Chapter 35

Ziad poked at the food on his tray.

"Hey, you gonna eat that?"

Even though Ziad wasn't fluent in Indonesian yet, far from it really, a short jab with a fork towards uneaten food by a very large man followed by a question is a universal language.

"Yes," he answered in Indonesian.

The big man continued speaking, but naturally Ziad didn't know what was going on. He became angrier. Some of the men sitting around Ziad grew agitated.

The big man flashed a tattoo at Ziad like it meant something.

Ziad stood up, picked up his tray, and began moving to another table.

The man came at Ziad like a bulldozer, grey prison fatigues swishing. Ziad dodged the first punch but didn't escape the second.

The tray clattered to the floor, spilling food across the stained tile floor.

The other prisoners stood around and watched. The guards were nowhere to be found.

Ziad reeled from the punch, only to be caught in the gut by the huge man's knee.

"Ow, shit..." he coughed. The big man swung his arm again, and Ziad ducked underneath it.

He reached up his left sleeve and pulled out a metal fork that had been hidden there since his first meal and held it close in his right hand, concealed from the big man. Ziad let the man charge again, ducking into the area between his arms.

The big man then ran his throat and eyes into Ziad's fork at least twenty or thirty times.

The big man collapsed to the ground, air hissing and gurgling in the bloody mess that was his neck.

Ziad wiped bits of eye and flesh from his fork. He ripped the man's shirt and used the scrap to wipe blood from his eyes.

Bejo appeared from the crowd and clapped twice.

"Your first kill. Congratulations. I believe a tattoo is in order."

"Tattoo?"

Bejo took Ziad by the arm and began leading him through the damp halls of the prison.

"For every kill in this place, you get a tattoo. I have none. Most have none. So I congratulate you. I think they will respect you a little now. You may have noticed how the men with the most tattoos aren't messed with?"

Ziad had noticed this.

"Yes, I have. So, you're thinking I should rack up as many kills as possible?"

"That was my line of thinking, yes. You've been here only two weeks and you have a kill. I sense a lot of promise in you. How long is your sentence for, anyway?"

"Twenty years to life. No parole."

Bejo hissed appreciatively.

"My sympathy. I can get you out earlier- probably four of five years."

"I need to get out sooner. I'm talking months here, Bejo."

"Hmmm... That will be difficult. I am released in five months. I will talk to my people after that."

"Fair enough."

They had arrived at a man's cell. A totally nondescript man of unerring normallness. He had equipment for a tattoo.

"Well..." said Bejo, "What do you want?"

"Um... I want barbed wire around my bicep."

"Seriously? Everybody and their grandmother has that tattoo."

"Just kidding. How 'bout my name in Arabic on my arm?"

Ziad got his first tattoo.

Ziad got his second tattoo rather more purposefully.

Let me set the stage.

This prison is way, way out in the sticks, the boonies. It was built in and around an old Dutch military baracks, so the core building is a horseshoe-shaped monstrosity of brick and stone. It is inside the three walls that the prison has its exercise yard. This yard is always muddy. No grass ever grows, and it rains enough that the mud virtually never dries up.

Bejo had given him a target and asked Ziad to plan and execute.

The target was a man named Yayan. He'd killed one of Bejo's friends years ago, before prison. Bejo wanted him dead.

Ziad complied.

One day, during their thirty-minute exercise period, it was raining. Heavily. The mud was thick and viscous with huge puddles.

The prisoners huddled under the small sheet-metal shelter built against one of the walls of the prison, unwilling to risk the mud and rain to get their exercise. Ziad spotted his target leaning against one of the shelter's support poles- on the edge of the crowd closest to the mud and rain.

Ziad slowly made his way through the crowd of sweaty prisoners until he was standing behind Yayan.

The guards stood at the far end of the yard, under another- smaller- shelter. They weren't watching the prisoners and were instead preoccupied with a dirty magazine.

Yayan lit a cigarette and stared forlornly into the rain.

Ziad flexed his fingers. He counted to himself, three... two... one!
He kicked the back of Yayan's left knee, causing him to sprawl forward into the mud.

Ziad jumped on his back and pushed his face deep into the mud while pinning his arms and his legs.

Yayan struggled for about a minute before shuddering once and going limp.

Ziad quickly scooped mud and piled it on top of Yayan's body. When combined with the rain, this quickly buried the corpse beneath the mud, leaving no trace of the murder.

Ziad stood up and got back under the shelter. The guards glanced once back at the prisoners before returning to the magazine.

Ziad pulled a cigarette from his pocket and attempted to light it. Alas, the cigarette was soaked through with rancid water and would not light.

Probably a good thing, too, 'cause Ziad didn't smoke.

When Ziad wasn't sleeping, eating, or using the necessaries, he was working out and training with Mad Dog.

Most people take years to learn a martial art. Most people don't have the same sort of free time Ziad now had.

Ziad usually spent ten hours a day training.

So he had the basics down within a month.

Within two months he was getting a fair amount of respect. He had three more tattoos by that point, slowly removing Bejo's opposition in the prison.

He had a nickname now. Ishmael.
Ziad liked that. Admittedly, he was the one to suggest it.

Ziad was learning about killing in a way he'd never had the opportunity to do before. His earlier kills had all been in the heat of the moment, or against somebody who was clearly in the wrong.

Here, not so much. He was killing because he was told to do so. He was killing not with hot anger, but with cold rationality.

He was learning to kill for no other reason than the fact that he could.

Ziad quickly realized that this is not exactly what most teenagers do during their summer to "find themselves."

Author's note:

I was having a lot of trouble with this chapter, so I decided to just publish the first bit of what I wrote so I can get it over with and work on the rest.

I'm thinking about briefly transferring the bulk of the narrative (the next chapter or two, maybe more- we'll see) to Parvati, because I think Ziad will be spending quite some time in this prison, and I don't want to ignore what's going on over in little old England.

Plus I want to write about Parvati kicking ass, because I like seeing secondary characters become primary characters with significantly more badass involved. It'd be like a spin-off series of Star Wars movies based entirely on Lando Calrissian. Wait, holy shit, can we make that a thing?

I ask you- the reader (can I be so optimistic as to say readers?)- is my proposal acceptable?