chest while his new-found friends howled with laughter.
Chapter Seven
Dub and his crew passed through a parking lot full of Harleys and pick-up trucks, old abandoned automobiles and brand spanking new SUV’s, all buried beneath a thin sheen of dusty, grey ash. They pulled up in front of the jailhouse, a few yards down from a tanker truck loaded to the brim with gasoline. A group of men carrying the same kind of spiked bats Bert and Ernie had left back at the pit watched over the tractor-trailer rig, one with a bat and one with a hand-held communications device linking them to a team of armed bikers. The men, with their gaunt features and deep-set hollow eyes, were not gang members, but grunt-labor forced into servitude by The Devil’s Own, worker bees charged with keeping the hive operational, some of whose very own wives and daughters had been taken from them and now toiled within and without the complex. Months ago this foreboding structure had housed the dregs of society, criminals led to their new accommodations in leg-irons and chains. Now the shackles were gone and the inmates walked freely about the asylum, spreading a healthy dose of misery everywhere they went.
The tanker truck, part of a fleet commandeered soon after the thunder rolled and the fire fell from the sky, provided the precious resource that fueled four industrial-sized generators sitting in pairs at the back of the jail; plenty enough to supply the first floor with ample amounts of energy to keep the lights burning and the coffee percolating, the water running and the refrigerators filled with ice-cold beer. Here was the headquarters of The Devil’s Own, where injustice was handed down to any poor bastard unlucky enough to have been dragged kicking and screaming up the concrete stairs. Here was the property room where a steady supply of drugs was disbursed, and the Armory, which kept Dub and his band of brutes armed to the teeth with all manner of weaponry: shotguns and assault rifles, and an assortment of handguns: Glocks and Berettas, Colts and Sig Sauers, all topped off by enough ammunition to sink The Bismarck . Many an evening Dub and the boys had spent passing a sniper rifle back and forth, guzzling Jack Daniels and picking off the night crawlers and alley dwellers—five points for a head shot, two for a body; an extra point if the second body-shot dropped them, forfeiture of the weapon if it didn’t.
Dub always collected his five points.
He always won the game.
Dub stepped off his bike, smiling at a group of men coming down the stairs toward him. Three men, led by Rock Steady Teddy, who had missed his date with the cot-and-needle courtesy of the awe-inspiring phenomenon which had busted down prison doors all across the nation. All around the world, Dub figured.
Teddy’s sleeveless denim jacket hung loose on his wiry frame. Taller than Dub, his light blue eyes matched the faded material of his wildly embroidered threads, his thick beard a shade darker than the straight blonde hair hanging across his shoulders. An attacking scorpion rose up on one side of his jacket, a coiled rattlesnake on the other, both creatures rounded out by The Devil’s Own grinning skull and crossbones emblazoned on his back. One baleful eye winked from within the skull’s leering face, while beneath the crossbones, blood-red letters spelled out The Devil’s Own . Three tattooed teardrops spaced evenly down from the corner of his left eye denoted the three lives he’d snuffed out in the can. Two he’d gotten away with. The third of which had earned him his place on death row.
“Steady Teddy!” Dub called out, high-fiving his partner in crime as Bert and Ernie and Teddy’s two pals headed up the jailhouse steps. “’Sup, brother-man?”
“It’s all about you, baby.”
Dub didn’t acknowledge Teddy’s words. He let his grin do it for him, because it was all about him, and everybody around there knew it.
Teddy, nodding toward the spiked head,
Chapter Seven
Dub and his crew passed through a parking lot full of Harleys and pick-up trucks, old abandoned automobiles and brand spanking new SUV’s, all buried beneath a thin sheen of dusty, grey ash. They pulled up in front of the jailhouse, a few yards down from a tanker truck loaded to the brim with gasoline. A group of men carrying the same kind of spiked bats Bert and Ernie had left back at the pit watched over the tractor-trailer rig, one with a bat and one with a hand-held communications device linking them to a team of armed bikers. The men, with their gaunt features and deep-set hollow eyes, were not gang members, but grunt-labor forced into servitude by The Devil’s Own, worker bees charged with keeping the hive operational, some of whose very own wives and daughters had been taken from them and now toiled within and without the complex. Months ago this foreboding structure had housed the dregs of society, criminals led to their new accommodations in leg-irons and chains. Now the shackles were gone and the inmates walked freely about the asylum, spreading a healthy dose of misery everywhere they went.
The tanker truck, part of a fleet commandeered soon after the thunder rolled and the fire fell from the sky, provided the precious resource that fueled four industrial-sized generators sitting in pairs at the back of the jail; plenty enough to supply the first floor with ample amounts of energy to keep the lights burning and the coffee percolating, the water running and the refrigerators filled with ice-cold beer. Here was the headquarters of The Devil’s Own, where injustice was handed down to any poor bastard unlucky enough to have been dragged kicking and screaming up the concrete stairs. Here was the property room where a steady supply of drugs was disbursed, and the Armory, which kept Dub and his band of brutes armed to the teeth with all manner of weaponry: shotguns and assault rifles, and an assortment of handguns: Glocks and Berettas, Colts and Sig Sauers, all topped off by enough ammunition to sink The Bismarck . Many an evening Dub and the boys had spent passing a sniper rifle back and forth, guzzling Jack Daniels and picking off the night crawlers and alley dwellers—five points for a head shot, two for a body; an extra point if the second body-shot dropped them, forfeiture of the weapon if it didn’t.
Dub always collected his five points.
He always won the game.
Dub stepped off his bike, smiling at a group of men coming down the stairs toward him. Three men, led by Rock Steady Teddy, who had missed his date with the cot-and-needle courtesy of the awe-inspiring phenomenon which had busted down prison doors all across the nation. All around the world, Dub figured.
Teddy’s sleeveless denim jacket hung loose on his wiry frame. Taller than Dub, his light blue eyes matched the faded material of his wildly embroidered threads, his thick beard a shade darker than the straight blonde hair hanging across his shoulders. An attacking scorpion rose up on one side of his jacket, a coiled rattlesnake on the other, both creatures rounded out by The Devil’s Own grinning skull and crossbones emblazoned on his back. One baleful eye winked from within the skull’s leering face, while beneath the crossbones, blood-red letters spelled out The Devil’s Own . Three tattooed teardrops spaced evenly down from the corner of his left eye denoted the three lives he’d snuffed out in the can. Two he’d gotten away with. The third of which had earned him his place on death row.
“Steady Teddy!” Dub called out, high-fiving his partner in crime as Bert and Ernie and Teddy’s two pals headed up the jailhouse steps. “’Sup, brother-man?”
“It’s all about you, baby.”
Dub didn’t acknowledge Teddy’s words. He let his grin do it for him, because it was all about him, and everybody around there knew it.
Teddy, nodding toward the spiked head,
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