The Prison Transfer - part 1 (caption) (Patreon)

Read part two here.

The cold gets to me before anything else does.

Gel, everywhere the gel touches, and it touches everywhere. Cold on my face and in the crease of my neck, where the stuff has pooled. Underneath it all the cradle is still warm, it's been cooking me for however long I've been down in it, and somewhere across my middle there's a line where the warm quits and the cold takes over. I find the line, lose it, find it again a thumb lower. The bed is running on battery. The heat goes out of it in steps and the line goes with it.

Cold down between my legs, on skin that has never once been out in the open air. I go past that one fast.

I've known this temperature once before, loading a doe into the bed of the truck in November. Hide cold enough to sting your palms. Heat still holding in the body underneath.

I stay on the line a long time. When I breathe, the gel lets go of my ribs somewhere with a small peel and takes hold again on the way down, once a breath, and I count breaths by it for a while. There's gel at my hairline too, and in my ears. When I move my forehead, the stuff cracks and holds and lets go slow, and I can hear it letting go up near my ear. It smells sharp and sweetish, medical. Breathe through my nose and it's up in there. Breathe through my mouth and it's the air I'm tasting.

I know this smell from the right side of it. I walked in here this morning with a coffee in my hand and signed the form on the clipboard and let a tech fill the pod with gel around me, and she talked the whole time about her sister's wedding. Forty minutes, she said. Two pods in this room, six feet apart. I lay down in the one by the door.

When I turn my head, hair pulls where it's stuck to the back of my neck, and there's a lot of it, soaked heavy, down past my shoulders. I've kept a buzz cut for twenty years. My head has never weighed anything before.

The weight on my chest shows up late, after the rest of me. I breathe in and it rises. I stop, and it keeps going, a half beat behind, and it holds that half beat every time. This has shape to it.

Flat on my back it isn't sitting where I'd have guessed. It's gone wide, out toward the arms, spread instead of stacked, and the gel lies cold across the whole top of it and colder at two points that have no business being points of their own. Two spots on the front of me have gone hard and gone separate and they're louder than anything else on me, and it isn't all the cold doing that. I worked a fence line one January at four in the morning with my coat open, pulling a man off a wire. Nothing on me ever did this.

Between my legs, the cold is still there. Nothing hanging.

My dick is gone.

I lie there and wait for it to come back. It doesn't come back. It didn't hurt going. There's a flat nothing now, and the gel is cold on both sides of it, cold in folds of skin that are new to me, and I can feel the cold finding them one at a time. My stomach goes over. I breathe through my mouth until it settles.

Here's the thing about carrying one. It never shuts up and you never hear it. It rides along in the car and sits through four-hour interviews. It takes the hit when some drunk lands a knee wrong, and you feel that for a while, and you don't think about it any of the rest of the time. It's the first thing you account for going into a cell with a man and the last thing you think about walking out. I'm thinking about it now.

I shift my hips to get my back settled and the whole arrangement down there moves wrong. Where I expect something to catch, nothing catches.

What's there instead, the gel tells me, because I'm not reaching down and I'm not looking. It's cold at the edge of something and the cold stops where the something starts, a clean line same as the one across my chest, and there's no mistaking the shape of an edge for anything else once you've felt one. There's an opening there and I can feel exactly where it starts. That's as far as the feeling goes and it's plenty. It's a hole. That's the word I've got for it. Nineteen years of writing the polite version of that word on forms and lying here it's a hole, and it's mine, and there's not one thing I can do about that from here.

I try the muscles I'd use to lift it. Nothing answers. The muscles are there.

I've booked men who lost fingers in presses. There's always a stretch in the interview where they keep looking down at the hand. I used to think that was shock.

I try looking down the length of myself to check. The chest is in the way of the looking. Past the chest there's amber light and gel and the edge of the shell and nothing I can do one thing with. I quit looking.

"Fuck," I say, out loud, to the empty room.

It comes out high, rough along the bottom of it. I say it again to be sure, and it comes out the same, out of my own chest, up through a throat that doesn't have the width mine has had my whole life. I run a count in my head, one through ten, to hear the numbers come out. All ten come out in the same voice. My own laugh would come out wrong too, and I don't try the laugh. I know every officer's voice on this side of the wall, and this one isn't any of them and it isn't mine. I go back to the line across my middle and give it everything I've got.

Behind my head, back in the housing, one relay clicks slow, then slower.

There's a scrape along the ceiling. I've been looking straight up at it since I came to and it took me until now to work out what's wrong with it. That's the tile a tech clipped with a ladder in April, and it sits over the pod by the wall, and the pod by the wall is not the one I was in.

So I'm in the other one.

Teague. Alma. Thirty-six, second-degree, twenty-two to life, ten years down. Nothing leaves that wing without my signature on the movement order, so my signature is on this. An hour ago I stood in that doorway with my hands in my pockets and watched a tech put her under. Then I went and lay down six feet away and let them do the same thing to me. I could pick this forearm out of a lineup.

They were going to take my disposition and put it in her. That's what the folder said in the second paragraph. Nineteen years and no use-of-force since 2015, and they wanted a copy of whatever it is in me that stops. But this isn't that.

So it ran backward, or it ran both ways at once, and I don't know which and it doesn't matter one bit from in here.

The room is on the backup strips, that flat amber they put in for the cameras. The count bell went before the power did. The bell, then the fans quitting mid-note, and since then, nothing but the relay and my own breathing. That's the last thing I have from before.

And there's nobody I can tell. I open my mouth to the first officer through that door and what he sees is an inmate doing twenty-two to life saying she's Lieutenant Ross. Best case he puts me face down on this deck with a knee in my back, and I know he does, because I trained him to.

Here's what the building is doing. I wrote half of it and drilled the rest until it ran without anybody thinking.

The count runs five minutes clean on a good day. This one isn't coming back clean. A dark wing reads as a break until it's proven otherwise. Doors drop on the tiers. Response stages at the west sally port, six men, then twelve. Dog truck rolls at minute six, north treeline first. I wrote that route. Route 9 shuts at the bridge inside the hour. Somewhere in there somebody works out the escape-response lieutenant hasn't checked in.

Every bit of it runs on my handwriting. None of it has me in it. Dana thinks I'm on the clock today, earning overtime for lying down in a pod.

While I run it, the warm keeps butting in. Low, across the front of me, down where the nothing is.

I go up for the lip of the shell. My hand closes on air a full hand's width short of where the edge lives. I've been reaching for things for forty-three years and I know how far my arms reach. I reach again, same plan, same air.

Third try, I aim long, past where the edge should be, and land metal. The grip is wrong too. I send a grip that's supposed to wrap, and what closes on the lip is narrow, thin across the knuckles, and the metal bites in sooner than it should. I don't look at the hand. I hold on.

Getting up happens in pieces. Weight over the arm, then the middle of me comes up, and the front of me arrives second, weight swinging forward where weight has never swung, pulling me off my own line. I stop halfway and let the room tilt and settle. The lip of the shell is higher off me than it was when I lay down in this thing. Same pod. Same room. The hair comes down off my neck and gets in my mouth. My knees have come in toward each other.

Where my weight lives has moved. It's low now, down in the hips, and when I lean to catch my balance the whole arrangement swings and I go with it. The lip of the shell digs in under my arm, in the soft of it, where nothing has ever had to take weight. The arm I'm braced on is shaking. The weight on my chest settles against it, warm side down.

I shift my shoulders to get my back off a rivet head, and a contact at the side of my neck peels loose and takes skin with it. Small rip. Bright sting, wet right behind it. And I'm glad of it. Sting is sting. I know sting. It's the first item in this room that came across with me from the other side of whatever happened.

Except the sting doesn't stay put. It runs, down the side of my neck and in under the collarbone, and it picks up heat along the way, and the heat goes low, lower than stings travel, and lands somewhere I've never had a somewhere. Adrenaline, I decide. They train that into you the first year. Adrenaline dumps heat and prickles through you. You learn not to lose your head when your body starts acting up on a call. I've been tased in training, twice, and both times I knew the whole shape of it inside a second. Cut on duty, twice, same thing. Then the sting is long gone and the heat has stayed, spread out flat along the crease of my hips, under the nothing.

The gel is cold and getting colder by the minute and this isn't. This is warm the way the inside of a person is warm, and it isn't running down off me, it's coming out of me, and it's been coming since before I opened my eyes. I put it with the ache and I leave the both of them where they are.

Low inside, past anywhere I could put a hand on, something has a slow ache going. Nineteen years of incident reports. I've got a word for every way a body can go bad on a man. Nothing in the kit covers this. It isn't pain. It sits there and keeps on. It's been down there since before I woke, near as I can tell.

The gel has gone warm again in the patches where I've been lying longest, and I can feel every place it touches me at once. It lets go an inch at a time when I move. It lets go along the small of my back and I feel it at the nape of my neck. I want out of the pod. The want is all the way down, no thinking in it. I'm not sure getting out is the whole of it. I don't sort it. I watch the door.

Sound comes through the door in pieces and I can't build it. A gate rolling, a big one, west gate by the track noise. Boots, plenty of them, no cadence. Officers run in step even when the place is burning down, it's drilled in past thinking, and these boots aren't in step. A woman's voice, huge, riding over the top of everything, words I can't get. Then metal going down a stairwell, ringing at every step, and glass somewhere close, then farther. A horn, short bursts, somebody's hand on it. Under everything, the tiers are awake and loud about it. Give me a disturbance from the control desk and I can take it apart by ear, but not here.

I've had one ear on the other cradle since I worked out which pod I'm in. It stops being quiet. I get my head around far enough to see it. My body is sitting up in it. Legs over the side, then on its feet, my shoulders, my walk, and it goes out the door into the boot noise without looking back.

Then the door is full of women.

Three of them, moving fast, and I know all three, and I know all three off Teague's sheet. Odum and Fanning and the Salas girl. I've read their names in a stack with hers on top of it. They didn't come down this corridor by accident. Knowing all of that does me no good from inside a pod.

Odum's jacket has a temper in it going back years, and her jaw is doing the thing jaws do when a plan's gone sideways and the owner hasn't found which part yet. She's the one running this, whatever this is, and she's running it hot. Fanning comes in last. Her eyes do the room and then come back and do me again, top to bottom, unhurried about it, and I've watched a thousand officers run that exact sweep and I've never been inside it before. Six years celled together, if the housing sheets are right. The hair on my arms is standing up.

"There she is," Odum says, to the room, not to me. "Teague. Up. We got a window and it's burning, so move your ass."

Salas is behind them somewhere, favoring an arm, saying she's fine and nobody needs to wait, and nobody's waiting.

"Nobody waits," Odum says. "That's the whole plan. Move it, Teague."

It takes me the length of the name to work out the name is pointed at me. Hands go in under my arms, one each side, and they haul. The grip lands on skin that isn't ready to be gripped, and something runs through me, fast, low, no warning. I'm angry about it before I know what it is. The hands that close on my arms are big. Mine were bigger.

And I come up off that cradle like nothing at all. Two of them, no effort in it, on their way past. I've gone two hundred and ten since I was thirty, and the last man who tried to move me off a spot I didn't feel like leaving needed four others and a team with a shield. These two do it one-handed apiece and neither of them thinks about it after. Leads rip out of the housing behind me. A couple of contacts come away. A couple stay stuck and sting sideways. Gel comes off me in strings and hits the deck.

My feet hit the deck and the deck is cold. The knees go inward and I let them. Fanning's hand stays on my arm and I can feel all five of her fingers, each one on its own. She comes up close, puts her mouth by my ear, and her breath lands on my neck where the gel already is.

"Teague," she says.

There's no bend in it anywhere. It's an instruction with the name on the front of it.

"Yeah," I say.

It comes out steady. It comes out in the voice. Nobody blinks.

Fanning still has my arm. She hasn't let go of it since the pod, and she's holding it the way you hold something you've held before.