DEAD CELLS

by Adam Millard

  'That's fucking disgusting!' Paulie said, taking a step away from the strange, drooling man. The room, as if someone was in control of a very large volume switch, faded to silence. All eyes fell on the breakfast line. A few of the men at the back of the room stood up, not wanting to miss what was almost certain to become a fight.

  The man turned from the line, facing the rest of the room. He was clearly unwell. His eyes could barely focus, and sweat dripped from him in buckets.

  He staggered forward one step...two steps, and then almost fell backwards, which prompted a raucous howl of laughter from most of the watching prisoners.

  Shane didn't laugh. Something was seriously wrong with the man.

  'Hey!' Paulie said, realising that he had the attention of the entire audience. 'Somebody get this fucking guy another beer!'

  More laughter. Paulie was almost doubled over as the man continued to stagger through the room, bouncing from table to table. Some of the more violent prisoners began to push him about, laughing, encouraging the sick man to do something else funny.

  Cyrus Clay stood up. 'It's alright for you fucking guys,' he said, laughing. 'I have to share a fucking cell with this fucking prick.'

  The room erupted. Not laughing at Cyrus Clay's joke was a bad idea.

  Carlos Silva bounced around the room for a few more seconds before coming to a stop. He looked confused; almost as if he had been sleepwalking all along and had woken up with no idea as to how he had got there.

  His eyes were blank. In fact, his entire face was expressionless. He looked like a painting. Something by Goya, perhaps. It was then that he vomited.

  The table in front of him got it the worst, but the ones to the left and right didn't remain clean. Carlos Silva was erupting. Prisoners were diving out of the way, falling from their chairs, their laughter silenced, just cries of revulsion as the man spewed forth a neverending torrent of guts.

  *

  The eruption of violence that followed was incredible. Carlos Silva was lucky to still be breathing when the officers managed to pull off the other inmates. Officer Tyler, one of the more experienced guards, had witnessed the entire thing from the side of the room, and had only decided to step in once the filthy Mexican had received what he deemed suitable retribution from the vomit-covered thugs.

  'Alright, alright, everyone back the fuck up,' Tyler said with one hand on his taser; if the sick bastard decided to upchuck on Tyler's boots, then he better be prepared for a few hundred thousand volts.

  The inmates separated. Rooster Hill, Marvin “Murderer” Manson, and Jimmy “Gentle Rapist” Kelly headed into the corner where Dennis Hart – the Pack leader – sat nonchalantly finishing his dinner. Out of the three of them, only Jimmy Kelly had vomit on him, but it was clear that some of it had managed to get into his mouth; he was still wiping it away from his lips and then scrubbing at his tongue as if he had just eaten something particularly rancid.

  They watched from the side as Cyrus Clay got one final kick in before stepping away. 'See that sick shit, boss?' Cyrus said, pointing at the man rolling in agony on the canteen floor.

  'Shut the fuck up, Clay!' Officer Tyler said. 'If I had to eat in here with y'all sick fuckers, I'd find it hard to keep my food down.'

  The guard radioed for assistance, explaining that he didn't want to get any of it on his clean uniform. Michaelson said that he'd be over in a few minutes.

  Meanwhile, Carlos Silva managed to push himself up onto his knees. A long string of blackened sludge hung from his mouth so that it was almost touching the floor. He was groaning and holding onto his stomach. Every few seconds he made a strange hissing sound, like a cat warning off a potential threat.

  Tyler put his foot on the sick man's side and gave him a little push.

  'Git up,' he said, still keeping his hand on the taser. When Carlos failed to respond – his dark drool was now forming a deathly puddle on the canteen floor – Tyler said: 'I will fucking taser you if you don't git up!'

  Shane watched, along with Billy, as the guard kicked again. This time though, the sick man did something remarkable: He grabbed the guard's ankle and sunk his teeth in.

  The expression that jumped onto Tyler's face would have been comical in other circumstances. As he screamed, he managed to pull out the taser gun and aimed it at Carlos Silva. The man on the floor, however, had no idea; he was way too busy trying to pull off the chunk of flesh that he had managed to clamp onto. And the funny thing was, despite what was happening, nobody moved a muscle. If anything, people stepped away, as if they wanted no part in the event. There were shouts and gasps, but nobody made to intervene.

  As Tyler levelled the taser, trying to stay focused, he knew that there was no way he could fire. The contact between himself and the growling piece of shit on the floor would mean that both of them would receive the current, and having been shot once before – in training – he knew that he couldn't bring himself to fire.

  Luckily, he didn't have to. The flesh on Tyler's leg pulled away, like a chicken wing on a Sunday roast. The guard stumbled backwards a few feet before crashing through a chair and thumping to the floor.

  It was at this moment that Shane could see something was wrong. This was no sickness, no inane reaction to incarceration, there was something severely wrong with the new guy, something “bad”, even. The way he was growling, with thick, black slime dribbling down his chin and cascading from his face like a hellish waterfall; the way his eyes had changed into nothingness, like deep pits of anger and hatred with nothing inbetween. He was disturbed, and yet seemed to be grinning. The man had just added a few months to his sentence, maybe even years for the bite, but it didn't seem to register. It was as if he knew that it was all over.

  He pushed himself up onto his haunches, like a rabid wolf might in anticipation of its prey. He snapped at the air, once, twice, and then he was airborne.

  Officer Tyler opened his eyes just in time to see into the man's bottomless pits as they got closer and closer, his teeth still snapping at the air.

  Tyler screamed.

  The sound of a shotgun blast was the last thing he heard as the man landed on top of him.

  *

  The prison went on twenty-four hour lockdown shortly afterwards; an event like this, one that culminated in violence towards one of the guards, always resulted in complete internment, with no prospect of yard time and meals being delivered to cells with no cutlery. It was the guards' way of reminding inmates that violence against staff would not be tolerated. It also resulted in cells being turned over, private items being removed and incinerated, and the occasional beatdown. The prison took such acts of vehemence against their own very personally.

  Tyler was taken to the infirmary, although Shane didn't think his wound would recover with a few stitches and a handful of Tylenol. That was a mighty chunk ripped off; a skin graft might be the only solution.

  Billy Toombs sat in the corner of the cell. The book he held, and was flicking through at such an voracious pace that Shane couldn't take his eyes from him, was something by Kurt Vonnegut. Billy would laugh intermittently, and Shane would laugh too; it was a strange sight, watching a man the size and build of Billy Toombs laugh at literature. He looked more like the kind of man that would find a savage dogfight comical.

  Shane watched, but he couldn't shake from his mind the events that had unfolded in the canteen that morning. How had that man, a man that had looked so sick and ill one moment, managed the strength to pounce from all fours like a wild animal the next?

  The way that he had managed to tear the flesh away from Officer Tyler's bone, as if it were nothing more than window-putty, was something that required a lot of force.

  Any man, Shane didn't care how crazy, would realise that the chances of succeeding in finishing off a guard were slim, and the probability of either escaping, or surviving the requital of the other guards, was so slim that it was practically anorexic.

  Yet that man hadn't cared; his sole purpose was to cause as
much damage as possible.

  It was his eyes, Shane thought to himself. His eyes had been empty, dark, infernal.

  Being in one of the toughest jails in the state, you came across evil on a daily basis; it was everywhere. If you turned your back in the shower, you made sure that your cell-mate – providing he wasn't your main rapist – was spotting you. Items would go missing; anything that could be carved, or shaved, into a weapon would mysteriously disappear, only to turn up a few days later covered in blood. Shane had lost three toothbrushes this way.

  The volition of the damned was an unstoppable force.

  Yet that man – Carlos, Michaelson had called him after blowing the top of skull off – had not been just evil, or the misplacement of what should have obviously been a secure hospital transfer. He had been Death itself.

  'You think he wasn't right, don't you?' Billy said, without looking up from his uproarious volume. 'Hey, I've seen some things since I've been in here, man,' he continued, 'but I ain't never seen anything as crazy as that.'

  He turned the page, as if his statement had been nothing more than a footnote.

  Shane sighed. He'd seen his fair share of shit, too, and this was also at the top of his list of things I never want to see again, ever.

  'I don't know what happened out there, Billy,' Shane said, wiping the sweat from his brow. It had become increasingly hot in the cell in the last two hours; another thing the prison tended to do when an inmate stepped out of line was turn the heating up to almost intolerable temperatures. 'I think he wasn't crazy. I think he was controlled.'

  'Controlled?' Billy said, finally allowing his humorous novel to fall into his lap. 'By who?'

  Shane shook his head. 'I don't think he was controlled by anyone,' he said. 'Satan himself?' he added.

  This brought a massive laugh from Billy Toombs. 'So you think that the man was possessed?' he sneered. 'I'm the token fucking Red-Indian around here. Shouldn't I be the one who makes up inexplicable shit about forces and ghosts?'

  'He wasn't a ghost,' Shane said. 'But do you honestly believe that he was human?'

  There was a moment of silence whilst Billy pondered the farcical question offered to him. How could the man have been anything other than human? Monsters didn't exist, other than the kind that raped children, or burned down the houses of pregnant women in an effort to prevent them from having the “wrong coloured” baby.

  'What are you talking about, Shane?' Billy asked. He placed the book on a table beside him. This meant that he was either genuinely intrigued, or severely pissed off.

  Shane sighed. 'Don't you just think that what happened out there was gravely wrong? I mean, that guy was fucking ill one moment, and the next he had the force of a panther.'

  'The guy was just pretending to be weak,' Billy said, sniggering. 'We've all thought about it, about trying to outsmart the guards. This guy had the balls to actually try it. He failed, and now he's missing the top of his head.' He picked his book up and returned to the page that was bookmarked. 'I wouldn't look too much into it if I were you.'

  Shane smiled. 'You're right, Billy.' And yet he knew that he was right, that something bad was about to happen.

  So near, he thought, and yet so far.

  Freedom, he surmised, would have to wait.

  *

  Marla Emmet pulled up the tray of dangerous-looking implements. She was beautiful, yet not in the conventional sense. She had the eyes, the lips, the breasts, and yet it seemed that her confidence was her main appealing factor. She was the type of woman that needed no man; her own strength and sassiness were more than enough to get her through the working day. Her dark black hair trailed down her back, aiming towards the voluptuous thighs that nestled neatly in her prison-issued garb, and yet such shallow descriptions could never take away from her the fact that she was the only female graduate in the prison-system in the state of Phoenix, and that she could count cards better than any professional poker-player on the circuit. She could, in fact, complete a Su-Doku puzzle in less than a minute, and had even won awards for her paintings, which one critic said “reminded me of an early Renoir.”

  'Is this gonna hurt, Doc?' Tyler said, whimpering like a child visiting the hairdressers for the very first time.

  Marla glanced casually at the wound, then said: 'Probably. It was a deep bite, so I wouldn't be surprised if it stings a little.'

  Tyler allowed his eyes to roll. 'Fucking typical. I get the chunk taken out of me, and he probably gets back to his cell with a meal and a goddamned certificate of virtue from the crims. I hate this shit.'

  Marla laughed. 'Brace yourself,' she said as she dipped the cotton wool in the Iodine. 'This is gonna sting.'

  She wanted it to sting, to be perfectly honest. Officer Tyler had been nothing but a lecherous pest to her since her arrival. She'd tried to present a case, but there just wasn't enough evidence, and he'd walked away a free man, knowing that his advances had been inappropriate. What was it about the prison-system that awarded the male staff complete immunity? Marla Emmett had no idea. So yes, she hoped that it stung like a motherfucker. The bastard deserved it.

  He gasped as she applied the wool to the leg; he even drooled a little, like a child refusing to take his medicine. 'Fuck! That shit hurts,' he grimaced.

  'Really?' Marla asked, uninterested in his pain. In fact, she had expected a little more response; she had laced the Iodine with salt in an attempt to induce more agony from the demoralising pervert. 'Shouldn't really. It's just Iodine.'

  'Well it feels like pure acid to me,' he managed through gritted teeth. The ailed expression on his face made Marla want to laugh; he looked for a moment as if he was apt to pass out. She hoped that he would, but when he gasped again and blinked the pain away, she knew that it was unlikely.

  She dabbed the wound and placed the bloodied wool on the aluminium tray. 'Looks like you're going to need a good few stitches in that,' she said. 'That man sure chewed you up pretty good.'

  That delightful, wonderful man, she thought.

  Looking toward the open wound on his leg, Tyler shook his head. 'He was like a fucking wild animal,' he said. 'An absolute maniac. I didn't even have time to taser the bastard. Shit, I couldn't even pull my leg out of his mouth.'

  This made Marla smile. The though that Tyler, the sexual predator, had felt hopeless for even a second seemed to lift some of the darkness that she had felt during the tribunal.

  'I'm gonna make that bastard's life a misery when I get fixed up,' Tyler snarled. 'He's fucked with the wrong guard.'

  Marla hesitated for a second, and then said, 'Did they not tell you? They shot him in the head.'

  Tyler blinked, unable to comprehend the new information. 'They what?'

  'Apparently, Michaelson answered your call for backup, but by the time he got there things had already gotten out of hand.' She kept her eyes trained on the needle which she was expertly threading. 'Made a hell of a mess. The guy's down in the mortuary right now.'

  Tyler thought about this for a moment, then smiled. 'Serves the sonofabitch right for messing with me,' he said. 'Good old Michaelson. Always knew that guy had the balls to kill someone.'

  'Yeah,' Marla said, positioning herself more suitably for the surgery ahead. 'Anyway. Here we go. You may feel a little discomfort.'

  She used very little anaesthetic.

  He felt a lot of discomfort.

  *

  That night, the night when Officer Tyler had been stitched together so painfully, Carlos Silva lay on a trestle table, or at least, most of him did.

  Doctor Jacob Strauss, a short portly man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, stood over the body, a dictaphone in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other. Between bites he added new observations, sometimes with his mouth still stuffed with bread.

  Strauss was good at his job; he had to be. Working at the prison had taught him many new things about cadavers, and although many of the bodies passing through his mortuary had certainly appeared to die from natural causes,
more often than not there were other possible theories.

  He stuffed the remainder of the sandwich into his already crammed mouth, and pulled on his double-thick autopsy gloves. Then he spoke into the dictaphone, announcing the time and date of the autopsy. It was, however, pretty clear what the cause of death had been; the man on the table had no cranium. Strauss chuckled to himself. 'Yeah, that'll do it every time.'

  He began to slice through the breastbone, speaking as he did so. He wondered why he bothered though as most of the tapes were filed under N, as in Never to be listened to again.

  As he crunched through the sternum, the stench hit him almost immediately. It was at this point that he realised he had forgotten his face-mask. He seldom wore one, anyway, but as the rancid fetor stung his nostrils and the back of his throat he wished he had on this occasion.

  Regaining his composure, he continued to talk aloud, although it was laborious; in all of his years as a mortician, he had never smelt anything so vile, and it was all he could do not to upchuck all over the poor bastard on the table.

  He reached for the shears and put them in place. A few crunches later and he had opened the chest cavity completely.

  At first, he thought he was hallucinating, that what he was seeing was purely imagination, or the effects of too little sleep or not enough food. He blinked, glaring down at the mess.

  Where the lungs should be there was just a black mass, so dark that it was almost impossible to determine where they started from the rest of the indescribable organs. The pericardial sac was blacker than the darkest night. Everything was covered in a liquefied goo. It looked like a sewer, not a person's insides.

  'Holy shit!' Strauss panted. 'What is this?'

  He picked up his camera and began to take photographs of the anomaly in front of him. When he'd been taking exterior photographs a few moments prior, he had never envisioned that what lay within would be so disturbing.