GroupThink: the Lighter Side - Chapter 2

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Year 5

The weirdest thing about Bull’s death was that it was honestly thought to have been an accident. By everyone except Nate and his boys.

5 minutes after he saw Bull, Nate knew that he would not be able to take him. He was a little bigger than Nate, but he was also strong and fast as hell. He was also confident and he knew how life worked behind bars.

To survive in a place like Attica, you had to be a badass or you had to be somebody’s bitch. You could have outside influence, like being with organized crime or maybe having someone owe you enough that the warden would make sure you were not severely mistreated. And then there were the bosses.

The bosses were the ones who ran the drugs and contraband and everything else that should not go on inside a prison. Running that sort of thing is dangerous – you had to get at least some of the guards to be in on it and you had to get a good sized chunk of the inmates to help as well. One of the conditions was that if someone got out of hand, you had to get them back in line or put them down.

Bull had apparently run such an operation before, because a week or two after arriving he had a small cadre of followers. Sooner or later it would come down to Nate and Bull facing off – the way Nate had been running things there was no other way. And when that time came, Nate knew that Bull would win.

Nate couldn’t have put into words exactly how he knew. It was the way that Bull moved that said the man had been in a few fights where the loser had gone to the morgue. And it was the way he talked to people that said he was just plain crazy and didn’t give a damn if he lost: he was either going to be the boss or he was going to be dead.

Given the changes that were going on, Nate would not have actually minded handing over leadership to Bull, but that was also not an option. One of the things that Bull’s victory would give to everyone was a good reason not to mess with him. Nate, as the “top dog” was therefore the only person whose defeat could give Bull what he wanted. And Bull was not going to be satisfied with anything else.

Nate sat in his cell and thought. It may have been the first time in his life he thought so hard about a problem. Though he didn’t notice at the time, the people around him were concentrating too. In fact all the people in the cells nearby were quietly contemplating the situation.

He felt as if he were thinking faster than he ever had in his life. He quickly went through a number of options but discarded them for one reason or another until he remembered an accident that had occurred a few years back in the shower…

With lightning speed, he recalled the details of the incident. The man had slipped on a tile and hit his neck on a low partition that separated the showers from the lockers, breaking his spinal column and killing him instantly. It was judged a freak accident and forgotten. Nate thought about what he would need to do to get something like that to happen to Bull…

Abruptly, the feeling of intense concentration left Nate, and he shook his head. Wishing for Bull to die that way was not going to kill him. He needed to get a few thugs together, get Bull alone with them and kill the motherfucker. Of course it would be difficult to get the right group because nobody would help Nate out of the kindness of their own hearts and even if he did win, he would be facing murder one and…shit.

Over the next few days, Nate noticed that he was thinking about the “freak accident” idea a lot. He found himself going over the details again and again: exactly what part of the neck had been hit? How much force did you need to strike that area to snap the spinal column? Had it been the front of the neck or the back? When did people take showers? Did they have a choice or was it on a schedule? When did Bull go?

The weird thing was that he noticed that the people around him seemed to be thinking about it too. One day he found S&W sitting in his bunk reading a book on human anatomy, turned to a section about the spine. As he was passing a nearby cell, he noticed one of the inmates looking over what appeared to be a schedule of some kind. Ordinarily, Nate might have thought he was just being paranoid…

The next day was marked with a bizarre series of coincidences.

At shower timemost of Nate’s cell block was there. The guards stood around, with their usual disinterest as the inmates took care of business in the overly chlorinated water.

Bull came into the shower area and took spot near the top of the row. The showers were now full. A minute later Nate came in and took a shower near the bottom. Nate saw Bull as he walked in. The man smirked at him in his crazy, “I’m gonna fuck you up” way.

Nate also noticed that he was near the partition wall.

A few seconds later Nate exclaimed “Fuckin water’s cold!”

He looked around and noticed Deck standing under the water near him.

“Hey Deck! Let me use your shower!”

Deck, a large man who occasionally gave Nate trouble, turned to him and said: “Fuck you.”

Hoots and laughter filled the shower area. This was another one of those discipline/hierarchy moments…

“Awww, c’mon. I asked all nice and…”

Nate smacked him and the two went down throwing punches at each other. Immediately, pandemonium reigned in the showers and other inmates rushed in to see what was going on. This included Bull, who was near the outside of the crowd. The guards were yelling and trying to clear a path to fighters.

An opening appeared near Bull, who quickly approached to get a better view. He didn’t notice that he was near the partition wall. The guards had similarly noticed an opening…on the other side of the crowd.

Abruptly, the man next to Bull moved and kicked Bulls feet out from under him. At the same time, the man on the other side of him pushed him back.

“What the fuuuuu!”

With amazing precision, the man behind him caught and accelerated his fall, putting his hands on Bull’s face and chest. A split second later the back of his neck connected with the partition.

There was a cracking noise and the man quickly stepped back and looked at Bull. A second later he exclaimed: “fuck man, are you hurt?”

Bull didn’t respond. He lay on the ground with his neck at a weird angle. The tussle between Nate and Deck continued.

In fact it took about five minutes before the guards discovered that anything was amiss. They had hauled off Nate and Deck to what guards jokingly referred to as “the time out room,” when they noticed that the inmates were all milling about staring at Bull. In another 5 minutes the managed to get the man to the infirmary, where he was pronounced dead.

The conclusion was that Bull had slipped on the wet tiles and broken his neck. Just like the man had done a few years back. The warden used this point when he spoke about it to the inmates and impressed upon them in the importance of not having fights in the shower area.

As Nate sat in the tiny, dark “time out room” after they had hauled him away, one thing that hit him was the way the water had felt. Nice and warm. Why had he hit the Deck?

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GroupThink: the Lighter Side - Chapter 1

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Year 0

As the cell door slammed shut, Nate, the largest of John’s new cellmates quipped: “Well boys, looks like we got ourselves a new plaything.”

The two other men in the cell sniggered at this while John, the man who had just arrived, started listlessly at him.

John wasn’t his real name, so he had been dubbed “John Doe” by the authorities who had apprehended him after he murdered a passing stranger; apparently for his wallet. Normally, when someone does that to another person, they are bright enough to flee the scene, but in John’s case, he had just stood there, holding the wallet, until the police had arrived. It was fairly obvious that John was severely mentally ill, but in the days of cutbacks or closings of state mental hospitals, John had ended up in a maximum security prison, along with his new friends.

Nate, the man who had spoken, approached John. Nate was about 250 pounds of muscle, bald, and psychopathic. He put his hands on his hips as he looked John up and down.

“Well fella, there’s something you should know about me.”

Nate’s fist slammed into John’s head. John bounced off the bars and slumped to the ground.

“I don’t like new people.”

Nate’s other two cellmates laughed at this, perhaps with a bit more enthusiasm then was warranted, since it meant that they would have to endure less of this treatment at Nate’s hands. For himself, John just lay on the ground and stared at the ceiling, the few meager possessions given to him by the guards on the floor with him.

Nate got to work, giving John an introductory beating and rape so that the new guy would know “whose boss” in this cell. He was disappointed with John’s reaction – basically none, but that was John’s reaction to most of life these days.

His condition, such as it was, manifested itself when he was 5 or so. Much of the time he functioned at just well enough to clothe and feed himself. He would react to his environment in a slow and methodical fashion, and basically without the capacity to communicate.

Every now and then he would become very active, at least compared to most times. During these periods John would use different speech patterns, body language, etc. All in all he seemed to be a different person. One of the few doctors who John had seen in his life had diagnosed him with multiple personality disorder and prescribed some medication that John’s family couldn’t afford.

What was actually happening was that John would start picking up the thoughts of another person – for a short period of time he actually was that other person – but such a conclusion was expecting way to much for an overworked doctor who himself was addicted to Vicodin.

That had been the situation John was in the night that he killed a random stranger. A crack addict nearby who was desperate for a fix had invaded his mind and caused John to awaken from his slumber. He espied a passing stranger, attacked and killed him. Unfortunately for John, just after his victim was dead, the connection was lost, and John found himself in his current situation.

John’s primary response to violence was catatonia. When someone like Nate decided to beat him up, John would lapse into a coma for a few days. This was fine as far as the people in the infirmary were concerned, they preferred people who weren’t a lot of trouble, but there was only a limited amount of space, so the prison guards encouraged Nate to ease up on the beatings.

Nate was mostly trying to impress on John the hierarchical nature of his new environment, but the situation being what it was, he complied with the requests of the authorities and only bothered John for sex. This was fine as far as John was concerned, he had lived with such arrangements on the street for years. Street people have to put up with a lot if they want to survive.

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Year 1

It’s hard to say exactly when it started.

If you’ve ever had the experience where you’re eating with some friends and you notice that you have lifted your glass at the same time as your friends, then you have experienced a piece of it.

“The voice,” as it came to be called, ran deeper than that.

One fine day, one of Nate’s associates remarked on the fact that Nate had put a piece of bread on John’s plate during lunch. Nate looked down at his plate and frowned. His bread was missing.

“You better gimme that back now, or I’ll kick your ass.”

“I ain’t got it! You gave it to your punk.”

“The hell!”

“Check it out.”

Nate looked over at John, sitting a couple of tables away with some other gimps. John did indeed have extra bread. What happened next was even weirder.

“What the fuck…”

John got up, walked over, and put all his bread on Nate’s plate. And then walked back. Nate spent the rest of lunch confused.

When he got back to his cell, Nate was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. Eating bread.

Things like that started to happen all around him. Not necessarily just for John, but for everyone in the cell. After what happened in the lunchroom, it became more subtle.

One of the more noticeable times was when Nate woke up one morning, swung his legs out over the floor and hopped down. From the third bunk. Nate always took the bottom bunk – it was just one of those things.

Nate frowned and looked over at Ed, who was sleeping in the bottom bunk. He was going to pound the shit out of him when he remembered that Ed was sick last night and had to use the toilet a lot. Nate was about to shrug it off when he realized that he had never given up the bottom bunk before, even in the same situation. If anything, he would make the sick guy try and hold it all night.

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Year 4

Things were getting out of hand.

In some ways, prison was like the military in the sense that a certain amount of discipline is expected, even necessary in order for things to run, if not smoothly, then at least predictably. In the last few months, there had been very few beatings near Nate’s cell.

The thing is, you really did not need someone to step out of line for them to warrant a beating. Sometimes they could have something nice happen to them: maybe a visit from a relative that other people thought made you too “uppity.” Whammo, problem solved.

Finally, one of the guards even remarked on the fact and it struck Nate that something had to be done. That night, Nate got ready to beat up John.

As beatings go, it was fairly typical for Nate. Rage, his old friend, came to Nate’s aid as it always did, putting the man into an almost meditative state. He doled out his punches and kicks onto the unresisting man in a methodical way, careful to ensure that the bruises would be very visible, but also careful to ensure that John did not die.

The two other people who shared his cell watched Nate beat John with expressionless faces, having learned long ago that they could neither hide from Nate nor help John avoid his beating. All in all, fairly, typical.

Then Nate noticed some differences.

After he was done, Nate lay down in the bottom bunk. Administering a proper beating took some effort. When he looked over at John, he saw that Ed and S&W were attending to him, but in a way that would actually help. What’s more, Nate had a headache.

It started barely noticeable, in the back of his head. As time went on, it grew to encompass his world, until he felt like his head was being used as a drum. Then the body aches set in. When the guards dropped by and took John off to the infirmary, Nate tried to pretend he was asleep.

The next day, Nate still hurt, but not as badly as he had the day before. The worst part was that he was deathly afraid that Ed or SnW would mention his condition to everyone else. To his surprise, however, they kept quiet. Despite the discomfort, Nate managed as best he could and got through the day. There were a few raised eyebrows over his quietness, but he managed enough growls and dirty looks that people thought that he was just in a bad mood. Word had also gotten around about John.

It took a full week before Nate was really feeling better. Strangely enough, that coincided with John’s return from the infirmary.

When John got back, the four of them sat around and stared at each other. Nate noticed the bruises on John’s head and felt the corresponding places on his body. They seemed to ache a bit. Nate looked around at the others and they too were prodding themselves in the same areas.

This was going to make things difficult.

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Groupthink: the Lighter Side

An emerging telepathic group consciousness called the Coalition is born...in a prison for murderers and psychos. Does humanity have a future in a world run by a psychotic super-mind?

Table of Contents:

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7

Disclaimer:

All truly great writers do lots of research before writing their stories. This is one of the many reasons why I'm not a great writer. I have no clue if this story even lives in the same neighborhood as reality, I have no clue whatsoever what life is like in jail, and the only thing I know about the FBI is the factual reporting that I've seen in the X-Files.

I chose the name of Attica because I'm lazy and did not feel like coming up with a real name – most people will not recognize the name of a prison aside from Alcatraz, but that has an extremely specific meaning. Attica sort of sounds familiar, but most people can't place it. Or at least I can't. I think it is (or was) in upstate NY. I think it was where some famous prison riots occurred.

As with most of my stories, this one is not ready to be published…even on a web site. Given the glacial pace that I was editing it (e.g., none), I decided that it would be better to post it, and thereby gain the motivation to edit it, then it would be to wait until I had finished editing it.

Please email me with comments like "what the hell were trying to say here?!!" or "this makes no sense at all!" If you read the story first, it would be even better.

Avoid gnomes,

Whatever

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