The Devil's Whisper

by T. H. Moore

  Built to withstand all environmental challenges, the transport bus sped along. Red clouds of dust billowed into the thick outback air as the bus headed for the headquarters of the prison city. As a precautionary measure dictated by the British penal code, the side windows were blackened to ensure the shackled prisoners aboard were blind and disoriented as to their geographic surroundings. The only light penetrating the fortified vehicle shined in through the front windshield, the wipers whipping back and forth on high speed to keep the dust away.

  To ensure the safety and timely arrival of this particular load of prisoners, there were five young, heavily armed correctional officers and one older, higher-ranking officer on board. The correctional officers were familiar with the monotonous, anxious trip to the prison city in the center of the continent. While the driver battled the bumpy road, all but their ranking officer busied themselves checking their weapons. The officer kept his beady eyes on the prisoners while wiping his sweaty brow and the rolls on the back of his neck with a hand towel.

  Newer correctional officers wouldn’t even consider taking a job on Katingal, but for those who had been on the force and heard the stories, it was a coveted assignment. Despite having to work at the wretched facility, exiled for three-month rotations away from their families, loved ones, and civilization, and having to face hazardous situations and see the worst of human beings, at the end of that time they could return home and enjoy wages unmatched by any profession worldwide.

  It was the money that talked. None of them would dare to admit that the work scarred them. When they returned home after a rotation, they brought back with them endless tales of K-City’s inhumane living conditions, tortures, rapes, murders, and mutilations. To maintain their own humanity, they eventually became inured to the suffering and atrocity and erected walls of their own.

  On the job, accompanying another transport of hardened criminals, they let themselves feel no empathy for what these prisoners would soon endure. The most observant prisoner would notice how he, too, should harden himself against what was to come, as this would give them the best chance at survival. Most didn’t notice enough to help themselves in time.

  The driver of the fortified bus turned the knob to increase the speed of the wipers, but they couldn’t whisk away the dirt and kicked-up gravel enough to clear the windshield. The stones dragged along the glass like fingernails on a blackboard.

  Toward the back of the bus, Charles Gravo sat in silence next to an equally quiet woman. When the bus smashed into another pothole, the passengers were launched out of their seats and jerked back down by the chains.

  “Hey, muthafucka!” screamed a bearded Italian convict. “Hit one more pothole and you’ll be the first one I kill when we step off this raggedy bus!”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Charles muttered from the row in front of him.

  “What in the hell?” the Italian barked, glaring at Charles. “A white man speaking with an African accent? Your mama preferred men from the dark continent, huh? Hmph, you don’t look like a mongrel.”

  Charles didn’t respond.

  “Nothing to say now, eh?” The Italian grinned and folded his arms over his chest. “It doesn’t matter. First the driver, and then you.”

  The driver glanced up at him in the rearview mirror.

  “You won’t be the first officer to have his life snatched by Donato Bilancia,” the Italian bragged.

  The woman beside Charles turned her head to look at Donato. In return, he leaned forward and licked his lips like a salivating dog.

  “Ciao, bella,”6 Donato said. “What’s your name?”

  Charles glanced at the petite yet voluptuous, curly-haired beauty shackled next to him. He let his eye travel down her body. Her silicon-enhanced breasts were all but bursting through her standard-issue jumpsuit.

  “Don’t you prefer them a bit younger, Gravo?” Donato asked.

  Charles raised his head but continued to remain silent.

  “That’s right, I know who you are. Everyone here does. After all, you’re a celebrity.” The chatty Italian opened his arms as wide as his chains would allow.

  Charles looked around the bus, noting that all eyes were now trained on him.

  “Yäbälay.” Donato jabbed a finger at Charles. “That’s what they call you, right?”

  At the mention of his alias, Charles heard murmurs in a variety of languages echoing through the bus. The Brazilian beauty next to him inched away as far as her constraints allowed.

  “You pronounced my name correctly,” Charles calmly retorted. “So what of it?”

  The murmuring became louder.

  “When we get to Katingal, you’ll be passed around like a cigarette.” Donato scoffed. “With all the beautiful women on Earth, you go after children? Little girl babies? Even now, you’re shackled to a woman I can’t wait to shove my cock in. But when I saw you eyeing her, Gravo, the look on your face was priceless.”

  The young beauty tensed and sneered, turning her head toward Donato.

  “That’s right. Get angry, cunt.” The Italian wagged his tongue at her. “I want you to fight the entire time I’m fucking you.”

  Just then, the bus hit a large pothole, sending every passenger into the air again and causing Donato to bite his tongue.

  “Bastardo!”7 he griped as he spat blood.

  Charles watched as the driver glared at Donato. Then, in his rearview mirror, he scanned the ceiling above Donato’s seat. The driver peeked at the distracted commanding officer, then slyly opened a control panel near the steering wheel column. A second later, Charles heard a rapid thumping behind him. He looked back to see Donato convulsing, his eyes rolled back and bloodied tongue hanging out and dripping saliva. He fell over onto his shackle-mate, passing the electrical current onto him.

  Charles turned back around in his seat to catch his Brazilian shackle-mate looking at the abstract tattoo on his wrist.

  “You take pride in what you do to children?” she whispered in her lyrical accent.

  “We’ve both consorted with the devil,” Charles responded with a faux-apologetic smile. “You want answers, look inward. I’m sure you’ll find plenty. The time I spend on this continent among you people will be minimal. Your fates have already been predetermined. I’m the only one here in control of his destiny.”

  She pursed her lips and looked at him. “Thin skin for such a diabolical criminal.” She chuckled. “I have to say the Italian is right. They’ll soon be passing you around.”

  He leaned toward her, eyeing her chest as it bounced in rhythm with the jostling bus. “Me?” he whispered. “The moment we step from this bus into K-City, you’ll be gang-raped for hours, maybe days. Then, nine months from now, your body will spit out a bastard that won’t survive the first week of its life. You’re a lamb in a den of wolves.”

  “I’m sure my dead husband and his dead whore also suspected me to be weak and naïve.” She smiled, showing her straight white teeth. “Right before I tore the guts from their bodies.”

  A small smirk graced Charles’s face as he shook his head at her. “As if any of that matters here… ” he began to say, but was distracted by the sudden transition as the bus rolled onto a paved road.

  He craned his neck and saw that they had arrived at the outer reaches of the vast barrier wall of K-City. He raised his chained wrists up in the air until the tension forced his shackle-mate’s to move also.

  “We’ll be there soon,” he said to her. “So for your sake, you better hope the Italian’s cigarette theory is wrong. Because, like it or not, you and I are in this together.”

  “Attention!”

  The commanding officer’s bellowing jarred his subordinates from their slumber. They checked their weapons and straightened the creases in their uniforms.

  A speck of K-City could be seen in the distance. Its massive walls had be
en inspired by the Great Wall of Zhoukoudia, with Katingal’s architects having tripled the height and width in creating their masterpiece. The biggest difference was that the Great Wall of Zhoukoudia had been constructed to keep would-be conquerors out, while Katingal’s barricade was designed to keep the same sort of savage man confined.

  As the bus neared the wall, countless surveillance cameras and drones patrolling the skies fed the warden all the information he needed to govern the city. The live video feeds that these cameras offered doubled as a means of tight patrol, as well as gambling entertainment for the correctional officers during their three-month deployments. They would often take bets on which prisoners wouldn’t make it through the day. Or the next hour.

  When the first of two steel security gates opened, the inmates got their first unfiltered glimpse of the prison city. Watchtowers with large floodlights stood at thousand-meter intervals. From those high perches, guards with automatic weapons lorded over the property.

  The bus came to a halt at a giant, metal entry gate.

  One of the non-English-speaking prisoners butchered the warning information on the sign at the gate as he read it aloud.

  “The word is ‘warning,’ you dumb Spaniard,” the young driver said with a sneer.

  The Spaniard pushed aside his long, jet-black hair and stared at the driver.

  “You eyeballing me?” the driver asked as he smiled and reached for the control panel. He flipped the numeric switch corresponding to the prisoner’s seat, sending a quick but powerful jolt.

  “Detener!”8 the Spaniard spat out from between his tightened jaw. “Tengo una afección cardiac. Puedes matarme!”9

  Donato laughed. “No hablas espanol! Hablas englais!”10

  “He’s saying he has a heart condition, and the electricity could kill him,” Charles said loudly enough for the ranking officer on the bus to hear.

  The chubby sergeant tried to pull his utility belt up over his protruding belly, but it sank back down again. He pursed his brow. “You shock another prisoner without my direct order,” he scolded the driver, beads of sweat forming on his crumpled forehead, “and you’ll never work this detail again.”

  “Yes, sir!” the driver responded with mock seriousness.

  The Spaniard clutched at his heart and took deep breaths, his eyes wide with panic.

  “¿Le parece bien?”11 Charles asked. “¿Necesita un médico?”12

  “Estoy bien,”13 he said, nodding. “Gracias.”14

  Charles rested his head upon the seat in front of him and sighed.

  “Keep back fifty feet,” the sergeant instructed as he read aloud the notice on the steel door. “All violators will be shot without warning.” He repeated the same message in Mandarin, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic while examining his cuticles.

  The prisoners at the front of the bus craned their necks to see the seventy-foot wall. Ten signs stacked one after the other, written in ten languages, alerted the incoming inmates that marksmen were prepared to shower bullets on those who violated the prison’s protocols.

  “Meda! Meda!”15 the Spaniard declared with agitation as he pointed out the window. “Los cadáveres, algunos de ellos . . .”16 He paused, his voice trailing off.

  “Goddamn it, what’s he saying?” Donato demanded.

  “He says he sees corpses,” Charles said.

  Before anyone could respond to that, the speakers on the bus crackled to life, broadcasting an official statement about what the inmates were seeing.

  “One of the dead is a guard,” Charles translated. “They shot down one of their own.”

  The Spaniard was rocking back and forth, eyes closed, hands clasped together. “Dios te salve, María,”17 he muttered, “llena eres de gracia. El Señor es contigo, bendita tú entre las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre Jesús.”18

  The sergeant seized the opportunity to teach the driver a lesson. “Look out there on the ground, rookie,” he said. “That’s the officer you replaced. That’s what happens when you don’t follow protocol on this detail.” He was interrupted by a voice coming through the bus radio handset.

  “This is Warden Johnston. Identify yourself and cargo.”

  The sergeant reached over and flipped a switch. The blackened windows of the bus lowered. Charles looked out and saw what had shaken the Spaniard. Among the countless bullet holes that had scarred the walls was a rotting corpse being picked over by buzzards and insects.

  The sergeant coughed and firmed his stance as he eyed the prisoners. His uniform was soaked through with sweat, his hair matted down into little points. He moved as close to the bus door as the elastic radio wire would allow. The radio crackled.

  “This is Warden Johnston. You have fifteen seconds to identify yourself before your vehicle is fired upon.”

  “This is Sergeant Ludlow of the Southern Wales Territory, Great Britain,” the sergeant announced, now looking a bit anxious. “I’m the ranking officer for this transport of twenty-three prisoners.”

  “Verbal identification has been accepted,” the warden acknowledged. “Disembark and approach the prison entrance for retinal and palm verification. You have forty-five seconds to comply before you’re fired upon.”

  The sergeant scrambled from the bus to the massive front doors, where a computer panel stood. Charles took another look at the greedy buzzards and then watched the sergeant. He had almost reached the control panel when several birds scattered into the sky and startled him.

  “You now have thirty-five seconds to complete retinal and palm identification before you’re fired upon,” the warden warned.

  The sergeant lunged at the panel, punched in a few buttons, and put his face up to the infrared orb. The red line scanned his face. He backed up and wiped his palm on his pants before placing it flat against the panel.

  “You now have fifteen seconds to complete retinal and palm identification before you’re fired upon,” the warden’s voice rang out again.

  “Shoot him!” Donato shouted from the bus.

  “Shut up, you fool!” Charles’s shackle-mate yelled. “If they shoot him, do you think they’ll think twice about littering this whole bus with bullets?”

  A computerized voice approved the scans over the loudspeakers outside the prison. Sergeant Ludlow hurried back onto the bus. He grabbed his wet hand-towel and wiped his head and his quivering double chin. The driver shut the door just as the massive, hydraulic-powered, metal gate of the prison roared to life. Atop the doors’ control panel, a large digital clock began its countdown from forty-five seconds.

  “That’s it, rookie, squeeze right in there,” the sergeant urged to his driver. “If we don’t pass through before zero, the hydraulic pressure will crush this transport as easy as an empty can of beer under my fat foot.”

  The driver punched the accelerator, and the engine stalled.

  Silence held for a long moment. Then the sergeant burst out with, “Get this goddamn thing moving!?”

  The digital clock read thirty-seven seconds.

  The driver leaned forward, and the bus’s engine started cranking.

  “Hurry!” shouted the sergeant.

  The engine started, and the driver again stomped on the accelerator. This time the bus lurched forward, which roughed up the prisoners. Nobody complained, though, and they made it through the gate just in time.

  Once inside the compound, the bus passed through two sets of high, metal fences topped with electrified razor wire. At each fence stood a checkpoint where prison officers verified the identification of the transport officers while taking a count of the prisoners.

  Once they cleared the fences, the bus came to a halt at a series of very modern and fortified structures—the prison headquarters. A sign indicated the prisoner intake building. Ten officers in full riot gear fanned out around the door. The w
arden stepped out.

  “Okay, now, pay attention,” said Sergeant Ludlow.

  Several of the prisoners continued talking among themselves in low tones.

  The sergeant opened the control panel on the bus and flipped a large switch. The sound of the prisoners’ screams was so loud that the officers covered their ears. The convicts convulsed until the sergeant reversed the charge.

  “Muh-thuh-fuckuh!” Donato cried out between his clenched jaws.

  “Shut up, or I’ll hit you with another!” the sergeant yelled.

  Everyone quieted.

  “Like I said, pay attention,” the sergeant hollered. “I’m going to release your chains. Stand and file off this bus. Form a single line across the courtyard. Once you’re in the courtyard, your orders will come from the warden.”

  “I don’t have all day, Sergeant!” the warden shouted. “Get those prisoners off that bus now!”

  Sergeant Ludlow flipped the switch that released the prisoners’ shackles. Moving awkwardly with the heavy leg chains still attached, they shuffled off the bus and into the dusty prison courtyard. The strapping guards all bore scowls and had angry eyes that dared the prisoners to fall out of line. The warden barked an order. The officers in riot gear pushed the prisoners through another set of doors.

  The warden approached the sergeant and saluted. He was an imposing man with hulking shoulders and a full gray beard. He wore dungarees, steel-toed boots, and a Kevlar vest.

  “Sergeant Ludlow, thank you for your service,” he said crisply. “It pleases me that we didn’t have a repeat occurrence of your last visit—especially when it could have been prevented by adhering to my prison protocols. You may exit my prison now. You have three minutes to exit my facility until you’ll be fired upon.”

  The sergeant saluted and waddled back to the bus. He wasted no time as he slammed the door shut, already yelling at the driver. The bus lurched forward and sped toward the gated checkpoints and the hydraulic doors.