Authors: Adam Millard
He reached up and pulled down the sun-visor. A photograph, six-by-eight, portrayed Holly and Megan on a see-saw, the kind of old rust-traps that you can no longer buy for health and safety purposes.
'It's for you,' he said.
He closed the visor, climbed out of the car, and headed for the liquor store.
*
Shane hadn't noticed the woman working the register press the button beneath the counter, but she must have; the cops were all over the place before he even had time to finish bagging the money.
'You bitch!' he cried at the woman, whose make-up had streamed down her face leaving her looking like something from a cheap horror film. 'You fucking bitch!'
The sirens and sounds of squelching tyres made it perfectly clear that most of the Department had been despatched. Shane couldn't see outside due to the stacked boxes and crates of beer that had been piled up in front of the windows. The only sunlight in the store emanated from the cooling fan on the far wall, sending an eerie shadow across the room as the fan spun.
He had to think fast.
'Where's the back door to this place?' he yelled at the hysterical teller.
The lady, Arleen – he had noticed her name-badge when he'd threatened to blow here head off – gasped as if there was no longer any air in the store. She couldn't speak, instead she just muttered incomprehensibly and pointed to the back of the room.
'THIS IS THE JACKSON POLICE DEPARTMENT,' came the voice that Shane had anticipated. 'COME OUT SLOWLY WITH YOUR HANDS UP.'
Like that's gonna happen, Shane thought. He turned and headed for the back of the store, in the direction of the shaking, bony finger of the terrified Arleen.
He could hear the crackling of police two-ways and the sound of a distant helicopter, but that couldn't be for him. Could it?
Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he lunged through the door that would hopefully lead to a back alley. Places like this always had a loading bay of some sort, a place where the crates get delivered and stored until they're needed.
This place, though, didn't. Shane stumbled straight through the door into possibly the worst toilet he had ever been in.
'Fucking BITCH, Arleen!' he yelled.
There were two cubicles, a solitary urinal, and a sink that Shane suspected hadn't been used in a long fucking time. Above the sink there was a window, frosted and rotten.
Without further thought, Shane climbed up onto the sink and grabbed hold of the lock. His heart sank when it wouldn't budge, either to the left or the right.
He reached for the back of his jeans and pulled out the gun. A gun that was no more real than the ones available to buy for children at the seaside. Nevertheless, it was heavy enough to smash the bathroom window through.
He thumped the glass with the butt of the pistol – BB pistol, for fuck's sake! - and the window exploded outwards. Making sure there were no sharp edges left to snag himself on, he climbed through and spilled out onto the street.
The sunlight hit him first.
The taser came soon after.
*
Shane came awake as the electricity began to surge violently through his body. A slick film of sweat coated him from head to toe. A dream that he had had almost every night – not just a dream, but a recollection of his mistake – could still cause him such panic and intense distress.
He sighed.
There would be no more sleep for him tonight.
*
Billy Toombs pushed his tray in the general direction of the slush they called breakfast. Working the spoon that morning was one of the newbies, and that bode well for the food; there was no way on earth a fish was going to spit in the food, or worse. He was shaking even as he piled the scrambled eggs onto the side of Billy's plate. Shane tapped Billy on the arm and they shared a silent smile that said:
Fuck me! This kid ain't gonna last long!
The room was, as always, noisy as hell. Breakfast was the one meal that everyone turned up for.
As the nervous spoon-handler now slopped eggs onto Shane's plate, Shane glanced around the room. He could sense something.
Something
wrong
was about to happen.
The atmosphere had somehow changed. Not the volume, but the tension. Billy sensed it, too.
They moved along the line, receiving a solitary sausage, which was almost unrecognisable, and a rasher of bacon that looked like something picked off a child's knee a few days after a nasty fall.
Taking a seat, Billy looked to Shane. 'You feel it, too?'
'Yep,' he said, shovelling a forkful of sloppy egg into his mouth. 'I've got your back.'
'I've got yours,' Billy said, digging into his food.
They were halfway through breakfast when it happened, and it was one of the strangest things either of them had ever seen.
A man, also a newbie, staggered along the breakfast line, sweat pouring from his head and landing on his own plate. The man behind him, who Billy and Shane knew as Paulie Sorvino, watched silently as the man began to drool all over his own breakfast, swaying back and forth as if intoxicated.
'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.