Blood Cell

by Shaun Tennant

  Sonny hadn’t thought about it, but the sauce on his hands had been wiped away in his efforts to save Frankie. Now, kneeling on the floor, covered in slippery blood, Sonny was a lot more defenceless than he thought. He stared at the doorway, still on his knees, at this eye level he saw a pair of shining animal eyes. In the darkness maybe five feet past the doorway, Sonny thought he saw a wolf. Then it was gone.

  An instant later, he saw a flash of light shoot in from the doorway and Sonny felt his stomach slice open. He looked down to see Frankie’s meat cleaver half-way embedded in his stomach. He screamed Ox’s name.

  Ox called back, “Don’t pull it out!”

  But that’s what Sonny did. He yanked the massive blade from his belly and held up the cleaver like a weapon he very much intended to use. He tried to stand. Sonny was struck by the worst pain he’d ever felt as bile and stomach acid poured into his wound. He fell back to his knees and doubled over in pain. He didn’t cry out. He didn’t have enough breath for that.

  With tears streaming over his cheeks, Sonny Ramsden crawled, ignoring Ox’s pleas, to the doorway. He was going to make his last stand.

  Crossing through the doorway, Sonny managed to lift himself up off the floor and sit back on his heels. He couldn’t see through the tears or the darkness. He brandished the cleaver, raising it above his head.

  And then a set of animal jaws locked onto his throat, and Sonny Ramsden was dragged away by the neck. The beast snarled and growled as it hauled him into the darkness.

  Now alone, Ox Werden set about his task. He had most of the gallon of sauce poured out now, and that was enough. He began taking handfuls of the thick red liquid and rubbing it around his body. He started by rubbing the sauce around his neck, which made him look ironically similar to Frankie. He covered his wrists and arms in sauce, as well as his face. He smashed a handful of the stuff over his heart. He remembered something about there being big veins in the legs, so he started to rub the pungent sauce all over his uniform pants.

  While he was working on coving himself in the sauce, the vampire calmly walked into the room. His loose jacket flared behind him like a cape. He slowly turned to Ox and paused. He sniffed at the air. Ox stared the monster in the face. He had grey eyes, kind of bright in the darkness. His teeth were sharp, not just the incisors but all of them, like some kind of dinosaur. A bit of stringy meat hung from between the man’s teeth.

  But the feature that interested Ox was the dark purple hand-shaped burn on the creature’s right cheek. That’s where Sonny got him. Even with the blood that covered the monster’s face, this burn was plainly visible. It was lumpy, a combination of melted skin and boiling blister. Sonny had hurt this thing. Hurt it bad.

  Ox reached into the pot and grabbed a fistful of sauce. Clenching it tightly, he threw the sauce like a snowball toward the vampire. The vampire ducked back to the doorway and the sauce splattered harmlessly against the wall. Ox threw another handful and the vampire left the kitchen completely, wary to avoid the garlic.

  “That’s what I fuckin’ thought!” Ox called triumphantly.

  Ox got back to work coating himself in sauce when he heard the rustling. It sounded sort of like the vampire’s jacket flapping, but somehow it also seemed like more than one sound. Like there were several dozen of those jackets flapping in the same manner.

  A single, small, brown bat flew into the kitchen. It buzzed around for a second, went above Ox, and hooked onto a rafter above his head. It hung there, rocking slightly, looking Ox in the eye.

  “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding. You turned into a bat? I’m gonna fucking boil you in the sauce now.” Ox turned his back to the doorway and jumped to reach the bat. The animal just took off and started flying circles over Ox’s head. He continued jumping at it, each time failing to grab the creature. The sound of the beating wings filled the narrow kitchen. Then a second bat crashed into the back of Ox’s head. Then another landed in his hair, hooking in with claws, and bit into his scalp. Ox turned back the doorway and saw the entire kitchen flood with bats.

  There were a couple hundred pounds worth of bats, all of them conspiring to pin Ox against the wall and bite at him. They screeched and squealed their horrible sounds, and each of them bit Ox somewhere. He did what he could to keep them off his face, but they wouldn’t be stopped. The sauce seemed to be working a little, at least. The bats weren’t eager to touch Ox’s neck or the centre of his chest and they were leaving his legs mostly alone. But they pecked at his ears and scalp, his shoulders and feet. Their wings and Ox’s own hands had cleared most of the sauce from his face, and now they were coming in on force to attack his eyes and nose.

  Ox held his hands over his face, trying to shield himself, but that only meant his hands were staying still. Bats bit hard into his fingertips and chewed at the sensitive nerves. Ox screamed in terror.

  One of his hands reached for the pot of garlic sauce, and found it. He started rubbing handfuls of the sauce on the bats, which made the shriek and take off. But there were so many bats, the more he burned them the more they came. For every one there seemed to be two to replace it.

  Finally, Ox could take no more and he picked up the whole pot of sauce and turned it upside-down over his head. Then he forced the pot over his head like a helmet, trying to shield himself from the onslaught. A few bats were trapped in the pot with him, and they screamed and shook in agony from the garlic. Now blind, Ox ran forward, trying to escape the narrow room. He pushed through until the cloud of bats seemed to disappear. There were none left hitting or biting him. No sounds of flapping wings or echoing screeches. The bats were gone.

  Ox lifted the pot, but before he got it over his forehead he felt a two-hundred-pound wolf pounce on his chest. Ox fell back, hitting the counter behind him on the way down. The back of his skull slammed against the inside of the pot, and suddenly Ox felt very tingly all over. The tingling sensation continued even as the wolf opened its mouth to an unnatural angle and sank its teeth into Ox’s belly. The animal planted its front paws on Ox’s chest and pulled at the meat, jerking its head from side to side as the jaws tightened. Finally, a softball-sized chunk of flesh and guts pulled away from Ox’s body, and the tingling pulled him into unconsciousness. He was dead within twenty seconds, his head still trapped inside a heavy pot full of garlic & herb tomato sauce.

  In his hiding place in the air vent over the stove, Leo Jimenez watched the entire scene below him. He watched the wolf feasting on the biker’s neck as it faded into a haze that became a man, who was still sucking on the wound.

  It was the greatest thing Leo had ever seen.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Josh crept slowly through the hallways of the pod’s second floor. He had left ad-seg like a man going to his own funeral, certain that the Eighteenth would find and kill him within five minutes. But so far, Josh hadn’t seen a single person. Lit only by emergency lights in the corners of each corridor, the prison became a haunted house of long shadows and flashes in Josh’s peripherals. Josh couldn’t decide if it was more like walking through a graveyard or a minefield. Every corner he turned came with held breath beforehand and a sigh of relief afterward. But after making it this far without so much as seeing a single other inmate, he was almost starting to hope that someone would find him around the next corner. Almost.

  But there was nobody here. Josh’s plan had been to go the offices of the telecommunications company that employed inmates for its call centre. Josh had hoped that nobody would bother going up there after the riot, and he could hide out there. So far, that plan was working perfectly.

  Josh had never experienced a riot before, so he was a poor judge of what they were like, but it certainly wasn’t supposed to be like this. Where were the fires? The rampaging, violent venting of frustrations? Other than the makeshift barricade Josh had seen by the doors at the end of the secure corridor, the pod had been left intact. You’d think people would at least start a few fires for light and to heat food, but the place was as lifeless
and quiet as a mausoleum.

  Josh did the math in his head, making some rough guesses. There were 500 men imprisoned at Pittman, between four pods. So call it 125 in C-Pod. If that riot killed or maimed 25 of them, that still left a hundred guys walking around a limited amount of space, with at least ten of them very definitely following Santos’s orders to locate his enemies. Leo would be priority numero uno, but it was almost guaranteed the riot would have killed him. That left Josh, the man who killed Delman, in the on-deck circle. But there was nobody here at all. Nobody searching around, nobody hiding in the dark and jumping out when Josh went by. Nobody talking or screaming in the distance. Hell, there were usually people screaming in the distance on a regular Tuesday night. For them to suddenly go silent after the inmates took over the asylum, well the implications of that just left Josh baffled.

  Josh considered that maybe the guards had taken over again, and the inmates had been moved to another pod. Not likely. Any warden would want to keep punishment in-house to show the inmates that they never really had control.

  So what did that leave? Maybe the Eighteenth had been wiped out. Santos was dead on the floor somewhere and Josh was in the clear for any wrongdoing. Maybe they had all gone back to their own cells for the night. But where were the sentries, the enforcers? Where were the opportunistic score-settlers and unsupervised rapists?

  Something was rotten, and it sure as fuck wasn’t in Denmark.

  Josh reached the call centre without incident, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something out of the corner of his eye. It was like something was altering the light, making it diffuse more than it should, but only when Josh wasn’t looking. You know that theory that the universe exists because you observe it? Well his is the opposite: something in this prison was slipping into reality whenever Josh’s head was turned. He could feel eyes on his back, ice on his spine.

  The room contained a large circle of tables, in a long, narrow loop with about twenty chairs inside it. Each chair faced a computer and a phone with a headset instead of a receiver. Just like Josh had hoped, there was a door at the far end of the room. Somebody’s office. Seemed like a perfect place to camp out for the night. There was no emergency light in the call centre, so the only light came from the emergency light across the hall. Josh slipped out of the narrow shaft of light and headed through the darkness toward the vaguely-lighter-than-the-rest rectangle that was the office door. His eyes were seeing in black and white now—all rods and no cones. The floor here was carpeted to help muffle sound, and Josh realized this was his first time standing on carpet since Quinn’s office. The sound of his footsteps had been a constant so far, and the sudden change in sound actually felt like an accomplishment. A sign that he’d made it.

  Josh found the door. Feeling in the darkness, he found the knob—one of the long, horizontal bar handles that feel more like tap fixtures than doorknobs. It didn’t turn. Josh tried to force it, only to feel the definitive clunking of a solid lock on a solid frame. Probably deadbolted too.

  Still, not all hope was lost. Josh was good with locks. Feeling against the darkness, Josh found the back of a computer tower. He located the cords for the mouse and keyboard and disconnected them. Josh took the keyboard first, laying it on the floor and stand on it. He gave the cord a strong jerk, and it snapped free from the keyboard. That was one. He balled up the wire and pocketed it.

  Josh set the mouse down, but found that he couldn’t pin it down in a very satisfying way with one foot. He opted to cup the mouse between both feet and stand on it. He jerked hard on the cable, and it whipped free, snapping loudly as it struck the bottom of the nearest table. The sound was too loud in the empty echo chamber of the prison.

  It got ever so slightly darker. The yellowish light across the hall was still glowing, but the quality of light in the call centre seemed to drop by about five percent. It was like somewhere down the hallway, the next closest emergency light had faded. Or been blocked out by a man coming down the hallway.

  Josh considered hiding under the tables, but decided that the safety of a locked door was much more reassuring. He kneeled down in front of the office door, and pulled the keyboard wire from his pocket. He bit the rubber insulation and jerked the wire away from his face, tearing the rubber and exposing the metal within. It wasn’t solid, but rather a bundle of hair-thin copper wires spun together. That was no good for picking locks, but Josh didn’t have anything else. He opted to leave the mouse wire inside the insulation and slipped both wires into the keyhole.

  The room continued to dim ever so slightly. A shadow was approaching. Josh kept trying, feeling with the wires as he tried to trigger the lock’s mechanism with such terrible picks.

  He felt the lock give in, and tried the knob. It turned. He stared to stand as he pushed the door open. But the door only gave little. As Josh pushed, the door pushed back. Someone was inside the office, overpowering Josh and trying to slam the door in his face. Josh took a step back and launched his body toward the door, knocking it open almost a foot. He stuck his left arm and leg through the opening before the door slammed shut on him. The door was pushing much harder now, and Josh knew that there must now be more than one person pushing it on him.

  Bending his left arm, Josh grabbed for the hair of the man he could reach. He found a buzzcut, but reached around for the face and pushed his thumb into the eye. A man grunted, and the door let up a little as the man reached for Josh’s arm with both hands. The man pulled Josh’s arm straight, and forced it flat against the wall. Someone else was still pushing on the door, pinning Josh, so he could only helplessly watch as the man who now controlled his arm twisted it, obviously looking to break Josh’s arm or elbow. His eyes were now very used to the darkness, and Josh could make out the shape of the man he saw through the narrow opening in the door.

  “Carlos!” Josh whispered.

  The man’s head jerked up. He eased his grip on the arm. “New guy?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Josh. Let me in.”

  There was a look to the person Josh couldn’t see, and the door let up. He squeezed inside before quietly closing and locking the door behind himself. He pocketed his bundles of wire. As soon as the lock clicked, Josh felt two powerful hands grip his neck and throat, squeezing tightly. A man spoke softly, the voice only inches away from Josh’s ear.

  “You want to tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now?” It was Santos Vega. Josh could feel his breath.

  “I didn’t-“

  “You didn’t what? Kill Delman and run away like a bitch?”

  “I-I had to.”

  “Bullshit, you followed him. You think I’m stupid?” Santos’ voice was still calm and quiet, like keeping it down was more important than killing Josh. Something about that was even more unsettling the hands around his neck. Something had Santos spooked and Josh couldn’t even comprehend what would make that happen.

  “He was going to—“ Josh stopped himself. He couldn’t sell out Sally after saving her. Even after what she’d done to him. “...Delman was going for the guns. He was trying to get into the guards’ riot room to get the rifles.”

  “That ain’t the truth either. Delman was on orders to hit the lockdown and that’s what he did. Lie to me again.”

  “No, he was going for the guns. I had to stop him.”

  “You had to stop my side from winning the fight?”

  “If those guns got out everyone in here would be dead and you know it. I hit the lockdown to stop him. He rushed me, but I jumped on him. I got him off balance, he hit his head. Knocked him out. Then I ran.”

  “My boy said you stripped the clothes off his body. You like that kind of shit?”

  Josh hadn’t thought of a story to explain the clothes that he’d stolen for Sally. “No, I just left. If somebody fucked with him it wasn’t me. I got out as soon I saw what I’d done. I was scared of you.”

  “Damn right.” Santos tightened his hands. Josh lost his breathing.

  “Hold on,” w
hispered Carlos. “We can’t kill him.”

  Santos continued to strangle Josh. “Give me one good reason.”

  “See what he did to that door? Two of us in here with the door locked and now he’s inside too.”

  “So what?” Santos squeezed harder. Josh was already lightheaded.

  “He’s the Houdini. He can get out of here. He can get us out.”

  Santos’s hands stopped squeezing. Josh took a hard, painful breath in. Santos leaned in, his stubble brushing Josh’s ear. “Is that true? Can you get me out? Tonight?”

  Josh had never escaped from a maximum security facility. Add in the fact that he didn’t even know the layout very well, and that there were no guards to bribe, the power outage had killed the electric locks, and there were probably five hundred cops and guards within the next kilometre outside the doors, and escaping from here tonight became impossible.

  “Sure. I can get out of anywhere,” he lied. “I can do it.”

  Santos let go of Josh, who turned his back to the wall and slid down to a seated position, catching his breath. He looked around, not quite sure where the other two men were standing in the pitch-black room.

  “Someone want to tell me what the fuck is going on out there? Where is everyone?” Josh got no reply. The only light in the whole room was the narrow bar of yellow light that ran under the door to Josh’s right.

  Josh heard the other men inhale. He realized why—the strip of light was getting narrower—something in the call centre was blocking the light between the doorway and office door.

  A person’s shadow had fallen on the other side of the door. Josh crawled away from the door until he found the desk at the centre of the room, turning back to watch the little line of light disappear, sending the office into complete darkness.

  The shadow shifted, and for a second the light returned before it was blocked again. Like someone had stepped away, then turned back to the door. Second thoughts?