Chapter 2 Sunday, April 10
Dust danced wildly in the vast waves of brome grass, and now and then a jumble of small fragments flew in the charcoal-black sky.The front of the storm roared over the Oklahoma horizon, the clouds crisscrossed, piled up and merged, as if countless forces were constantly rising, and the violent thunderclouds really grew bigger and darker every few moments.
The sound of bells rang in the church, and it happened to be Sunday, and those who were chosen to worship were directed from their cells into different parishes in the church.Earl Oberlin Sykes, who had chosen not to attend the service, was watching the approaching storm from his cell.
All kinds of bells in the prison rang together, and the electric doors opened and closed, accompanied by shouts and regular footsteps.The April wind howled across the prison, slapping the hooks on the flagstaff with a monotonous jingle.This brought back memories of Sykes' youth sailing on stormy nights in the harbour.
The inner walls of the prison are estimated to be four stories high and six feet thick. It is a red-brick detention center covered with a row of high-voltage wires and a large number of heating wires, which can instantly melt the metal buckles on the belt.On the outside of the wall were two twenty-foot underground defenses, both wired to an electrical grid, along with three coils of high-tension wire and pressure-sensitive alarms implanted in the ground.The sentries in the watchtower are equipped with fully automatic sniper rifles.Heat-sensitive infrared device is to improve the security level.Each of these pieces of equipment is deadly.
Beyond the high wall is a barren land stretching thousands of square miles. There are no roads, no lights, no boundaries, and there is little hope of escaping the helicopters in such a dark night.
Sykes thought, no need to stare at the wall in a daze every day.Oklahoma was no longer his concern.Because he is about to be released from prison.
He retreated to the edge of the bunk and sat down under the covers, which were as sweaty as his body.His muscles, sallow from the lack of sunlight, were flabby, and green tattoos flickered across his bare arms, a leprechaun on one arm and a nude woman on the other.He has the word "Love" engraved on his left wrist and the word "Hate" on his right wrist.His eyes were dark brown and the lids were lined with lines.A deep, reptile-like scar snaked down the eyelids and down the neck, where another inmate who lived with him had cut his throat with a can lid.He had a dark brown, cauliflower-like growth behind one ear and another above his groin.There is a piece of dead skin about a quarter of the size on the back of the neck, which has festered and is often bleeding when he scratches it with his hands.
Sikes wiped his armpits with a towel, and then his face.Sweat was still coming out of my forehead and stomach, and hell, it was so hot.
Water droplets splashed on the windows continuously, and after a while, the rain suddenly stopped.He flipped the blanket over his stomach, opened his mouth with difficulty, and manipulated the cot towards the toilet.He turned over and sat down on the toilet, an opposite force rushed out of his abdomen, feeling a kind of enjoying relaxation for a moment.
This morning, as usual, he thought of Susan Marko, wondering what she was doing now, where she lived, with whom.Thinking about when was the last time she thought of him, whether she was still thinking about him, what would she think of him now, if she could still remember him.
He remembered her in his old pickup truck, in a hippie dress, legs crossed, lips painted red, eating something from the truck rack over at the Dead Pine Market, Or more likely, a stolen basket of strawberries.Her green eyes were always full of fever, intently waiting for him to tell her where to go next and what to do; the anticipation made her even crazier.
A chill ran down his spine and his body began to shiver.After going to the toilet, he pressed the flush button, staggered back to the bed, picked up the towel and wiped his mouth again.
A heavy voice echoed in the passage.It was the sound of a large iron door opening and closing.He stared at the iron fence for a long time, and then looked at the iron wall, ceiling, floor, passage, sink, toilet, bed...everything was made of iron.He hated the sound of metal more than anything in the world.Like a monkey in a cage, he estimates the time by the opening and closing of the door.Air time, meal delivery time, workout time...all of it starts with their unique metallic noise.
His body trembled more violently.He knew that the problem of playing the pendulum had begun to occur again.He has been told that he has the disease of pendulum.Even the strongest inmates in the cell had suffered from it, but it never occurred to him that he would contract the damned disease himself.He went on recalling Susan.
"Nervous Sue," as Susan's friends called her.He'd been running all over Wildwood, smearing "Nervous Sue" on railroad tracks, overpasses, concrete walls, and boardwalks.
She is very rebellious against everything, just like the name "Neurotic Sue" who was given to her, she always imagines herself as an anarchist and despises all authority.If she moved to a big city, she would definitely join the Weathermen or the Symbiont Liberation Army.One of the most fulfilling things for her in the small town of Wildwood was to hang out with Sykes.
She wallowed in lust.But for Susan, it's not because she likes sex or because she's empty.She just wants to use this to forget her past.She wants to escape the dream of a once-beautiful childhood that was suddenly shattered; she wants to forget her rude, hypocritical father, who was once a police deputy inspector, but was accused of extortion; she wants to forget her beautiful mother. , she did not want to throw herself into the sea because of her husband's shame.
She wanted revenge, and she wanted revenge on everyone, even herself.She wants to cause pain for others.Among the idyllic seaside resorts and the hippie fanatic generation, Sykes' unorthodox appeal naturally caught her eye.
He is not like everyone else, who is full of beads and talks nonsense.His downright, unadulterated rebellion drew her close to him like a moth to a flame.
Sykes knew that when Susan took him among her friends at school, their amazed reaction filled her with vengeful pleasure.She especially enjoyed running afoul of his father and his gang of police station friends who used to drop by for barbecues on holidays.Then run away before being scolded.
But Susan Marko isn't too ostentatious, she just has an insatiable appetite for adventure.There was nothing she dared not do, even if it was to rescue a murderer from a prison.She knew that Sykes' appetite for adventure was also strong.Once, Susan and he jumped onto a school bus.Of course she knew what would happen to the women in the car.
Sikes threw the dirty towel into the corner and looked at the indigo Timex on his wrist.The raindrops fell on the window in big drops again, and then began to fall.He reached out and grabbed the dead skin on the back of his neck vigorously, and a stream of wet stuff gushed out.His emotions began to rage again, and he kept pounding on the sink with his hands.Sykes had grown up poor, even in a middle-class family like Susan Marko's had.But he deeply knows what it means to be rich and what a rich person looks like.He used to commute to school in that rickety, rickety school bus on the highway from Dead Pine to Wildwood.He saw students in the northern region, their mothers taking them to and from school every day in shiny new convertibles, the gold chains around their necks gleaming, and their skin smelling of delicate perfume.How he wanted to have them, how he wanted to be one of them.
"Want to ask me to give you a ride?" Once he was stopping to admire a car, Bianca suddenly appeared next to him.
Bianca Ashley was one of these women.She had hair long enough to hang down her miniskirt and this new Mustang convertible she got for her sixteenth birthday.Several times she saw him staring at her car after school.The black paintwork was so shiny you could put your hand through it.
She passed him by, then threw the book on the back seat: "Tell me quickly, please."
They had never spoken before.For seven years, they went to the same school, but Bianca never paid him any attention.
"Come on, boy. I'll take you a ride if you just beg me."
Sikes just stared at her, not caring whether she meant it or not.Bianca crossed her legs over the steering wheel, but her little checkered skirt lifted too, revealing her pink panties before it could be blocked.His eyes were fixed on her long naked legs. "Wow, not bad," he couldn't help saying. "Okay, please take me for a ride."
As he straddled his legs to the car door, Bianca turned the key and stepped on the accelerator quickly, and the car lurched out of the parking lot, dusting Sykes' pants. "Aren't you happy, you big idiot." She laughed and taunted him, and the car drove away.
From that moment on, Sykes realized that whatever he wanted in life, he had to get it himself.No one ever gave him anything.He was also sure that one day he would meet Bianca Ashley again, and in the same situation, it would be her turn to suffer.But this was all a long time ago, and thinking about it now is the most realistic.Sykes had to focus on the present.Concentrate on the little time he has left.
The town police never paid any attention to the crimes committed by Sykes and Susan.They're too busy dealing with the thousands of hipsters who flock to the Coastal Society and stopping incidents, including a lot of little shit that's just about issuing parking tickets.The state troopers had been called here to help with some serious cases, but the local police were jealous of them and didn't buy them.Therefore, the cooperation between the two parties was full of hostility, and almost nothing was accomplished.
During that time, Sikes and Susan committed kidnapping, robbery and theft, and none of them were punished.Their collusion has brought great harm to the stability of the town.Individually, they are all dregs of society, and there is no doubt that they will all fall into the law one day.But the combination of two guys will bring even greater harm to society. The combination of two arrogant elements with the same goal adds a resourcefulness and a threat.Whereas Susan is obsessed with trying to divide society, Sykes is concerned with taking away all the rights he feels are his birthright but are denied.They complement each other in a distorted way, intelligence and brute force, different backgrounds, different temperaments, but they are all the same extreme and depraved.If Sykes hadn't panicked and overturned that school bus, the police might never have caught them, at least not for years.Not in jail in the chaotic and crazy seventies.His recollection of the accident is already hazy.
I remember that winter, when Susan and he were attending a fastball meeting in North Beach, they broke into an unoccupied rich man's house and lived there for several days.They bought the key to the gate of the house from a cleaner and opened the door.Their madness becomes even more out of control when they forcibly pick up a trembling hitchhiker and her toddler on a highway outside the city.He raped the woman in the Black Marsh, then killed her, and Susan watched the child in the car.However, when he returned to the convertible, the car was gone, and so was the child.Susan Marko took the man and the car away.
He had to walk home, borrow a neighbor's car, and drive up and down Atlantic Avenue looking for her.She didn't stay where she usually goes.No one ever saw his car again.Afterwards, he thought that in the first few days, something was obviously wrong with her.Her mood fluctuated, and he remembered that they had quarreled about something the first day.While it all makes sense, God only knows it's going to happen because they've been doing drugs and having fun together.
The second time he was driving on the sidewalk looking for her that afternoon, a police car followed him.He hit the gas and started to run, because he still had those pants on after killing that woman the other day.He got away from the police car for about a mile, turned off Atlantic Avenue, and sprinted into a school bus one-way street to escape.Then came the car accident that made him chagrin.
He never saw Susan Marko again.She was never seen again anywhere that could be found.In the years that followed, he heard nothing more about the child, but neither did any leaks about the six women he had killed at Wildwood.
A few years later in prison he received a letter from Susan.She told him she was happy with what had happened.She said she began to believe in God and prayed that God would bless her.Susan, who once believed that the world was God's dirty pigsty and that God was the Lord of Evil, claimed to believe in God.She used to say that it shouldn't be easy for others, she thought it was a world where the poor died of starvation while the rich evaded taxes, drank and dined, went to sex places, and then sent their own children to school to learn to be like them people.She said these people should be damned.They should all be killed.If Sykes and she happened to ruin anyone's life, it was his due.
However, Sykes knew that Susan had not betrayed him.If she had done that, the police would have taken him back to New Jersey to be interrogated again as a murderer.If someone had found those bodies in the junkyard, it would have been big news across the country.But no one has found out, which means that Susan did not really confess her crimes to the priest in the confessional.Then, as long as he remained in prison, she and God would be perfectly content to keep the secret for him.
Now twenty-nine, almost thirty years have passed, and he has spent most of his life in prison, all because of the traffic accident that deserved death.What an irony!
It took him a long time to bring himself to face reality, to face the reality of being punished by life.The public defenders sent someone to tell Sykes to plead manslaughter, in which case he would only get two years of probation.This is also the punishment received after all drunk driving caused car accidents in the 1970s.
But Wildwood Police Chief Jim Lynch found more evidence, and voters sided with him when he offered evidence to charge Sykes with second-degree murder instead of manslaughter, In an election year, the words of a judge carry a lot of weight.Second-degree murder is interpreted as "causing death while committing a criminal act."For the murderer, this does not need to be a sufficient motive for the murder.Chief Lynch argued that because Sykes had killed seventeen people by driving while under the influence of a prohibited hallucinogenic drug, he should be charged with murder, not manslaughter.
Sykes was formally charged, interrogated, and finally sentenced to two life sentences.An additional fifteen charges were dismissed without retrial in the interests of justice.In the end Sykes was sentenced to two life sentences.More trials are just to comfort the people in the small town who have recovered from the panic. People need such trials to comfort the dead.Only one more enlightened judge showed mercy, allowing both sentences to be served concurrently.
Like most rapists and murderers, Sykes reflected a lot on his crimes over the years.But Sykes, unlike the other prisoners, is that his real crime has been missed.His madness and calmness when he kidnapped and dealt with the victims flashed before his eyes like a real kaleidoscope of pictures, severed arms, legs, stomach, hair, frenzied eyes and pleading lips.He thought of Susan's beautiful body, and the crazy sex games they had played together.Looking back on his first few years in prison, he can hardly remember thinking about anything else.All he had then were memories of the past.
But now, it's all back to real life again.Susan was once again a nuisance.Susan knows a secret that no one else in the world knows, that is, where the bodies of the victims are buried.
Sikes pulled on khaki trousers and heavy shoes, then pulled a Marlborough cigarette from the bag on the stainless steel table.He struck a match and lit a cigarette, admiring the woman's breasts tattooed on his shoulder, swollen and bigger as he lifted his arm, just as they had done it together when he was seventeen.He got up and threw the matchstick into the sink, then spat thickly into the toilet.
He exhaled smoke rings towards the ceiling, smoke rings snaking up from his lower lip.He lifted his foot up to rest on the sink, and as he laced his shoe, he wondered what it would be like to die.
A door at the end of the corridor opened.He heard footsteps approaching.He ran his fingers through what was left of his dry gray hair, then scratched the wound on the back of his neck and leaned against the iron bars.
Finally the moment came.
They escorted him through the windy courtyard, where a blizzard was still falling.Although it was morning, the sky had already turned gray, and the searchlights flashed blinding beams back and forth.He was wearing an orange prison uniform with shackles on his wrists and chains connecting the shackles around his waist and feet.
Pale white clouds pressed low over the high wall, emitting a cold light along the sentry tower.Lightning split the darkness, revealing the lone silhouette of four walls.Sykes observed that lightning was getting weaker and weaker.He looked up at Lightning, and grinned.
Under the force of the rotation of the Teflon bearing, the heavy steel door slowly opened, and the signal lights slowly cycled from red to green.He looked to the side, visually measuring the distance between the passage and the guards. The rifles in their hands were all loaded, and the sharp barbed wire flickered in the arc of the searchlight.He walked into a wiring trough, between the guard and the breach in the outhouse.The door slid shut and the searchlights switched to red.
The center of the blizzard devastated everything, rolled up a circular arc in the yard, rattled against the fence, passed the tower, howled, and the hailstones began to smash to the ground, pounding the roof like stones, making a deafening noise. sound.
The guard and Sykes ran desperately to the small room in front, and the iron door slammed shut behind them.They took him to a mottled iron table and ordered him to sit on the concrete floor.After Sikes had fingerprinted and signed, he was led by the guard into a small room with a bench.They unshackled him and threw him into a canvas bag.Then he was given a belt and a denim sweatshirt, a check for eighteen thousand dollars, and a fifty-dollar bill.Finally they took Sykes to a door far from the fence, where one of the guards pressed a button that opened the mechanical lock.The guard opened the door and let Sikes go out.A pure white car was parked outside the fence, its taillights were flashing red, and both rear doors were fully open.
The hail came over like a wave, and he raised his head to meet it, letting the cold ice sting his forehead and neck, and his open mouth was also filled with icy slag, a piece of hailstone slipped through his lips, and blood gushed out.
He put one foot on the bumper, and a flash of lightning illuminated his face.His eyes gleamed with wild excitement as he climbed into the car, licking the blood from his lips and thinking how sweet it must be to be free.