The Hunchface of DOC

The following is an excerpt from Part One:

Gunfire cracks the air. My head jerks and spins in the direction of the blast. I crouch with my arms swinging to cover my face. Just as impulsively, my cellmate springs from his prone position. With precise and instantaneous Samurai-like fluidity, his feet are planted on the grimy cement floor. My heart is pounding in my throat. I focus, and discover that a guard is generating the clamor. He relentlessly slams the butt end of a steel flashlight against the ironclad entrance of my newly adopted echo chamber. My eyes bulge open, staring blankly toward the dizzying, explosive force puncturing the stillness. The unforgiving blasts persist while the monster at our doorway incessantly whacks metal on metal.

…. My pupils dart to the figure beyond the glass opening in the door. “Stand for the count!” it screeches. The figure looks like an apparition lurking in a damp and darkened dungeon: a stumpy old ogre with a full crown of silver-gray. His hideous grimace causes the platypus lips to contort like a wrinkled handkerchief at the bottom of a drawer. The Hunchface of DOC would be a fitting title for his biography. After peering briefly through the narrow aperture, he poises himself to record information on a clipboard—probably that he has counted two heads. Judging from his appearance, that is the extent of his mathematical skills.

I recognize this loathsome insect as the guard who greeted me at the mod on my first day. As I approached the window to the shadowy guard shack called “the bubble,” he was mumbling something about pushing my papers in through a slit in the wall. I pushed the wrong sheet of paper in through what was apparently the wrong opening. While he was going haywire, I managed to submit the correct paper but, as it turns out, in the wrong crack again. With the passion of a firefighter busting out of an enflamed building, he frantically smashed the door.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, what are you? Some kind of fuckin’ dummy? ChrrrRRiiist!” His whole head and face were bright red; his neck muscles were bulging. His entire body began to tremor. Again, he yelled, “You got to be the stupidest god damn mothah fuckin’ dummy on the face of this god damn mothah fuckin’ planet.” He flung the first sheet that I slid through to him in my general direction. I stood with eyebrows lifted. He continued screaming, grabbing the door, and slamming it behind him. I retrieved my document from the floor and proceeded through the block entrance toward my assigned cell. All I could think was Wow!