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Chapter 8 – Now sign!

[Location: Decontamination Depot t3rm1nu5 - Cafeteria]

Charlie stood silently as the prisoner unfolded his arms, stood up, yawned, and stretched. Harry McCormick would be considered short by modern male standards, standing approximately five foot three inches tall. The sleeves of his lime green prison jumpsuit had been cuffed a few times to shorten them while the rest of the garment hung from his slender frame.

From outward appearances, Harry Hell Raiser McCormick didn’t have the look of an evil mass murderer—he was quite handsome. He appeared to be healthy and fairly young, somewhere in his late thirties, with a full head of brown hair. His face was tan and smooth with a little rosy glow around his cheeks and small crow’s feet on the outside of each eye that deepened when he smiled. He provided Linda and Charlie with a friendly smile that revealed a perfect set of white teeth. Charlie looked to Linda and realized she was mesmerized by what she saw and intently watching everything the prisoner did.

Harry stuck his slender hands into his pockets and said in a jovial voice, “I’m happy to meet you, folks. You appear to be the first two normal people—” he nodded towards Jack, “besides our boy from Kansas—that I’ve seen in quite a while.” Linda and Charlie continued to watch the prisoner in silence.

“I’m sure you’ve already found out for yourself,” Harry said, “but this one,” he nodded towards Jozef, “and the greasy one,” he nodded toward Tom, “aren’t very friendly people. I have no idea why they aren’t sitting in one of these cubes just like me.” He chuckled under his breath. “And the young guy Ruben? That kid is messed up.”

There was a pause and Linda didn’t know how to respond. A majority of the criminals she had come in contact with had played the part and actually looked evil. Most of them had bodies inked with evil tattoos as well as scars and facial deformities from old wounds that had never received medical attention. She realized that the man standing in front of her didn’t look like a criminal at all; if he had been wearing a suit and tie he could easily play the part of a business man or a lawyer.

Jozef restarted the conversation as he barked, “There. Happy? Now sign the damn pad.” He shoved the e-pad toward Charlie and lifted the small controller in his hand in preparation to put the cube back into isolation mode.

Linda snapped out her daze and held out her hand. “Wait. I don’t see any reason you can’t leave his cell this way.” She slowly walked a little closer to the box. “Is it against the rules to give another human being a chance to see and hear other people? A chance to get a little bit of human contact?” She always believed that deep inside, people were naturally good-hearted and she lived her life following that line of thinking.

Jozef lowered the controller and rolled his eyes. He whispered to himself, “Un-fucking-believable.”

“If we aren’t in any danger from this man, and there’s no way for him to escape,” Linda continued. “I don’t see any problem with the prisoner being allowed to hear and see us.”

Harry remained silent and glanced back and forth between Linda and Jozef listening to see what the outcome of the discussion would be.

Charlie began to question Jozef, “Was he in isolation mode for your entire trip from Earth?”

Jozef slid the controller into his pocket and laid his arms across his chest. “No, he was not in isolation mode during the entire trip. Regulations state he must be in isolation mode when we move him or if he becomes verbally combative.”

Harry glanced at Linda and gave her a quick smile. Linda didn’t respond to Harry’s actions at first, but after a few seconds her face softened, her good nature and love of people flowed out and a smile appeared on her lips. It was evident that her golden heart was starting to influence the situation.

Linda had developed a deep sense of empathy for people, even if they had done some heinous task at some point in their lives. Charlie had told her numerous times that if she had a personality downfall it was that she loved the people closest to her too much; she would forgive them for anything and everything they did.

When Linda was a child, she forgave her father for his crude and abusive behavior every Monday morning. Her father had a serious alcohol problem for many years of his adult life. According to Linda’s mother, when they were first married he was an honorable, loving man and model husband. But life is a constant moral battle between what you should do and what you want to do and Linda’s farther gave in to the latter.

It was easy to see he was having trouble adjusting to married life after the first few honeymoon years and he would sit in the living room after work smoking cigarettes and watching re-runs on TV. It was during this dark time he started to drink excessively as well. His drink of choice was Pabst Blue Ribbon, as he had never been interested in hard liquor and would easily finish off a twelve pack each night. His drinking and depression started to affect his job at the grocery store and he was almost fired twice for not showing up.

Linda’s mother noticed the change in her husband and thought having a baby might reinvigorate his loving personality and get him back on track. At first it seemed that her mother’s plan had worked. After Linda’s father learned that his wife was pregnant, he cleaned up his act. He enrolled in Alcoholics Anonymous and religiously attended the meetings. He started going to church every Sunday with this wife and even joined her Bible study group on Wednesday nights. He left his job at the grocery store and went to work at the lumber yard because the salary was nearly double.

When Linda was born, her father showered his wife and daughter with love and affection and the three spent many happy times together. The love between Linda and her father grew stronger every day, and when she was old enough to talk he gave her the nickname Princess. Linda’s childhood was wonderful until she reached high school and her father was involved in a car accident.

A drunk driver in a pickup truck had rear-ended him while he waited at a red light. He ended up with a concussion and a severely broken back from the force of the collision. During this time, he was prescribed a narcotic pain killer to control the ever-present throbbing located in his upper back. After a few weeks of using the pain killer, his additive behavior returned. He abused the narcotics and when his supply ran out he turned back to alcohol. Because the narcotics had numbed his senses, he switched from beer to hard liquor to satisfy his desire to stay sedated. Linda and her mother tried to help him fight his cravings, but with no success he sunk into a deep depression.

When he had healed enough to return to work, he was able to hide his alcoholism during the week and kept his regular job running the debarking machine at the lumber yard. When Friday afternoon rolled around, he would start drinking and continue nonstop until Sunday evening, when he would sober up and be back to work on Monday morning. During this time, Linda had begun to hate the weekends and spent much of her time out of the house with friends to stay away from her father.

He was never physically abusive to her or her mother, but he flung a barrage of verbal abuse at them while he was drunk. Through all of the emotional pain and mental agony, Linda stilled loved her father immensely. She always held out hope that he would change and everything would go back to the way it had been before the accident.

During this time, one of Linda’s high school classmates brought up the subject of her alcoholic father in gym class. Nancy Morris lived next door to Linda and constantly saw and heard the behavior of her drunken father and the negative effects it had on their dysfunctional family. She maliciously made fun of Linda’s father in front of the entire class and vividly described how he abused alcohol and destroyed their family.

At first Linda was able to control her anger, but as Nancy continued her onslaught of humiliating verbal abuse, Linda’s temper started to rise. She thought how her once happy family had been destroyed. Her heart ached, wishing that he would change back into the loving man he once was and that her family life would return to normal. The emotions inside of her were too much to handle and erupted as rage boiled over inside of her. Completely out of character, the beautiful young girl that had been nicknamed Princess by her loving father viciously attacked her classmate in the middle of fifth period.

Linda ran at Nancy, tackled her, and pinned her to the floor. Then she began to beat her face and shoulders with her balled fists, her victim squealing and squirming below her trying to break free. Some of the students tried to pull Linda off of Nancy but she pushed them away.

Saliva sprayed through Linda’s clenched teeth as she pounded her fists into Nancy’s face. A whisper slipped past her lips. “No one will ever take my happy family away from me. I will fight forever to get my father back.” She wrapped her hands around the girl’s throat and began to drive the back of her head into the gymnasium floor. “Forever!” she screamed.

The boys’ P.E. teacher had to be called to peel Linda off of Nancy’s motionless body and get her under control. Linda had blackened both of Nancy’s eyes, broken her nose, and had given her a knot on the back of her head.

On the surface, it appeared as if she had lost control of her emotions because her classmate made a joke of her loved one, but deep down inside Linda realized that she had lost control because she loved her father and treasured the life style of a loving and nurturing family; she could not stand the thought of the change being permanent. The loss of hope was enough to trip the switch that turned a pretty, good natured high school girl into a hyper-maniacal attacker.

A few years later, when Linda worked at the prison, she continued to live at her parents’ home because her small salary would have been barely enough to pay rent on a rundown apartment. Her father’s alcoholism had grown worse, he had lost his job at the lumber yard, and he would go missing for days on end. It was during this time that Linda met Charlie. In those dark days, Charlie was a ray of sunshine in Linda’s life and was the major reason that she was so in love with him.

Linda had noticed Charlie right away as he walked the halls of the penitentiary in his neatly pressed uniform. He was a handsome young man with a full head of dark hair and a clean shaven, rugged jaw. But after they began to date, she realized he was also personally strong. He had a certain sense of drive inside of him that she was attracted to, not having a father figure in her life. She saw him as her protector and felt secure when she was around him.

One Saturday when Linda was trying to stay clear of her father, Charlie asked her to go horseback riding. He loved horseback riding and had introduced the hobby to her. They reserved two horses at the stable in the state park and then spent the day in the wilderness, exploring and enjoying each other’s company. About mid-day, they shared a sack lunch that Linda had packed the night before. They ate left over fried chicken, which Linda knew was Charlie’s favorite, and lost themselves in conversation.

During the ride, Linda noticed a giant patch of Black-Eyed-Susans. Black-Eyed-Susans were her favorite flower, so the two decided to stop for a few minutes to admire them. Almost immediately, Charlie began to pick some of the flowers to make a bouquet. After a few minutes, he turned to Linda with an enormous spray of flowers, bent down on one knee, and asked for her hand in marriage.

Even though Linda’s family life was a mess, her relationship with Charlie was perfect. Over a nine month period she had fallen completely in love with him and it gave her hope for her future. Hope that the two could build a loving husband and wife relationship and someday a family of their own. Tears welled in her eyes and love pumped through her heart as she accepted the proposal and hugged her fiancé, wishing that the moment would never end.

But at home, tragedy struck. Just a few weeks before Linda and Charlie were to be married, her father had gotten into a fight at a local tavern. His first mistake was to start a brawl with a guy that was twenty years younger and six inches taller. His last mistake was trying to pull the buck knife from a sheath on the guy’s hip. Her father’s body was found face down in Hurricane Creek five days later. Only a few close friends and family members showed up for the funeral. Linda had become very close with Charlie’s father and asked him to walk her down the aisle at their wedding.

As time passed, Linda had come to deeply treasure the life that she and Charlie built for themselves on Earth and now on D.D.315. Even though they lived in the bowels of a smelly hydrogen condensing facility, she loved her life and her husband and did not want anything to change.

Linda looked back at the prisoner and then to Jozef. “Well, that settles it. Isolation mode will not be enabled while you four—you five—are visiting. She walked closer to Harry, gave him a welcoming smile, and said in a chipper voice, “Welcome to D.D.315, Mr. McCormick.” She bounced on the balls of her feet. “My name is Linda and my husband Charlie and I hope that you enjoy your stay with us.”

Harry kept his hands in his pockets and bowed slightly. “Why thank you, Linda. You are quite the gracious host.” He nodded toward the cafeteria line behind her. “Do you happen to be the head chef in this fine dining establishment?”

Linda’s smile grew as she nodded. “Why yes, Mr. McCormick, I am. Is there something specific you’re hungry for?”

Harry cocked his brow and stroked his chin in deep thought. “I’ve always been partial to red meat.” His face took on the look of optimism. “Is it possible to get a strip steak, medium with a baked potato and a side of green beans?”

Linda put her hands on her hips as she nodded. “All of those items are available on our menu and I would be happy to make them for you.” She looked at the other four guests. “And you guys come with me as well. I know that Jack here wants some bacon and eggs with a side of pancakes.” Linda nodded at Jack and gave him a wink. “I need to get orders from the rest of you.” As the group walked toward the cafeteria line, Linda spoke with a motherly tone. “And who here likes cherry pie?”

Jozef stopped Charlie and pushed the e-pad back in front of him and grumbled, “Now sign!”

Charlie took the e-pad and began to review the document. He was never one to just blindly agree to something without reading the fine print first. As he read the document, he thought it looked to be fairly normal; a typical shipping and receiving form with a check box to verify decontamination and a spot for a signature. He impatiently scanned the last few sentences, expediting the process to get the crew from the Elysian Fields off of D.D.315 and on their way as soon as possible. He grabbed the stylus, checked the box, and scratched his name onto the dotted line.

He turned to Jozef and pushed the e-pad toward him. “Here. Happy?” He huffed and began to walk away, not waiting for an answer.

Jozef looked at the signature and clicked the screen to confirm the entry. As he slid the e-pad into his pocket, he said the words. “Charles D. Kennedy…” He squinted and tilted his head. “Charles D. Kennedy?” He pinched his lips between his thumb and forefinger. “The name doesn’t ring a bell, but he sure reminds me of somebody.”

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