The Long Haul Read online

Excerpt from

  THE GUARD: Campground Stories

  Inside the truck I had been assigned it was warm and dry, but the air was getting a little bit close. The windows were so fogged up that they offered very little visibility on this rainy night, so I decided to roll down the window and let the wind defog my windshield.

  Unfortunately in doing this, I failed to notice the giant mud puddle I was approaching. As the mud and stagnant water flew through the open window and hit me square in the face, one thought raced through my mind: I hate this stupid unpredictable weather! The only things that reached my lips were a bunch of four letter words that would have made a sailor blush. Now I would have to report back to my captain in the morning looking like some kind of swamp creature.

  As an armed guard, it was important to keep myself clean and neat looking, because my appearance reflected to the public that I meant business. In this business it was very important to gain the respect and support of the public, because I didn’t have the authority to arrest people like the police did, even though I carried a gun in a holster on my side.

  Vehicle patrol was one of the best posts to get, because I could do almost anything I wanted within reason. If I got bored, I would drive around discovering new paths through the woods. This was what I had been doing for the last hour when I hit that mud puddle. By the time I hit the puddle, I was hopelessly lost in the woods. Sure, I knew I was in the same woods that I had patrolled a thousand times before, but everything looked different at night. The headlights on the truck only made the shadows longer and the forest seem deeper. The only way out, I figured, was to keep turning off on different side roads and hope that they would eventually lead me to something I recognized. It was on one of these side roads that I came across a huge wooden gate crossing the road. Now by huge, I mean, this was no ordinary farmer’s gate. This gate was enormous!

  If I had stood up on top of the truck, I still would have had a hard time reaching the top of the gate. This was the kind of thing that made my skin crawl. Realizing suddenly, how alone and lost I was, I started to shiver, even though it was nearly ninety degrees outside. I told myself to man up and stop being such a baby, but it didn’t help much.

  Through some irresistible urge to do bodily harm to myself that I had no control over, I got out of my truck and grabbed my flashlight and proceeded to walk toward the gate. They say that curiosity killed the cat, but if you are never curious, then you will never learn anything. I am naturally curious, sometimes even nosey, so I often explore the unknown, even if my senses tell me not to. As I made my way toward the gate by jumping over the mud puddles, I reached down and patted the butt of my .38 special police revolver. It made me feel a little more secure, but not much. The holsters they issued us were made for the sole purpose of making a guard think twice before attempting to pull his gun out. This was because it was absolutely painful to pull the dang thing out. As I neared the gate, I noticed a large chain with a lock attached to it lying on the ground. The chain had been snapped, and had fallen from the gate when someone or something had tried to go in or out of the gate. Pulling the gate open proved to be as easy as pulling a bulldozer out of a mud bog with bare hands. Finally, after tremendous effort, the big gate swung open enough that I could squeeze through. The gate looked as if someone had chopped the tops off of a bunch of pine trees and bolted the trunks together.

  When I brought my flashlight around, I noticed about ten log cabins scattered around the area. It looked as if this had been a campground at one time, or something like that. Why I hadn’t heard of this place before hand, I had no idea. All of a sudden, flashbacks of old horror movies ran through my head. Was some knife-wielding psychopath going to come out of the woodwork and turn me into something that resembled three-day-old meatloaf, or was I just getting paranoid?

  Excerpt from Getaway

  “Another night shift,” he muttered to himself as if it was the most tragic thing that had occurred in the past decade to anyone on earth. Tory had been doing a lot of talking to himself lately, because there really wasn’t any one else to talk to. Nighttime was a very lonely time in G section because it was the most isolated section of the prison. G section was the west wing of the penitentiary and was reserved for inmates deemed criminally insane, and too dangerous to be housed with the regular inmates. Most of the inmates in G section would never live to see society again, and were well aware of this. Because of this, no one wanted to go near that section of the prison. To say that the other officers were reluctant to do the job Tory was assigned tonight would be an understatement, and this assignment was usually given to people who had messed up or made the supervisor mad. Tory fell under the first category.

  In the time that he had been working as a detention officer at the penitentiary, Tory had earned a reputation of being a fighter. He had been in more fights in his career than even the most hardened criminals there. Most of it was because he had been in the right place at the right time. Some folks think that when you try to break up a fight between two or more inmates they will be glad to oblige. I am here to tell you, they could not be farther from the truth thought Tory. Usually, as soon as the inmates saw an officer coming toward them, they would move the fight to the officer. Unfortunately, the inmate can hit the officer and get away with it, but the officer gets in trouble if he hits the inmates. Well, that is why he was working the graveyard shift at the psycho ward.

  The psycho ward, as the officers called it, was set up differently than the rest of the prison. It was set up like the isolation ward, with a long hallway with doors on both sides facing the middle. There were no windows in the cells, and some of the cells had padding on the walls, ceiling, and floors. These cells were reserved for the inmates who were classified as an extreme danger to themselves or others.

  “Head Banger,” as he was aptly nicknamed, was an inmate who occupied one of the padded cells. This was his nickname, because for some reason he felt the compulsion to bang his head into every solid object in sight. When he was let out for exercise, he had to wear a helmet strapped to his head so he wouldn’t do himself in on some solid object.

  Most of the other mental cases had nicknames pertaining to their personalities as well. The ones Tory knew about, besides Head Banger, were: Slasher, Doc, Swinger, Crybaby and Diablo.

  “Slasher,” as he was called, was diagnosed as being, “psychotic with homicidal tendencies.” Given anything sharper than a stick of butter, he would slash out at anyone in sight. It was rumored that he had killed twelve people out of prison and eight inmates while in prison. When in court, he had tried to kill his own attorney with a ball-point pen. The story goes, that he started out as a door-to-door salesman selling cutlery, and one day when a customer told him to get lost, something inside of him had snapped. He consequently pulled a cleaver out of his demonstration set, and demonstrated its many uses on the customer’s body. The rest of the day until he was caught, he made several such demonstrations on customers that wouldn’t buy his cutlery, using a different piece of cutlery each time.

  “Doc,” on the other hand, was diagnosed as being a delusional schizophrenic. Doc, had about five known personalities. One of which was that of a medical physician. This is what landed him in jail, because he had decided to practice without a license, and consequently killed five “patients” on the operating table because he didn’t use anesthesia (at least not in the conventional sense). Doc would “anesthetize” his patients with a ball peen hammer.

  “Swinger” was an interesting case. He was diagnosed as “paranoid” and earned his nickname because he tried to hang himself several times. When Swinger was a teenager, he had begun to experiment with drugs. He had started out in middle school, smoking marijuana with his friends. They would cut class and walk to a nearby bridge and get stoned under the bridge, while listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. At lunchtime, they would sneak back to the school and sit through the rest of their classes, which became much more interesting when they were stoned.

 
In high school, Swinger had tried harder drugs like Quaaludes, cocaine, and LSD. It became more difficult to cut class, so he would go to lunch with his friends and they would get stoned and return to the school wasted for their fourth period classes. Swinger had Spanish class for fourth period, and his Spanish teacher was a fat German woman.

  One day when Swinger had returned to class after lunch, as he was looking at his teacher, her face had started to melt. When he regained his senses several hours later, he was in the school clinic. He had the vague taste of chalk in his mouth, and was told by the school nurse that he had emptied the pencil sharpener down his pants and had tried to eat the chalkboard erasers. Needless to say, he had been suspended that day.

  Swinger had never returned to school, and had started using drugs so often, that he had to steal things and sell them for money to pay for the drugs. One day, his drug dealer had sold him a “dirty joint” (a marijuana cigarette soaked in PCP). Swinger had smoked the joint just before breaking into a house that he thought was vacant. Unfortunately, a family was sleeping in the house at the time, and as the drugs had warped his sense of reality, he had believed that everyone was a monster that wanted to kill him. When the police had found him the next morning, Swinger had been dancing in the front yard naked with intestines draped around his neck like a macabre Mardi Gras necklace.

  Angel Dust had destroyed what remained of Swinger’s psyche, and he had never returned to reality. Every half hour Tory checked his room to make sure he wasn’t swinging again.

  “Cry baby” was a classic example of “Manic Depressive” personality. He was the victim of a homosexual rape by his father as a boy. One day, he had come home from school to find his father drunk, and screaming about the dirty dishes he had left in the sink. When Cry Baby had run to his room to get away from his father, his father had kicked in the door and raped him. Cry baby had not told anyone about the rape, because he was so embarrassed and ashamed, but a month later, he had found his father passed out on the living room sofa, and had cut his privates off with a knife. His father woke up screaming, and watched dumbly as Cry Baby had dropped his father’s privates into the sink and turned on the food disposal. His mother had discovered what her husband had done, and had confessed to the crime when the police arrived. Cry Baby had been placed in foster homes, but he had never recovered from the emotional damage of this. He had killed three foster fathers until he was caught. He was an emotional mess, and all he did all day and night was sit in a corner of his cell and cry.

  “Diablo” (or “Devil”) was the most dangerous one of all. He was diagnosed as an “extremely dangerous psychopath.” When Diablo was only eight years old, he had butchered his mother, father, and his five sisters with a curling iron, an axe and his father’s revolver while they were asleep. He spent eleven years in the state mental ward for boys, and escaped. When he was apprehended six months later, he was found living like an animal in a shack full of dead bodies. Since that night as a child when he killed his family, he had never uttered a single word, and now he just sat staring off into space. Although he seemed peaceful enough, his eyes betrayed him. All the hate and evil only a devil could posses lay waiting behind those black eyes.

  Every time Tory made a pass by the cells in G section, he could feel the danger lurking behind those closed doors, and this scared him, even if he would never admit it. All that stood between Tory and the inmates was a wall and several doors. The darkness wasn’t exactly reassuring either, because shadows moved, and dark passages looked like open doors. The section was so quiet at night, that every little sound seemed amplified hundreds of times. Every step he took echoed down the hallway.

  Every few minutes he would ask himself if he had really locked the doors, and if the doors were shut all the way, and if there was anyone lurking behind him ready to pounce. He could imagine that animal Diablo crouching behind his door like a tiger waiting to devour his prey.

  After a while, Tory relaxed a little, especially when he realized that all of the doors were closed, and things seemed quiet. He sat down in a chair at the end of the corridor and started to read a book that he had brought. Tory thought that maybe he could keep his mind off his paranoid fears and kill some time as well. As often happens with a good book, however, Tory lost himself in the story, and his mind started to wander. A sharp pain in the top of his head snapped him out of this trance-like state. Tory tried to stand up, but suddenly his legs were made of Jell-o and he weight a thousand pounds. He looked down at his hands and noticed that his lap was covered with a pool of red sticky stuff, blood. Yuck, he thought as his world started turning red and watery before his eyes. Suddenly, the floor came up to meet him and the familiar smell of floor wax filled his nostrils as the darkness surrounded him.

  A dark figure walked down the hall twirling a key ring on his finger and chuckling to himself. Then, like a cloud of smoke, he blended into the shadows and disappeared.

  Thank you for reading books on Archive.BookFrom.Net
Share this book with friends