Novel Excerpt: Faraway
You can read the first chapter of Hannibal Tabu's second novel, Faraway, broken into parts for mobile consumption.
What's the story about? The biggest problem with building the world's smartest prison is an inmate whose life's mission has been to get inside.
The steamy fog of the showers hovered around Anthony Harata like the limbs of a weeping willow. The muscular Asian man methodically washed himself, humming a vague tune of no specific origin. The insistent drumbeat of water on tile was loud but calming, and as he began to run his hands over his shaven head, he never even heard the sound of footsteps approaching.
In a flurry of motion he was caught -- both arms pinned to the grimy saffron-colored tiles, held above his head. Two huge Samoans held him fast as he struggled, and with his face pressed against the slick shower wall, he could just make out three more slowly approaching. He grunted and gritted his teeth, his legs trembling as he was afraid to move and slip into a much more vulnerable position should he fall.
"Not such a big shot now, are you, shooter Harata-san?" a gravelly accented voice said behind him. "Don't think we forgot what happened in Manila. Do it, Ata."
Two more sets of hands held him fast against the wall as the last one started to remove his dark blue jumpsuit. Harata grunted, his mind racing for a solution. No good ideas seemed to come. He clenched his entire body like a fist, vowing silently horrible vengeance should he survive this.
Harata was still bracing himself to be violated when he heard the first body fall to the ground. Soap was dripping into his eyes, so he couldn't see the motion behind him at all, but two of the bodies holding him moved away and shortly after fell to the shower floor with a sound like overripe persimmons losing their battle with gravity and finding soft earth. There was a lot of cursing in Samoan from the last two, and each one's voice was cut off suddenly by hard blows Harata could feel through the thickness of their torsos before they too slid to the ground. Quickly he moved away from the wall, struggling to see through the water and soap flowing over his tense form.
"Calm down, Harata," a deep, calm voice said through his blurry champagne-colored haze. "I'm surprised you were crazy enough to come in here alone."
Harata calmed down some, and he felt a towel fall over his left arm. He wiped his eyes and was not surprised to see two Black men in jet black uniforms standing, arms crossed, and another near the shower's entrance standing watch.
"My second had his work shift changed at the last minute," Harata said, toweling himself off quickly. "I was only in a minute or two before the Beach Boys here showed up."
"Never without somebody watching your back," Inmate XV4012287 replied, the word "DAMU" stenciled in white thread on the right breast of his uniform.
"I know, Ishmael," Harata nodded, starting to move towards the exit. "Thank you."
"Thank Jonesy," Damu noted, patting the man closest to him on the shoulder. "He was on his way to play ball with Quincy over there and saw Junior Toleafoa and his gang running this way like the warden left a door open. We figgered whatever was going on, we should take an interest."
"Damu," the lean, light skinned man called Quincy said from the doorway, "we gotta shake the spot before they reinforce."
Damu nodded. "Take the point. Then Jonesy, then Harata, then me." In single file, they quickly exited the shower, pausing quickly to grab Harata's black uniform jumpsuit and let him get dressed before leaving altogether.
They turned right, angling down an anonymous, dingy gray corridor, and rounded the next corner just as four more huge Samoans were approaching the showers from another direction. They kept moving in silence until they were all at the exercise yard amidst the regulars around the basketball court.
"Too close," Jonesy sighed. Jonesy was a lanky man with a deep cognac complexion and a fidgety energy that manifested itself in sudden, jerky movements. His dark blue uniform looked about a half size too small for his 5' 10" frame.
"Way too close," Damu agreed, his eyes on the passage they'd just exited. "It is simply your
shai that Junior and his boys didn't have the application of will to do serious damage to you, and that Jonesy was on point. This time. It is always our objective to be perfect in all ways, flawless and unassailable."
A voice from the court chimed in, "That has to be Ishmael Damu, runnin' that same material since the teens!"
All four turned to see an extremely dark man with his uniform jumpsuit removed to the waist and tied around his stout tummy, smiling brightly with brilliant ivory teeth.
"Morgan Summers," Damu said with a sigh. "What in the name of Ma'at are you doing here?"
A dark, stocky man, Summers sauntered up like the neighborhood wiseguy walking down Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. "Same as you, dog," he said with a wistful smile, "wishing I wasn't stupid enough to get caught." The two men drew close, and each grabbed the forearm of the other. Quickly, they touched cheeks, and then hugged with a laugh. "I see you're still teaching The Way of The Circle."
"The Circle is eternal, but Mister Harata here is nobody's student, lookin' like the Hulk on Wontons and isht," Damu offered. "Gentlemen, meet my 'uncle,' Morgan Summers, one of the finest men ever produced in the cesspool of Brooklyn, New York, and convicted, finally, of something I haven't been briefed on. Summers, this is Anthony Harata, shooter for some Yakuza offshoot, convicted on something like a billion counts of first degree murder, a few hundred thousand counts of murder two, and a pesky parking ticket that just won't go away. Over there is Intel's worst nightmare, uber-hacker Paul 'Jonesy' Jones, Jr., and East St. Louis' most notorious drive-by shooter, Mister Abdul Quincy."
Summers shook hands briefly but warmly with each, and Damu made a subtle knit of his fingers before shaking Summers' hand. Summers nodded and relaxed visibly.
"How'd you get caught?" Quincy asked, his eyes carefully examining this newcomer.
"The wife," Summers sighed. "We were undercover, waiting for a signal. She must have said something when she was out getting groceries or something. Next thing I know, bicopters was all flyin' towards my house like a herd of bees ..."
"Bees come in swarms," Damu injected, smirking, "but go on."
"... and it's all I can do to get her and the baby into the drop shaft before the Fives bust in. I got them both off safely, but I was busted."
"What crime did you commit, if I may ask?" Harata spoke reverently in only the slightest accent, his voice clear and almost delicate for a man of his appearance. His tall, shirtless sanguine form was offset by the dark brown of his uniform pants.
"Basic consorting with dangerous minds sort of BS that the DOC got Obama and Sharpton for," Summers said with disgust.
Damu pulled on the featureless midnight black uniform jacket that matched his long t-shirt and jeans perfectly. "Aunt Fumilayo was always as dumb as a soup spoon. They had flix of you with me?" he asked.
"You know they never got a good shot of you until after you were caught," Summers answered, smiling grimly. "No, it was me and Seker, and some other shots of me with Fidel and Harjanto they spliced together in Gump labs."
"So, the guilty by association rule came into play ..." Damu started, nodding at Jonesy.
"... and I end up at Faraway in a black uniform instead of at Mule Creek or Sing Sing in a red or an orange," Summers finished. "Most dangerous brand of prisoner, 'specially after you went nuts when they came for you, bruh."
Damu grinned. "Yah, that was bangin.' And I've been assured by people here that I
did only get
mzungu, like I meant to."
Harata scrunched up his face again before he remembered the Zimbabwean word for Caucasians. He peered at Damu with a mixture of reverence and confusion.
"Anyway," Summers yawned, stretching, "what you got goin' on here, bruh?"
Damu shrugged. He turned, the sunlight glinting off the lenses of his gray wire glasses. "There's all the prison basics, but I keep my cipher tight. We've made an ... arrangement with some of the guards and we're all sequestered together, right next to solitary. There's things visible and things unseen. I'd bet you still prefer agressive basketball to combat training ..."
At that, Summers wide West Indian face opened a canyon of blazing white teeth, and nodded.
"... which will work out just fine for you, since Harata could use somebody other than Quincy who does more than defend, which is all me an Jonesy here's good for. None of us are in much want for anything -- got the hook up on commissary, so we basically center on resource allocation and keeping all relevant parties happy. Harata here has a connect for cigarettes and ... well, he's hooked up. With him as the homie, we keep our lifestyle as plush as we can while still trying to figger how to manifest in the world."
"And Mister Damu here provides me with additional security and the occasional embarrassing basketball game," Harata smiled.
"Security? Big muhf**ka like you?" Summers questioned, half mocking.
Harata smiled, a thin slit of teeth between grainy lips. "When I got here, I was the world's only six foot tall Asian weighing in at a hundred and fifty pounds. In addition to my reading, Damu suggested I do some more ... physical development. That was 2025."
Damu grinned. "Ten years of pumpin' up this sorry li'l mofo into a badass, kung fu movie, temple of Shaolin, saki swillin' ..."
"... Asian guy who still can't fight a lick and has no training away from firearms," Harata finished with a shrug.
"All them convictions and you cain't fight?" Summers boggled.
"I was a shooter," Harata said with a small measure of pride. "They'd have never gotten me at all without this rat turning on my clan ..."
"... who mysteriously slipped and fell on a detanator that blew him and his house into a billion pieces two years ago," Damu smirked. "But that's not important right now ... it'll be lunchtime in an hour and a half, and none of us are on shift until four," Damu commented after pulling out a late 90s handheld and tapping it twice. "Q, Harata -- Uncle Mo here is a natural baller, why don't y'all get acquainted over some trash talk and rock-handlin'?"
Harata didn't have time to answer, his mouth still moving into position to form words, before Summers had grabbed a ball lying on the ground and tossed it directly into Harata's breadbasket. Harata grimaced and called Quincy on team, who grabbed Jonesy and dragged him on to an empty half court. The four leapt into play with fervor as Damu wandered off to one side, partially standing in the shadow of a beam, his smile melting away into a hardened poker face, glaring carefully around, often glancing up at the guards patrolling the walkway above and the warden's office above that.
| continue to part three | index |
