The inside man, p.7
The Inside Man, page 7
Behind the brick wall were eight separate cubicles. Immediately Jax heard the muffled screams. Then he saw the blood: a red stream snaking its away across the tiles from the base of the first cubicle to the drain at the centre of the room, where it disappeared into darkness.
‘Fucking stay still, ya cunt!’
Jax froze, as if the order had been issued to him.
Crack! Knuckle hitting jaw.
‘I told ya.’ The voice continued, and so did the hits, all bone on bone. ‘Don’t make this any worse.’
Rooted to the cold tiles, wearing only a towel, Jax was just six steps away from the man making the noise, and the source of the blood. As there were no doors on the cubicles, he’d have to walk straight past the commotion to get to a free faucet. He was about to turn and walk out when he remembered the man at the entrance. A lookout.
At best, Jax knew he would look weak if he walked out without taking a shower. At worst, the lookout might think he was going to get help, and stop him. The best option was to proceed, act like he hadn’t heard – or seen – a thing. He’d stride through, head down, making sure he didn’t slip on the wet and bloodied tiles. He didn’t want to know what was happening. It wasn’t his problem. He wouldn’t look.
But he did look.
‘Help,’ came the plea, just as Jax had nearly cleared them.
Instinctively, he turned. He saw the face first: eyes desperate and full of pain. The man was bent over and being held in a headlock. His shoulder-length hair hung lank, damp. The blood was flowing from his nose and from a gash under his eye. It was 59999, the inmate with the black eye and broken nose he’d noticed at roll call that morning. Jax could hardly believe that not even twenty-four hours had passed since that first muster. It felt more like weeks.
‘Fucking shut up,’ said the man holding him in the headlock, a skinny thirty-something with spiderweb tattoos on his elbows and forearms. As Jax froze on the spot, the man released 59999 for a second, jerked his head up and delivered a hard jab to his face, making a sickening noise as the fist hit the already split eye. Blood sprayed onto the white tiles.
‘Fuckin dog,’ the skinny assailant said, inspecting his knuckles for damage.
Behind them was another man. He said nothing, only grunted and groaned as he thrust. He stood with his hands on his victim’s hips, and his pelvis was a piston, moving steadily back and forth, groin clapping against buttocks. His eyes were closed. It was Marsh.
JAX moved swiftly to the last cubicle. He reckoned neither Marsh – eyes closed as he pounded – nor the man doing the holding and hitting, had seen him, so he thought he might be able to wait them out. He moved into the corner of the shower and left the taps untouched; he didn’t want to turn on the water in case they came to investigate. The mate might go looking for something fresh.
Jax was terrified, but also ashamed. He had always been taught to lend a hand, to look after the weak.
Stand up to the bullies. That’s what his dad had told him before he died.
Never leave anyone behind. That was the motto in the army, and the army had taught him to be brave.
Yet here he was, cowering in the corner of a cubicle as a young man was being raped. And he hated himself for it.
HE waited until he was sure they had gone before making his move. Prisoner 59999 was huddled in the cubicle, cowering, his wet hair plastered to his skull.
‘Here,’ Jax said, holding out an arm. ‘Get up, mate. Don’t let anyone else see you like this.’
‘Fuck off,’ came the reply. ‘Just leave me alone.’
A short, lightly built guy, not much older than Jax. His face was a bloody mess. A sizeable clump of his long shaggy hair had been ripped out, revealing a chunk of reddened skull. Jax winced as he noticed blood trickling down the man’s back leg.
‘Nah, come on,’ Jax said, still holding out his arm. ‘Get up, get dry, and go to your cell.’
‘I said fuck off!’ And he lashed out at Jax from the ground.
Without his army medical kit, there wasn’t much Jax could do anyway. All he had was his towel, his shame and his fear.
He walked out wondering when they would come for him.
CHAPTER 7
Supermax, Goulburn Correctional Centre, Goulburn, NSW, Australia
THE SERPENT, that sinister shade who shared his cell and controlled his mind, had left a puzzle for Scott Wensley, or the Professor, as the other inmates called him: a carving on the cell wall.
Wensley was rarely allowed to emerge these days. Once, maybe twice a month? He was no longer sure. In any case, he lived mainly inside his own head, which had been entirely black until the Serpent had allowed him into the light. All he knew about his body was that it, too, now belonged to the Serpent – and the thirty-three people he had devoured.
There was always some new riddle for Wensley to solve, and the Serpent knew he liked riddles. This one was strange. Arabic. But it meant nothing to Wensley. Or maybe it did. Either way he did not have time for games. He had real work to do: the P versus NP problem. He had already solved the Hodge Conjecture, one of the five greatest unanswered questions in mathematics, scrawling the solution in chalk on the prison wall during his brief time in the light.
One down. Four to go.
Wensley hoped the Serpent would give him more time now he’d proved himself. Surely he would see his genius, see how important he was. Fair enough, the Hodge Conjecture had proved elementary, but the P versus NP problem would be more challenging. The Serpent could not ignore him if he cracked that nut.
So, best press on. He never knew how much time he had. How much time the Serpent would allow him.
He shook his head when he couldn’t find his chalk. ‘Not again,’ he yelled as he rummaged through his one and only drawer. He ignored the dead cockroaches, all in various stages of dissection – one of the Serpent’s projects, and brushed past the miniature mobile phone, which he hadn’t known he had but knew he couldn’t use.
He remembered back to when they didn’t even have chalk. After being told that pens, pencils, textas, crayons and even chalk were dangerous, he’d been forced to use his food to write with. He had experimented with soup, bananas, and mashed potato with gravy. Tomato sauce had been the best option, but he’d found that even thickly pasted ketchup would eventually dry, flake and peel. It was the Serpent who had suggested using faeces, and that, in fact, had improved his life – after the prison officers complained about the smell, the warden decided chalk wasn’t so dangerous after all. A box of coloured Crayolas was then dropped through the meal slot.
‘Yuck,’ the Professor fumed as he pulled a maggot-infested piece of meat from his drawer and threw it on the floor. He would have put it in the bin, but he knew what the Serpent did in the bin.
‘Urggghh,’ he grunted, resigned to carving instead of writing with chalk. He would have to go through all the Serpent’s rubbish to find the knife, but at least then he wouldn’t have to worry about the chalk being rubbed out. He considered hitting the knock-up to tell the guards it was safe to clean his cell, but he decided he didn’t have time to be interrupted. And he didn’t want to anger the Serpent.
A sudden chill stopped him in his tracks. He realised he was naked. He looked down at his body to check for fresh self-mutilation. No bleeding. Good. He wouldn’t have to go to the hospital. He checked for new scars. Had he just come back from the hospital? He couldn’t tell, there were so many scars, but he couldn’t see any fresh stitches or bandages. He was sure there would be some damage somewhere – the Serpent needed pain for his ritual – but he was confident it was nothing drastic. Not this time.
He didn’t bother looking for new ink, but he did notice that his first tattoo was starting to fade. The Serpent had been little more than a voice in his head when Wensley had walked into the tattoo shop and paid $150 to have the chaos theory equation inked on his forearm in twenty-point Helvetica: xt+1 = kxt (1 – xt). The tattooist didn’t even blink: Robert May’s equation wasn’t even in contention when it came to the weirdest tatts requested by walk-ins.
‘Damn you,’ Wensley said when he realised the pants he had just retrieved from a pile of clothes in a corner of the cell were wet. ‘I have had enough of your games.’ He took them off and went back to the pile. A stub of white rolled out from under from a sodden shirt. ‘Yes. Yes, yes, yes,’ he muttered as he chased it across the cell.
He didn’t care that he was cold, now he had his chalk. Naked, he moved to the wall, relieved to find his equation was still there. For a moment, he’d feared the missing chalk and the Serpent’s new carving meant that the ceasefire was over. A while back, he’d made the mistake of wiping off some of the Serpent’s nonsense, and the Serpent had retaliated by rubbing out all of his work. The Professor had then hidden the chalk, but the Serpent started writing in excrement. Finally, the Professor had placed the chalk in the middle of the cell, as an offering. But the Serpent hadn’t wanted a gift. He’d been in a fury. Instead of using the chalk, he’d eaten it, leaving Wensley with nothing.
Thankfully, they’d agreed to a détente before the next box of Crayolas had arrived. And so far so good, although the latest carving and the hidden chalk were a concern. He was also worried what would happen if a guard found the phone.
The Serpent was up to something. The ritual was evolving.
CHAPTER 8
Long Bay Correctional Complex, Sydney, NSW, Australia
A CLICK, followed by a buzz. Instinctively, Jax pulled his hands in front of his face.
False alarm. It wasn’t the door. Of course not: the door was only locked at lights-out, which was hours away; no one had to unlock the door to get to him here in the afternoon, they could just walk straight in. No, it was just the cell light going on. Jax shook his head. No wonder they kept it in a cage.
A week had passed since his admission and he still hadn’t been bashed, fucked or murdered. He hadn’t even been threatened. Even Robbo, the drug addict who’d harassed him, had barely said a word since the wing had been flooded with ‘H’ three days earlier. The unusually strong heroin had so zombified him and his addict mates that they spoke only nonsense if they spoke at all.
One had already overdosed. Jax had seen the guards wheel him out on a gurney before muster. His death was not treated as murder, even though everyone knew it had been a hot-shot. Inmate 59035 had run up a debt he couldn’t pay, so they’d laced his gear with rat-kill. No one cared: his own fault, should have paid. And no one talked about how they’d got in his cell: wasn’t unusual, happened all the time.
Jax had managed to stay anonymous for the best part of a week. So by now he should have felt better, safer. But calm always precedes a storm. Thunder and lightning were still coming. He could feel it in his bones.
He’d thought that nothing could scare him after Afghanistan. Just four days after arriving at Camp Hadrian, he’d been sent on a clearance patrol. Walking in front of the convoy, all he’d had to protect himself against the armour-piercing bombs that were buried all over the desert was a metal detector, no better than the kind used by a Sunday treasure hunter at Bondi Beach. From right to left and left to right he and the others swept. Painting the road, they called it.
Dicko found the first one. A bucket full of nails and ballbearings, buried two metres off the road. Not the first place you’d look.
‘Stop!’ he’d yelled. ‘Nobody move.’
Jax froze mid-step. Almost shat himself.
‘Not another fuckin’ inch,’ Dicko ordered as he began pulling up a wire running out from the bomb.
Jax held his front foot off the ground and watched the dirt spurt into the air as Dicko chased the wire towards him. It ripped through the road surface, leaving a wake like a lightning bolt. Jax suspected the thunder was underneath his raised foot.
It was. He was just a step away from the trigger. A pressure plate. Made of plastic. Which, of course, his metal detector couldn’t detect. The Taliban learned fast.
Thank God Dicko’s shout had scared him stiff. One more step would have killed him outright. Killed them all.
‘Got it,’ Jax then said, before Dicko even had to ask. ‘Everyone step back. Take cover.’
Now he was on his own. He had to find the trigger and disarm it. He got down on his stomach and began to clear the hard, compacted sand by prodding the ground with his knife. Then he dropped the knife and used his fingers to clear the last of the dirt and probe the plastic. He winced as he gently pulled the casing apart. Once he could see inside, he took out his wire cutters and got ready to play roulette with his life. Red or black? Click or boom?
Black . . . Click.
It got a little easier then. Each bomb a little less terrifying. At least until Dicko stepped on a trigger before the connected bomb had been found. Though that just left Jax feeling numb, not scared.
He didn’t feel fear after that. Didn’t feel anything. Not until he walked into Long Bay . . .
Now it was like he was on his first patrol again: hidden bombs everywhere, expecting to step on one at any moment. And this time he didn’t have Dicko to save him.
WHEN it was time for dinner, he reluctantly left his cell. At the mess hall, chops, mash and vegies were plonked onto his plastic plate. All the men at his former table looked down as he walked past. The man who had attacked him stared at Jax but didn’t say a word. The silence was deafening. Jax found a half-empty table at the back of the room. He nodded at the elderly man he sat across from but didn’t say a word. From the corner of his eye he saw another inmate lean over and whisper into the old man’s ear. He only picked up one word, and that was Marsh.
He tucked in, even though his anxiety had killed his hunger. The rest of the inmates were like vultures on carrion and he didn’t want to look out of place, so he forced himself to eat, shoving roughly cut chunks of meat into his mouth, chomping and swallowing – just another animal.
The mess was awash with chatter, a low and constant hum like summer rain. But then there was a thundercrack, one voice louder than the rest. The start of the storm.
Marsh.
It was his first appearance in the mess in the week since Jax had been admitted. Jax hadn’t seen him in the yard, or even coming and going in the wing – just that one time in the shower block. Jax studied him through squinted eyes, searching for some kind of hint that would explain his absence.
He was so intent on finding out what he needed to know that he let his guard down for a second. Their eyes met. It felt as though all of oxygen had suddenly been sucked from the room. Jax could hear his own pulse beating loudly in his ears.
Marsh gave him a sly smile. Jax snatched his eyes away, his vision blurring. A sour taste filled his mouth. He felt disorientated, a sudden rush of crippling heat. His vision narrowed.
He hated himself for not having the guts to look up again. He told himself he was just being smart, attempting to avoid a confrontation. But he knew he was staring at his half-eaten dinner because this place had turned him into a pussy.
When he felt the hand on his shoulder, he jumped from his seat and swung round.
‘Relax, big guy.’
Not Marsh, thank fuck. But it was the co-rapist. Jax didn’t need to see the spider-web tattoos on the backs of his elbows to be sure. He never forgot a face, no matter how hard he tried.
‘Just letting you know I’ll be paying you a visit tonight. Marshy wants me to come and talk shop. No need to go making a fuss, but, if you insist, I take me tea with plenty of sugar.’
Jax didn’t react, even though he knew ‘sugar’ was code for sex in prison. The skinny little scumbag laughed at what he thought was a private joke as backed away.
Ignoring the filth that covered the sink, Jax filled his one and only plastic mug with water. The caged fluorescent light on his ceiling was the only source of light now that the sun had well and truly gone down. No visitors. Not yet.
Before he could even take a sip, he had to put his mug down and rush to the toilet. He wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t just a couple of steps away. Everything in his cell was just a couple of steps away.
He brought up his dinner. Again. Spending every moment of the day waiting to be attacked had been making him physically ill. Last night’s pea and ham soup had come up and now it was tonight’s chops. The evenings were worse than the days. His cell was a death trap. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Lockdown couldn’t come quickly enough. Only then would he be safe.
Fear had spread through him like a virus, first affecting his skin with a pins-and-needles-like tingle, then working its way down his throat and into his gut. Finally it seemed to enter his bones, so that he felt heavy with it. Now it was like he was being consumed from the inside out.
He wiped his mouth, flushed the toilet and gargled with the water before spitting it back into the sink. He retreated to his bed and, eyes closed, looked deep into himself for something that would help him conquer his fear. He had to; he couldn’t live like this.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a click followed by a buzz. A different combination. Not the light this time. He jumped to his feet.
False alarm. His door had been locked, not opened. Lockdown at last. An hour until lights-out.
Still Jax did not feel safe. Almost unwillingly, he assessed the risk of the door being breached. It was secured by a state-of-the-art electronic lock, and there was no way the door itself, a chunk of hardwood reinforced by a steel plate, could be kicked down or jemmied open. He doubted even the ‘big red key’ – the battering ram they’d used in the army – could break down this door. Jax reckoned it would have taken a good-sized ball of C4 to blow through it. Yet, despite its apparent strength, he kept on staring, waiting for it to swing open. He’d been thrown into a new world, like none he’d ever known, where the natural laws of the universe no longer applied. And as if he had been given the power of premonition, he was still certain that someone was about to come barging in.
