Black Man / Thirteen

He locked down the fear, siphoned it carefully into anger and stoked it up. He stopped at the B wing gate and raised his face for the laser. The blue light licked over his features, the machine consulted its real-time records, and the gate cracked open. He paced through. The chapel was left and halfway down a fifty-meter corridor that led to kitchen storage. Surveillance would have him for twenty-five meters along the passage, would see him turn in through the impressively sculpted genoteak double doors, and that was all they would know. Carl felt the mesh shudder online, jerky and grating with Louie’s substandard griego chlorides.

All right, Jacky boy. Let’s fucking do this.

The chapel doors gave smoothly as he pushed them, oozed backward on hydraulic hinges and showed him twin rows of pews, also in genoteak. The furniture sat like islands on the shine of the fused-glass floor. The interior architecture soared modestly in echo of a modern church. Angled spots made the altar rail and lectern gleam. In the space between the rail and the first row of pews, Jack Dudeck stood with another, bulkier Aryan at his side. Both wore their corporate prison blue coveralls peeled neatly to the waist and tied off. Sleeveless generic gray T-shirts showed beneath. A third shaven-headed weight-bench type, similarly dressed, hauled himself up from his slumped position between two pews halfway down on the right. He was chewing gum.

“Hello nigger,” said Dudeck loudly.

Marsalis nodded. “Needed help, did you?”

“Don’t need me no fucking help to carve a slice off your ass, boy. Marty and Roy here just wanted to make sure we ain’t disturbed.”

“That’s right, nigger.” The gum chewer squeezed out between the pew ends, eyes screwed up in a grin, voice leaning hard on the insult. Carl tamped down a flaring rage and thought about hooking out those eyes with his thumbnails.

Lock it down, soak.

It was depressing—the same timeslip sense of loss at his reactions. Over the last four months, he could track his own change in attitude toward the antique racial epithets still in wide use across the Republic. Nigger. The first couple of times, it was disconcerting and almost quaint, like having your face slapped with a dueling glove. With time, it came to feel more and more like the verbal spittle it was intended to be. That his fellow blacks in general population used it of themselves did nothing to stem the slowly awakening anger. It was a locally evolved defense, and he was not from there. Fuck these Republicans and their chimpanzee-level society.

Lock it down.

The gum chewer came ponderously up the aisle toward him. Carl moved to the right-hand bank of pews and waited, nailed the approaching Aryan’s gaze as he came level, watched the man’s eyes for the move if it was coming. He figured boot to shin and elbow uppercut to chin if he had to, left-side strikes. He didn’t want to show Dudeck the shank ahead of time.

But the other man was as good as Dudeck’s word. He brushed past with a snort of contempt and stationed himself at the door. Carl moved down the aisle, feeling the mesh now like arousal, like the juddering of bad brakes. It wasn’t ideal, but the tidal power of it would do. He stepped out from between the two last pews and faced Dudeck across five meters of fused glass. He lifted his left hand in a casual gesture designed to lead the Aryan’s attention away from his right, rejoiced silently as Dudeck’s eyes flickered to follow the move.

“So, birdshit. You want to run me your rap now?” Carl burlesqued a Jesusland comedy drawl. “The South will rise again.”

“South already risen, nigger,” blurted the big Aryan next to Dudeck. “Confederated Republic is the white man’s America.”

Carl let his gaze shift briefly to the speaker. “Yeah, that seems to have worked out well for you.”

The big Aryan bristled, surged forward. Dudeck lifted a hand and pressed him back without looking away from Carl.

“No call to get all riled up, Lee,” he said softly. “This here—”

“Jack!” It was a hissed prison whisper from the door. The lookout, gesturing furiously. “Jack! COs coming.”

The change was unreal, almost comical. In seconds flat, the two Aryans in front of Carl hit the front pew side by side, shaven heads bent in an attitude of prayer. Back by the door, the lookout moved two rows down and did the same. Carl stifled a snort and found a front seat of his own on the far side of the aisle from Dudeck and Roy. The mesh surged and pounded for release. He kept peripheral awareness of the two men and waited, head down, controlling his breathing. If the correctional officers passed by without stopping, the fight was going to kick off again right where it got paused, only by then Roy would have calmed down and the chances of goading him back up to interference levels would be lost. Carl had pla

Footfalls at the back of the chapel.

“Marsalis.”

Fuck.

He looked around. Three COs, two from the B wing day crew, Foltz and Garcia, both hefting stunwrap carbines and sca

“Chew doin’ here, Marsalis?” Foltz’s jaws worked a steady, tight-jaw rhythm on the gum in his mouth. “You ain’t no believer.”

It didn’t require an answer. Garcia and Foltz were old hands; they knew what went down in the chapel. Foltz’s eyes tracked across to Dudeck and Lee. He nodded to himself.

“Findin’ racial harmony in the Lord, are we, boys?”

Neither of the front-pew Aryans said anything. And back at the door, the third supremacist had the butt of Garcia’s carbine almost at his ear.

“That’s enough,” snapped the new face. “Marsalis, you’re required in admin.”

A tiny surge of hope. Meetings with Andritzky, the UNGLA rep, were alternate Tuesdays, late morning. For someone to turn up this late in the week una

Yeah, you’d better hope, soak. He let the shank slide out of his sleeve and land gently on the pew beside him. He tucked it back against the upright with his fingers and got up, leaving it there, invisible to anyone, including the Aryans, who didn’t have a clear angle of vision on where he’d been sitting. Seventeen, he remembered, and felt a faint chill at the thought. He didn’t have the finances or the juice to buy again if this didn’t work out and they sent him back to B wing to face Dudeck and the supremacist grudge. And mesh or no mesh, without an edged weapon he was probably going to get hurt.

Suddenly the hope in his belly collapsed into sick despair and a pointless, billowing anger.

Reggie Barnes, I hope you fucking die on that respirator.

He walked up the aisle toward the COs. Dudeck turned to watch him go. Carl caught it in peripheral vision, swung his head to meet the Aryan’s gaze. He saw the hunger there, the deferred bloodlust, and summoned a stone-faced detachment to meet it. But beneath the mask, he found he was suddenly falling-down weary of the youth and fury in the other man. Of the hatred that seemed to seep not just out of Dudeck and his kind, but right out of the prison walls around him, as if institutions like South Florida State were just glands in the Republican body politic, oozing the hate like some kind of natural secretion, stockpiling it and then pumping it back out into the circulatory system of the nation, corrosive and ripe for any focus it could find.