Fear Me

13

Night.

Administrative Segregation.

Jorgensen pulled the duty because Houle was out on sick leave. Kid hadn’t been any good since he found what was left of Reggie Weems. Still… sixteen years and here Jorgensen was, pulling the graveyard shift down in the bleak, dripping cellars of Shaddock Valley. He wasn’t too happy about it. They had thirty Ad-Seg cells and eight of them were filled now that Tony Gordo was down there. In Jorgensen’s way of thinking, Warden Linnard should have kept Gordo down there permanently. He was a fucking animal and he rated a cage.

Rated more than that, I had my way, Jorgensen thought.

He sat at his little desk, a paperback western forgotten on his lap, staring down the corridor at the steel doors which sealed all the bad boys into their private, darkened hells.

Tonight was quiet.

Some nights the shitheads started acting up. One of them started hollering and, just like monkeys in the zoo, the rest started kicking their heels up. Jorgensen wasn’t in a good mood. If one of them started, it was going to be a real sorry day in their sorry little books.

He put his feet up, closed his eyes.

He knew he wouldn’t sleep because it was damp and chill down there. It had a way of getting under your skin. When he was younger and pulled Ad-Seg, he used to do sit-ups just to keep warm. Maybe he couldn’t do so many sit-ups anymore, but he was still hard and stocky. Sixteen years of working society’s trash will do that to you.

He started thinking about goddamn Houle and getting angry… but then that led to Reggie Weems and he started feeling the chill dampness down there more than anything else. Weems. And in a locked cell yet. Just like that madness over at Brickhaven—

Hell was that?

He heard a thumping sound from one of the cells down the way, only the more he thought about it the more it registered in his brain as kind of a wet slapping sort of noise. Expecting trouble, he walked down there, feeling his dander rising, and a slow, rising approximation of something quite akin to fear.

The corridor was silent.

The cells were silent.

Not a noise anywhere.

Probably the pipes. They got to making funny sounds down here in the bowels of Shaddock, the steam making them contract, pop and snap. He paused before each cell and listened. Quiet. So quiet in there. Even through the iron doors he could hear a few men snoring. That was good. That was fine. Let it stay like that all night.

But he was not reassured.

Something wasn’t right here and sixteen years as a corrections officer had given him a real powerful gut-sense of what was good and what was bad and what was certainly not right. He stopped in front of Gordo’s cell, Number #3, even though he’d already paused and listened. It was quiet but he had a very uncanny sort of feeling that someone was standing on the other side of the door, holding their breath, doing everything they could so as not to be heard.

Crazy, you’re thinking crazy.

No… there was something.

He pressed his ear to the door and he could hear a faint rustling followed by what sounded like a dripping. Like water was falling from the ceiling in there.

A thumping noise. Then again.

More rustling, the slap of something like a bare foot on the concrete floor, a moist gurgling sound like Gordo had just worked something snotty and phlegmy from his throat.

The noises could have been explained by a lot of things, but to Jorgensen they were just plain unnatural. That approximation of fear was no longer approximate: it was real. It was a dark river, a rising tide and he felt it overtaking him, crawling up his spine and prickling his scalp, settling into his belly with a fluttering volume.

Scraping sounds now… like nails scratched over the walls or maybe claws.

Now a stealthy shifting as of sheets.

Jorgensen knew he was losing it, sixteen years of this shit and now he was unraveling. He was losing his mind just like they always said it happened to the cons in solitary confinement. But not the guards, never the guards…

He reached up for the bolt that would open the security port, but his hand just wouldn’t obey as something in there started thrashing and he heard a weird, unearthly wailing that cut right through him.

And in the seamless, enshrouding blackness of his cell, Gordo began to scream in a high, tormented voice: “YAHHHH! HELP ME! HELP ME! GET IT OFFA ME! SOMEBODY GET IT THE FUCK OFFA ME—”

Jorgensen stumbled back and fell right on his ass.

The fear was thick and white and ungainly knotted in his belly, spreading out and coiling around his chest in thick bands. He could scarcely draw a breath. It was irrational and immense and suffocating. He was shaking and wet with perspiration. Around him, the corridor was close and cloistral and suffocating. He could feel the walls, the darkness that webbed him to the floor.

There was nothing silent in #3 now.

In fact, it sounded like open warfare was raging in there, but Jorgensen knew it was more along the lines of a slaughter. He sat there on his ass as the other cons started shouting and crying out from their cells. Never had he felt more helpless or hopeless, for that matter. He was shaking, his heart racing, his bladder feeling like an especially juicy melon that was about to blow.

Inside #3, he could hear Gordo screaming, screaming maybe the way his many victims had screamed, but certainly worse… oh yes, certainly worse. But those screams were losing intensity as whatever was in there with him—Jesus, it sounded like the cell was filled with snakes, slithering snakes, brushing the walls and coiling on the floor with smooth sliding sounds—made short work of Tony Gordo, the terror of the streets and wriggling parasite #1 at Shaddock Valley. Whatever it was, it made a wailing/shrieking sort of sound that was pure animal rage somehow coupled with dire human insanity and delivered as an almost hypersonic squealing.

Jorgensen seemed to remember that he was, in fact, a corrections officer. He fumbled for his walkie-talkie. Dropped it, picked it up, dropped it again. When he got it in his hands, his fingers were trembling and clumsy and he could not seem to thumb the button to bring up the channel.

And it was at this time that something started slamming into that iron door with the force of a runaway train, making it tremble in its frame. Whatever it was, it hit it again and again, each time putting dents in it, an iron door two inches thick. Boom, boom, boom. It kept coming again and again like artillery shells hitting it from the other side, the dents getting larger and what was striking it sounding moister and juicier until mortar began to fall from the walls and concrete dust rose up in a cloud and blood that was bright and shockingly scarlet oozed beneath the door.

And by then, Jorgensen was on his feet, running, shouting into his box with a high, girlish sort of treble that was the sound of the human mind stripped clean by absolute primal terror.