THE RAP ON the door startled Mars. Then the door slot opened at the bottom.
“Get your ass over here,” said the voice.
Mars obediently rose from his bunk, turned his back to the door, placed his hands behind his back, and slid down on his haunches until his hands were level with the slot. Handcuffs were attached to his wrists. Then he rose and stepped away from the door as it opened.
It was Big Dick. He’d been here as long as Mars had. And the years had just made him meaner.
Big Dick was so wide his bulk filled nearly the entire opening of the cell door. A scowl and a smile fought for supremacy on his features.
“What’s going on?” Mars asked.
“Shut up! I tell you to talk, boy?”
Two other guards emerged from behind Big Dick and shackled Mars’s feet. He was hustled down the corridor, his chains clanking like Marley’s ghost.
He passed walls of cells with faces looking out the square chicken-wired windows. Then he felt on his face the rush of Big Dick’s foul breath, smokes mixed with whiskey.
“You a lucky man,” said Big Dick, his thick neck flexing rhapsodically with each syllable. “You off death row for now. You heading to gen pop. Folks’ll be glad to see your chocolate ass, Jumbo.”
Mars did not consider himself a lucky man. Going back to general population meant only one thing.
He was heading to an unofficial execution.
His own.
* * *
If you wanted to survive in prison, there were strategies and tactics.
If you wanted to kill someone, there were also strategies and tactics. His leaving his cell and the security of death row was the strategy.
The tactics of his planned murder were about to be revealed.
He was led into another building. When the second door slammed shut with the shriek of automatic hydraulic rams doing their job, he was brought to a halt by the meaty hand of Big Dick on his shoulder.
“Last stop, Jumbo.”
His handcuffs were removed but not the leg shackles. Then the guards turned and left him.
Mars looked around.
Death row was housed in Building 12, but he was now in the prison’s open area with all the other inmates. The place was filled with convicts, some in pants, some shirtless, some in shorts cut from their prison pants. Though it was technically winter, it was stifling hot in here. Overhead fans spun away but barely moved the thickened, humid, malodorous air that hung over them all like a marine layer of toxic gas.
A group of prisoners sat at tables bolted to the floor. Some stood conversing. Still others were doing push-ups, or else pull-ups on bars built into the walls. The stench of sweat, cigarette smoke, and the fuzzy must of prison-alchemy drugs hit him like a wave. Guards hovered, their batons smacking lightly against callused palms. Their eyes spun around the space, looking for signs of trouble. But they kept coming back to Mars.
He was obviously the special guest today.
The show was about to start. Everyone had good seats. The only thing missing was the popcorn.
The prisoners had also turned to look at Mars. Those doing push-ups and pull-ups stopped. They wiped off their hands and moved back against the wall.
And waited. Their expressions were clear.
Thank God it’s not me.
The news had spread fast. Mars might be getting out after nearly being put to death.
Getting out.
Uh-uh. Wasn’t to be. At least not standing up.
Mars rubbed his wrists where the shackles had cut into him. The pain was actually welcome right now. If you could feel pain you were alive. That status could change, surely. But right now he was breathing.
He looked up one story to the catwalk that ran around the perimeter of the open area. Big Dick was up there staring down at him. The smile on his face was something to behold. Next to him was the runty Reedy looking just as gleeful—the royals above, the gladiators below.
Mars looked back at the group of prisoners watching him. Two in particular seemed to be paying him a good deal of attention. They were both white, bigger than he was, prison-barbell-muscled, tatted, bearded, crazy-eyed, with rotted teeth, strung out on the shit they smuggled in or made right here.
Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum.
Mars didn’t know them or what crimes they’d committed to be sent here. But he could easily see that they were exactly where they belonged. They weren’t humans. They were animals in a cage. But they weren’t in a cage right now. They were right out in the open.
With me, thought Mars. And my legs are chained.
He stretched out his neck and felt a gratifying pop as a kink was relieved.
Next he eyed the field in front of him like he had as a running back earning his future between the tackles in the old Southwest Conference, smashing into men bigger than he was and yet almost always somehow winning the battle. He’d always divided the field into grids, planes of existence through which he had to navigate. He was blessed to have vision that saw everything all at once. That attribute was perhaps the rarest gift in sports. And he still had it even all these years later.
His breathing slowed, his nerves calmed, his muscles relaxed. He felt good, actually.
Twenty years of my life. Twenty damn years.
The anger in him was suddenly immense. The frustration just as potent.
Somebody had to pay. And somebody was about to.
Jumbo was about to come down for an extremely hard landing.
He shuffled forward with what seemed to be the intention of joining a couple of inmates.
Mars knew the lay of the land, and the pair did what he expected them to do. They turned and walked off. Nobody mixed with the leper. The infection might rub off on you.
He looked back up at the catwalk. At Big Dick and Reedy.
He knew what they expected to see on his features: fear.
But instead, he smiled.
And on their faces he saw what he wanted to see: surprise.
He turned back to face Dee and Dum, who had separated from the pack and were now circling him, wild dogs on the prowl. There were lots of wild dogs in Texas and they always hunted in packs. They went after wounded animals, running them out of air and then ganging up on them for the kill.
Well, Mars was not wounded and he had plenty of air.
He wondered what their reward would be. Drugs, smokes, maybe a local skirt snuck in for an hour?
Well, he would make them earn it.
Dee and Dum were both in their thirties, years younger than he was. They were tough, scarred, hardened.
To a degree.
It was always about degrees.
He was about to find out where this pair stood on the prison hardiness spectrum.
Mars shuffled toward Dee while keeping Dum in his periphery. Dee was the linebacker looking to take him head-on because he was big and strong and that was his job. Yet he looked a little surprised that Mars was coming right for him. Then his expression told Mars that he thought this a positive. That Mars was actually making his job easier.
Maybe instead of Dee, he was actually Dum.
Now the other dude was the safety, the fail-safe. If Dee went down, Dum was the one set to take Mars out of this world.
From the corner of his eye Mars watched Dum. The dude was jacking himself up, getting ready. Part of him wanted his mate to fail, just so he could have his shot, build his cred inside here to unassailable proportions.
He could hear it now. I took out Melvin Mars. Dude was a murderer. NFL lock. Biggest, meanest cocksucker you ever saw. And I wiped the floor with his ass.
He’d be telling that story in here for the next forty years. Well, except for one thing. It was never going to happen like that. And Mars didn’t think Dee and Dum had forty seconds, much less forty years, left to live.
Get ready, fresh meat, ’cause here comes Jumbo.
“What’s up, brotha?” said Mars to Dee.
“I ain’t your brotha,” snarled Dee.
“Know that, man, just makin’ conversation. Ain’t no big deal, right?”
Words did not come out of Dee’s mouth. Instead a shiv was revealed in his hand as he came at Mars with a burst of speed. The strike would be to his belly and up to his chest cavity. That was quick and clean and the bleed-out would be fast and fatal. And immensely painful.
The prisoners and guards had backed away, to give Dee room to work.
And Mars to fall.
Well, they actually had it backward.
Mars had already lowered his shoulder, squatted down, tensed his enormous thighs, and, despite the shackles, sprang forward like a launched cannonball. As his hand clamped around Dee’s wrist, holding the shiv right where it was, his right delt slammed into Dee’s throat, pushing his chin up at an angle that would cause nothing but a bolt of pain right before blackness.
There came an audible crack as the spine was pushed past all point of return. And it was over, just like that.
Bleeding from the mouth, an unconscious Dee crumbled where he stood, the shiv dropping from his hand.
Linebacker down.
Mars pointed to the blade as it hit the floor. “Hey, man got a blade,” he said to the closest guard. “Y’all be careful now. Somebody might get hurt.”
He saw in his periphery what he expected to see.
Dum was hesitating now after the quick slaughter of his larger twin, but then how could he not follow through with all the dudes and especially Big Dick watching?
Man had to go. No choice. Else he’d get a shiv in his gut later. Just how it was.
America didn’t have prisons. It had chaos pens where men were transported back seventeen centuries. Where the strong survived until it met something even stronger, and where the weak died every time.
Dum screamed and ran at Mars at the top of his speed.
It was almost too easy, really. Dum was all muscled up and yet slow as gravy. Big in the arms, light in the quads. And the man was about to pay a steep penalty for that imbalance.
Mars again bent low, pivoted, blocked Dum’s arm where his shiv was held, got his shoulder under Dum’s belly, and exploded upward. It was the same move that had launched three-hundred-pound defensive linemen off their feet.
The two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Dum went airborne, soaring over Mars. The crowd parted and Dum landed hard on the concrete and slid across its smooth surface headfirst into a cinderblock wall with shattering velocity.
There was a crunch of bone as his spine compressed and he lost about an inch of height. He didn’t move again. He’d just been in a car accident without benefit of a vehicle. Blood seeped from his mouth. His shiv had fallen from his hand and clattered to the floor.
Dee and Dum out for the count.
Blood from their wounds pooled on the filthy floor. Their last lines in the sand.
Adios to the Texas correctional system.
Actually, Mars didn’t know if they were dead. And he really didn’t care. Quads for life might be better justice.
He looked up at Big Dick and called out, “That man got him a shiv too, sir. Lotta that goin’ round. Best tell the warden.”
That’s when the guards pounced, beating Mars with their batons until he went down.
Smiling all the way.