Chapter 4 -- Getting Into It

Assistant Warden Julian Barnes was not having a good evening.

He had worked full-time and then some for the past several days, preparing for an upcoming state audit of the prison. What was more, Barnes had to stay at work especially late this particular night to meet with the family of Yolanda Perez, the prisoner who had committed suicide in her cell earlier that week. Then, two hours before the meeting, one of the maintenance staff burst into Barnes' office to inform him that the main water pipe in the basement had burst. There would be no water pressure anywhere in the building for several hours while the pipe was replaced. Barnes dropped everything to supervise the repairs himself, knowing that, while prisoners could go without a lot of things, nothing pissed them off like missing their already-infrequent showers. There was also the question of how the main cell block was going to smell in a few hours because the cell toilets couldn't be flushed.

With the problem under at least partial control, Barnes hurried to his meeting. Halfway to the visitors' lounge, it suddenly hit him that he had wanted to look at Perez's prison record again, just to refresh his memory about where she was from, how long she had been in prison, and other data that might be useful to him in his conversation with the deceased's parents and siblings.

Barnes didn't want to go back to his office; that would make him late to his meeting by several minutes, and he didn't want to keep a grieving family waiting. Fortunately, the main prison records were all stored under password protection on the Fuller server. Barnes could access them from any networked computer in the facility. And, luckily, Dr. Reynolds' office was just up the hall. Barnes didn't think she would mind.

He knocked quickly, on the off chance that the psychologist hadn't gone home yet. As he waited, he began to fish for his master key, but he heard movement inside the office.

Several seconds later, someone opened the door. It was not Dr. Reynolds.
Rather, it was a smallish woman in her 40s with short blonde hair and downcast hazel eyes. She wore the uniform of the cleaning staff.

"Sorry, sorry," the woman said in a small voice. Her thick accent sounded eastern European. "I did not mean to lock, it close behind me."

"It's all right," said Barnes. He looked at the woman's ID tag, which read "Laina Aronofsky".

Barnes normally made it his business to know, by sight if not by name, everyone who worked in the prison. It was partly a matter of security -- it was not unheard of for prisoners to escape disguised as staff -- and partly a matter of respect. Barnes' mother had worked as a cleaning woman in a highrise office building. When she retired after more than twenty years, half the executives whose offices she had cleaned every day didn't even know her name.

"How long have you been working here?" Barnes asked.

"Just two days," the woman answered, still looking towards the floor. "I am-" she searched for a word "-substitute. I work different places."

"Right," Barnes said. He looked at his watch; he needed to hurry up if he wanted to make his meeting.

"I just need to get on the computer for a minute," Barnes said, walking over to Dr. Reynolds' desk. Oddly, the doctor had left her computer on. Even stranger, Reynolds had left the local directory open, which contained a listing of all of her case files by prisoner ID number. One of the files was highlighted, and there was a text box open which read, "Enter password". Barnes was pleased that Reynolds was taking precautions to protect her confidential files, but thought it strange that she had left the computer on with the file list just sitting there on the screen.

Lacking Reynolds' personal password, Barnes couldn't open the file. He could see from the directory listing, however, that the file was unusual in two ways. First, Barnes recognized the file number -- 7302, Faith's number. Second, the listed file size was ten times that of most of the other files in the directory. Even 7583, Sonya's file, wasn't half as large.

Barnes checked his watch again. There was no time to dick around. He quickly opened Yolanda Perez's prison record and printed it out. He could read it on the way to the visitor's lounge.

"Nice to meet you," he said to the cleaning woman as he exited Reynolds' office. "Nice to meet you, also," she said clumsily. She grabbed Reynolds' wastebasket and emptied it into the large trash bag on her cleaning cart.

Barnes walked fast to his meeting and put the incident out of his mind.

-----

The next morning, the day after their meeting with the warden, Faith and Sonya discussed how they would carry out the warden's plan of having them be seen together to attract members to their 'gang'. They decided to try hanging out at the gym. Both women enjoyed working out, and there were always lots of other prisoners there.

Faith was stretching while Sonya puffed away on the leg press machine. For a non-Slayer, she could lift a lot. Faith tended to avoid the weights herself, since she couldn't really use her full strength without looking like the circus strong woman, but she liked running on the treadmill and, of course, working out with the heavy punching bag.

As she pulled her arm behind her head in a shoulder stretch, Faith noticed a woman -- young, Hispanic, and obviously new to Fuller -- putting some weights on the bench press bar. Not too many, Faith noticed, probably because she didn't have anyone to spot her.

The woman lay down on the bench, not noticing that there were three other prisoners closing in around her. Faith recognized them as members of Fuller's resident white-trash gang. Poor, skanky, and badly tattooed, they were rumored to have ties to militia and white-supremacist groups on the outside.

One of the gang girls leaned over the bench at its top end, so that her hair, half bottle-blonde and half dark roots, hung in the prone inmate's face.
"Hey," she said. "This is our bench."

"I was here first," the woman on the bench responded, with an obvious effort to sound braver than she was.

The other two gang girls moved in on either side of their intended victim. Each grabbed her by one armpit and hoisted the woman roughly to her feet. The first woman punched her in the gut, making her exhale sharply. She would have doubled over were it not for the two inmates holding her arms.

The ex-blonde prisoner pulled back for another blow that would surely break the Latina's nose. Her intended victim squeezed her eyes shut in anticipation.

But the punch never landed. Instead, the woman opened her eyes to see her assailant on her knees. Faith was standing behind the gang girl, twisting the woman's arm behind her back with one hand and holding her by the hair with the other.

Sonya walked up to the other two gangbangers, who were still holding the new inmate by her upper arms.

"You want a workout?" Sonya said, raising her fists. "'Cause you'll get one if you don't let go of her right this damn minute. Whole lot of pain, not a lot of gain."

The two gang girls looked at each other, uncertain. On the one hand, it would be two against one. On the other, they knew who Sonya was; the story of her subdual of the crazed prisoner in the cafeteria had rapidly become local legend.

Their indecision was resolved by a painful grunt from their cohort, whose arm Faith had just given an extra twist. The two women let go of their captive and backed off. Once they were out of fighting range, Faith pulled their comrade to her feet and shoved her towards them.

"Now take off," Faith said, putting her hand on the victim's shoulder. "This gal's our new friend, and we don't want her taking any of your bad hair care advice."

The three women walked off.

"You OK?" Faith said to the new prisoner, who was still gasping a bit from the gut shot she'd taken.

"I think so," the woman breathed. "Thank you."

"No prob. I'm Faith, and this is Sonya."

"Gloria," the woman said.

"You wanna hang with us?" Sonya asked. "We can show you how to keep things like that from happening. Later, when you feel up to it, I mean."

"That'd be great," Gloria answered, sitting back down on the bench to get her breath.

Sonya moved closer to Faith and pointed across the room to where the three gang girls were standing, talking to a fourth member of their crew. "Those girls?" Sonya said. "They're gonna be back later. With friends, sisters, cousins, everybody."

"Those hicks? Their sisters ARE their cousins," Faith responded. "But yeah, we're gonna have to kick some ass. Until they stab me in the back, anyway."

"Can't happen," Sonya said. "'Cause that's where I'll be."

Faith smiled, just a little. Because it wouldn't be cool to start screaming or crying over having a best friend for the first time in her life.

-----

The next morning, Faith had another appointment with Dr. Reynolds, who had told Faith that she wanted to see her twice a week. Faith couldn't believe that the psychologist, with a couple thousand prisoners to deal with, could afford to spend that much time with just one, but Faith wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Her first session with Reynolds had had its painful moments, but she had walked out feeling strangely liberated. Maybe sharing your problems with someone else wasn't always a bad idea.

"Faith," Dr. Reynolds said as Faith took a seat in Reynold's office. "How are you today?"

"Pretty good," Faith said. "Got started on the warden's project today. Me and Sonya got our first new recruit."

"How did you do it?" the doctor asked. Faith explained about the confrontation with the three gang girls.

"That must have been difficult for you," Reynolds said.

"What?"

"Holding back. Not beating the daylights out of her."

"It- It was, kind of. I mean, I'm grabbing her from behind, and my first instinct is to...choke her. Or beat her head against something. Just...just..." Faith paused. "Just make her go away."

"Go away?" the doctor asked.

"I mean, she's just going to do it again to somebody else, right? And if she's dead, she can't."

"You make it sound very simple."

Faith took a breath and exhaled it. "It was. 'Til I remembered that Angel could have made the same decision about me."

The doctor nodded.

"I mean, who'd blame him, right?" Faith went on. "After what I did to him and Wesley. Angel could have killed me; I would've let him. I was in total self-destruct mode.

"But he didn't. He...knew what it was like, I guess. To not be able to live with yourself."

Reynolds said, "It is a powerful comfort to feel that someone truly understands you."

"Yeah. It really was."

"Was that how it was with you and Richard Wilkins?"

Faith's chest tightened.

"What- what do you know about him?" Faith asked nervously.

"Just that he was Mayor of Sunnydale, and that you worked for him for a time. And that he was the mastermind of some sort of criminal conspiracy."

Faith looked away from the doctor's gaze. "I don't want to talk about him," she said.

"Faith," the doctor said carefully, "if he did something to you that you don't want to discuss-"

"No! He never did anything to me! He was-" She stopped. "I'm just...not ready yet."

The doctor seemed to realize that she wasn't going to get any further with Faith on that subject. They spent the rest of the session discussing Faith's new friendship with Sonya.

But, for the rest of the day, Faith couldn't help thinking about the Mayor. How much he cared about her. And how much he frightened her.

-----

The next morning, the three gang girls brought four of their friends to confront Faith and Sonya when both women were working at their jobs in the prison laundry. They brought makeshift weapons -- shank knives, part of a mop handle, half a brick in a pillowcase. They chased off the other prisoners working the laundry, leaving Faith and Sonya to face them alone.

The fight lasted thirty seconds. At the end, both Faith and Sonya had a few bruises, and Sonya had cut her forearm a little taking a shank out of an attacker's hand. The seven gang girls, on the other hand, were unconscious. Those who weren't knocked out pretended they were, knowing that to do otherwise would be useless.

-----

Warden Andrew Teague met with Faith and Sonya that afternoon. Their meetings always took place in secret now; Faith and Sonya were to tell anyone who asked that they had been doing extra duty shifts cleaning the furnace room. If other prisoners knew that Faith and Sonya were backed by the administration, it would only bring the gangs down harder on the two women.

Teague was very pleased, both with Faith and Sonya's defeat of the seven gang girls and with the fact that they had recruited two new members to their own gang afterwards. Furthermore, the story was spreading through the prison like wildfire, which would only attract more prisoners to Faith and Sonya's sides.

"Now," the warden warned, "it starts to get dangerous."

"Oh, it STARTS to get dangerous now?" Sonya said with a touch of sarcasm. "Great, 'cause seven-on-two when they've got weapons and we don't was just like the 'It's A Small World' ride at Disneyland."

The warden ignored Sonya's comment. "You need to get some more members quickly, because the major gang leaders are going to start feeling threatened by you, and they're going to want to stamp you out before you get too big for them to control."

"OK," Faith said, "we'll crank up the recruitment. Too bad we can't give out free t-shirts with every new membership."

"Remember," Teague said, "you're selling safety -- a chance to go straight without being hassled. More than that, though, you're selling community. The women in here will feel better about themselves if they think they're a part of something bigger."

The warden looked at his watch. "Well, I see it's nearly dinnertime. How about you two have dinner with me and Mr. Barnes? I believe the staff cafeteria is having pepperoni pizza tonight, which I think might be better than the stew -- or what the state is calling stew these days -- in GP."

They didn't need to be asked twice.

-----

A week passed. Faith and Sonya recruited several more members into their group, and the gangs seemed to be leaving them alone for the moment. Sonya and Faith knew it wouldn't last, but they were happy to have a break from brawling.

There was one dark bit of news: Sarina Thompson, the terrified woman whom Faith had stopped from killing a prison guard, had died in the hospital. Rumor had it that her liver had failed, though her drug tests came back negative.

That Friday evening, Julian Barnes was knocking off for the day, finally having finished all of his preparations for the upcoming audit. He was looking forward to a nice dinner with his wife, after which they would probably have some cold beers and just relax in front of the tube. He vaguely remembered that there would be a Lakers' game on.

Barnes locked his office door, then started down the hall to sign out at the main guard station. He stopped when he heard noise behind him.

It was the short, blonde cleaning woman, pushing her cart down the hall. Barnes hadn't run into her since the first time they'd met, and he turned around to say hello, but she had already hurried out of sight.

Barnes' many years in the field of corrections had given him a good sense of what suspicious behavior looked like. There was something about the cleaning woman's seeming avoidance of him that bothered him. He turned and went back town the hall towards where he had just seen her. She was gone, but her cleaning cart was at the end of the hall, near the door to the stairwell to the basement. The door had locked automatically behind the woman. Barnes opened it with his master key and proceeded cautiously down the stairs.

The main corridor in the basement was gray and quiet, lit weakly by florescent lights. Barnes saw the doors to the furnace and boiler rooms and the storage areas, but one door in particular caught his eye -- the door to the old solitary confinement unit. The new unit was above-ground; there were plans to make the old one into a gym for the staff. Julian thought that was kind of fitting, exchanging one form of torture for another.

The reason this particular door had caught Barnes' attention, however, was that it appeared to have a brand-new lock on it. Julian tried his master key; it wouldn't even go into the lock, let alone turn. Which meant that the lock wasn't prison-issue.

Julian turned around to go back upstairs. He thought about getting security to come down and break the door open, but thought better of it; if he waited until the morning, he could get the prison locksmith to come down and open it. Or at least explain why he had put it there.

Barnes opened the door to the stairwell, then was stopped by a stinging sensation in his back. He turned around to see what had happened; he saw the figure of a large man down the hall, but Barnes' vision was too blurred to see who it was. Every muscle in Barnes' body weakened; he sank to the floor, trying to call for help, but unable to produce more than a squeak.

The last thing he felt were big hands under his arms, dragging him away.

END CHAPTER 4
END CHAPTER 4