It was all you could do. You couldn’t avoid it. They were like mini car accidents; you wanted to ignore them, but you couldn’t help it. Every new sound, every cry, every utterance of the word no, had to be listened to and identified, because they didn’t always come from the same place.
If the devil was some kind of animal that attacked its victims through their subconscious minds, then by listening to where the sounds were coming from, we could in theory track its movements. It was an eerie thought, one neither of us wanted to really think about.
We were sitting in a box, listening to a predator as it prowled nearby, searching for food, for someone to eat. Like Russian roulette, nobody knew where the creature would strike, or when, or even if it would strike. But we were all of the mind that it would. It had over the last few days, without fail.
Someone was going to die tonight.
The only saving grace we had was Azlu, and the weird, disgusting mucus she was able to produce. It kept us not only awake, but also sharp of mind and body. I felt ready to attack at any given moment, to jump at the first sign of trouble, and act.
I only ever felt this way in the lead up to a fight, but without a fight to release it, I didn’t know what to do with myself. So, I paced. I talked. I exercised, with Alexa, and using Alexa. Azlu wasn’t interested in exercise. She found the whole thing weird and unsettling. Why would anyone want to voluntarily expend so much of their own energy?
I’d tried explaining to her that this was how our people gained muscle and got stronger. She said her kind didn’t need to exercise; she only needed to eat if she wanted to get bigger, faster, and stronger.
Eat, eat, eat.
Eat anything and everything in sight.
More and more, I was starting to envy the little spiderling and her strange quirks. She was formidable, full of surprises, and usually went completely underestimated. It was no wonder she had done so well for herself on this side of the rifts, despite her almost frail-looking body.
We were in mid-conversation when the mother of all screams tore through the cellblock. It was so loud, hopeless, and pained, it bounced off the walls and rattled the inside of my chest. The three of us stared at the door to our cell, rooted to the spot, unable to move.
The sound died off as instantly as it came, leaving me breathless and frozen. I waited, watching the door as if at any moment the devil was going to come bursting through it. Then another scream pierced the silence, this one filled with terror, and dread. It made me lurch and run toward the closed cell door. I thought maybe I could see the person screaming, but I couldn’t.
The cell block was dead, empty, and unmoving. I could see the guard post from my little porthole, but I couldn’t see the guards inside. Were they even in there? Could they see, or hear what was going on? Maybe one of the guards is doing all the screaming. There was nothing so far to suggest the devil only fed on inmates.
“What the fuck is going on?!” Alexa yelled as she rushed toward the door.
“I don’t know,” I said, “I can’t see anything.”
The screaming was starting to sound more like a struggle, now. I heard a thud, and then another thud, like a body smashing into a wall. Then I saw it, a little movement—a rapid break of the light—from the porthole of another cell.
It was on the lower level, the window to the cell eye-level with our own. I couldn’t see directly into it, though, not from this angle, but there was definitely some kind of struggle going on. I pointed at the window.
“There,” I said, “That’s where it’s coming from.”
“Holy shit,” Alexa said, “What the fuck is happening?”
I started pounding on the cell door. “Hey!” I yelled, trying to get the guards attention, or anyone’s attention. “Open this door!”
But the sounds of my voice were easily swallowed up by the brutal chaos taking place in that other cell. As I watched, pounding frantically on my door, the noises coming from that cell transformed, morphed, from the panicked screams of a man scared for his life, to the brutal death-throes of someone being… killed.
Viciously, and horribly.
The thudding had never ceased. In fact, it had gotten faster, heavier, and more violent. Another instant passed, and the unmistakable sound of bones being cracked and broken rang out through the cellblock like gunfire. The inmate’s screams got worse, higher pitched, and then he slammed face first into the little window of his cell door.
For a moment he was stuck there, his eyes wide, his ragged breathing misting the window up. He then pulled his head back and slammed it against the window, leaving a bloody splatter on it before disappearing back into his cell. Another scream, more cracking bones, then a thud… and then silence.
I started through the porthole in my door, my eyes wide, my ragged breath still fogging it up. I waited like I was in Limbo, stuck, unable to move, or speak, or even think straight. Whatever had just happened in that cell had been brutal, and savage, and so quick. The inmate’s screams had also been so loud, the silence now was deafening.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“There’s nothing to do,” Azlu said. She was hanging from the ceiling above the door. “He’s dead.”
“You know that for sure?”
“Trust us, he’s dead,” Alexa said, “That’s what it’s been like all week. I mean, maybe not as loud as this… but someone always dies. Every night.”
“What the hell…” I said, clouding the window a little more. “This is like living in a nightmare.”
“Welcome back to D-Block. Be grateful you’ve spent most of this week in the hole.”
I pressed my finger against the window. “Wait, there, look.”
A guard emerged at the top of the metal stairs leading to the next floor up. He was holding onto the railing and peering, stretching his neck as far as he could to try and glimpse the cell where all this had taken place. He was scared. I could tell by the way his arms were shaking, and by the fact that he was keeping his distance instead of moving closer to investigate.
He took a tentative step down, then another, and another, until finally he decided to crouch just by the top of the stairs. From there, it looked like he got a glimpse of the little window into the cell. As soon as he saw the blood, he grabbed his radio and called it in, but the slowness in his movements made it clear he also knew the inmate in that cell was about as dead as they came.
What followed was a different kind of chaos. Guards started pouring into the cell block. Most of them were gripping their batons so tightly their knuckles were turning white. Another couple of guards, though, were armed with guns. Shotguns, in fact. As soon as they reached the door to the cell, they raised their guns and waited for the officer in charge to arrive.
That was officer Howes—Brickmore’s old right-hand man. I hadn’t seen him in a while, not since around the time his partner threw me into a room with a bunch of werewolves and a mage to get beaten to death. He’d clearly received a promotion in the wake of his buddy’s death, but he didn’t come into the cellblock alone.
Sanchez was with him, and with her were two men in green scrubs pulling a gurney between them. A woman in a white doctor’s coat joined the orderlies as they took their positions near the cell door. It was a cabaret of prison staff, all of them falling into place but none of them daring to give the order to open the door.