Free Read Friday: Destination Unknown

Photo courtesy of Olivier Guillard

Read this story from the beginning HERE!

Destination Unknown

That’s the sixty four thousand dollar question. What will happen to me after I die? Those who believe in god tell us that after death we will either go to heaven, or hell, depending on how we lived our lives. I’d always figured there was a room reserved for me in hell, and until the moment I escaped my cell, I’d never given it much thought.

But if that’s the hell waiting for me I want no part of it.

And that was just some small town hole in the wall cell, now I’m at the Polunsky Unit in Texas, waiting for my one way ride to the death house. The guards keep pretty good track of that for us, counting down the days as they pass uneventfully, they‘ve even got a wall calendar out where everyone can see it, you know the kind you can pick up at any dollar store for a buck. It has a picture of a cat hanging by one paw, with “Hang In There,” printed beneath it in big letters. So you can see why I don’t like calendars.

The guards told me on my first day here that I should feel special. The cell I’d been assigned had once been inhabited by none other than Angel Resendiz also known as The Railroad Killer, and had been executed in oh six. That information was enough to keep me from stepping across, hell it was enough to keep me up at night, I know that evil son of a bitch left his imprint on my cell, and created an alternative persona on the other side that was patiently waiting for me to step across.

I wonder what he saw as he waited for his appointment with the death chamber? Was he even aware of what lived just beyond his view? Probably not, after all, he was considered sane by those who tried him, but I find that hard to believe.

I can feel his presence in the shadowy corners of my cell where the light from my only lamp fails to reach, watching me while I try to sleep. I can hear it at night while the others around me dream of life beyond the four dreary walls of their cells.

Like rats in a wall they scratch at the fabric between our world and theirs seeking a way over. Every night I listen to them and their incessant scratching, wondering what I’ll do if they manage to get through. I know what I’ll have to do, the only thing I can do, I’ll have to step across and run like hell.

So I just wait and listen, and watch. I know on one of those calendar pages there’s a day circled in red that’s meant for me. My lawyer told me the date while promising to do everything he could to have my sentence commuted, but I can’t remember what it is. Funny isn’t it, that I’ve forgotten what day I’m scheduled to die.

But there’s always hope, maybe the lawyer will come through and get my sentence commuted, hell while we’re dreaming why not aim big, maybe the governor himself will pardon me. Or maybe while I’m being transported to the death house, I’ll just step back. I’ve never done it from a moving vehicle, but there’s always a first time.

The End

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Free Read Friday: Destination Unknown

Photo courtesy of Olivier Guillard

Read this story from the beginning HERE!

 

Destination Unknown

That pretty much summed up my life, living day to day, a nomad on the open road. I’d never had a bank account, didn’t understand the first thing about saving for the future, like I had one. Every dollar I took was wadded up and shoved into my pocket as I moved through life, staying among those I understood, and shunning what I couldn’t comprehend, like the schools of fish from that aquarium so long ago.

I thought I had it figured out, and for me I did, when my cash got low I’d check out a bank, measuring the distance from the street corner to the interior of the vault. That night I’d show up outside, slip in between, and walk into the vault. Most times I was right on target, emerging from the in-between inside the vault where I would fill my pockets with what I needed from the teller drawers stored inside, then be on my way before anything from the in-between got close.

I had to always be aware of that, those creatures on the other side, they were always on the prowl for me. Circling my last known location in a spiral that would bring them to the point where I crossed over. I never waited to see what they were, afraid if I did I might never escape.

I learned early on to ignore the blocks of new bills wrapped in plastic that were just sitting on the shelf in plain sight. Tried to bring one across but was unable to do so, and it fell to the floor of the vault where it lay until the following morning when the manager opened.  He must have been the suspicious sort as I learned later when the police pulled me in for questioning. It appears they found my fingerprints on the block of cash and wanted to know how I found my way into the vault.

There was also the matter of the missing cash from the teller drawers. Some of the bills had been marked and of course the police found them wadded up in my pocket. They hammered at me for two days, wanting to know who the inside man was, how did I circumvent the alarm system, and so on. Had I told them the truth they wouldn’t have believed me, besides that was my ace in the hole, when they locked me up all I had to do was slip across into the in-between and be on my way.

Or at least that was my reasoning. The reality of course turned out to be quite the opposite.

After a couple of days they gave up and charged me with grand theft, I’d taken nearly five thousand dollars. A mere pittance really when compared to what many of these banks made in interest and fees. I was tried, found guilty of course,  and sentenced to five to ten years at the state prison. The night before my transfer from the city lockup I decided it was time to go.

You know how they say some places give off a certain vibe? Like abandoned mental hospitals that years after their closure are still filled with the despair of their former patients. The terror and fear of these lost souls who appeared abnormal to the general public. In reality they were attuned to things beyond the understanding of the so called sane among us. Secret things and places that existed in a shadowy realm.

Jails are like that, the walls seem to absorb the energy of those incarcerated. Oozing with helpless terror, fear, and sometimes unimaginable evil. I didn’t know the history of the cell I was in, but there must have been some pretty bad shit that went down in there.

When I crossed over it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The landscape around me was one of shadows dancing in an endless night with the screaming cries of past victims echoing all around me. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I don’t know who had been in that cell before me but they had been one evil son of a bitch. Their presence was in that dark landscape, a predator stalking its prey, and I felt it on a purely emotional level that made me feel like someone had kicked me in the gut.

It moved through the darkness, zeroing in on me almost instantly, scrambling towards me in a shadowy form that resembled a massive spider. It was and it wasn’t, if you catch my drift, I was looking at something my mind could not comprehend, so it created what it  was familiar with. It moved through the emptiness in a jerking motion, stopping and starting, then stopping again as it watched me with a multitude of eyes that all said the same thing.

We want you.

I felt its need like a thousand tiny hands clambering all over my body, pulling at my clothes, my flesh, my hair and face. It was the most frightening thing I’d ever felt before or since. I managed to get away, but I’ll never escape the memory of that nightmare landscape. It will follow me to my grave, and that is where the real problem lies.

When I take my final walk, and they strap me down to that gurney, and as the fluids designed to kill me flow into my body, where will I go?

To be continued!

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Free Read Friday: Destination Unknown

Photo courtesy of Olivier Guillard

Destination Unknown

It was only natural that someone such as myself, from the wrong side of the tracks, with little education coupled with little hope for the future, would find themselves in my current situation. After all my trip to death row was foretold on the night of my birth when my father managed to drag himself to the hospital long enough to see what his seed had produced.

Like father like son they always say, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree was another homily that pretty much sealed my fate. From what I was able to piece together my dad had been a drug dealing, pill popping, thrill seeker living along the shadowy edge of our ordered society.  A biker with little hope for the future who lived for the moment as that was the only one that mattered. In his world there was little need for 401k’s, bank accounts, or even jobs.

He and his kind lived day by day, feast or famine, constantly on the move, never pausing for a moment except when they were too drunk, or too high to function, and even then they pushed on. Always wandering, moving from one end of the country to the other, living by their wits, accumulating only what wealth they needed for the moment through wheeling and dealing, and in rare cases by sticking a gun in some poor saps face.

They didn’t take from the man, they kept their distance from the more ordered members of society, the nine to fivers who went about their daily lives unaware of the danger lurking just beyond view. They dealt strictly within the family, that loose coalition living in the shadowy realm between good and bad. The pimps, hookers, and dealers who fed on the darker needs of an ordered society that at times became too stifling for some.

They were modern nomads roaming the land in search of a freedom that no longer existed, and they welcomed me with open arms. After being held back for the ninth grade for the third time I decided that school was not for me. There were no scholarships in my future, no invitations to visit the campus of this college or that, and even if by some miracle a college did approach me, our financial situation pretty much ruled that out.

We were nomads in our own right, the woman who gave birth to me and I, living at the very edge of society as she wheeled and dealed her way through one government program after another, her hand always extended, never once offering more than a token effort and just long enough to get what she needed. In that time we moved from one crappy apartment or trailer to the next, each worse than the one before, as we spiraled down the drain to homelessness.

I’ve often wondered as the night grows long and the others on death row with me sleep as best they can knowing at the end of the hall their destination waited. How would my life have turned out if the woman who gave birth to me had been different. Would I be sitting in this lonely cell, counting down the days to my own unknown destination, or would I have built a family of my own.

A loving wife, a couple of kids, a boy and a girl, maybe more. A family pet a dog, or cat, and some fish of course, I’d always been fascinated by fish swimming in their ordered little world. One of my childhood friends had an aquarium when I was growing up and I could sit for hours and watch as they swam back and forth from one end of the tank to the other. Staying in their groups, some holding to the center of the tank while others traveled along the outer edges.

Never aware that there was a wide open world on the other side of the glass that imprisoned them.

To be continued!

If you've been enjoying what you've read why don't you stop by my one of my Author Pages listed below to check out my other work. 

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