DEFENESTRATION

Part II

By James McKenna

A week passed as Marc Spector was put in house arrest, the cops and feds tried to coerce a statement out of him, but any one who dared would only receive a cold piercing gaze. Another two weeks passed, as evidence was stacked against him. In truth, there were some grey areas regarding his dual identities as Marc Spector and Steven Grant; had he chosen, a clever racket could have been run with them, but he was no longer a man of mercenary means—however the other lawyer preyed upon Marc’s past, the troubled adolescence and the hazy years as a hired gun. All the charity and good deeds he’d done, they were washed over, Jen did her best to sway the jurors, but to no avail. The jurors had been convinced by an outside source that Marc Spector was a threat to society, and with a sizeable donation by the same outside source, they voted to put him away.

It was his last night in the county jail before being moved to the federal penitentiary, Marlene came to visit him; his cold eyes softened like snow before the sun. His stunning blonde, his resurrection.

“Steven…” her voice dripped with despair.

“Shh. We’ve had worse. It’s just a run of bad luck, Marlene, it can’t last,” he tried to comfort her.

“How can you say that? Steven you’re going to prison, you’re being taken away and chained up! How could this happen, you were so careful,” she replied quietly, her eyes glistened, but she wouldn’t cry.

“I guess…I wasn’t all that careful, the whole thing smells wrong. It’s bad luck, Marlene, it happens. I crossed the wrong person. The charges just showed up out of nowhere. No hints or signs—and the trial! A disgrace. But don’t worry;” he placed his hand, palm open, on the thick, dirty Plexiglas divider between them: “they crossed the Moon’s knight. I know in my gut something’s up, something’s wrong, and whoever or whatever’s behind this, well they shouldn’t have fucked with the avatar of vengeance,” his eyes smoldered.

“Steven…Marc, just be careful,” she said, almost with a smile. They had weathered worse before. Being involved with a superhero, she’d been through just as many trials as he and she could handle waiting.

“Never am,” he grinned a madman’s grin. Their time was up; the guards came to escort him away.

“I love you,” were Marlene’s last words to her paramour, as he was forced to set down the receiver of the communication system used for inmate and visitor. He mouthed the same words back to her.

With steeled nerves, Marlene walked back outside, Frenchie was waiting for her, the red evening sun glinting off of his dark sunglasses. He opened the car door and motioned her inside, shutting it he cursed under his breathe and wished Marc the best of luck. He walked around the car and got in the drivers seat to ferry his anguished friend away from the dismal place.

Back in the police station, Marc was handcuffed and shipped off to the Federal penitentiary up state. That was the plan, at least. The paperwork had been misfiled—purposefully, and he was being sent to Ryker’s Island Prison, a maximum security facility housing some of the worst criminals in the U.S. and any abroad who’d been extradited and it even housed an array of supercriminals.

However, before his shipment, Marc had been given a “last meal” or sorts, his farewell to real food which the crooked cops under Bain’s payroll laced with drugs. Drowsy and half manic, Marc was shipped, blind-folded, to Riker’s. The ride was a clandestine water crossing. At the prison he was received by equally malign characters, clubbed in the back of the head and shoved into an empty cell in a deserted wing of the facility.

Amidst fitful bouts of sleep, Marc Spector dreamt, it seemed. Encompassed by bile black waters, splashing and moving much more like pools of viscous ink and less like brine; in the middle Marc sat in a boat, made of bare, unfinished planks and though the craft slowly moved, there were no oars with which Marc may guide the tiny vessel.

The only light was the full moon, Khonshu’s watchful eye scanning for any harmful influences that would dare accost Marc. Now however, the moon seemed to wane, slowly turning to a crescent, and then altogether, it vanished as bilious clouds moved in, dark and grey, slowly covering the dim stars, erasing the last vestiges of hope and light from the sky. In the pit of his stomach, Marc felt ill and cold, naked to the world and abandoned—served up on a platter to the leery and fickle fates.

The dream was interrupted and he woke up to a flat buzz as his cell door unlocked at 5:30 in the morning. His head hurt, his gut reeled and he had a bad taste in his mouth from the dirty mattress and hazy air. Dazed, Marc crept out into the hall. He’d been dressed in the prison uniform, the orange made it hard to blend into the shadows, but he did his best. He saw a line of inmates walking somewhere, prodded along like cattle by the guards.

This was all wrong, the facilities were different than he’d expected, the other inmates were hardened crooks, and from another corridor, the sounds of a struggle resonated throughout this end of the prison. Marc rushed towards the sounds, keeping to areas immersed in darkness. Two guards brandishing clubs and more wrestled with a lone man, it should have been easy to subdue the prisoner, but instead the inmate made easy work of them. He grabbed the club of one officer and pulled him off balance, knocking him across the jaw with a vicious blow and sending him down. With his newly acquired weapon he clubbed the other guard in the gut and spat on the crumpled form. The door from whence the prisoner had emerged was now ajar, but the sign above the door frame read Solitary Confinement. Marc recognized this man, and it sent a shock through his system. This wasn’t a federal white collar tax-evasion penitentiary. This was Riker’s.

The man who just clawed his way out of the solitary pen, and who’d just taken down the guards was Frank Castle.

Spector lost Castle in the darkness and decided to continue following the train of orange-clad inmates to the cafeteria. After a lenghtly procession they arrived. When they got there, Marc was surprised by the lack of officials present, there seemed to be no cooks even. Frank had been here already and had done his job well, incapacitating and hiding the cooks and guards. Marc knew he was laying in wait, to take out someone.

The crowd milled about, their routine upset and many attempting to take this opportunity and run with it. As groups started to form, one commanding voice rang out.

“Sit down. I don’t have enough bullets for all of you, and most of you aren’t worth a bullet anyways,” the voice called out, and the inmates looked up at Frank Castle, the Punisher, now brandishing the weapons of the guards he’d incapacitated. In the dull roar of the cafeteria and the inmates disorder, he’d climbed atop a serving platform, his face painted black with a skull pattern, for intimidation, he’d used some sort of coloring materials from the kitchen.

Most of the inmates saw this man sparingly, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement; being reprimanded for the murders of other prisoners. The guards could never directly prove it was him, and they didn’t really care anyways. Most of them looked kindly upon Castle’s exploits—however they kept him in solitary to appease the higher-ups. When he made an appearance, he was the law; he was a hawk waiting to swoop down and capture his prey. The rest of the inmates were field mice, and one day, Frank aimed to take all of them out. Then his eyes met Marc’s.

Castle’s eyes narrowed on Spector for he recognized the true face of the Moon Knight. In his business, Frank made a note never to forget a face, anyone could be a hit man or a gangster coming for him, and in one instance when he’d seen Spector shed his cowl, Castle had concentrated hard and kept the visage burned into his memory.

The other inmates’ eyes followed Castle’s gaze, and only one dared speak: “Ah! Mes amis, is this a reunion of sorts?” Georges Batroc spoke with a mock jovial tone to it.

“I’ve not seen him around before. He looks familiar though,” Machete whispered after to Zaran, who kept silent.

“Shut up Batroc, and don’t act like you’re any better than the other fools who landed themselves here,” Castle called out. He kept his eyes on Spector, he knew the Moon Knight’s true face, and was wondering how he’d landed himself at Ryker’s.

Fred Myers had been planted in the prison weeks before, waiting for Spector’s arrival. Myers had slinked to the back of the room; carefully he drew a small bladed weapon out from inside his orange jumpsuit. He’d had second thoughts about constructing the shiv in a boomerang shape, thus he’d fashioned a small knife, which would be more likely to implicate Machete or Zaran, or any of the other various inmates. With everyone distracted, Myers had made his way to the back of the room and threw the knife with precision and fervor.

Castle noticed this out of the corner of his eye and fired a shot past Marc. Spector had ducked the moment he saw the gun pointed near him, an in-mate behind him lay exanimate, and looking in front of him, Marc noticed a knife-like, makeshift weapon embedded in the back of a now collapsed man. Marc grabbed it and hid it in his shirt sleeve. With this sudden outburst, the cafeteria erupted.

Myers fled the scene and Castle rushed out behind him. Frank had been in solitary for the past few weeks, and wanted to know why Moon Knight was there, and why this thug was out for Marc’s blood. Myers was faster than Castle and more agile, which he used to his advantage, as he started to gain some headway down another of the prison’s long, stolid corridors. Tired of the chase, Castle sprinted and tackled him.

“What’s the deal?” Frank asked the would-be assassin, as he lifted the man roughly and placed him against the wall, restraining his arms and pressing his face against the cold, rough concrete.

“An’ what is it you wanna know, Punisher? Yeah, I know who you are, an’ I’m not scared, not like those other punks, you even got the rest of the costumes scared of ya. Not gonna happen with me, I’m here on assignment,” Boomerang laughed, even as Castle applied more force and crushed him against the wall.

“Assignment? Who sent you? Who are you?”

“What is this, twenty questions? C’mon Franky-boy, you’re smarter than that. This mash-my-fucking-face-against-the-wall trick may work on those regular thugs, but, I’m a Ryker’s boy, y’know, we’re a special breed, takes more to break us, or if you can get me a bit of grog, an’ spare the pain, I might tell ya just ‘cause I’m bored,” Myers continued, as he tried to wrest free and pull a knife on Castle before Frank searched him. Castle pulled him back from the wall and smashed him back into it, mashing his face on the concrete, cutting him up and rendering him unconscious, the knife dropped to the ground, and cogs turned within Frank Castle’s brain.

Back in the Cafeteria

Batroc felt free in mid-air. He was not known as the Leaper for nothing, and his mastery of Savate was unparalleled as he sailed through the air, his left leg tucked under him as his right struck one man’s chest brutally, sending him reeling into a dense crowd of men, all fighting. He landed, and Zaran came up beside him, taking out another would-be assailant. Zaran laughed at the prisoner’s ineptitude.

“What now, Batroc?” The Weapons Master asked his French ally. “They will have seen this on the security cameras, we haven’t much time.”

“Try an’ watch, mon ami. See what happens, an’ perhaps we can use it later for our plan. If this small group is such a powder keg, maybe the rest of the prison is much the same, an’ we may use such a distraction to aide our escape,” Batroc answered his friend, leaping again to avoid an attacker. “But where is monsieur Machete?”

The Walk-in Freezer

Machete had cornered Spector and driven him into the back of the kitchen, and now to the large, walk-in freezer. The mercenary from San Diablo now wielded two of the larger kitchen knives he could find. He’d grabbed them up as Marc had attempted to put up a fight through the kitchen. In the crowd Machete had singled him out and had bowled him over. Marc tried to run and get lost in the uproar, but Machete had managed to follow him.

The mercenary pulled off several advanced tricks with the knives, balancing, tossing, flipping and catching them, all menacingly.

“¿Como estas? Me llamo Machete…¿Hmm…no español? Con permiso. Alright, I am Machete, would you like to hazard a guess as to why they call me that? Now tell me why you look so familiar stranger,” the devilish assailant ordered him, one hand cocked to send a knife into Spector’s heart, the other ready to slash his throat.

“I don’t know, maybe I just have one of those faces, huh?” Marc was trying to stall for time, to formulate some plan.

“No. No no no. You—I know your face, I’ve seen it before, I just can’t place it. Cop? One of those ‘heroes?’ Maybe the great Captain America or one of the other Avengers?”

“Oh yeah, you got it right. When Captain America throws his mighty shield, all who oppose his shield must yield! How’d you guess?” Marc sang off-tune, trying to keep up a sense of bravado.

“Very funny, Cap,” Machete let out a chuckle, his eyes trained on Marc. Spector had managed to loosen the shiv from his sleeve and grasped it tightly.

“Perhaps I was mistaken, no?” Machete wondered aloud, lowering one of the knives. Suddenly Spector launched himself at the disarming mercenary, hoping to take advantage of the moment and catch Machete off balance. They tumbled to the ground and rolled around in a heap, Marc was trying to gouge at the mercenary or find his throat. At last they rolled over and Machete laughed, he was atop Spector, who lay face down, prone, on the ground. Machete leaned on the fallen hero’s back, keeping him down, now both of the mercenary’s knives gently poked at the sides of Marc’s throat, urging small rivulets of blood to rush forth.

“Adios, amigo,” Machete hissed.

Two days later

The groaning persisted until an orderly came in, readying a morphine drip for the IV tube. Before the orderly could apply it, the patient’s hand gripped her arm tightly. She looked down and smiled at him…even the hospital ward deserved kindness she thought. The breathing was haggard; she adjusted his oxygen tubes and helped the patient, the prisoner, right himself in the bed so as to breathe easier.

“These wounds were very deep, you have to be careful, okay?” She asked, knowing there would be no answer, as she drew up the hospital gown on the patient to change his bandages. “You lost a lot of blood, you better rest, we’ll see about getting you some real food tomorrow. But take it easy for now.” She affixed the morphine drip to his IV, and the patient fell into a deep sleep, as though lulled by the beatings of Hypnos’ wings.