bunk and stared at the light fixture again. Just as she had the day before. Just as she would, she imagined, for the nearly eighteen hundred days yet to come.
When she heard the screaming start it barely registered.
In the dorms used by the general population of the prison you heard screams at night, sometimes, and you quickly learned to block them out. Women in prison had nightmares. A lot of them were mentally ill, but not in dangerous ways, so they were just crammed in with the rest of the inmates and convicts. The screams didn’t mean anything, and there was nothing you could do about them, anyway.
The SHU was much quieter at night, because the COs responded quickly to any excessive noise by forcibly extracting the offenders from their cells and dragging them away to cool-down rooms—what the prison called its padded cells. Still, even after the third or fourth scream, Caxton didn’t move, didn’t even roll over to wonder what was going on.
Stimson responded much more quickly She climbed out of her bunk and went to the small window in the cell door. She shielded her eyes with her hands as if she were studying what was going on out there.
A scream came next that sounded much closer. It was different from the screams Caxton expected, as well. It was longer, more drawn-out. It was a scream of real pain, of someone being violently hurt. Of someone being killed.
“Stimson,” Caxton whispered. “What’s going on?”
Caxton’s celly didn’t reply.
“Stimson!” Caxton hissed. “Come on. Tell me.” She sighed. “Gert,” she tried.
The other woman turned and glanced up at her with hard eyes. “What, are we friends now?”
Caxton tried to think of how to reply but she was forestalled by yet another scream. This one was cut off quickly. Abruptly. Caxton knew all too well what that meant. Someone had just been killed.
The speaker in the ceiling crackled to life. “Get back from your doors, right now!” it commanded. “There’s nothing to see.”
That was enough to make Caxton want to look out the window, too. She jumped down from the bunk and shoved her way in next to Stimson, their bodies touching as she tried to get a look.
There wasn’t much to see, after all. The SHU looked as it always had, blinding white paint, central guard post, single reinforced door at the far end. One thing was missing, though. Normally, even in the middle of the night, one guard sat inside the glass-walled guard post, while two COs walked circuits around the unit, keeping their eyes open, listening for trouble. Now the patrollers were gone and only one CO was visible inside the post.
“Where’d the others go?” Caxton asked.
“They hightailed it a couple of minutes ago,” Stimson told her. “Grabbed up their shotguns and booked out the door. That’s all I saw.”
Caxton looked at the CO in the guard post, and recognized her at once. It was Harelip, the female CO who had performed her body cavity search. The one who had knocked her down to the floor when she tried to read the warden’s BlackBerry.
“Alright, bitches, wall up for me now or there’s going to be some ass-whooping,” Harelip said over the intercom. Her voice echoed off the walls of Caxton’s cell.
Stimson ran back to the wall, but Caxton stayed where she was.
The screaming was far away again, when it came next. But there was a lot more of it.