Ride the Lightning- First Interview

First Interview

I sat in the hard plastic booth in the McDonalds near the strip mall, sipping coffee and waiting for Mr. Cromes to arrive.

It all started as a paper for college. Stragview is such an iconic prison, existing for so long that it had taken on a life of its own. At some point, I guess it became a book, but the more I wrote, the more I realized that what I had wasn't very entertaining. People didn't want a technical history of Stragview. They wanted something that they couldn't get from a textbook.

They wanted the stories that hid in the shadows of that ancient place, and I was just the person to drag them into the light.

Or so I thought. The more I wrote, the more walls I hit when getting stories from the inside. When I had lamented this lack of interesting stories to my grandad, he had given me a friend's email address from his days in Corrections. Grandad had had a few good stories, and I'd gotten a few other guards and ex-inmates to talk to me about their time at the place, but it seemed to be hard to get people to talk about their time at Stragview. Stragview cast a long shadow, and it seemed to be hard to stay out of the shadow of that ancient place.

That was a line from the book, which I was pretty proud of.

Stragview is a local oddity, having existed in some capacity for nearly two hundred years. The exact history, however, is hard to find. I know that it had been a prison camp during the civil war, an internment camp for a while during World War two for German and Japanese citizens, and was one of the last prisons to operate an Electric chair. These were things that everyone knew, though. The prison was very tight-lipped about what went on inside, and people who left tended to be tight-lipped about their time there.

When Mr. Cromes agreed to talk to me, I was ecstatic. He'd worked for Stragview during the eighties, a time when physical violence was still in full swing; no pun intended. Grandpa had been midway through his career, and he and Cromes had started at about the same time. The two were friends and had been work partners. Grandpa had also been an observer to the incident that Mr. Cromes was going to tell me about.

"The other guards were calling it the Lightning Killings, and they had a lot of people freaked out. Several guards quit during that period, and many of us kept an eye over our shoulders, fearing we were next."

The Lightning Killings had claimed the lives of multiple inmates and two guards, grandad confided and were committed by a single inmate.

An inmate who was in the infirmary at the time of the killings.

An old Ford pickup pulled into the parking lot, and a tall man with silver hair climbed out. He was dressed modestly, blue jeans and a button-down shirt, and he made eye contact with me before ambling into the restaurant. He ordered some food before coming to my table with his tray and fixing me with a speculative look.

"You Fred's grandkid?"

"I am."

"So you're writing a book about Stragview, that right?"

"Yeah, I'm hoping you can tell me about something called the Lightning Killings."

He smirked as he sat down, but there was no mirth behind it, "He told you about that, huh? You realize the Warden will never let your book come out. He was the Warden of Stragview for the thirty years I worked there, and he's quite the powerful figure around the prison."

"I've been told he's been a powerful figure for longer than that."

He took a sip of his drink, "Can't speak to that, but I can speak to the Lightning Killings. I was a witness to the whole damn thing. If you've got the time, I guess I'll tell you."

I took out a tape recorder and set it between us, depressing the record button as I waited for him to start.

He was willing, it seemed, though I didn't understand them what his story would cost me.

Stragview is a strange place, but I think you knew that already. I've seen beautiful things inside those walls, and I've seen monstrous acts committed by both guards and inmates alike. When you're inside those walls, you feel like you've stepped out of time, out of space, and you don't really realize it until you're laying in your bed, thinking about the day you've just had.

From September until October twenty-fifth of nineteen eighty-five, I was stuck in one of those miasmas of weirdness.

It all started with the power outages on the morning of September Sixth. We were in the middle of a heatwave, the hottest it had been in September in living memory, and the loss of electricity meant no fans, no radio at night, and the failure of the freezers in the kitchens. The food there had spoiled, and the inmates were not pleased. The day before had been chicken day, a day usually held in high expectation, but with the freezers down, the inmates had been close to rioting. The heat hasn't helped matters, and we guards were sweltering in our uniforms as we tried to keep the peace.

However, a few of them had taken it as an opportunity to take revenge.

September Seventh was the day of the Rec Yard Fight that landed Inmate Frasier in the infirmary and kicked this whole thing off.

I had lost a game of rock, paper, scissors to your grandad and was standing on the rec yard on what felt like the hottest day of the year. This was only a Stragview thing, by the way. Once you got back to town, the temperature was an average seventy degrees, pretty standard for the season. However, the closer you got to Stragview, the hotter it seemed to get. We were never sure why, but I was quickly sweating through my uniform when Sergeant Kayden and a few other officers walked up.

Kayden was a real asshole, a grade-A jerk who liked to cause trouble. I was never scared of a fight, your grandad either, but we never went looking for trouble. Kayden, on the other hand, lived to lay hands on inmates. He was a big guy, discharged from the Marines before coming to work at the prison, and he was known for taking inmates out of view and beating the tar out of them. It didn't matter who they were. If they got in his way or got on his bad side, they were going to get beaten up.

All of them, besides inmate Frasier.

Frasier had sucker-punched him during one of the "disciplinary meetings" he held and dropped him in one shot. More importantly, he'd embarrassed him in front of his friends, and that was his biggest mistake. Kayden still had a bruise on his cheek where he'd hit the pavement, and I could tell that he was coming to cause trouble on my yard. There were lots of inmates out on the grass, playing baseball, running, or just using the equipment to exercise, and I could see Frasier talking with some guys by the baseball field.

I begged him not to when he came up.

"Not today, Kayden. It's too damn hot for this crap today."

Kayden smirked, "I just wanna talk with him, that's all."

The fact that he already had his hand on his baton told me all I needed to know.

He and his cronies pushed past me and made their way over to Frasier. Frasier had his back to them, but when his friends saw the group heading their way, they moved off quickly. No one wanted to get on Kayden's bad side, and they knew that Frasier was about to come in for a beating at the very least. He turned around, clearly expecting some retaliation after besting Kayden a few days before. Kayden had been off the last two days, leaving him with plenty of time to seethe, and it appeared that he was ready to make good on all that downtime.

I watched as they began talking, Frasier smiling and trying to back himself out of the situation as Kayden edged closer and looped the rawhide thong of his baton around his hand. They started out well enough, but eventually, Frasier had enough of Kayden's sas and started giving it back. Kayden didn't seem to like this, especially when Frasier's backtalk started making the other guards' laugh. I could see his face darkening as Frasier continued to talk, oblivious of the danger he was putting himself into.

When Kayden punched him in the mouth, I started moving towards the two at a run.

When Kayden raised his club for the initial strike, Frasier reeling away from one of his punches, I caught the end and told him that was enough.

He smiled over his shoulder before he elbowed me in the ribs and brought the baton across my face.

I was unconscious before I hit the ground.

Frasier was not so lucky.

I looked up, pen skritching over my notebook as the old guard finished his memory and took a long sip of soda.

"Are you saying that you were assaulted by a fellow staff member while trying to break up abuse?"

Mr. Cromes shrugged, "I'm saying that things like that happened a lot back then. Officers beat inmates; it happened. Sometimes I agreed with it, sometimes I didn't. This time, I didn't, and I tried to put a stop to it."

"So that was the start of the murders? Inmate Frasier's death was the…"

"Who said Frasier died of his injuries? You young people are always so quick to get to the kill that you can't enjoy a good story anymore. Do you want to hear it or not?"

I nodded, urging him to continue.

I woke up in the infirmary with a lump on my head and a throbbing headache. The nurse told me to take it easy, but she needn't have worried. My head was hurting too bad to get up too much right then. They let me go home early, and I made a mental note to talk to Kayden about his little head cracking when I came back to work next. I had the day off thanks to my injury, which was good because it turned out I had a slight concussion and spent the night throwing up in my bathroom.

That was the first night of storms and the first night of deaths.

The phone rang about six-thirty the next morning. I only know this because I looked at the wall clock as I staggered out of the bathroom. Your grandfather was calling to tell me about what had happened that night. Back then, we did revolving shifts, so no one got stuck on nights all the time, and I would be starting my first night of midnight that night. Our whole shift had been transitioned to nights for three months, and what a start of festivities it was. He had worked the night before, and he told me how all hell had broken loose that night.

"It was crazy! The lightning started early, big angry forks and pelting rain that came down in buckets, and just about the time seemed to hover over the compound, we got the call from Bravo Dorm. We had a trainee in there, a kid named Dawket, and he gets on the radio and starts calling for help, ten codes be damned. The Captain asks what the situation is, and he says he has a fight going on. The kid sounds scared, half out of his mind, and the four of us who were hanging around the Captain's office go pelting through the rain towards the dorm. We arrive to find one guy on his back, eyes staring at the ceiling, dead as a post. Dawket was in the station stammering about how the lights kept flickering, and he'd seen the inmate fighting with another inmate. He wouldn't say much more, but he looked pretty shaken up. We called medical and got them down there, but we couldn't find anyone else with wounds on them, and Dawket couldn't give us a description of the other guy. Medical took the body, and we headed back to our respective dorms."

I told him it sounded like he'd had a pretty crazy night, but he just laughed.

"You haven't heard the worst of it. I was halfway back to Foxtrot when the officer I left in there starts yelling about a fight in our dorm. We lock the doors at nine, and our cleaning guys are done by eleven. It's midnight; there shouldn't BE anyone in the quad to fight. So I go running back to the dorm, and I run in and look through the glass that separates the quad from the hall, and I see two inmates, one on the ground and one on top of him. The one on top is beating the shit out of the guy on the ground, and the guy on the ground is convulsing like an electric current is going through him with every hit. I bang on the glass, yelling at them to separate, and the guy on top looks back at me with a look of the most abject hatred I have ever seen. Then, he disappears as the rest of the team arrives."

I asked what he meant, not quite sure how someone just disappears from a secure quad like that.

"I mean, he was there one minute and gone the next. The other inmate was twitching, his breath coming out all weird and gaspy, and Haddock starts giving him CPR like they taught us to do. The rest of us start looking for the other inmate, but I knew we weren't gonna find him."

I asked him how he knew, and he suddenly sounded very nervous.

"Because it was Frasier. The inmate in F dorm was Gusper, the one he'd gotten into a fight with last month over unpaid debts. That's not all. The inmate in B Dorm was Kellog, the inmate who beat him up a few months ago to join the white boys. By the time the sun came up, both of them were dead, and no one really believed what I'd seen."

"Why not?" I asked, "Frasier sleeps in F dorm. He could very well have killed Gusper and," but your grandad cut me off.

"Frasier is still in the infirmary, Mickey. He's unconscious, hasn't come out since he jumped Kayden on the rec yard."

I tried not to scoff at the story Kayden was passing around, but it was a weird story, nonetheless.

Just how weird, I wouldn't know till that night.

I leaned forward, recorder still running as the older man stared at me over steepled fingers.

"What happened that night?"

"It's getting on a bit, kid. You mind if we pick this up another time?"

He said is casually enough, but I could help but notice that he kept glancing at someone standing at the counter.

Someone in a jacket with a DOC patch on it.

I agreed to meet him a few days later for breakfast at a little dinner downtown, and he left in a hurry after saying he'd see me then.

I researched the two inmates he mentioned, and they were indeed reported dead in nineteen eighty-five while incarcerated at Stragview. The cause of death was a heart attack, and it seemed they were not the only instance of sudden cardiac arrest in September. In all, fifteen people died of sudden cardiac arrest that week in October. Ten of them were inmates, but I noticed that four were officers. Something had happened at Stragview that week, and the fact that it hadn't made the papers was a miracle.

Whatever these killings were, they were exactly what I was looking for.