The Devil's Whisper

by T. H. Moore

  “No, let me die here. Please,” she cried out, competing with Kristoff’s aninalistic heaves and grunts ringing out over the speakers. The Spaniard’s grip was tight. She ran with him, terrified and confused. Was this a sinister or humane gesture? She couldn’t tell.

  “Fifteen seconds, ” the warden said. “Ten seconds.”

  “Take your hands off me!” Elaina struggled to keep pace with the Spaniard as he pulled her through the portal. They both fell through the hydraulic door as it began to close. The Spaniard released her.

  “Dragging a bitch by her hair is caveman shit, Spaniard,” Donato said. He grinned. “I like it.”

  No one seemed quite ready to make their way down the road to K-City.

  Donato reached to help Elaina, who ignored his hand, jumped to her feet, and without pause, threw a snapping kick combination to the midsection and face of the Spaniard. He fell to the ground and spat blood from his lacerated lip. Elaina maintained her battle stance, ready for him to retaliate. He stood and stared intensely at her slowly dragged his index finger across his throat before turning to walk alone down the road to K-City.

  Elaina looked back through the observation glass of the hydraulic doorway. The lone Japanese prisoner knelt with his palms resting atop his thighs. His chest rose and fell in deep breaths.

  The clock blinked a red zero, and a white, milky gas billowed through the tube. When it reached the prisoner, he clutched at his throat and clawed at his face. Desperation replaced his meditative trance as he thrashed on the floor of the tunnel. Blood trickled from his nose, and his eyes bulged. His tongue wagged out of his mouth.

  “Not so peaceful, after all,” Elaina muttered.

  Within seconds, the air cleared. The Japanese prisoner lay twitching for a moment, and then was still. A puddle of urine spread out around him.

  Elaina turned away from the portal, shaking, her breath out of control. She vomited onto the red clay earth of Katingal over and over again as tears ran down her cheeks and she clutched her stomach.

  Donato looked at her, still wearing the sinister smile and fonding his genitals. “I’m going to fuck you til you’re bloody.”

  Chapter 11

  CHARLES GRAVO WOKE IN HIS shelter, and as was his ritual, breathed deeply several times before pulling himself up from his makeshift mattress.

  Since the first moment Charles had set foot on Katingal soil three weeks ago, he had been constantly aware of how much freedom he had lost. He kept mental tallies, as if this might help him understand what defined a man and kept him human. Twenty sunrises since his vicious violation by Kristoff in the prison headquarters. 480 hours since he had walked through the airtight glass portal to K-City, then trekked into the outback alone. 20,800 minutes since his last shower. 1,728,000 seconds since his last hot meal.

  Charles wondered if he had crossed not only a threshold to this place, but also to another side of humanity where he had always belonged.

  His mind worked constantly as his body healed. He’d found shelter in an old foreman’s office built half-inside the mountain at the mouth of the mine that had brought Apex to Katingal years ago. He had fortified it as best he could with rocks and scrap lumber.

  A few hundred yards beyond Charles’s shelter, the main road led to K-City. The warden’s quarters also squatted about a hundred yards away. This intermediate zone resided within firing range of the tower snipers’ high-powered rifles. Charles accepted the risk of being a potential target for guards. Common sense led him to seek refuge in this outback, a less risky prospect than surviving among the other inmates while he healed from his rape.

  He had rigged pipes to channel the water that dripped from the roof of the mine into a five-gallon gasoline container he’d been lucky enough to find. Every four seconds, a fresh drop fell.

  Next to his water storage system, a warped, wooden table held Charles’s accumulation of rudimentary weapons constructed from fragments of metal, glass, stone, and other materials he’d salvaged.

  His best weapon was an ax he’d found half buried far back in the mine. Its handle had mostly rotted away, but he’d been able to fashion a new one from a scrap of wood, and had even put a decent edge on the blade with a small grinding wheel that had been left behind in a tool locker when the mine was abandoned.

  He’d also cut up an inner tube from one of the mine vehicles and used it to make a slingshot much like one he’d had as a boy. Metal shards and steel ball bearings scavenged from mining equipment fit perfectly into the pouch. Since it would be his only long-range weapon, he spent several hours a day practicing with the slingshot until he was satisfied that he could fling one of the metal shards a hundred feet or more with fair accuracy, and even farther with the ball bearings.

  The table doubled as a scouting station. He had barricaded the window, leaving a sliver uncovered so he could see out. He spent days staring out that window, uncomfortable but alive.

  He often thought back to the warden’s bragging of how harsh life in Katingal could be. The warden was so proud of his city, the brutality of its inmates, and the impenetrability of its defenses. It made Charles wonder why the warden was so intent on leaving a place he adored so much.

  Charles’s stomach rumbled. Every day, his biggest challenge, among many others, was foraging for things he could eat. And it was time to confront the challenges of this new day. After all, this would be a special day. He had plans to carry out.

  Uncomfortable with removing all his clothes, he took off his shirt, boots, and socks to wash his face, arms, and feet. Once finished, he put his socks, boots, and shirt back on and lowered his pants just enough to wash his genitals. He swished water through his mouth. He dried his face and body with the remains of a flannel shirt found in the foreman’s desk. He hung the shirt to dry on the back of a chair before stepping into his prison coveralls.

  In Charles’s first few weeks, he had waited for nightfall and the cover of dark to investigate the no-man’s land between K-City and the prison headquarters. He noticed that the guards in the towers relaxed at night, relying on the wall to take care of the masses inside. Under the twinkling desert moon and stars, Charles had inspected as much of the wall as he could to find weakness in the stone. He discovered previous inmates’ failed attempts to chisel through, dig under, or scale over the wall. Bullet holes scarred the stone, and human bones lay scattered in the dust.

  He would place his fingers into the fissures made by the bullets. The materials used to construct the wall were none he had ever touched before, but even a novice in masonry could detect that this was no ordinary stone. Now that he looked upon it for the first time with the benefit of daylight, he could see that he was correct. With a ridged and rusty buck knife, he tried to chip away at the hole in the wall. After nine or ten stabs, a small speck of dirt fell from around a metallic rebar forged into the wall.

  Charles had found himself chuckling at the futility of K-City inmates trying to gather the appropriate tools to chip away at a wall laced with reinforced metal wire. He could imagine how the warden and his correctional officers might fashion themselves in a control room, laughing over their surveillance cameras at malnourished inmates trying to escape.

  During those long nights of scouting the wall, Charles had nothing to do but think. His new brain traversed every book, every piece of information he had come across both after the surgery and before, now able to recall each moment, each piece of trivia, every last memory down to his earliest days as an infant.

  None of those memories had helped him to figure out a way to get over, under, or through the wall. On all those nights of excursion, he had traveled what he calculated to be several miles in either direction of his shelter until the position of the descending moon would indicate it was time for him to take cover. In both directions, he had discovered nothing.

  And last night, the moon, round and white in the sky, had told him there was no use in i
nvestigating the wall further. There was no life, no hope of escape, as long as he remained in the shadow of the control center or in its immediate vicinity.

  And so it was that Charles had decided that he could no longer avoid K-City. Instead of escape plans, he’d spent his previous night busying his mind with his plans to enact revenge on Kristoff.

  He shouldered his satchel containing water, his last remaining MRE, and his weapons. When he was ready, he looked through his peephole one last time. Seeing no one, he began to wrestle away the rusted filing cabinet and the boulder in front of the door.

  Chapter 12

  THE DOOR SWUNG OPEN, AND Charles was greeted by a wall of heat so thick, its density was more like water than air. The sun was at its highest point in the blue sky with a light sprinkling of milky white clouds.

  Charles paused a moment, realizing that for all this place was and represented, its beauty was stunning, almost serene. He allowed himself to imagine that he was on a remote beach, the sun gracing his skin, until he paused and forced himself to remember where he was. His boots crunched on the dry gravel beneath him as he set out.

  Dirt roads striped the empty desert before him. He calculated a thousand yards of open terrain between him and the edges of K-City. He would be visible, open game until the road wound into the cluster of towering buildings beyond.

  After final readjustment of the satchel straps, he headed to the unpaved road. As he marched along, the distant buildings appeared to dance to the rhythm of his steps. He passed solitary, caved-in lean-tos of board and brick and the occasional clusters of rocks, metal, and rag. He shook his head at the idiocy of building shelters out in the open. Debris and wire sectioned small portions of sandy soil and weeds, failed attempts at cultivating crops. The farther he traveled away from the headquarters, the more shelters and gardens he saw. Charles noted how most of the shelters featured botched tin roofs, boards for walls, bricks stacked atop each other. Others weren’t half bad, he had to admit.

  All in all, it wasn’t smart to remain here. Everything was flecked with bullet holes, lending the whole landscape the impression that it had been plagued by a pox.

  Through these slums, Charles continued his trek to K-City, and out of the range of the tower guards’ rifles. The closer he came to the outskirts of the city, the more frequent were the shelters, several with their garden fences still intact. Charles’s stomach lurched at the thought of fresh food, but the soil was sandy and the patches were overgrown with weeds.

  He looked at the sun’s position and calculated that he had walked for no more than an hour. A few hundred yards from the road, he saw a windmill and the remains of a farm dwarfed by a cluster of high-rise buildings in the distance. The windmill was motionless. An untilled field and a saggy barn stood next to a wooden house. Not a shadow or flicker of movement anywhere.

  He approached, holding his satchel tight against his chest. Thick foliage engulfed the house, and the windows looked black with dust. He didn’t want to be caught on the property, especially in the open land where he was so vulnerable.

  A hundred yards from the house, he heard multiple voices, a woman’s scream, and cheers. He cut across the field to squat behind a rusted tractor toppled to its side. Another eruption of noise came from the back of the house. This time it was much louder. Charles drew his ax as another celebratory roar erupted. He peered from around the tractor, maneuvering himself to a vantage point where he could see the rear of the crowd. He wished he could see what they were looking at.

  “We have a winner!” a man with a reedy, commanding voice declared.

  Another roar followed the declaration of victory, and rising above the din, a woman gave a harrowing scream.

  “No!” she pleaded. “I can still fight!”

  Charles needed to see what was happening. He crept on his hands and knees before flattening onto his stomach to military crawl toward the windmill standing idle some forty yards away. He made steady progress, and the closer he slithered, the better his vantage of the crowd became. Eventually, he made it to the foot of the metal ladder attached to the windmill. He made sure no one saw him before climbing the ladder. With each rung, he could better see the large crowd behind the dilapidated farmhouse.

  From the maintenance platform of the windmill, the entire event unfolded before his eyes as if he were a god and the criminals below mere mortals in the throes of a bacchanalian revelry. He could see two separate groups of men. The larger circled two women tearing at each other in hand-to-hand combat. In a different circle, men took turns raping the battered woman who had apparently lost the previous fight. She was a thin, leggy woman with short, dark hair. One man had her arms pinned to the ground above her head while two others each held a leg and a fourth unfastened his pants.

  “The bittersweet joys of losing a wager,” one of them taunted her. “Next time, fight harder.”

  The man between her thighs began to shove himself into her to the cheering of his cronies. He bent to lick and kiss her face, but paused to wretch and cough, his lungs rattling with mucus. She flailed and pushed against him. Her arms and legs bulged with definition, the muscle tone a clear testament to her desire to survive. But in the end, it seemed to Charles that everyone knew the four men pinning her down would have their way.

  “Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…” the crowd of spectators counted aloud.

  “Eight more and then my turn,” one of the instigators yelled. He spat into his dirty course hands and stroked his flaccid penis.

  “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty!” they concluded before the next one in line hurried to pull the man off of her.

  “Wheeeew! This one here is a firecracker.” The rapist gave everyone the thumbs up as he pulled out of her.

  The next inmate, whose wiry torso was littered with tattoos, shoved the coughing man aside and took his place between the woman’s bruised thighs.

  “Get in there,” the coughing man said while he rolled around on the ground, pulling his pants up. “You won’t be disappointed.”

  “I lost two dogs and a gallon of water betting on you, bitch.” The tattooed man narrowed his eyes as he jerked at his short erection.

  In the larger circle, another fight was about to begin. Ropes and chains tied like leashes around a line of women’s necks. Four or five men held their tethers and collected wagers on their success or failure. The men shouted a din of numbers. The women said nothing and looked nowhere.

  A large, dark-skinned man with tribal scars on his cheeks walked the interior perimeter of the circle. He stopped here and there to engage in quick discussions with random men.

  At the edge of the circle, a man in a Scottish kilt paced. He had red hair, a face full of freckles, and a patch over his left eye. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “All you bastards need to shut up. The next match is between Grover’s and Rodriguez’s bitches. Anything goes except eye-gouging. Even bitches deserve to see.”

  This initiated laughter from the crowd.

  “The first bitch to be knocked out or submit to her opponent loses… and we all know what happens to the loser.” He thumbed toward the smaller circle, where the men were counting in a frenzy, starting another roar from the crowd.

  Charles watched the two women, how the rage filled their bodies, the way they scowled at the men.

  “All winnings will be paid immediately after a winner has been declared.”

  One of the handlers, a small man, yanked his woman’s leash hard, causing them both to lose their balance. She snarled like a cougar and leapt onto his torso, wrapped her legs around his waist, and raked his face with her nails while he howled and roared. She bit into his neck, and Charles realized she’d torn open the man’s carotid artery when blood shot into the air. Several men rushed to pull her off him, but it was too late. The small man never rose again.

  “Crazy bitch!” a spectator standing behin
d her yelled. He lunged at her and struck her in the face.

  She fell off her victim in a daze, then stood and glared at the man who had hit her and the other men near her, her hands out. A mane of tangled brown hair hung over her shoulders.

  “Teach her a lesson,” the spectator yelled.

  She spat on him, and two other men converged on her.

  “Order!” the redheaded ring announcer shouted.

  The men began chanting, “Get her, get her.”

  Over their voices, the announcer called out, “Nnamdi, maintain order here!”

  A large Nigerian man walked into the center of the feud. He stood still a moment to wait for the men’s fury to die down. “The bitch still has another fight,” he said, his voice surprisingly high-pitched. “And anyone who interferes with that answers to Kristoff.”

  At the mention of the lunatic’s name, the two men backed away from the woman.

  Nnamdi then approached and grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair to guide her back to the circle. He broke through the crowded spectators and released her on the opposite side of her opponent. She snarled at Nnamdi upon her release, wiped the excess blood from her mouth, and spat upon the ground to prepare herself for the impending battle.

  The Irishman yelled, “Fight!”

  The women charged from opposite sides of the crowd and collided at the center. They punched, clawed, and ripped at each other’s hair, clothes, and flesh. In moments, their shirts were shreds, and their exposed breasts incited cheers.

  Charles glanced back to the savage rape of the woman in the loser’s circle. His body recoiled in memory of his own brutal rape at Kristoff’s hands. Blurry visions of the prison room walls flashed across his mind until he shook himself back into the present.

  He scanned the crowd with renewed anger perpetuated by his shame. Revenge fueled his desire to see Kristoff’s face among the crowd.

  His eyes returned to the ravaged victim in the loser’s circle. Her sudden absence of resistance and limp body signaled that she had fallen into shock. Her eyes were empty of expression as they seemed to stare up at Charles. A flicker went over her brow.