It wasn’t just the serious offenders anymore, it was everyone. The guards were emptying out the entire prison, taking busload after busload of inmates upstate to TFX. The ‘Special Handling Unit’ had begun life only a decade ago as a maximum-security prison before growing to everything-security as it swallowed up more and more of the US prison population with its cost-cutting, sadistically efficient means of containment.
Your wing is the last. The smell of sweat is rank as they load you onto the prison bus. You see tough men, men who have killed people, breaking down. Some are crying.
The psychopaths among the group, many of whom never considered themselves human in the first place, sit quietly, staring towards the front of the bus, comfortable in the knowledge that wherever they end up, whatever they end up as, they’ll find a way to come out on top.
Hell, their personality profile can’t be all that different from the people running the place.
Pulling up outside TFX, what truly terrifies you is just how small the compound is. Over half a million souls locked within those walls and barely larger than a strip mall. They’ve not even bothered with a perimeter fence. The prison itself isn't one of mere wire and concrete. The strange, mingled baying of many animals carries over the concrete outer wall, like canine jaws trying to enunciate human speech.
“I hope I get a dog,” O’Connor says excitedly.
“After all the people you’ve bitten, you think they’ll give you something with teeth?” someone mutters back. “You’ll be lucky if you get a mouth.”
Shotguns are waggled and your group is led inside, shackled. It’s the usual, almost reassuring in its mundanity- stripped, deloused and blasted in the ass with ice cold water before being marched, naked and shivering, into ‘Processing’. Before you, the remnants of the last busload of inmates are being carried away for imprisonment in a bucket. They’ve been processed.
At the harrowing sight, Murphy snaps. He howls in pure terror and bolts. With hands like spatchcocks, he knocks two guards flat on their asses before four can more seize his arms and legs. Even still, Murphy has the stature of a silverback gorilla, and it takes all their strength just to hold him in place. A fifth guard scrambles over dragging what looks to be a peach-coloured, cellophane body bag. Murphy tears one leg free and lashes out, but the guard snags the bare foot in the opening of the sack, dragging it up over him until his entire thrashing form is inside it. With a single practised motion, the guards slip him out of his manacles and seal the opening.
The sack contracts with a rush of air, the transparent cellophane vacuum sealing against his tattooed skin so that each of his bulging muscles are rendered in glossy plastic, his face a mask of panic contorting the cellophane. Somehow it constricts further and you all watch in horror as, with a series of wet crunching noises, he is compressed along with it, dwindling, until very soon all that remains is a tiny plastic doll squirming at the prison guard’s feet.
It looks like a barbie doll. Jutting triangular tits and glossy blonde curls. Its shrill voice, no louder than a rat, is too quiet to make out individual words over the ruckus, but you recognise the tiny, incoherent scream as the doll tries to tear at its face, failing to find any purchase on it with its fused plastic fingers.
They pick Murphy up. He thrashes and drums his little doll limbs against the man’s fist, who doesn’t even notice. A doll-sized orange jumpsuit is pulled around his plastic body and stitched closed at the back, before they toss him inside a wire cage not much larger than box a Barbie would be packaged in.
O’Connor steps towards the man with the doll sacks, holding out his manacled hands. “Me next!” he exclaims. He looks back at you with glee shining in his eyes, physically trembling with anticipation. “I hope they put me with Murphy. I always loved twisting the heads off dolls.”