The Guard: Campground Stories

  Chapter 1

  Lt. John Granger was fuming as he stormed out of his office and headed toward G section slamming doors and cursing the whole way. “Tory Peters, you’ve really screwed-up this time, you S.O.B. Three radio-checks and you still don't answer,” he hissed through gritted teeth. As Lt. Granger climbed the staircase that led up to the psycho ward, he had visions of Tory squirming and kicking while he choked him with his bare hands. When he opened the door at the top of the staircase, he froze. Something is not quite right, he thought. There was an eerie stillness all about. It reminded him of what happens after a shot rings out in the forest. All the crickets stop chirping, and everything seems still.

  The hallway smelled like wet copper and the steady drip, drip of a leaky water faucet echoed throughout the hallway. Something was wrong here, he could feel it, but he couldn't figure it out. The copper smell! That was it. The floors had been freshly waxed that afternoon, and the hallway always smelled like wax. What was that dripping noise? There weren't any water faucets in this section. As he walked cautiously down the dark hallway, he could make out a figure lying awkwardly sprawled out on the floor. As he walked closer to the figure, the coppery smell intensified and became overwhelming.

  Concentrating completely on the body, he failed to notice that the floor was wet and went sailing head over heels, landing on his back in front of the body. The coppery smell was the smell of blood, which was all over the floor. Lt. Granger could feel the hair on the back of his neck raise and bristle like a pissed off porcupine when he looked up into Tory’s vacant eyes.

  When Lt. Granger recovered from the initial shock, he called for backup and a medical team on his radio. Then he ran to the end of the hall and turned on the light switch.

  When he turned around, he saw that he ill prepared for the scene that awaited him. Never in his life had he seen such a heartless massacre.

  The floor was a pool of blood and the blood had been used to write a message on the walls. The message read “AND NOW TO FINISH WHAT WE STARTED.”

  In the middle of the hall lay Tory Peters, or most of him. Approximately half of his head was missing, and he had been disemboweled with the same pole that lobotomized him. The pole appeared to be the leg of a single bunk-bed, and had been crudely torn off of the bed.

  After taking in the scene, Lt. Granger, nicknamed “Danger Granger” aptly tossed his cookies, adding to an impossibly disgusting scene. When he stopped retching, he decided to check on the inmates in the cells.

  The first cell he entered was “Swinger’s” cell. Swinger was hanging from the ceiling by bed sheets, but he also had a slit throat. This was where the dripping noise had been coming from. As the blood ran down Swinger’s body and dripped from his feet into a puddle on the floor, it made a dripping sound, like a leaky faucet.

  “Crybaby” was in the next cell lying on his bed with bedsprings sticking out of empty eye sockets. His cell had been ransacked as if a wild animal had been trapped in there and had tried desperately to escape. John gave the cell a cursory once over, thinking: what the hell happened to his eyes? It took a few minutes for it to register after he saw it because they were so out of place, but eventually he realized that both eyes were staring at the lifeless body from the faucets on the sink in the cell. John swallowed the bile that was building up in his throat, and vowed not to barf again. Without thinking, John went to the sink to splash some water on his face, and unwittingly grabbed an eyeball as he tried to turn on the faucet. That was all it took. John retched so hard, he actually threw out his back. Ten minutes later, when he was through, and was able to somehow straighten up, he continued his assessment of the situation.

  Slasher, Doc, and Diablo were missing, and one of the legs had been torn off Diablo’s bed. A wad of toilet paper had been shoved into the doorjamb in a way in which the door would have appeared closed, but was not fully locked. A few pounds of pressure on the door coming from inside the cell would have easily forced the door to open, if the occupant had used something solid to help pry it open. Solid, like maybe the leg of a bunk, thought John?

  John Granger, usually a calm, subdued man, now was on the verge of total panic. As quickly as he could find the words, he issued a red alert in the prison. Soon after this, sirens wailed, spotlights flicked on, and all the lights in the prison came on.

  “My God, it looks like Christmas around here,” John muttered as he looked out of the window at the end of the bloody corridor. “Why did this have to happen tonight, when I’m in charge?” he wondered out loud.

  It seemed like the craziest, stupidest things happened to him when he was in charge. This was, at least partially, the reason people referred to him as “Danger Granger.” The prison had a large population of Haitian inmates, who were well known for practicing voodoo rituals after lights out, when the officers were elsewhere. One night, he had heard a disturbance coming from one of the sections, and had gone to investigate it. What he had discovered even made his skin crawl years later. One of the Haitian inmates had been duck walking around the section with a blanket thrown over his head. When John had snatched the blanket off the inmate’s head, the inmate had dropped to the floor and slithered like a snake under his bunk. The other inmates had been so freaked out, he decided to leave the section and call for backup. When several other officers had arrived and entered the section with him, everything had gone back to normal and the inmate who had slithered like a snake was sound asleep on his bunk. This was one of many instances, so the other officers had become somewhat skeptical when he called for assistance. “Not this time,” he muttered to himself.

  Seconds later, the stairway door burst open, and four officers ran up to him. “What’s wrong sir? We heard you needed backup,” said the nearest one with what sounded to John like disbelief.

  “Turn around,” was all John had to say. Their reactions were similar to Lt. Granger’s except that two of them kept muttering something about God and Mary in Spanish.

  Lt. Granger ordered them to guard the hallway and not touch anything until investigators arrived.

  John then headed back to his office to await further developments.