"The Bulwark's Shadow" - A Novel in Progress via Steemit (Part I, Chapter 7)
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I'm posting up the chapters of this uncompleted book as I hope the Steemit community might offer up its criticism (which would force me to finish it, honestly). Started in 2008, this was my first foray into novel writing and was my undergraduate thesis required to graduate. The story is about an executioner in the not-too-distant future. Executioners are highly trained individuals with extensive educations built to help them execute their prisoners in the exact same manner that the prisoner's victims died. This is called the law of retaliation or lex talionis; you may know it better as "eye for an eye."
Because I was also getting my degree in philosophy, I wanted to explore the ethics involved. While I feel I'm a better writer now and could certainly expand most of this book, I also really enjoy criticism as I'm usually too close to the work to see what's working and what's not (though in this case, there's plenty that I feel is not working). So please...feel free to criticize the work if you'd like, but be constructive about it. Simply saying "this part isn't good" doesn't tell me much; don't hesitate to tell me why it's not good or offer up possible alternatives to make it better.
Thanks in advance!
Previous Sections/Chapters:
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter One
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Two
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Three
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Four
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Five
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Six
Three days passed and Friday crept up on us like the flu. No one from the courthouse had gotten back to me about the file and I was stuck proverbially twiddling my thumbs as I waited and decided to leave the office for a walk around the prison.
It’s a monument to efficiency, this prison. Two people could barely walk down most of the hallways side by side and the ceilings were low. It was rare to find other people in the walkways most hours of the day, so I had my solitude for a bit. I had been so withdrawn that I almost walked into a pair of NV’s quietly talking to themselves in one of the corners of the hallways. Normally I’d give them a quiet look and they would’ve scattered, but today I managed a weak “excuse me” and kept on. I could feel their bewildered looks pierce my back as I kept walking.
I didn’t stroll often, but I always found myself at the execution room whenever it happened. Janus happened to be in there today cleaning up. The NV’s hadn’t come to pick up the body yet (probably the two I’d passed in the hallways), so I walked in and looked at his technique. Janus was one of the unsung heroes of our department. Incredibly skillful with a blade of any size and way more meticulous than any one of us, he was usually given the longer, more detailed executions. He was still a rookie by most accounts, but had graduated at the top of his class and wasn’t arrogant about it. He was tall like me, but lanky and possessed a wiry strength I’d witnessed only once in the six years he had been here.
One of the larger Violents had broken the leather straps on his gurney before being wheeled into the chamber and managed to block the scrawnier NV’s with it by overturning the gurney in the hallway. Janus and I had been on the other side thankfully and, being the bigger of the two of us, I tried to tackle the guy. He ran at me, pinned me to the wall and threw me to the floor. I looked up to scream a warning at Janus, but he just stood in the hallway, smiling. The Violent ran right at him, trying to overpower him and Janus knelt down with his shoulder in the guy’s abdomen, grabbed the him by his tunic, lifted him in a Judo style move, slammed him against the ceiling and then fell backwards using the guy’s momentum against him. While the Violent laid there out of breath, Janus put him in a chokehold and knocked him out.
He sat on the guy’s arms until we could get a new gurney into the hallway safely and eventually rolled him into the chamber with no more incidents and several more straps holding him down. Janus got permission to stand inside the chamber during the procedure just in case Miles had something wonky happen to him. He stood there silent for hours, not taking his eyes off the Violent. That’s when I really accepted him as one of us.
“Is my work up to snuff?” he said with a grin.
I looked at him and returned the smile. “When is it not? I’m just taking a break from the office. I usually end up here unintentionally on my walks. I’d ask how it went, but you’ve been in here since eight this morning and you don’t seem to have broken a sweat.”
He gave a short, barking laugh. “I love these kinds of executions, but this guy was something else. Almost had me pissed off at him for an hour or so.”
“Really?” I said incredulously. Not only was Janus meticulous, but he was molasses slow to anger as well. “What happened?”
He continued spraying the cleaner over the counter tops, his tools having already been cleaned and put away. “Man, everything was fine. Shot up him up with paralytic and started in on his inner thighs. He used to make this weird incision before doing anything to his victims. Kinda like an identifying mark, a territorial pissing or something.” I nodded. Every one of these guys had their own little quirk. That’s how they all got caught.
Janus threw the rag down and leaned against the counter and folded his arms across his chest. “Dude just stared at me. Brein, I swear to Christ the dude smiled at me at one point. Like it didn’t bother him. Ya know, most of these guys, their foreheads start sweating up. You see a trickle run down to the side of their head and you know that you’re doing your job. They’re feeling it, and they hate it because now they’re on the receiving end. But goddamit, I swear he was smiling at me as I cut him. Like it didn’t even phase him.” He shook his head and went back to rubbing the counter down. “After that it was all good. I got down to the really painful shit and he started staring at the ceiling the more he sweat. Sometimes I wish we could do more to these guys. I mean, we could probably get away with it, but then we’d be no better than them, right?”
The familiar smell of cleaner tickled my nose and I evened out immediately. I was in my house of worship, where I was at my most focused. “Yeah. That’s probably true. But as much as we enjoy what we do, we don’t do it for the killing.”
“You sure about that?”
I played with the stubble on my chin. “Not all the time,” I muttered. “Not all the time.”
“So what’s eatin you?” he asked.
I looked over the body. The open wounds had stopped bleeding and the body had the shading of the blue tint hinting at absolute death. You could almost taste the copper in the air this close to the body. “I’ve been thinking about this file I got last week.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see him nod slowly. “Yeah. I didn’t get a chance to see it before it got passed off, but I’ve heard a few whispers in the office. I’m all ears if you’re all mouth,” he said, grinning again as the NV’s came into the room to cart the gurney away. They tightened the straps across the chest and legs again so the body wouldn’t roll off onto the floor during transport, wheeling it out quickly. They’re afraid of my bulk, but even more afraid of Janus because he’s unassuming and friendly. Only when he wants to be though, and that’s usually just with the rest of us who get paid by the state. I waited until I could hear the squeak of the gurney wheels change pitch, which meant they had turned the corner.
“So you don’t know what’s in it?” I asked, curious.
He shook his head. “Naw, man. I’m still low man on the totem pole in most cases,” he said shrugging. “I don’t mind though. I do my job and I go home satisfied most nights, so it doesn’t bother me.”
I sighed and started pacing my side of the room, instinctively picking up a rag and joined in the cleaning process. “The Violent was in the news while I was in school, so you may not remember him as well as most of us, but there was a lot of doubt about his guilt at the time. The Towalski case.”
“Yeah, yeah. I vaguely remember that. He was a blip in one of my lectures, but we never got into it too much. Wasn’t there some issue about tainted evidence or misplaced DNA results?”
“Yup.” I scrubbed harder at one particular spot on the counter, a stain that didn’t want to come up. “The guy strung his victims up in some kind of…” I searched for the right word as I sprayed more cleaner on the stain. “…bondage ropes, I guess. The police found them hanging in their living room like they were all about to be drawn and quartered. The walls had been entirely painted with the family’s blood and every one of their internal organs had been removed, cleaned, and nailed to the wall in almost perfect replication of their placement inside the human body.” The stain came off with a few more scrubs and I turned around to find Janus open-mouthed and shock-still.
“Okay, I don’t remember that at all apparently.”
“Well, that was the stuff that wasn’t released to the press. One of those territorial pissing marks you were talking about. How many of these guys come through here can do that, ya think?”
He shook his head slowly, eyes wide. “I’ve read some shit in these files, but nothing quite like that. That takes a lot of...”
“Time, patience, strength and intellect,” I finished. “Well, two months later, the cops walk in on the Violent at another house with the same scene. Blood on the walls, bodies sliced open, organs on the wall, the whole deal. Had no identification on him, didn’t say a word for days, even after his lawyer showed up. Made no phone calls outside of his holding cell and his name didn’t show up in the fingerprint database. He wasn’t a repeat offender.” I pulled a stool out from underneath the counter and took a seat, propping my feet up on the support bars between the legs.
Janus furrowed his brow in puzzlement. “That’s not normal. A lot of these guys usually have priors, even if it’s just a relatively minor thing.”
“Right. This guy was perfectly clean. Aside from finding him at the scene, there was nothing else linking him to the crime. Add to that the fact he’s maybe 5’8”, 160 pounds and of just average intelligence. I have my doubts about his guilt. There’s a lot of stuff missing from his file as well, which doesn’t sit well with me at all.”
“Like what?” Janus asked, pulling out a stool of his own to sit on.
“A lot of stuff is blacked out with marker. His testimony from the trial, if he even testified, is missing. The courthouse hasn’t gotten back to me about any of it. I mean, there’s an incredible amount of information I’m not getting from the file and it’s just off-putting.”
“So, are you saying you’re gonna pass the file to someone else?” he asked, surprised.
“No, but I’m certainly going into it with a different mindset, which I don’t like. I stopped building my life on the foundation of surprises when my parents died. This throws a monkey wrench into my neat and orderly way of doing things is all,” I said with a weak smile. “I’m sure I’m just over-analyzing it though.”
“Maybe you’re not. I mean, we’ve gotten pretty good at finding the guys who do these things and they all come in here knowing they’re about to die, so they just stop caring. Have you gone to his cell yet to see what he’s like? Asked around about him?”
“Not yet. But I’ve been thinking about walking down there, just to get a look at him. That may put me in more of a weird spot though. I’m not sure I want to risk the attachment until the day I’m forced to do so,” I replied. “I mean, what if it turns out this guy isn’t the real deal? What if he’s the first innocent man we send through the system?”
“I don’t know about all that, Brein. First you’ve got to figure, what’s an innocent man doing being found in a situation like that. The odds are pretty much against him right off the bat. Secondly, I’m sure we’ve taken care of more innocent people in here than we’d like to admit. Part of the job is not to question, just to do. We’ve got the courts to make our decisions for us.”
“Yeah,” I grunted half-heartedly. I got up off the stool and pushed it back under the counter as Janus did the same. I took another quick glance around the room and headed for the door. “Well, thanks for letting me vent. I’m gonna let you get back to cleaning,” I said, stepping into the hallway.
“Anytime,” I heard him echo from behind me as I made my way to Towalski’s cell.
More Chapters:
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Eight
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Nine
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Ten
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Eleven
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Twelve
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Thirteen
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Fourteen
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Fifteen
The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter Sixteen