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Ride the Lightning- Second Interview

By: J Campbell

By Joshua CampbellPublished 3 years ago 17 min read
2

The dinner was packed. Mr. Crome was waiting in a back booth when I arrived and waved me over as I came in. I had spent the last few weeks researching the prison, the same thing I had been doing for the previous year, but now it was with more of an eye towards strange occurrences. Stragview had its share of unnatural deaths and odd disappearances, but the prison seemed to be good at covering them up. I had been excited to talk with Cromes again, and his story had made me reach out to some others I had been hesitant to talk to. There was a real story here. I just had to put it together. I had wanted to speak to Cromes again that same week, but it had been almost two weeks since I had managed to get in touch with him. He sounded nervous when he spoke to me, unsure about our next meeting but sure that it had to happen.

Crome had something to say, and he wouldn't be bullied out of saying it.

Crome had set himself near the back wall, the front door in full view. The place was full enough that we would be hard to eavesdrop on and harder still to pick out of a crowd. The waitress ambled over, and I ordered food. Crome waved me off when I offered to pay for his meal, just holding out his coffee cup for the waitress to refill. He took a long sip before turning back to me, savoring the dark liquid.

"So, I see I didn't scare you off."

"Seemed like you might have been the one who was spooked. Did you worry you were being tailed?"

Mr. Crome looked uncomfortable as he sipped his coffee. His eyes flitted around the dinner, and I could tell he was looking for familiar faces. He must have been satisfied with what he saw because he turned back and pitched his voice low.

"I told you about the Wardens' influence, right? Let's just say that I've seen some things that could get me in a lot of trouble if I went blabbing about them."

"Then why talk to me at all?" I asked, very curious about why he would stick his neck out.

"Because maybe I need to be in trouble. Maybe it's time we paid for what we did that night in October. I spent the next twenty-five years trying to make amends for that night, but it never seemed like enough. No matter where I went or what I did, I couldn't shake Frasier's face. We did him a disservice, and it's time people knew about it. It's time they knew about a lot of things. Some skeletons are hidden under Stragview that need to come out, and some aren't even skeletons yet. Still want to hear about it?"

When I set the tape recorder between us and clicked it on, he grinned, showing yellow teeth that had seen a lot of coffee and cigarettes in their day.

"Good."

A week later, I saw Frasier with my own eyes.

We had a full shift that night, no call-outs or vacations, so every dorm had two people in it. I usually worked with your grandfather, but the Captain had put me in the dorm with Sergeant Kayden. I was told later that he had gotten a complaint from the officer he'd put in there the night before. Cap needed someone in there that he was unlikely to sexually harass, and I was elected. I started the paperwork, counted, made small talk, and generally tried to ride out the night. Kayden had apologized for what happened on the yard by then. He claimed he got a little out of hand and didn't mean to stick me. I had generously accepted it, hinting that the info might be something I'd want to hang on to for later. We'd had a tentative truce since then, and as the thunder rumbled way out in the woods, we settled in for a long boring night. When the rain started, the lights flickered in the cages above the beds, and the tin roof sounded like there might be a little hail in it. We hadn't had a good storm since a week before, and I remembered wondering if it was going to be as crazy as the one your grandad had told me about.

When the lightning started, the lights went out completely.

That was nine, and we sat with just the emergency lights for company for an hour before the incident took place.

Kayden was just finishing telling me a story that was ninety percent bullshit when someone started screaming on the floor. We shined our lights into the dorm, flashing them through the caged box that surrounded us, and we could both see someone pinned against the wall. He was looking at whoever's back was to us and shuddering all over. The person menacing him was yelling incoherently, and when the lightning peeled overhead, you could see that whoever the other was wasn't quite right. His proportions were wrong, too big and too undefined, and he seemed to move beneath his clothes like a bundle of cords. My daddy had a scarecrow made of old spun-together wires when I was a kid. This guy looked like her had, his clothes vaguely man-shaped but not in one solid piece.

Kayden sprang into action, grabbing his stick and telling me to hang tight. He lumbered onto the floor, shouting at the two to separate. The inmate who was pinned jerked a little as the other reached for him, and I could swear I could see sparks coming off his skin. He reached out a hand to take the man by the throat, and when he did, he started bucking like someone whose grabbed an electric fence. Kayden roared as he came at him, bringing that stupid club of his down on the other.

It pulled lamely at the shirt, and I could see that whatever lay beneath was more liquid than solid.

When the other turned his face and bellowed at Kayden, that was when I saw him. Inmate Frasier's face was lumpy and damaged, his eyes were black pits of red rage, and Kayden took a step back as it turned to fix him with its gaze. The club fell with a hollow wooden clump, and Kayden began to run as the thing turned away from its target to come after him instead. The inmate that had been pinned, Griggs, his name had been Griggs, crumpled down the wall, still convulsing as he fell.

Kayden was out the door as the Frasier thing walked jerkily across the floor, and that's when it saw me.

His eyes met mine, and I could see nothing but hate, nothing but fear, nothing but uncertainty behind them. He approached me, eyes locked on me through the glass of the booth, and I felt like a bug under a magnifying glass. People were yelling at him to sit down before the other guards got there, but he ignored them and just kept coming closer and closer to my office. I backed away, trying to put distance between us, but I hit the opposite wall as he came right up to the glass. I could see his deep blue eyes pulsating with deeper energy as he tried to press his face through the wire mesh and glass and fall into the station. I tried to push my backside out the other side and into the adjacent sleeping area, but it remained substantial against me.

When he hit the glass with his head, cracking it and causing it to ripple like splintered ice, I yelled loud enough to wake the dead.

The A team arrived a few minutes later, and when they did, Frasier was gone.

He'd left nothing but a pile of clothes and the splintered glass in his wake.

"Gone? Where did he go?'

Cromes shrugged, "Vanished, just like he had in Foxtrot. If I hadn't seen him for myself, I would have never believed it. When I talked to your grandfather about it, he seemed unsure about what he had seen that night after having some time to think about it. I asked if he'd seen Frasier too, but now he didn't seem to want to talk about it. He was scared, but the fear for us had just begun. Kayden may have escaped the dorm while Frasier was staring at me, but his luck wouldn't last forever."

The waitress brought my food out then, bacon, eggs, hashbrowns, and toast, and refilled Crome's coffee again. He let me pick at the food a little before he asked if I wanted him to continue. I was hooked by this point, enraptured by the story and the idea of someone having their revenge from their infirmary bed. I nodded, the recorder still running, and he picked back up again.

A week later, things had settled down a little. Kayden had taken two nights off, leaving early that night after he'd run straight to Captain's office to tell them about the fight. He had used those two days to convince himself that it was all bullshit and that no boogieman Frasier was out to get him. He had seen something, yes, but it was just a trick of the light. Besides, Griggs hadn't even died that night. He'd spent a couple of days in the infirmary with light burns on his chest and neck, but he had made a recovery. As the muggy weather stretched on and the sky stayed cloudless, we all prepared for an unseasonably warm autumn. We hunkered down for some further heat-related inmate issues.

Then the storms came back, and it was a bloodbath. It came up suddenly one night, the first peel of thunder seeming to attract the buckets of rain that followed, and the killings weren't far behind. It happened suddenly and without warning. Four inmates from four different dorms as the worst storm of the year raged out of control. The traffic was always the same, two inmates fighting or inmates kicking the doors saying someone was fighting. We had to run from Hotel to Echo to Alpha and then back to Hotel, though it was a different quad. All four seemed to have died of heart attack, their hearts having just stopped beating all of a sudden. They were deemed heart attacks, but they were seen fighting with other inmates before they died in two cases. We would get to the dorm and find a body lying by their bed or crumpled over in the bathroom with no other combatant in sight. The two from Hotel died in their cells, but both cellmates swore they saw someone in their cell after lockdown, fighting with the victim. That someone couldn't be found, and by the end of the night, we were soaked to the skin and ready to chew nails. Cap was filling out paperwork, trying not to let his fear show. We left that night, the rain showing no signs of stopping. Luckily, however, the lightning took a break, and we had a week of balmy, rainy weather that made us all wish the heat had been our only concern. I remember my boots being constantly wet for that week and the general feeling of unease as the idea of another string of heart attacks hung over the compound.

A week later, The first week of October, the rain retook a thundery tone, and two more inmates died of heart attacks.

One of them, a guy named Drell, had been walking to an early morning call-out when he was suddenly set upon by an unknown person. Macklemore, the officer who'd been escorting him, said they had just rounded the side of Charley dorm when someone had come out of the shadows and shoved Macklemore over and jumped on Drell. Drell had screamed, screamed like a pig who's got his leg hung, but as Macklemore grabbed for his radio, it was already too late. Drell's body was still twitching, but his life had fled.

Macklemore said the guy had been enormous, six feet at least, but no one was ever found, and no one besides Drell was on the yard at that time.

The week after that, two more were found dead in their beds after the lights came on, both with burn wounds around their throats.

That was when my fellow officers started leaving. Most of them were just smart enough to see the writing on the wall, and they weren't about to get caught up in this bullshit. It was only a matter of time before someone got blamed or an officer got caught up in this nonsense. Kayden had already started whispering about what he'd seen, and some of his friends were not real big on getting caught in the crossfire if Frasier came for them. Others were just lazy and were simply looking for an excuse to burn vacation time or sick leave. All of them were gutless, and it left the shift ragged and undermanned.

A week later, and I was in the Captain's office helping with paperwork. You see, inmates will always take an opportunity when handed to them. They had picked up on this mysterious killer and decided to run with it. On top of the ten killings committed by our mystery man, we'd had six stabbings, five assaults, and found dozens of new weapons during dorm raids. Our captain was beside himself, worrying that his job was history, and we were ragged from running in the rain, which had been falling almost constantly since September had become October. I was sitting with the inmate's files and going over them before sending them to the Warden. I started comparing them to the two inmates that were killed the first night. Six of them disciplinary notes in their files from the last six months, and most of them had cited inmate Frasier as the victim. Four had been sent to confinement for fighting or stealing, and two more had been written up for alleged gang activity. I imagined that the others would have some sort of run-in with Frasier as well, though they had been smart enough to keep it under the radar.

I felt myself shudder under my wet uniform, remembering what I'd seen and thought of Frasier finding a way to tie up loose ends from his infirmary bed.

As I made notes on my soggy notebook, I could hear the Captain making excuses to The Warden on the phone. Ten deaths, multiple injuries, and a lot of man-hours used to quell them. I imagined he was up to his ass in alligators over this, and it wouldn't take much for them to have his bars over it; his fault or not.

When the radio crackled and the scared voice of a trainee Freck came blaring over it, I thought this might be the straw that broke the camel's back.

"I need help. Please help me! Officer down, repeat, officer down in Delta dorm side two. I need help, please, someone help me!"

We were running before we even knew what we were doing. Officer down was one of those phrases that elicits immediate action if you're any kind of officer. It doesn't matter if you like the guy who's getting his ass beat or not; you go to help because you'd want him to run if it was you in trouble. I met your grandfather as we both ran across the grass, slipping and sliding in the mud as we tried to stay upright. We burst through the door to side two together, batons in hand and ready for anything.

That's when I saw a familiar face slumped over a sink. He was still twitching, his eyes still jittering and dancing in his skull, and as he convulsed, I noticed a pair of discarded blues sitting on the floor by his feet. He was pale, his hand gripping his chest as he looked at us like he thought we could throw him a raft in these troubled waters.

He was one of the officers who'd gone to the rec yard with Kayden.

Officer Miles was receiving his comeuppance for his hand in Frasier's beating, but I wasn't going to let one of my own get caught up in an inmate's revenge fantasy.

Your grandfather and I were on him in a second. He was still breathing, but his heart was fluttering in his chest like a caged bird. We carried him between us, the rain sheeting down, as we drug him to medical. Miles was twitching like landed trout, and his feet kept kicking the ground like he was trying to trip us. We nearly dropped him a few times, and as we came by the captain's office, a few others came out to help us. They had been grouping up to go to Delta dorm, and now that they saw what was waiting for them there, they came out to help us drag him to medical.

We were all completely soaked by the time we got to medical, and Miles had stopped gasping and started wheezing. The nurses took him from us and wheeled him to the back, giving him something to get his heart back on track and calling the hospital to get a bed ready for him. We left him in their capable hands, but I couldn't help but look through the glass to Frasier in his infirmary bed. His head was bandaged, his eyes blackened, and he was starring at the ceiling as he lay there. His face, however, wore the most cherubic grin I have ever seen on any grown man.

It was hard to believe a man who smiled like that had been doing what he was doing.

I went down to Delta dorm after that to ask Freck what he'd seen. To say that the kid was shaken up would have been an understatement. I found him sitting in one of the big uncomfortable metal chairs we kept in the office, knees to his chest, as he breathed like he was having a panic attack. He jumped when I touched his shoulder, not even hearing me come in, and the sight of someone like me, a REAL officer, seemed to calm him. I took a seat across from him and, much as you're doing here, started making mental notes for later.

He told me that Miles had been attacked by an inmate that had melted into clothes once it was done.

"He was out doing a walkthrough, making sure everyone was asleep, and he was coming through the bathrooms to get back to the station when something stepped out of a toilet stall and grabbed him. He grabbed him by the shoulders, and his hands kind of...glowed? I don't know, man! I was beating on the glass and yelling at him to stop. Miles started convulsing and twitching like he was being electrocuted. That's when I started yelling over the radio, telling people to come help. He pushed him against the sink then, Miles jittering and shaking, and then you and Office Grimes come bursting in, and he just...melted?"

The kid looked pretty rattled, and I took his post and let him go home. Freck went on to become a Major, a freaking major, but I always remembered him as that scared-as-shit TA who nearly pissed his pants in Delta dorm. Just goes to show you.

He finished another coffee, and I began to smell lunch smells wafting from the kitchen. Was it lunchtime already? It had just been morning time. How long had I been sitting here, listening to this man tell me about a particular stretch in nineteen eighty-five? My phone vibrated in my pocket, freeing me from my trance, and I pulled it out to check my messages.

My stomach dropped, and I was out of the booth in a second.

"I've got to go."

Crome looked worried, "Everything okay?"

"My mom's at the hospital with my grandpa. Someone tried to run him off the road."

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About the Creator

Joshua Campbell

Writer, reader, game crafter, screen writer, comedian, playwright, aging hipster, and writer of fine horror.

Reddit- Erutious

YouTube-https://youtube.com/channel/UCN5qXJa0Vv4LSPECdyPftqQ

Tiktok and Instagram- Doctorplaguesworld

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