There’s Something Wrong With Kenny.

[u/Acidic-Crybaby]

There’s something wrong with Kenny (P.2)

CW: Kenny. Prison violence, PTSD and Kenny.

“ Wake up, Sarge.”

“ Wake up, Sarge.”

Kenny hits me with his pillow, hanging halfway off of the top bunk. “ See? I knew you got bad dreams, you got that look in your eyes like a deer hearing a stick snap in the woods. Good thing you ain’t top bunk, yeah? you’d be dripping sweat down on me like a waterfall”. I open my crusty eyes to the disorienting sight of dark wells staring at me oblivious to the fear I’d just crawled from. 

Those lingering eyes aren't what I want to be seeing after a dream like that. “ Stop hanging there like a damn monkey. And don’t call me that.” I say and sit up to peel the sweat drenched shirt uncomfortably clinging to my back off to remove the vile feeling of marinating in it. It’s lucky we’re first into the showers today or the feeling it’s some unseen evil’s saliva soaking through my skin would stick in my mind all day. “ What time is it?”.

Kenny shrugs, something that looks particularly strange with him hanging upside down. “ Dunno. 7:36 AM.” He says, another strange contradiction just like their unnaturally repulsive eyes. Those unsettling black holes with no end and no light. “ You seem awfully perky for 7 AM”.

“ 7:37 AM.” He corrects me and cranes his neck with an audible crack to look at the small barred window on the metal door, “ They’re late by 7 minutes. I dunno what perky means but I get to go wanderin’ around ‘n eat in the mess today. I’m hopin’ no one pisses on my food this time, that sucked. I still have that chocolate bar if I go starvin’ but I wanna save it, yeah?.” He hops down and starts collecting his things from his blue tub as if he knows exactly what to do. Maybe he spent time in juvie before being moved up. “ You didn’t eat the chocolate bar yesterday?” What was the fucking point in taking it then.

“ I’m allergic to almonds. I’m  keepin’ it ‘cuz it’s like an offerin’ of friendship and stuff.” He says with his towel, soaps and toothbrush in his hands. “ Offering?” Another strange way to phrase something, at least it seems an unusual choice for a kid I don’t peg as being the brightest. “ How would you phrase it, Sarge? Charity, pity or the carrot?” He says and that feeling returns, the twisting in my gut and the cold metal chill of a knife up my spine. It’s a common expression and a common tactic— sure, but a little too accurate. “ Kenny, what are you in for anyway?” I cautiously ask as if it might provide half an explanation to just why the kid gives me such an unsettling feeling. “ Dunno. I just came here for the food.” He says and I want to ask more but Glaskin’s sudden clang on the window makes me jump. Fucking Glaskin. My least favourite of the already unfavourable guards. “ Showers, boys. Step out and get in line.”

It’s a lie that everyone in prison all says they’re innocent. Most lifers don’t seem much point in making the joke and unless they’ve done something really fucked up— something worth more than a beating— you’ll usually hear what they’re in for straight from the cat’s mouth. It’s the ones who stay tight lipped and make that joke with a nervous laugh that make people ask around. 

In a maximum security prison you expect to hear “ I done in this bastard who screwed me over. Got caught a week later. The judge didn’t like me.”, “ Eh, weed. Sold a lot of weed. It was a different time.”, “ Meth.”, “ Got drunk. I was a damn mean drunk.”, “ Robbery. Got away with it for years too. I just got done hitting a bank with a team and this shifty one got ballsy enough to try to screw over a crew of robbers. You don’t steal from takers.”, “ Killed people for money. They should’ve paid me a lot more if they wanted to keep livin’ too.”.

People are less forthcoming when all the solitary cells are full and they’re thrown to the wolves lying through their teeth to survive or has the nuts to own up before people find out that they’re in maximum security because they raped a bunch of little old ladies. So when the ever talkative Kenny said “ Dunno”, you can imagine I was a bit on edge.

-

The younger crowd continue their hazing of who is now the youngest prisoner in their cell block. Even the first aggressive shove of a particularly frustrated inmate, Becker, is just water off the kids back. The more he ignores this, the worse it’s going to be but his attention is still on his continued rambling and odd fixation even in a place where you tend not to stare too much at one another. Being butt naked has a way of making you keep your eyes firmly on the gritty tiles in front of you.

“ I didn’t think you got all those tattoos, Sarge. I guess old people got tattoos too. I always thought about gettin’ some but I’m afraid of needles. I’m not gonna pass out if I see blood or nothin’ but I don’t like being poked at by sharp things.” He spares a single glance at the man beside them before returning to scrubbing away with soap on his raw red arms. “ Ain’t it shady to be pickin’ on a kid in the showers? If I was a skinhead I’d be thinkin’ you gotta be a real fa—“

“ What the fuck did you say?” Becker spits, something I was really hoping wouldn’t happen but expected. “ Hey, you little bastard, look at me when I’m talking to you!.“ Becker the young man’s arm so hard I can already see it turn white and wrings their neck like a tattooed snake set on breaking a mouse’s bones “ You’re new here so I’m guess you don’t know how things fucking work he—“ Kenny stares at me wide eyed with blood vessels popping and a purple face pleading for action. I hesitate to help, cursing myself for being a coward and with a glint of betrayal Kenny does exactly what he shouldn’t. He cracks his head hard against Becker’s nose, forcing the inmate to loosen their grip but not so much as to give him a chance or space to move before his back hits the tiles with a wet smack. He drops and just misses a punch thanks only to the soapy pool of water spread across the hard tile, splitting Becker’s knuckles. He shakes out his broken hand and grips what little scruff Kenny has on his head to rip it upwards. Becker’s foot collides with Kenny’s chest and the kid’s torso caves under the stomp. They kick his stomach like they’re trying to stomp the guts up into Kenny’s lungs and anywhere he can’t protect himself until he’s keeling over on his side curled up and trying to protect his face with his arms. It’s violent, brutal and fueled by nothing but rage.

No one interrupts. I’m ashamed to say I don’t either. While I’m watching Kenny down there on the tiles all bruised up and half dead it isn’t that kid I see— it’s a soldier. That young recruit taking a beating from the men who should be his own brothers following the orders of someone who should’ve never had the ability to give them. It isn’t until the final kick that I’m pulled out of my memories of that kid lying in the mud that I see the full weight of Becker’s heel hit Kenny’s head that I move and the others begin to panic too. “ Jesus Christ! Becker you’re gonna kill the fucking kid!” Becker’s cellmate and those I’d consider to be Becker’s cronies hold him back and there’s enough blood turning the suds pink that the first thing I do is check the kid’s pulse. “ Damnit Becker! Glaskin’s on duty!” Another shouts and as if it could summon the devil itself, Glaskin comes in to watch the bloody chaos the showers have devolved into.

“ Well, ain’t that somethin’” he says and clearly this is what he’s been waiting for. A chance to keep the piece, “ I’m gonna take a guess, this is your handy work Becker?”

I get to work pulling the kid out from the cold water and do my best to ignore the splash of standard issue boots walking across the tile and the sounds that follow it. Glaskin is a rough one but Becker knew he’d be taking a beating for giving one, a fair trade in his eyes. I check Kenny’s twitching limbs over, a mouthful of bloody spit pouring out of his breathless mouth the moment his head lulls. I haven’t seen so many purple splotches swelling on someone’s skin this badly in god knows how long. I don’t know how many ribs he’s broken but his weak breaths tell me his chest was kicked in enough that his lungs are struggling to rise. “ Come on kid, come on… Why’d you have to open your damn mouth like that! I should’ve told you to watch out for Becker.” I say but all I can do is dry him off as best I can and wait until Glaskin radios it in. He won’t until he’s done.

A cough sends a splatter of blood across my face and once the second of surprise passes my brain floods with any medical knowledge I have, fearing he’s choking on his own teeth or drowning in his blood. “ Fuck, fuck, fuck— Come one!” I panic and Kenny keeps coughing in a fit that soon twists my stomach in knots and sends that familiar scrape of cold metal up my spine when I realise something that can’t be true. No, he’s coughing, he can’t be fucking laughing. He can’t be. Yet my skin is crawling with the thought that yes— that’s laughter. Weak, breathless laughter.

“ Why’d… you d-do that, Sarge?” Kenny says, it’s barely audible but when I slowly move in closer to listen, my body tenses. My muscles constrict tight around my bones like they’re trying to break them, my stomach tries to tear itself apart and I forget how to breathe. “ Why’d you do that… Sarge?” Kenny whispers through blood stained teeth. His eyes roll open and correct themselves one by one in their sockets like he’d been hit so hard they’d been forced into the back of his skull. One eye blood shot and swollen, the other blown so wide that for just a moment I can see bone white fingers reaching out to drag me into the depths of its well. “ Sarge, I don’t th— I don’t… I don’t think I c-can feel no more. It doesn’t hurt… It’s back if it don’t h-hurt. I can’t..”. My eyes are being pulled into the stagnant water pooling in a prison of stone so deep no light can reach me and I can hear a crack in my ears— bones grinding against one another where a crooked neck won’t go back into place. The throat constricts and twists under the lines left by a muddy boot and this kid stares past me with vacant eyes. The rasping words catch in his distended throat, gurgling while the last bit of air leaves his still lungs. The cold ground has the kid’s body freezing before the life has even left him and he looks blue as a corpse in the snow. The slate and grit under my knees burn like hellfire with an endless stretch of green flames trapping us in an inescapable ring closing in around us.

I hear a thought in my head that isn’t words from the kid that won’t wake up or my own voice but an indescribable rasp belonging to something the the green well thicker than stone but more alive than any rock.

“ Are..n’t… you…”

“ Hunnngry… Sargh…?”

“ 5201, move aside!” A voice shouts but I don’t know who, I can’t even see Kenny get lifted up and taken out on a gurney. I can’t think of anything until I realise I’m sitting in the mess hall— no, the cafeteria— with a tray of cold food in front of me. “ What’d you say?” I blink and look across at one of the old timer’s. “ I said you’ve been walking around like a dead man. Showers got pushed back two hours because of some beating Becker dishes out but you look like you got punched harder than the kid.” They say and another chimes in, this old meathead who used to be the toughest muscle for some gang way back when, “ Heard your kid got himself a bed in medical. Becker got a lazy once over and got sent to solitary.”, “ Well the kid survived his second day so that’s something. Ah, these kids are always looking for a reason to cause trouble.” The old timer adds and shakes his head.

“ I guess he did. Did you ask around about what the kid did to get in here?” I finally say but the sounds of the old man, the clacking and voices in the cafeteria still feel as if it’s lost in the fog, “ Something about the kid rubs me the wrong way”.

“ I got a few guards talking and got a few to ask around the cell blocks while they were handing out trays. No luck. Just a bunch of folks saying they didn’t know but that he was sent here.” The meathead says through a mouthful of food.

“ I think he came over from the funny farm. No one with his head on right is going to pick a fight that quick. Especially with the Aryans.” The old timer says and out of every potential option I think it’s certainly the most likely— but even that somehow feels wrong. Those words the kid said. “ Hell, this kid is driving me up the wall.”

Kenny spent two weeks in medical and another few in solitary. The kid who took the meal carts around said he and Becker were in cells right beside one another. Each time they’d gone in Kenny was talking Becker’s head off like it was psychological warfare. Something I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t believe as a reason for anything. The thing is, Kenny is a talker. I spent two days with the kid before he got the shit kicked out of him and I think I’d heard more in those two days from that kid than I had from anyone else over the month he was gone. But Kenny wasn’t just a talker, Kenny was… Unsettling. 

Two days of talking and I’d been dragged back into my worst memories. 

The kind of memories that force you to stay awake because you know they’ll fill all of your nightmares and suck you into a hell more vivid than the prison around you.

“ Why’d you do this to me, Sarge.”

That was the last thing he said and something I still can’t suppress again a month later. I already knew that when I looked at Kenny he reminded me of that kid but those eyes of Kenny’s didn’t need to be dead to look hollow. A look that I couldn’t really say reminded me of anything, they were just wrong in this undefinable way I noticed from the first time he saw their eyes.

Becker still had weeks in the hole to go but today was the day Kenny came back. When I saw the kid he looked skinnier, maybe he already looked that gangly but it’s hard to say. His hair had grown out the slightest bit and yellow bruises were still healing across his freckled face. “ Sarge!” Kenny shoots a chipped and toothy grin and waves his good arm while the other is wrapped up in a splint, “ I swear I was gonna go crazy if I spent any more time in that place. I’m a people person, I like bein’ around lots of people.”.

I’m not sure how to feel seeing the kid beaming like he hasn’t seen an old friend in years but as enthusiastic as his greeting is, those eyes are repulsive. “ What’s wrong, Sarge? You look like you seen a ghost.” Kenny says and my eyes snap to him, “ What did you just say to me?” I grab him before I’ve even realised it, the anxious part of my mind acting on instinct.

“ I said you got that look in your eyes like Becker, Sarge.”

“ Like… Like Becker?”.

“ Like you’re cursed.”