Cherub

Noise and bright light jolt me, followed all too quickly by a stale, vaguely rancid odor.

I’m sitting alone at a cafeteria table, and there’s a plate of unappetizing food in front of me. A crumbled slab of meatloaf, covered in what might be ketchup. A blob of potatoes. A roll. A glass of water.

The bright light is fluorescent. Hanging rows above the whole room, which is the size of a basketball court. Formica tabletop. So I’m some time after World War Two.

The noise is a hundred or more other guys, all sitting and eating and talking at other tables, all wearing the same gray pants and shirt I am.

I’m in prison.

The guards at the doors and next to the food line offer a clue. Fixtures and furniture here aren’t modern, but their uniforms and comm gear are. I’m guessing it’s the mid- to late-Eighties.

There’s a row of narrow windows at the top of the cement block wall opposite me. Windows too small for even the skinniest guy in the room to crawl through. No sunlight. It’s not yet seven, by the wall clock, but it’s already night. Must be east coast, winter. Of course it’s night. I only work at night. Night after night after night. I can’t remember the sun anymore.

So, here today, one of these guys needs to die today. I need to pick him and take care of it.

Don’t know where exactly I am. Don’t know where I was. How I got here. Where I’m going next. Don’t know how I can do the terrible things I do.

All I know is that I have to do them, to move on.

Not the first time I’ve popped into a prison. Not the first time I’ve taken a prisoner. Not the first time I’ve had to choke down a shitty meal while I get the lay of the land.

I toy with the idea of picking someone completely at random, just to get the hell out of here and move on to my next vile act. Blink out of here and into somewhere else. But I know that won’t help. It won’t be any better, and will probably be worse.

I survey the room, and it’s exactly what I expect: this mess hall is packed wall-to-wall with monsters. Filthy, grotesque, unspeakable. So thick it’s almost a stench. Unfocused violence. Putrid lust. Madness, dark and ice-cold.

Monsters. Like me.

I have a table all to myself, and so does the skinny kid at the table beyond mine. I stare at his back, giving myself something to look at so I don’t have to look to either side.

Glancing into the minds to my immediate left and right, I see a guy beating his next-door neighbor unconscious a decade or so again for accidentally knocking over a garbage can. Not sure what it’s about. It doesn’t matter. On the other side, an old man who’s been in here a quarter century. Robbed a hardware store. Shot the owner in the head. Shot his daughter, ‘cause she saw him do it. Amazed he didn’t get the chair.

And that big fellow raped his own stepmother. Fractured her skull while he was at it. And he’s raped over a dozen of his frat buddies here since getting locked up.

Bored, I check out a guard. The one standing next to the food line. He’s on the take, skimming crates off the grocery trucks that come twice a month and selling the stuff off. Looked the other way while a couple of the inmates shivved another one who caught him and was going to turn him in.

May as well go back to random. Everybody in the goddamn place deserves to die.

I fork up a bite of the wretched meatloaf, just to keep busy while I look around some more. It’s not as awful as what I’m seeing in their heads.

Whoa... here’s something.

I drop my knife to give myself a reason to turn and look. He’s two tables over and three rows back. Sitting with four other guys but not talking to anyone. He doesn’t like the meatloaf any more than I do.

Big but not huge. Late thirties, muscular. Scar on his neck. Tattoo on one arm that only I can see, but it’s too early for the fashion, this one was Navy. He picked it up in Vietnam, during the war. Navy.

Furlough in Ho Chi Minh City – no, Saigon then - a dozen years ago, his time. Drunk with his buddies. They scatter with whores, but he’s into something else. He follows some young local boy out of the bar and into the dark streets. The air smells like grease and salt and dirty laundry. Feel his excitement, building into rage, following this guy, the kid’s too drunk to realize he’s there behind him.

He stumbles toward a side street and steps into shadow, and sailor boy makes his move, breathing beer down the kid’s neck as he pulls him into a black alley and clamps a hand over his mouth. The kid struggles, panicking, but he doesn’t stand a chance, Navy is far too strong.

His other arm is wrapped around the kid’s arms and he leans back, lifting his feet off the ground. He shushes him softly, then tentatively takes his hand off the kid’s mouth. The boy is too terrified to make a sound.

With his free hand, Navy pulls a blade three times bigger than it needs to be from a sheath on the back of his belt. He shifts the arm that’s holding the kid up to his neck, pinning his right arm with his own, and knocks a couple of buttons off the boy’s shirt and slips the knife in, tip pointed upward, and drives it into his heart.

The kid doesn’t breathe, doesn’t fully realize what has happened, and Navy withdraws his arm and blade before they have time to get bloody. He steps back, holding the kid up with his left hand and turns him as he starts to crumble, realizing he’s dead, and his eyes are as big as magnifying glasses, radiating white terror.

This is the part Navy likes. I can feel him wallowing in it.

The kid’s eyes never close as he collapses in a heap at Navy’s feet.

But this is just an old memory. Navy hasn’t thought of this in ages. He’s got other things on his mind.

A face. Another kid. Unwhiskered, borderline cherubic. Terror in his eyes. Not a memory. A fantasy.

Navy’s after someone new.

Maybe take him right now, save the cherub? My good deed for the year.

And what have we here? Other side of the room, entertaining his table with some shit they all think is funny. Life of the party. Natural leader. Likes the attention. A little older, forties, glasses. Not particularly tough but smarter by half than anyone else in the room.

There’s a room in the back of his head, somewhere in a cabin back in his younger days. Oak chair in the center of the wooden floor. A picnic table liberated from some park just beyond. Leather straps with buckles hanging on the wall. A couple of plastic buckets. Two car batteries.

His younger self opens a door and goes through it, re-emerging with a young woman, a black hood over her head. She screams and shouts something obscene, but he isn’t concerned. This place is ass-end-of-nowhere. I can guess what comes next.

I’m wrong. I can see that he’s waterboarded quite a few guests, but he’s in a sparking mood. He forces her into the chair and straps her in, saying nothing, clamps jumper cables to her wrists – red-left, black-right. She cries out.

Slowly, with great relish, he touches the other clamps to one of the batteries.

Her screams should wake the dead, if there are any dead out here. And he’s in it for the screams. Doesn’t even need to see her face. Has her hooded so she won’t be able to identify him later. He’s not going to kill her. He’s not even going to rape her, even though he’s got a titanium boner. He just needs her screams.

He drugs her heavily, then dumps her at a bus stop in the middle of the night.

Sadist. And a craftsman, apparently.

But, once again, I’m looking at old pages of his scrapbook. I glance at his working memory.

Jesus!

He’s not the only one planning something new. He’s done some improv here in the slammer, some hot wax, a fingernail or two – but he’s focused on a fresh face.

The same face. The cherub.

I rise from my table, pick up my water glass. Nobody gives me a look. Crossing to the food line, I refill the glass from a pitcher. On the way there and back, I scan every table I can clearly see. No cherub.

I cast a wide net, focusing on the image of the cherub’s face they gave me.

I get a hit. But it’s not the cherub.

It’s the rapist.

He’s thinking about the cherub this very minute.

I’ve seen how he does his thing. What he did to his stepmother. They say rape isn’t really about sex, it’s pure violence, and that’s true, as far as it goes. But it’s more complicated than that. There’s this place in the heads of the true despicables where sex and violence are the same feeling. That’s this guy.

He’s made some special friends here during his tenure – smaller, weaker inmates that he’s taken behind the machines in the laundry or in the equipment locker out in the yard. They fought him at first, until they knew better.

And now he has a new crush.

I’ve got to find this cherub. This pretty boy. All three of these beasts have him on radar. He may not survive one of them, let alone all of them.

I can’t see him in here anywhere. Maybe back in his cell? Maybe he’s sick?

The answer’s right in front of me. Literally. That’s him, sitting alone, at the table beyond him. I slip into his mind, see his reflection in the bathroom mirror earlier today. It’s him.

He’s a new arrival. Like, a couple of days new. That’s why he’s the darling of the pervert set. Fresh meat. Lean, healthy, but not strong. And as pretty as can be. Lovely eyes!

Poking around a little more, I see that he’s here because he killed someone. A younger cousin. Went into a rage and pushed her into a swimming pool, she hit her head, she drowned.

But...

He doesn’t understand why he’s here.

He’s frightened and confused. He doesn’t know where he is or why. I know those feelings well. He isn’t even clear that she’s dead, even though I can clearly see her body in his memory.

This kid is mentally ill.

Now it’s all starting to click. He shouldn’t be here at all. Why wasn’t he institutionalized? Because it’s the Eighties, and President Bonzo has gutted mental health treatment, top down. So just lock him up.

Where the perverts can feast on him.

Okay, now we have ourselves a ball game. Keep this kid out of the jaws of monsters.

Except... I can only take one of them. I’m only ever allowed one. Then I jump somewhere else.

If I take any one of them, I’ll be gone and he’ll still be here, at the mercy of the other two.

Take out the one who’s going to kill him? No, that might be depriving him of the most merciful fate. Figure out which of the three will be worst, and take that one out, to at least minimize the damage? Which one would that be, exactly?

I know better than to ask, so I don’t.

It comes to me.

I go an extra mile here. Usually I just tweak the heart, the brain, put some ice on a stair step, cause a traffic light to fail – some little glitch that smooths the path for someone’s mortal exit. Very seldom have I ever resorted to spurring involuntary actions in a victim-to-be.

But these are extraordinary circumstances. And, hey, it’s not my fault I can do these things. None of this was my idea.

I go into the cherub’s mind and plant an idea. He begins playing with his food.

And a moment later he pushes away from his table, making a rasping sound that morphs into an agonized roar. Everyone turns to look. He is in incredible pain. His eyes are wild, and he has broken out in a hot sweat. He stumbles as two guards rush toward him.

He clutches his arm and then his chest, and pitches forward, just in time for one of the guards to catch him on the way down.

He’s dead.

I only have a minute. I revisit all three of the cherub’s would-be attackers. All three are alarmed. All three are disappointed.

I couldn’t leave him to them. Bad enough, what any one of them would do to him, but all three? And on top of everything else, he’s mentally ill. In a place like this, he was utterly without hope anyway.

Justice? No. But that’s not my job.

All three are alarmed, and all three are disappointed, but the worst of it is still ahead. The prison doctor is going to find that this young man died of tachycardia, brought on by a massive adrenaline surge. It will look like he was poisoned. The autopsy will be superficial, and that’s the conclusion that will go into the record.

It will look like poisoning, and the three of them will be in for a rough few weeks with the warden and the police, as all three will be suspects. The evidence won’t be enough to stick, and none of them will end up having to own it, but the nature of the evidence will scare the holy piss out of them for the rest of their lives. Enough to curb their sick appetites? Probably not. But at least they’ll experience some terror themselves for a while, as they keep coming back to that evidence:

All three of their names, written on the table in mashed potatoes.