Free The Damned by William Ollie

showroom the day the generators were hooked up and power returned to the jailhouse. Four refrigerators stood along the back wall of the room, sandwiched between rows of cases of beer and wine that were intermingled with various cartons of canned foods and soft drinks, stacked nearly as high as the refrigerators.
    Bert and Ernie and their two compatriots stood by one of the tables, Bert thumbing through a Hustler magazine while Ernie looked over his shoulder. Several bikers lay around the couches, some with women and some without. On the massive television screen, the actor Russell Crowe stalked the Roman Coliseum in his gladiator garb.
    Dub and Teddy grabbed a couple of Coors from one of the fridges and continued through the lobby, down a hallway to what had once been a booking room. As a teenager, Dub had spent enough time in this facility to actually come to have known some of the officers by name: Shaunessy, with his huge gut and bald pate, and a drunkard’s bulbous nose; Minerva Wray, the corrections officer with tits out to there; Smitty, the gap-toothed photographer who had snapped Dub’s picture more times than he could remember. He wondered where they were now. Probably hanging upside-down from a metal beam, or bubbling in some lunatic’s soup pot. Either that or hiding out in suburbia, hoping like hell The Devil’s Own didn’t come calling, or someone worse, if there was someone worse.
    All the desks and tables and chairs in this room had been left untouched. Teddy sat down in an office chair, leaning back and drinking from his beer as Dub leaned against a long, waist-high table. Dub knew this piece of furniture well. Many times his fingers had been inked and rolled against eight-by-eight-inch squares of paper, like the ones that now lay scattered along the rectangular wooden surface.
    Dub drew a vial of cocaine from his pocket, uncapped it and tapped some of its contents onto the back of his hand. After snorting the powder, he capped the vial and tossed it to Teddy, who performed the same operation, smiling as Dub took a long drink of beer, sat his bottle on the table and said, “Fire us up a joint, brother.”
    Teddy pulled a Bic lighter and a rolled-up plastic bag of marijuana from his front pants pocket, opened the baggy and fished out one of three pre-rolled joints. Fire crackled the cigarette paper when he lit up and sucked some smoke into his lungs.
    Dub said, “We’ve got us a nice piece of real estate here—here and the clubhouse. We need more, Teddy. But to get more, we need more men. We need to do some long term planning, lay out some goals. Seven weeks into this shit, the smoke’s still in the air. When that shit clears out, we need to be in charge. Firmly in charge. Of this whole area, not just our little corner of town.”
    Teddy took another hit, blew out some smoke and passed the joint to Dub. “Look, I hear what you’re saying, but, sooner or later things are gonna come back online, the army or the National Guard is gonna roll through here and shut our ass down.”
    “We act now, we could have our own army by then. Kick their asses and send ‘em hightailing it back to where they came from.”
    “The United States Army. We’re gonna kick the shit outa the United States Army.”
    Dub let out a stream of smoke, took a drink of beer, hit the joint again and looked at his friend. “Teddy, where’re all the cops? Why haven’t they shut us down?”
    Teddy, shrugging his shoulders, accepted the joint Dub held out to him.
    “They’re gone, just like the army’s gone. Sure, there might be some rag-tag, bullshit groups out there, but they’re not organized.”
    “How do you know what’s out there?”
    “Think about it, bro. The same thing that happened here’s happened all over the world. All those people who vanished—you don’t think a shit-load of ‘em were in the army, the National Guard, the government? Just like the cops, man; shit hit the fan and half of ‘em vanished, the