I couldn’t move properly between the casts, bandages, and of course, being handcuffed to the gurney. The doctor, a woman whose brother had been a victim of the incident on Broadway, rarely ever showed herself to me after having repeatedly explained why painkillers were rationed due to budgetary concerns. Her assistant, a young man who went by the name of Parke, did what he could to make me comfortable when she wasn’t watching but there was only so much he could do.
Parke informed me that after I had sabotaged the pipeline into New York, setting in motion a drought that many were not sure when it would end. I had been brought to an emergency ward with twenty-three bullets in me. I spent over twenty minutes flat-lined before they could revive me. Over the period of the next week I crashed an additional number of times he assured me I would make it into the world record book if only an official witness had been there. The repeated defibrillator usage shorted out an implant in my head, I was told, even had it caught fire briefly. I was glad to be unconscious for most of his stories about my recovery.
I was in Sing Sing, they had held my trial in absentia since any appearance in court was likely to cause even more rioting. It was a life sentence, which should have already been over after my death by cop. They even kicked the case up to federal court until it was decided whether or not to try me as an enemy of the United States and rot in some deep dark hole. Parke grinned excitedly as he said he wished me good luck in ‘going pro.’
He explained to me that then I would be the most dangerous criminal he had ever had the honor of meeting. Yes, it turned out Parke was some sort of crime groupie. As he took my picture with an old-school Polaroid camera and bragged about how he was going to add it to his collection I started getting a little worried. I asked him about Mara and Lisa, and what had happened to them. He didn’t recognize their names but he thought the werewolf council had been footing my defense bill.
It was weeks before I was declared ‘good enough’ by the doctor and sent back into gen pop. The shouts and threats as I was paraded to my new cell were anything but hopeful. Many of the prisoners had family or friends in the city and seemed to take it as a personal affront to attack them. I could probably expect trouble sooner rather than later. The guard led me to my new cell; my body was still not healed enough to move properly. The next several days I rarely left my cell, trying to exercise my battered body to try to get it back into working order. It got easier the more time passed and it gave me an excuse to avoid most of the other prisoners… unfortunately they didn’t avoid me. Four days after my arrival I got visitors to my cell, I had no concept of how they got out of their cells with or without the guard seeing them but there they were. Five gentlemen who were also staying at the behest of the New York correctional system appeared in front of my still-closed cell door.
“Sorry, gents, but our office is currently closed. If you could come back during normal hours of operation I’m sure we could find someone to help you.” I sat up on the little cot they gave me to sleep on.
“Oh, I think you’ll find yourself offering special late hours just for this occasion.” The guy closest to the cell gave me a leering smile as the door rattled open. A multitude of homemade blades appeared in my opponent’s hands, each crafter more creatively than the last. Perhaps the prison offered a course in the rec room during downtime; I would have to look into the activities menu to find out. The men were sure of themselves as they approached me but after fighting alters for so long a normal human could only offer so much challenge to me.
The guy who spoke, maybe their leader came at me first and my hand lashed out. I bent back his wrist sharply breaking it and causing him to drop the shiv. A twist of his arm wrenched his shoulder violently and a directed strike took the arm out of its socket, with a final shove I sent him head-first into the metal bars. In the time it took the other four to think ‘Oh shit what did he do to his arm?’ they had joined him on the floor. When the guards finally arrived they found me lounging back on my cot surrounded by the other unconscious prisoners, maybe next time they wouldn’t underestimate me so drastically.
The guards found the situation much less humorous than I and showed their disapproval by repeatedly tasering me if I so much as moved. I suppose not everyone gets my personal sense of humor but their reaction just seemed rude. A lot of fuss was made over the attack, eventually ending me up in the warden’s office. He was a tired-looking man who had the look of someone who didn’t sleep often or well. I was told he didn’t have time to deal with troublemakers like me, as if I had been the one starting the fight. He claimed his only option for the ‘safety of all involved’ was to throw me in solitary for the foreseeable future. The grins on the faces of the two guards escorting me spoke volumes about their joy at the decision.
I was brought to a cell, less than half the size of my previous one and locked in. There was enough room for my cot and a toilet with little enough room to walk around in. As I lay down on the cot I thought for a time this might be better than having to deal with everyone else topside. There have been few enough times in my life that I have been as wrong a that. Featureless gray concrete walls left no real place to let your eyes rest upon and no windows leaving the whole cell with a stifled enclosed feeling. The lights, a piercingly bright set of tubes set in the ceiling were always on, making sleep nearly impossible.
After some hours the small hatch opened in the solid steel door and a tray of food was shoved unceremoniously through. It clattered to the ground, spilling some of its contents as it fell. This became my days… waiting… food… more waiting… food… if I figured three meals a day I had been in the cell almost four whole days before my body collapsed out of exhaustion. It was less falling asleep and more an unconsciousness brought on by stress. I was tortured in my dreams by faces I was trying to forget, Lisa, Mara, Kaylee, Tony… all of them angry but I couldn’t remember why. I woke up more stressed than I had been before resting, now worried about sleeping at all.
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I lost track of the days by counting meals after what I guessed was two weeks. I hadn’t seen or spoken to another human being in that entire time, I never thought I would be so desperate to simply hear another person’s voice. I began exercising, trying to pass the time, doing sit-ups, push-ups, and anything to occupy my mind. As each day blended into the next it began more and more difficult to get up the energy to even get out of bed. I found myself lying on my back below the food slot, not knowing how long I had been there, several of the paper food trays lay on the ground near my head. A line of drool ran down my cheek to the ground in a puddle… no one could go through this and emerge unscathed. At least alters would tear you apart, set you on fire, or crush you with sledgehammer-like fists… this was truly inhuman.
Time passed into the void of oblivion second by second and eventually, the loneliness led me to hallucinations. Tony would show up and scream at me about being a lazy, lackwit, layabout. Apparently ghost Tony had a thing for alliteration, he would shout training exercises in rhyme for hours on end but he was easily ignored by this point. Other specters would arrive from time to time, and Lisa would ramble on end about absolutely nothing for what seemed like days. Mara looked at me in disappointment, as if she felt nothing but pity when she looked at what I had become. Nathan cried out that he would never be avenged, his family could never find peace and his soul would wander for all eternity. In the end, it was all just noise until Michele showed up.
I was dimly aware that the cell was warmer than it had been in a long while, perhaps we had passed through winter to the other side once again. It had been months in this concrete closet and the beard that had grown in that time itched my face. I sat up and my breath caught in my throat at the sight of a woman sitting on the end of my bed.
“You know, Der, I think it’s high time you and I had a talk.” Her eyes shone with a laser-like intelligence behind them, despite the impossibility of her being here there was no doubt who she was. Michele, all grown up, how I imagined dozens of times she might have looked like by now. My mind screamed in panic, it had held together through the storm of nightmares like tissue paper in the rain and this threatened to be the final gust of wind that tore it all apart.
“How- why-“ My voice cracked from disuse as I tried to ask her any of a hundred questions I needed to hear the answer to.
“I ‘suppose you can thinka me like one of them windows you’re friend cooked up. A what if things happened dif’rently. Gotta say I thought you woulda done better by yerself than this. You were the toughest sonnuabitch in alla Rock Spring. The day you defended little Elsa and took on the whole lot o’ dem Clark boys… well you still barely knew who I was but I knew that I had to make you see me somehow.” She smiled, laughed, and fell backward onto the cot. I could feel her weight on me, my eyes began to water at just how real it felt to have her in my arms.
“What happened to him? The man who fought for thems that couldn’t fight for themselves? The man that took a beatin’ from four guys older than him but still never even thought about giving up? What happened to the Derek I loved so much that every breath burned in my chest like I was about to burst into flame? I… I can’t tell you how sorry I am about leaving you, some stupid whim nature walk and I messed everything up for both of us.”
“Wasn’t… your fault.” My heart was breaking all over again, I had never got the chance to fully cry when Michele passed, I was too filled with fury to do so but now…
“My Derek wouldn’t be givin’ up like this. When we lost something on the roof, you were always the first one in the tree climbin up ta get it.” I smiled at the memory, I had broken my leg falling from that tree too. “When we wanted to cut across the field, you would always distract the dogs so they wouldn’t bother us. Even back then, you always found a way. Never once did I see you just lay down and take what life gave ya… you made it give you what you wanted.”
She flipped over, laying on top of me, her face mere inches from mine. I closed my eyes and not for the first time, I imagined the life I could have had with her and it was wonderful. It was just a dream, though, and one without Kaylee in it, and despite the longing in my heart I could not give up a world where she existed for any other.
“See? Knew ya could get over me. We got dealt a bum hand that’s fer sure but you can’t wallow in the corner trying to get your chips back. The only thing you can do is step right back up for the next deal.” She kissed me full on the lips and the cell, the prison, the whole world was gone. There was nothing left but the two of us, floating in space in a moment that we could never have. “You keep on fighting, you hear? There are people out there fighting for you but if you lose yourself then we all lose. We’ll see each other again, but don’t you be in no rush to join me. You still have life, live it while you can. I can wait as long as I need to…”
She was gone, I was left hugging the air where a moment ago she had been. It wasn’t fair, losing her once nearly destroyed me and I had to do it again? Where was the justice in any of this? I felt the rage burning up inside me, threatening to boil over and consume me. I screamed a primal yell from the depths of my soul and went willingly into madness.
I calmed down what must have been hours later and saw the cell was in shambles. The cot had been ripped apart and used as a club tearing out chunks of cement from the walls. The small toilet had several dents beaten into it to the point it hardly resembled a toilet anymore. The porcelain of the sink next to it was cracked and broken, several small pieces littering the floor. I fell back, limply to the ground in exhaustion, and closed my eyes willing myself into any state of mind that wasn’t here.
Drip drip drip…
The sound of water falling, rhythmically from the sink refused to let me drift. In my rage, I must have bent a pipe or broken something to start a leak going.
Drip… drip…
The sound was regular, about a second apart each. In my mind, I counted with it, one... two… three… I counted out a minute, then an hour, then two. My brain latched onto the sound as a way to mark the passing of time. I scrambled up to a sitting position making a small mark in the wall as every hour passed. Within three days I had an approximation of time based on when meals arrived. The constant dripping gave me a focus for my mind, a way to keep the madness at bay, and most importantly, it gave me hope that if… no when someone got me out of here there would be enough left of me to finish what I had started and avenge my friend. Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day I sat in that cell, thinking about just how much pain and suffering I owed Toussard on behalf of his beloved citizens. I would make sure he paid back every cent.