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No one responded to his denial of guilt.
The clerk filled out custody papers and turned the young man over to Gerard who silently led him to another patrol
car.
"I didn't do anything," Harwell kept saying to Gerard. "I didn't do anything!"
Gerard was used to dealing with innocent detainees. They were all innocent. He had not responded to anything any
of them said for the past forty years. "You'll be staying here until tomorrow morning at nine when the magistrate
hears your case," said Gerard mechanically. The fact that one day had seen the world turned upside down didn't
mean that tomorrow would be the same. Gerard was passively confident that the dead would return to being dead by
nine the next day. If the detainee didn't think so, that was his problem.
Gerard was tall and bald. He shaved the little bit of hair that remained on his skull. His eyebrows remained bushy
and black, making him look angry most of the time, regardless of his actual emotion of the moment.
Gerard's look intimidated the young man, who didn't fight back when placed into the cell. "Do I get a phone
call?" he asked.
Gerard didn't respond to the question. He walked out of the room.
Randy Harwell sat down on the cot on the floor. He looked around the room and wondered if he would ever get out.
This was not a normal time. He should not have allowed the deputy to treat him like that. It was too late to reconsider
that, though.
Harwell had been accused of taking cash from an untended cash register at the Northside Kroger, which he had indeed
done. Still, when the world was falling apart, what did a few stolen dollars matter?
Randy looked around at the empty cell and through the bars beyond it to the empty room and then the thought struck
him: What if Deputy Dawg didn't come back? A light case of paranoia seized him then and he began looking around
for tools to enable an exit from this ancient jail. There were none.
The cell held a cot and nothing else. Randy remembered a Stephen King story about a man in jail selling his soul
to escape. If the devil appeared right now, he thought, he might get quite a bargain: souls were being marked down
quickly.
TWO
Nearly an hour had passed. It was after six. They hadn't taken his watch when they brought him in. He had spent
the whole time wondering what he would do if no one came back tonight. Or tomorrow. Or the day after that. He remembered
hearing "the rule of threes" about death. A person would die after three minutes without air, three days
without water or three weeks without food. He didn't have to worry about that third one; it would be the second
one that would get him. Just thinking about it made him thirsty.
He thought he heard a noise downstairs, a door opening. A few hours ago, he would have been too cool to yell out
for help just because he heard a noise. Now that he had had time to reflect on just how much death scared him,
he thought otherwise.
"Hello!" he called.
No one responded, but he did hear more noise downstairs. Maybe it was someone who had broken in to rob the place.
Or maybe those things, those living dead things had broken in. At least he was safe here inside his cell. Should
he call out if it were the zombies who had come in? He had no choice.
"Hello!"
Then came the noise of footsteps on the stairs. Whoever it was was coming up. He could hear at least two-no, three
sets of feet. In a moment the door opened. Gerard pushed two women into the room. From the far cell, he couldn't
really see much. The bigger woman staggered, apparently drunk.
Randy stood and called out, "Hey! Let me out of here!" Gerard didn't even look at him. His attention-such
that it was-was focused on the two new prisoners.
"The magistrate will be here tomorrow morning, ladies," Gerard said. "Until then, you'll be here."
Unlocking the door, Gerard guided a young woman into the cell and slammed the door. He then placed the other woman
in the cell next to Randy.
"Are we going to get fed tonight?" Randy called out. "Can I get some water?"
"There's a man in here," the woman said.
Gerard slammed the second door. He started towards the door, ignoring the comments of the three prisoners.
"Hey! Hey! Don't walk out of here without telling me something! Hey!"
"Hey, motherfucker!" the woman in the middle called out. "You can't fucking leave us here with a
man! This shit ain't right!"
Gerard stopped.
"My mother and I did not have relations," he said. And then he walked out.
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