Barriers: Part One

Barriers

Jim Baines walked along the well-polished corridor. His too-new boots squeaked in the stillness of the oppressive night. The blister
on his right heel throbbed and he longed for eight o'clock in the morning when his shift would come to a merciful end.

It was quiet tonight; too quiet. Peace at nine pm always preceded mayhem at midnight. Baines knew it was going to be a long shift.

Sliding the hatch back, he opened the door to room forty-three, on the top level of B wing. Miguell, prisoner, number 36045379, lay sullenly on his bunk. Chapman, above him, snored loudly. These two rarely gave any trouble.

‘Night lads, lights out in fifteen minutes.’

Neither man answered and Baines moved along to the next cell. This one was occupied by Neil Hutchens, doing a three stretch for assault and battery. His wife's lover, it was said, walked with a limp
and had developed an irritating stutter.

Hutchens lay on his back, his right hand moving furiously on his engorged penis.

‘Now then, Hutchens, that'll make you go blind, you know.’

‘Fuck off, you bastard. Can't a man get a minute's privacy in this madhouse?’

He never slowed his pace, never stopped what he was doing and as Baines shook his head in disgust, the other man's sperm rose in a milky arc, to land on the pale blue government-issue bedspread.

‘Dirty git,’ Baines muttered, as he moved down the corridor. The other man insolently rose a soiled finger in salute of the retreating officer.

Baines felt the hairs on his arms rise as his hand rested on the grill of the next door down. The man in this room went by the name of Lighning.

None of the officers or fellow inmates ever referred to him by his real name of Carruthers. This was one of the oddest, oddball mother fuckers on B-wing. He steeled himself to slide back the
grill and make eye contact with the man who scared the shit out of him.

The grill moved with a nails-on-blackboard squeal and the officer shuddered. His balls contracted and every hair follicle along his spine stood erect as it played pin-ball with the droplets of perspiration making their way down the ridge of
vertebrae from the base of his neck. Why the hell did he always let this weird fucker rattle him? Because, he answered his own thought, Lightning was criminally insane with a capital I and about as predictable as a nest of vipers.

Baines took a breath and looked through the grid. Sometimes Lightning would crouch below the opening, and when the grid was opened he’d rise from his squat like a screaming banshee and frighten the bejesus out of whichever screw was on the other side.

Knowing he was likely to do it never stopped the duty officers from screaming and jumping back like a girly confronted with a spider. The anticipation of knowing he might be there, waiting, only
made the act more jumpy. Sometimes he'd have his filled piss pot in his hand ready to throw at the grill; on other occasions - if the tea urn
had just done its rounds – He’d chuck a boiling cup of tea into the eyes of the lookers. There were other violent cons on the wing; all of them were violent in varying degrees, but the difference with Lightning was that it was sport.

His acts were cunningly thought out in a dance of psychology that always seemed to give him the upper hand against the screws. For all his antics, Lightning was cold, as cold as a corpse's todger on burial day. He had a keen intelligence, one that was turned inward. Nobody ever knew what was going on inside his cynical head.

Lightning was sitting in the center of his cell. He did it a lot and the general consensus was that he was waiting for the officers to let down their guard and approach him. Lightning liked blood, especially other people's and most especially if it flowed freely from an open wound in the most sensitive regions of a screw.

Baines was partial to every drop of his blood and was particular about make sure that it stayed inside his ample body.

The crazy bugger had played this stunt before; sitting for the twenty three-hour duration of his lock-up in the lotus position, demanding that nobody moved him. They just left him to it now.

Once, when four officers had entered the cell because he seemed not to be breathing, he was enraged and body parts flew, decorating his cell in a garish modern art tableau. Of the four officers, three were hospitalised and the other had fresh flowers placed at his graveside by
his mother every Sunday.

Life for Lightning meant just that; he would see out the rest of his troubled days plotting and scheming in the six-by-six cell.

And God help society if he ever gets loose, thought Baines.

He was about to slide the grill home and move on to the next cell when something stopped him. His head snapped back to stare through the hole made by the open grill. His body was still. His blood sugar level plummeted and he felt his toes turn to
ice crystals in the thick thermal socks that he wore for night duty.

Officer Jim Baines was paralysed. His eyes were locked unblinking and rigid towards the naked prisoner sitting on the freezing cold cell floor.

Baines was scared, he didn't know what the hell was happening, but he knew it sure as hell had something to do with the sociopath sitting in front of him like Hari bloody Krishna.

His conscious mind refused to acknowledge the pale green light emanating from the man. It wasn't as though it was alien green, or exorcist's puke green; in fact, it was barely perceptible, only one hue deeper then mere air. As the light strengthened, it still didn't take on the gaudy glow of Halloween, but Baines couldn’t deny that it was there - a pulsing aurora around Lightning.

As much as the officer willed his body to get the hell out of there the more some unnameable force compelled him to stay rooted to the spot.

Baines' mind wasn't programmed to work on the supernatural, or anything above a simple man's understanding. He thought about the World Series
and pizza and how many pints he could piss against the bathroom wall. Green lights pulsing out of freaky prisoners were just way beyond his mental
capability.

Lightning's eyes snapped open. The snap was silent, but Baines heard it in his head.