Noble Warrior (25 page)

They were wrong, and the results were disastrous. With overwhelming evidence condemning the practice as inhumane, the strategy of using solitary confinement was all but abandoned by the U.S.
government for the next one hundred years.

However, in the latter part of the 1900s, solitary confinement made a comeback, but with a new twist. Instead of torturing prisoners by tossing them into dark and dingy holes, inmates were
placed in well-lit, sterile boxes. Cramped, concrete, windowless cells outfitted with a sink, a shower, a toilet, and a slot in the door wide enough for a meal tray to slip through was the new
version of solitary confinement. Prisoners, deprived of phone calls, commissary privileges, and family visitations, would remain in their unit for twenty-three hours a day, their only break being
rec time, which involved being escorted in shackles to another solitary pen, where convicts could pace alone for an hour before being returned to their original cages.

The psychological damage proved to be exactly the same. Correction officials, however, defended the practice as necessary to protect guards as well as other prisoners. A new category of inmate
was born: the V-S-Ps.

Violent Super-Predators.

This became McCutcheon's new classification in Jentles: a V-S-P.

Some V-S-Ps had spent a decade in solitary, their minds slowly rotting away.

Time itself evaporated. And with it, an inmate's sanity.

A loud
SLAM!
locked the box and McCutcheon, free from his restraints but restrained from his freedom, took a seat. Not on the bed, but cross-legged on the floor.

Is there any reason for hope
, he asked himself.
Any reason at all?

No
was the obvious answer. But M.D. knew a strong mind would look for the positive, the hidden unknown. McCutcheon, determined to find a satisfactory answer, repeated the question to
himself.

Is there any reason for hope
, he asked himself again.
Any reason at all?

A small but clear inner voice told him that there was, and although the thought might be far-fetched, the whole idea that hope still existed brought M.D. all the relief he needed at the moment.
Instead of succumbing to panic, M.D. simply reminded himself to breathe in and breathe out and accept his new circumstances one moment at a time.

Fear
, he reminded himself.
Welcome it. Do not push it away. Make the energy of fear a friend instead of a foe.

But where was the hope? What possible reason could M.D. find to still believe in a future beyond blackness?

The answer, McCutcheon realized, stared him directly in the face, and once he realized it, it even caused him to laugh.
In a world so strange as to deliver me to this destination, the world
could still prove strange enough to deliver me out of it, too.

Perhaps it would take a week. Perhaps a month. Perhaps a year. Maybe a decade. But M.D. knew he would not spend the rest of his life locked in this box. Therefore, he told himself, it was not a
matter of
if
he'd ever be released from solitary confinement, it was only a matter of
when
.

His moment came at midnight on his very first evening.

“I thought you'd like some closure,” Mends said opening the cell door. “You know, view the body and say good-bye.”

Mends tossed McCutcheon a set of clothes.

“After a shower, that is.”

M.D. looked down at the bag he'd just been passed. It wasn't a prison uniform; they were the clothes from when he first arrived at Jentles.

He raised his eyes.

“Come on,” Mends said. “We don't have much time.”

McCutcheon blasted on the water, quickly cleaned the blood off of his body, and carefully followed Mends through the winding prison halls down to the room where the penitentiary burned their
trash.

Raging heat from the fire blasted the two men in the face as they stepped inside the incinerator room and closed the door behind them. Next to the furnace door a body lay on a gurney covered by
a white sheet.

“I myself have always felt I'd rather be cremated as opposed to buried anyway. You?” Mends asks.

“Never gave much thought to it.”

“Seems purer in a way,” Mends said. “Like a funeral pyre for a Viking or something.”

McCutcheon shook his head. Leave it to Demon Daniels to exit this life like a gallant Viking.

Mends opened the incinerator's cast-iron door and the two men stared at the fire, its hypnotic flames dancing and flowing and waving as if to supernatural music.

“What about the morgue truck?” M.D. asked.

Mends removed the toe tag off Demon's foot and handed it to McCutcheon.

“They say there's only two ways out of the D.T., parole or the morgue truck. Looks like this guy just found the third.” Mends pulled back the sheet and reached underneath
Demon's arms. “Come on, help me lift the body.”

McCutcheon put two fingers to his lips, kissed them, and then touched his father's chest, right over his dad's heart. Without words or tears or any other sign of emotion, McCutcheon
lifted his father by the feet, and on the count of three he and Mends tossed Demon's corpse into the fire.

Mends closed the furnace door as the flames began to eat Demon's flesh.

“Jump on. I'll cover you up and I'll roll you out to the loading dock.”

M.D. ripped off his shoes, hopped up on the gurney and placed the toe tag
DANIELS
,
DAMIEN PRISONER ID
#475S869LZ
on the big toe of his right foot.

“Here,” Mends said, passing M.D. a final gift. “You might need this.”

McCutcheon reached out and accepted the offering. It was an Al Mar S2KB SERE combat knife, 8.5 inches long butt to blade, designed for the Special Operations Command Units out of Fort Bragg,
North Carolina. The acronym SERE stood for Survival–Evasion–Resistance–Escape. Mends had just passed McCutcheon a blade that could battle a bear.

“I'm transferring out, tomorrow,” Mends confessed. “Thought I could make a difference here. I can't.”

He hung his head, sad, defeated, and shamed. M.D. opened the folding blade, fingered the razor-sharp edge and then reached out and grabbed the major by the arm.

“You can still make a difference,” McCutcheon said. “And you are. Don't surrender your power.”

The two men looked one another in the eye.

“And never give up,” M.D. added. “We all have our destiny.”

A surge of inspiration suddenly began to flow through the major's veins. Maybe he still could make a difference? Maybe he still could reform a system that cried out for healing? Maybe
there were other paths, other roads he could try? Perhaps one closed door would lead to an open window, he thought.

Maybe I shouldn't give up
, he told himself.
I never have before. He's right, why now?

“Thank you,” Mends said. “I don't know what your story is or how you got here, but you're certainly not a middle-aged man named Lester Rawlins, and I definitely owe
you a debt of gratitude.”

M.D. closed the blade of the SERE and hid the knife in the lining of his pants.

“You just paid it,” McCutcheon said. “Now it's time to go make shit right.”

“Who, me?” Mends asked. “Or you?”

“Both of us,” M.D. replied.

M.D. adjusted his toe tag, pressed his shoes tightly to his hip on the left, and laid back on the gurney so that Mends could cover his face with the sheet.

Ten minutes later, he was in the morgue truck.

Twenty minutes after that, he was beyond the prison's gates.

M
cCutcheon lay strapped to a gurney underneath a white sheet, feeling the soft
bump-bump-bump
of the road passing beneath the
vehicle's wheels as it cruised down a lonesome highway in the middle of the night. The morgue truck wasn't so much a truck as it was an oversize wagon with an extended rear cab, and
though the space in the back offered capacity for two lifeless bodies, M.D. lay alone and unaccompanied. In a way, the path he'd discovered out of Jentles felt fitting, because a part of him
was now dead. A young man went into prison; an entirely different young man was coming out.

Using the knife Mends had given him, M.D. sliced through the white sheet, cut the tan restraints that belted his body to a cushionless wooden board, and freed himself using slow, methodical,
quiet movements each step of the way. Having paid close attention to even the smallest of details, M.D. knew he'd been loaded into the vehicle feet-first, which meant that his head pointed
backward toward the rear spilt-panel door of the black car. This, he knew, would be advantageous, because he'd be able to inch the sheet downward below his eyes without the driver up front
detecting anything suspicious.

Then again, the guy behind the wheel most probably felt no obligation to check for anything suspicious. People who transported live prisoners stood at high alert during every inch of the
journey; people who transported dead ones might as well have been delivering bushels of carrots.

It took M.D.'s eyes a moment to adjust to the blackness in the back of the vehicle, but once his vision sharpened into focus, he saw that the coroner's wagon, unlike an ambulance,
was bereft of any supplies. No tools, no cords, no clothing, nothing of any value existed that might help McCutcheon execute the next phase of his plan. Having an array of medical instruments to
build an arsenal of tools and weapons would have been helpful, he thought, but at least there was no divider separating the front seat from the backseat of the car.

Good, M.D. thought, pulling the sheet back up over his head. Patiently, having scouted the terrain, he formulated the next stage of his attack.

Make noise,
he thought.
Noise, for sure.

McCutcheon knew that pouncing into the front seat and putting a blade to the driver's throat would certainly allow him to successfully hijack the vehicle, but he also knew that a dead body
springing to life from the back of the wagon might spook the driver so much that he'd run right off the road and possibly flip the car.

Yet a
bang
. A
clank
. A noise that would cause the driver to scratch his head and wonder if maybe the rear door had not been properly locked, or a restraining belt had possibly
unbuckled, all would ease the man's attention into the back of the vehicle.

M.D. knew a small noise that grew more audible was exactly what he needed to create in order to
not
scare the living daylights out of the driver. Taking control of the vehicle
didn't pose a problem; doing so without giving the man behind the wheel a heart attack did.

McCutcheon used the heel of the knife to make a soft tap against the side of the metal gurney's silver bar. A few seconds later he made another. Then after that, two more, each a bit
louder than the previous. After the fourth noise the driver turned down the volume of the car's radio and listened more closely.

Maybe he had something in his tire? Maybe a gurney's wheel wobbled loose? Was that noise he'd just heard inside of the car or out?
He listened closely.

Slowly, patiently, M.D. waited without making any more noise in order to allow the silence to seep in. After a few seconds of stillness passed, the driver reached for the radio's knob,
turned up the volume, and an easy-on-the-ears country-western song resumed playing, the driver figuring, “Eh, was probably nothing.”

BINK!
McCutcheon banged on the metal again, and the driver spun around to scope out the back of his truck. That noise, he knew, had definitely come from inside.

“Continue. To. Drive.” M.D. said. M.D. sat up, deliberately avoiding sudden moves, but also deliberately making sure to show the driver the burn in his eyes and the sharp tip of his
long, dangerous blade. “If you want to make it home tonight, you'll do exactly as I say.”

The driver, fifty-eight, gray hair, beach ball belly covered by a white dress shirt and light black jacket, felt his chest tighten. No one had ever broken out of the D.T. before.

No one, he realized, until now.

Not only did the driver understand what was happening, but he also understood that he had no contingency plan. Assistant coroners didn't carry guns. Assistant coroners hadn't been
trained in prisoner protocol. Assistant coroners shuttled corpses from Point A to Point B like furniture trucks carried sofas; the stuff in the back was merely cargo.

McCutcheon hopped into the front seat and the driver realized he was as prepared as a florist would be to deal with an escaping con.

“Repeat after me,” McCutcheon ordered. “There was no body at the prison.”

Instead of repeating the words as he'd been told to do, the driver searched the road, instinctively looking around for help.

Empty highway. No police. No alarms or panic buttons on the vehicle for him to sound.