Noble Warrior (15 page)

A
s McCutcheon lay in his bunk staring at the cracked ceiling of his cell it wasn't the thought of his upcoming war that ate at his mind; it
was his father.

How did he even land in here? And how did Demon square his debts with the Priests?
The last he'd heard his father had turned state's evidence against D'Marcus Rose
because the High Priest had issued a green light on Demon's life, as a result of a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of gambling debts.

Yet now the two of them, the snitch and the shotcaller, were eating oatmeal together side by side like good old breakfast buddies? It didn't make any sense.

Of course, with Demon, little ever did.

McCutcheon worked to put the various pieces of the puzzle together. D'Marcus acting as if he had no idea that M.D. would even be arriving. Demon comfortably protected by a crew that once
wanted his spinal column chain-sawed in half like a piece of firewood. To McCutcheon, figuring everything out felt like assembling a model airplane that hadn't shipped with all the parts.

How in the world could he have
—

A high-pitched alarm suddenly pierced the air and blared through the facility. Startled, M.D. spun his head around and saw three guards racing down the hall.

“Riot?”

“Nope,” Fixer said, lying back on his bunk casually and reading a magazine on international cuisine. “Someone did the Dutch.”

“Did the Dutch?” M.D. asked.

“It's slang,” Fixer replied as another trio of black booted guards flew past their cell. “For committing suicide.”

Suicide? M.D. thought. Who?

But before the question even fully formed in his mind, McCutcheon already knew the answer.

“Shoelaces?”

“Probably,” Fixer said. “They work a lot better than bedsheets, which have a tendency to unravel.”

Two more guards made their way toward the scene, but instead of racing they trotted with a lessened sense of urgency. Dead was dead, they figured. No need to hurry.

McCutcheon hopped down from his bed and tried to gaze down the corridor, but the iron bars prevented him from gaining a decent line of sight. Once again, he began pacing his domain back and
forth, step after step, a trapped animal at the mercy of his captors.

Forty-five minutes passed, one torturous tick at a time, and then a small squeak became more and more audible. Soon a gurney appeared, its right front wheel wobbly, and it rolled past the front
of McCutcheon's cell. Twenty minutes later the gurney squeaked past the cell again, but this time from the opposite direction, with a motionless body lying lifeless under a wrinkled sheet.
The only thing M.D. could make out on the corpse were its shoes.

Orange, rubber-soled, and laceless.

Fury swelled in McCutcheon's heart. He wanted to rampage. To fight. To tear somebody's head off and make them bleed. Shark-versus-shark battles were one thing, but what had just
happened to the guy not named Timmy was something else entirely.

A nerve had been touched deep inside him. Injustice was his button, his inner trigger, and a flood of rage, liquid cancer, toxic and lethal, began racing through his veins.

“Jail eats everyone's souls.”
M.D. didn't believe it at the time Fixer said it and he didn't believe it could ever happen to him. Now it was. The anger,
the hatred, the fury, it made him feel...

Dare I even say it? he thought.

Murderous.

McCutcheon's inner beast awakened from its slumber, a giant rising from the depths of hibernation. M.D. felt its power, its strength, its energy. Most frightening of all, he felt its
capacity to turn homicidal.

McCutcheon closed his eyes as waves of red and violence crashed through his chaotic mind.
Breathe, M.D. Breathe.

He needed an antidote. Something cooling to douse the flames that threatened to engulf him. But what? What could bring him back from the edge of this dark and perilous abyss?

The squeak from the gurney's wobbly wheel faded from earshot, and McCutcheon searched for something to slow the stream of inner venom before it consumed him entirely.

Stay focused, M.D. Keep searching. Do not give in to the forces of hate.

An answer appeared. Love. Kaitlyn.

Focus on her. Focus on her now.

For convict after convict the thought of a special someone on the outside—an image, a dream, a memory, optimism for the future—represented the last rope to sanity an inmate could
clutch. Whether real or imagined, to a con doing hard time, a person on the outside must be brought to the inside in order for the inside to remain a viable, livable place.

Hope would be the remedy. He must mentally go to a place beyond the perimeter, a world beyond the walls, a destination at which he would one day arrive with his soul still intact.

McCutcheon closed his eyes and saw Kaitlyn's shining face. Her green eyes flecked with sunshine. Her warm smile. The little wrinkle at the corner of her lip.

Perhaps it was a way of coping. He knew this. Perhaps it was a way of simply making it from one moment to the next. Whatever it was, it didn't matter. M.D. needed Kaitlyn now more than
ever.

Just like she needed him.

Ever since M.D. arrived at Jentles, he'd told himself not to think of her. Thought it would be too unhealthy to dwell. He needed to be disciplined, he thought. To stay focused on the world
inside the walls so that he could stay alert, achieve his aim, and find the seam in the structure to escape. Puwolsky getting him out served as Plan A. Stanzer coming through for him somehow (even
though they'd never discussed anything of the sort) served as Plan B, because he knew the colonel would never leave him hanging out to dry. Yet tucked away in the back of McCutcheon's
mind was the knowledge he might also need a Plan C as well as a Plan D.

Trust no one
was the rule. Except yourself, of course. Ultimately, M.D. knew, it might fall entirely up to him to find a way out of this hell.

Despite his initial plan to keep Kaitlyn away from his thoughts at all costs, a new voice in his head now cried out and begged for him to hold on to the vision of Kaitlyn, like a life raft in a
sea of growing blackness.

Yes, she needed him but he, too, needed her.

Don't fight it
, he told himself.
Think of her inner beauty.

The beast within began to calm as McCutcheon began to remember he hadn't come here to fight for himself. He came to fight for her. The only reason he'd even ventured into this pit of
despair was because he'd listened to the most golden part of his heart.

Now that gold, in his darkest hour, would need to sustain him.

Though uncertain about the existence of God, McCutcheon dropped to his knees and said a small prayer for the guy not named Timmy. He never had a chance, and now he was gone. What kind of God
allowed for things like that to happen?

An answer did not arrive, but McCutcheon remained on his knees. Was it out of respect for the victim? Out of fear of nothingness? M.D. wondered if perhaps he needed to believe in God simply
because he'd feel too hopeless about life without the knowledge that there was a good, loving, logical force behind all the things in this world that made absolutely no sense.

McCutcheon opened his eyes and found Fixer staring at him.“I gave up on God a long time ago,” the old man said. “But to be fair, God gave up on me, too.” McCutcheon rose
from his knees. “And my penis,” Fixer added. “God gave up on that as well, so if you're keeping score he's winning, two to one.”

Fixer smiled but the grin was short-lived because a wooden baton clanked at the iron cage's door.

“Okay, sugar pie, hope you're ready for tonight,” Krewls said. “'Cause in a few hours, it's time to rock-'n-roll.”

K
rewls spit the gnawed shells of a few salted sunflower seeds onto the cold, concrete floor and reached into his pocket to reload his supply. Aside
from the two guards who had escorted M.D. to the Think Tank, no one else had yet arrived for the midnight festivities.

McCutcheon surveyed the battle terrain. Hard walls. Hard floors. No impediments or perimeters, just a squareish end of a poorly lit corridor with no windows, furniture, or phones.

Pretty straightforward, he thought. The only potential danger: the entrance to Cell One One Three lurking toward the back.

M.D. could see the front bars of the cage's door but little else as a result of the darkness engulfing the interior of the room. Cell One One Three looked more like a catacomb than a
standard prison cell. In the late eighteen hundreds the space housed the state's most mentally deranged inmates. Not much since then, it seemed, had changed. He knew evil lurked
inside—M.D. could almost feel its presence—but more than this he could not yet tell.

McCutcheon made a mental note that no matter where the fight took him he needed to keep away from the front of those bars. Hands could reach out—maybe even teeth—and a win could turn
to a loss if he found himself ambushed from behind.

As his eyes scanned the room searching for other clues that might help lead to victory, a door handle turned, and the sound of scratchy metal reverberated throughout the room. Seven prison
guards emerged from a behind the door, each wearing red and green uniforms with black patches on their sleeves that read
MOORLY
. A felon, blond hair, hands cuffed behind his
back, thick and taller than McCutcheon, followed behind.

M.D. immediately deduced that these guards had come from a different institution. McCutcheon had expected a war against a prisoner from Jentles. Instead, he realized, tonight would feature
inter-penal system battle.

“No big crowds tonight, sugar pie. Just a private showing for me and some of my buddies down the road. That man right there,” Krewls said, in reference to the prisoner M.D. would be
forced to fight. “His name is Thrill Billy. A real wild one. Doesn't just like to beat opponents; likes to take their teeth.”

Krewls withdrew a thick wad of hundred dollar bills from his pocket.

“But I got a feeling you like to chew that tasty food Fixer been fixin' for ya,” Krewls added. “And me, well...my aim is to thicken this here stack and enjoy myself while
I do it, too. Let's both head back to our beds happy tonight, shall we?”

Krewls spit out another sunflower seed and walked off to greet the men from Moorly, a three-and-a-half hour van ride from Jentles with no traffic. McCutcheon didn't pay much attention to
the officers from the other facility, however. His opponent, Thrill Billy, captured all of his concentration.

The guards uncuffed Thrill Billy, and once liberated from his steel bracelets the convict shook out his wrists to get rid of the stiffness he felt from wearing handcuffs for so long. A moment
later he yanked off his shirt without a care in the world for the frigid chill hanging in the air. A sea of blue ink covered his dense, puffy chest. McCutcheon knew a guy didn't get that
swollen in lockup without having spent years on the yard.

McCutcheon studied Thrill Billy looking for any small insights he might pick up that could help him form a fight strategy. The skull tattoos, the spiderweb inked around the entirety of his neck,
the letters E-W-M-N etched across each knuckle on his right hand, a prison acronym that stood for Evil, Wicked, Mean, and Nasty. Thrill Billy's whole body stood as a living, breathing
painting.

A painting, McCutcheon realized, that told the tale of his personality. All color, rage, and in-your-face aggression. M.D. began to calculate his approach to the upcoming battle. The more he
watched Thrill Billy warm up, the more convinced he became that he understood the best, wisest path to victory.

Thrill Billy threw a hurricane of strong, powerful left-right-left combinations and then rolled his head around on his neck with a big, wide, aggressive swirl. Not small rotations but rather
full swivels designed to not only loosen up his body, but impress everyone with his thick, powerful torso. Each motion seemed exaggerated, every action occurred with a sense of pomp and
confidence.

“Aaaaarrggghh!”
Thrill Billy suddenly yelled, and then he smashed himself in the face with back-to-back open-handed slaps. The guards from Moorly smiled at the sound of
their fighter's hands cracking his face. They liked their man's spirit. Liked it a lot.

Krewls crossed back over to McCutcheon, having locked in all the bets. M.D., knowing the time drew near, pulled off his shirt, folded it up neatly, and set it down on the floor off to the side
where he expected it wouldn't get mussed up.

Krewls squinched his eyes.
Folding a prison shirt?

The major looked his fighter up and down. McCutcheon sported no tattoos, threw no warm up punches, and made no show of aggression whatsoever.

“Aren't you gonna holler or something?” Krewls asked.

McCutcheon slowly turned his head and shot an ice-cold glare at Krewls. The major had been glared at by thousands of prisoners over the course of his career, but there was something different
about the way M.D. lasered in on him, and Krewls felt his stomach sink. McCutcheon offered no words, but the major could feel the presence of a dangerous energy. Having already seen a taste of
M.D.'s capabilities, he liked his fighter's chances.