He contemplated leaving more than once, usually after pulling the short straw and having to do janitorial duties on the cells. Overall though, he was happy enough at his job. He got to pick his start times most of the time, got every second weekend off and got to chat with other guards all day. Most of the time, the job involved just sitting and waiting for nothing to happen. He’d caught up on a lot of reading since he started here and if worse came to worse, he always had his Gameboy. Sometimes, when he got really fed up with the job, his friends would remind him that he’d be doing a lot more for a lot less at any shopping mall or fast-food joint around. All in all, the minuscule pay seemed worth it.
Last month, that changed.
The Pen had been assigned a new inmate, a high profile one at that, forcing shifts to change and more staff to be hired on to accommodate the extra manpower needed to deal with him. Clarence had even finally been offered his much-coveted full time position, but had turned it down almost instantly. Suddenly, the risk no longer seemed worth the reward.
Clarence stared vacantly into Adam Genblade’s cell, watching his shoulders rise and fall every time he took a deep breath. A shiver ran down his back as he watched, even though he felt warm and there were great circles of nervous sweat forming under each of his arms, staining his bright blue uniform a deep navy. He didn’t want to look at him, yet couldn’t turn away even when he focused all his energies on it. Wiping a speck of drool from the corner of his mouth, he waited anxiously for Genblade to move. To do something.
Genblade sat cross-legged on his mattress, the cold from the concrete floor making it one of the most unbearable places to sleep imaginable. He stared at the wall with a blank look in his eyes, just as he had been for hours ever since that visitor had come to see him. He seemed to fixate on one point on the wall, burning a hole into it with his eyes. A small sliver of warm drool oozed its way past his jagged teeth and onto his chin, rolling down his face, then hanging for a moment before finally dropping onto the floor with a quiet plop.
From out here he looked harmless, or even helpless. If Clarence hadn’t seen the photos of what he had done himself, he wouldn’t have believed it. This monster had killed children. Dozens of them, resulting in almost eight liters of blood on the walls at the Grendel home, so much that the family had to move. He had read once that serial killers as demented as this were often cold and emotionless. That, at least, he could have understood if not condoned. But this monster, when he did choose to speak, was filled with a kind of gleeful fascination. Like a child playing a new game.
“What the fuck is that guy doing?” a skinny guard with blonde hair remarked, stroking his unshaven chin as he eyed the inmate.
Clarence nearly jumped out of his skin, his hand immediately clutching his heart as it started to throb violently. After a moment he let out a sigh of relief, forcing a jittery smirk.
“A little high-strung are we?”
“Forgot you were there, Rudy,” Clarence laughed, taking a deep breath. “What were you saying?”
Rudy motioned towards Adam Genblade again, his upper lip curling noticeably when he did. “This fuck in here. The whole goddamn departments bending over backwards to make sure he don’t move a muscle. All the men we hired on and now I can’t pick shifts anymore. Had to hire someone to look after T.J. when Janet’s working. All because of that fuck in there.”
Clarence’s gaze went from Rudy to Genblade (who had just taken another of those large lungfuls of air) and then back again. “He’s a child killer, Rudy. What do you expect?”
“Oh, for god’s sake!” he scoffed, leaning in for a better look at the killer. His fingers weren’t even moving like they had been an hour ago. “He looks like he hasn’t had a coherent thought in hours. How in god’s name does a loser like that rate all these guards?”
“Rud - -”
“Watch,” Rudy interjected, raising a finger for pause before bending down and picking up two small pebbles from the floor. Craning his head around Clarence to make sure nobody was coming, he leaned in close to the cell, holding one of the small stones between his thumb and forefinger. He tossed it, watching as it bounced harmlessly off of the mattress and onto the floor.
“Come on, Rudy,” Clarence urged, nudging his friend’s shoulder, “Give it a rest.”
“No, watch,” Rudy chuckled, fingering the second stone. “I’m gonna prove to you how bullshit this is. Watch.” He closed one eye as he aimed, the tip of his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth ever so slightly. After a few phantom swings he let the tiny projectile go, flying through the air in a wide arch and bouncing off of Adam Genblade’s right cheek.
Both men watched with anticipation as they waited for some sign of movement or reaction.
After a few seconds, another glob of saliva dripped from his chin and plopped into the puddle on the floor.
“Fuck,” Clarence sighed, allowing himself a laugh as he started breathing again.
“See? What’d I tell you?” Rudy grinned, turning toward his friend and shrugging childishly.
“Still man, it does look like the D.A. is gonna be pushing for death row. Never know what someone that desperate might do.”
“If he’s that bad then someone should just take him out back and shoot him. Solve all our -”
Rudy stopped in mid-sentence, his lower jaw trembling.
It took less than a second for Clarence’s mind to process what had happened.
Genblade gripped Rudy’s wrist from inside the cell, slowly pressing his palm against Rudy’s elbow until it snapped back the opposite way. The sound of cartilage cracking echoed through the halls for a brief moment before being drowned out by Rudy’s screams.
“Jesus!” Clarence screamed, jumping backwards eight paces before reaching for his Taser.
Genblade smiled, licking his jagged teeth and then squirting the blood from his tongue out from between pale, cracked lips. He pulled on the guard’s arm more, making him to scream loudly as tears started to roll down his face. His mouth was opened so wide that Clarence could barely see anything else on his face.
Genblade closed his eyes, as if enjoying the sound. He looked like some aristocrat listening to old vinyl’s of Beethoven or Chopin. A warm smile spread across his lips as he opened his eyes, locking them with Clarence’s.
Clarence pressed his back further against the wall. The Taser still trembled in his hands, but he would not move close enough to use it. Could not have even if he had wanted to. His legs felt like they had bags of cement tied to them. The only things he could feel were those eyes that had been burning a hole into the wall of the cell for the past three hours now burning a hole deep into his soul.
More guards came running down the corridor, training their rifles on Genblade’s head.
He barely noticed them at first, instead staring directly at Clarence as he pulled on Rudy’s fractured limb once more, eliciting another high-pitched wail and causing Rudy’s shoulder to squeeze in through the tightly spaced bars. He watched as Clarence’s face winced but did not blink or turn away, even though the man did nothing to stop it.
It was like he was testing his limits.
Rudy’s skin began to split at the shoulder as it pulled itself out of socket, blood staining his clean uniform. The guards prepared to fire, aiming at the grinning gargoyle that was Genblade. He caught the glimmer of a shotgun barrel in his peripheral vision, then turned toward them as if only now noticing their presence. He gave Rudy one final, powerful tug before letting go and retreating to the corner.
Rudy fell limp against the bars and one of the guards rushed to him, placing two fingers against the nape of his neck to get a pulse.
“I think he’ll be okay,” he said, hoisting him to his feet as they helped him towards the infirmary.
Clarence stayed pressed against the wall, finally letting his Taser slip from his fingers and clamber to the ground.
Genblade curled into a ball facing the corner, rocking back and forth like a small child being p
unished by a teacher with a dunce cap on. Suddenly he burst into an insane fit of laughter, turning to face Clarence. His cobalt eyes seeming to glow under the flourescent lights. The hairs of Clarence’s neck stood on end as he slowly moved away from the cell, his back still against the wall until it was out of view. He felt another cold shiver, even as Genblade’s hysterical laughter echoed throughout the building, his smile wide and fierce.
He decided working at the mall would be worth the pay cut.
Roxanne watched Xander leave the Factory as she wiped their table of gravy and melted cheese with a rag she’d pulled from her apron. It was closing in on dusk now and she guessed that she’d seen the last of the teenage crowd for the night, not that there had been many of them anyway. Randy Owchar and Calla McFadden had stumbled in stoned and loaded while Xander and Derek had been playing video games, but they’d sucked down their burgers in a heartbeat before leaving again. Calla had gazed at her with paranoid fear in her eyes more than once.
She’d felt like telling the child that in this town, getting caught being stoned was the least of your worries if you were out after dark.
She glanced at her watch and frowned. In about an hour and thirty minutes the college crowd would show up. They’d order pretentious drinks and throw things around when they were watching the game on the big screen and start fights. She sighed, her smile fading into a frown as she wondered if she’d have to call the cops on any of them again tonight. Last week had been like that, when one girl wouldn’t stop causing a fuss over someone hitting on her boyfriend. Or it could have been the other way around, she wasn’t completely sure.
Grinding her teeth, she started to pump her arm faster to try and work a glob of hardened cheese out of the porous plastic table.
“Sorry about that,” came a friendly sounding voice from ahead of her. That didn’t matter much around here though, she’d found the best-sounding of the college crew were often the worst-tempered.
She looked up and saw Derek grinning down at her, one hand shoved into his jean pocket.
She didn’t smile back, just let out a huff as she pushed a lock of her curly red hair from her face.
“You need any help?” he asked, gesturing toward the table.
She rolled her eyes at him, allowing herself a brief smirk before wiping it away. She couldn’t let herself be smiling when the older crowd came in. With them, a smile just made you a target. “Thanks hun, but I’m fine. Been doing this a long while.”
“Yea,” Derek chuckled, nodding. “Ever since I’ve lived across the way, at least five years.”
“Six,” she said with an air of cynicism, getting the last of the cheese off the table and shoving the rag back into the belt of her apron. “Took it figuring it’d help me pay my way through University... but you know how that goes.”
Derek nodded, then stopped and grinned. “Actually, no, not really.”
“Right,” she grinned, waving a finger at him. “High school.”
“Sadly,” he responded, even as he started picking up dirty plates from the table closest to him and stacking them in a little tower. “What were you going to do?”
“Hmm?”
“In University. What were you going to do?”
She paused a moment, a dirty glass still in her hand as she piled them into a grey bin. “A kindergarten teacher, actually. I don’t know why, I just always loved kids.”
Derek bobbed his head as he listened, bringing his leaning tower of plates over and laying them carefully in the bin.
“I like how eager they are to learn at that age... you know? No offense, but kids your age would rather be anywhere than in the classroom. I don’t envy the teachers who have to deal with it.”
“Me either,” he agreed, thinking of the number of times he’d given Mr. Miles a hard time in the past few years. He was actually fairly certain that he was the reason the old Brit was growing grey. “So, what happened?”
“Well, you know,” she shrugged. “Bills, really. First it was full-time school with a part-time job. Then I needed more money, so it became part-time school with a full-time job. Then I started missing classes because I was so tired, or I’d be embarrassed to go with the same assholes I’d been serving the night before... you get the picture.”
Derek sighed, putting the last of the dishes away. “Maybe someday.”
The brief smile she had worn faded as she stared off into nothingness for a moment. She thought of the ‘night crowd’ that would be slowly pouring in. Somewhere in the back of her mind she got the impression that tonight wouldn’t be a good night for tips. The college folk weren’t likely to tip big unless they were trying to get a girl in bed. More than once, before she’d trained herself to hide her smile, that girl had been her. But she’d found that the guys actually worth going home with had a tendency to forget her name the next time they came in. She eyed Derek up and down, realizing that for all his sweetness he’d probably be another one of them in just a few short years.
“Thanks for your help, Derek,” she said in a faraway voice as she picked up the plastic bin and walked behind the counter.
Derek watched her go with a solemn look on his face, then turned and walked towards the exit.
Robert Miles ran a hand through his thinning chestnut hair, struggling to see the paper in front of him as more and more light was sapped from the room by the setting sun. The words scrawled onto the white, lined paper had become so hazy and moist that he had a hard time seeing them at all, let alone read them. Frowning, he grabbed his glasses by their golden rims and brought them into the light from the lamp, examining the tiny flecks of dirt and grime on them and wondering, not for the first time, how they had gotten there to begin with. He pulled a bright red handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suede jacket and started to rub the lenses with it vigorously, stopping once to examine the glass before wiping at it one more time and sliding them back onto his face. It was a little better, but no amount of cleaning, no matter how vigorous, could run out the effects of exhaustion and hunger.
He turned back to the paper in front of him, taking a sip from the long-cold coffee next to him on the desk as he did so. There was a slow tapping sound at the other end of the vacant classroom that made him stir his eyes away from it for a moment, gazing out upon the empty desks that stood silently in the shadows like soldiers ready to open fire on a condemned man. He watched them for a moment, then turned back to the page.
His eyes darted along the words for a moment, a smile slowly growing over his lips.
“The Elmbert-Eaton Dynasty,” he read aloud, scanning down over the page. “Felix Mason turned on his clock radio with a sudden switch of the dial. He liked this song, had ever since he could remember, and turned the volume up... to eleven.”
He wasn’t sure if ‘to eleven’ was supposed to have been a dramatic moment in the story, but when he read it aloud he did so with a deep, monotone voice that made it sound dire. He chuckled again at the passage, skimming down through the rest and then laying it aside.
- tak -tapptapp- tak -
There was the sound again from just beyond the veil of shadows cutting him off from the rest of the classroom, like the old electric heaters cutting in or a drape flapping in the breeze from an open window.
But he didn’t feel either the warm soothing flow of heat or the bitter chill that usually came with night air.
Miles stared into the darkness for a moment, then frowned and picked up the next sheet, and book report on Faust by Sara Johnson. He smiled, reaching for his red pen and circling her last name as a spelling error. For some reason the act itself made him sad, the word acting as a weight attached to his chest and bringing down his entire body.
-tak!-
“Hello?” he called out finally, standing up abruptly and letting the page fall back onto the desk.
The darkness just loomed back at him, only the desks and chairs from the first few rows visible before they became entrenched in darkness.
“Is some
one there?” he called again in his thick British accent, stepping out from behind his desk with his head cocked to one side and one eyebrow thrust up into the air.
Again, there was nothing but silence in response.
Squinting his wrinkled eyes knowingly, he stopped himself from taking another step. Without removing his eyes from the dark, he reached his hand around behind him until he felt the hot plastic of the lamp, turning it quickly to shoot out a beam into the shadows.
Nothing. Nothing but the desks and chairs and one knapsack that had been left after everyone else had gone, slumped against the back wall lazily. Its strap hung out over the side, swaying back and forth gently in a breeze that Miles couldn’t feel but obviously was there, making it touch the metal leg of the chair.
Miles chuckled to himself, turning away from the rest of the room when the lights came on.
“Christ,” he jumped, bringing one hand to his chest. “Don’t do that.”
“Sorry,” Principal Shnieder said gravely, visibly annoyed by the reaction. He was a short man with almost no hair and a large, red nose that Miles had always attributed to years of alcohol abuse, something that had been confirmed at last year’s Christmas party when he’d gotten so plastered on Southern Comfort that he’d passed out in the host’s front yard cradling a lawn gnome. “Didn’t realize there was anyone else here.”
“Me neither,” Miles admitted, returning to his chair and trying to settle in.
“Grading papers?” Shnieder asked, stepping inside and leaning his head up a little to see what the other man was up to.
Habeas Corpus: Black Womb (Black Womb Collection Book 1) Page 44