Red Cells

EIGHT: PAVOR NOCTURNUS

Stake had tried convincing his two cellmates, the black man Kofi and the bipedal dog-like Dacvibese, that they should take turns staying awake in three-hour shifts, to stand guard over each other. After all, Null had ordered all the members of the Mutie gang to do this if they could get their non-mutant cellmates to agree to it. But Stake’s two cellmates had resolutely refused. So it was that he lay on his bunk unable to sleep, listening to Kofi snore and smelling the foulness of the Dacvibese’s drool, while a parade of thoughts passed through his skull. He thought about the various types of interstitial creatures he had glimpsed out the windows on his way to the warden’s office. He thought about how the warden hadn’t sent word that he would grant Stake an audience. He thought about the ill-fated day Edwin Fetch had come into his little office. And he thought about a Sinanese woman he had met during the Blue War, named Thi Gonh, whom he had fallen in love with.

Finally, with thoughts of blue-skinned Thi in his arms, he drifted off, but whether for a matter of minutes or moments he didn’t know. All he knew, when he unaccountably snapped awake again – the hair on his arms and the back of his neck standing on end – was that a white apparition was standing just inside the cell, as if it might have passed right through the doorway’s energy barrier. The apparition gave off a soft radiance, like bioluminescence, that reflected off the walls.

Stake launched himself from his bunk and backed flat against the far wall of the cell in one movement, while crying out, “Hey! Help! Help us in here! Wake up… wake up… help us in here!” Yelling to his cellmates and, if it were functioning, the cell’s security camera at the same time.

The figure had taken one step toward him, but it turned its head, distracted, as Stake’s two cellmates awoke and cried out in terror themselves. The Dacvibese was closest to the intruder, on the lower level of a bunk bed occupied up top by Kofi… who, afraid to leap down, pushed himself into the corner and tucked into a ball as if he hoped to evade notice. The Dacvibese screeched horribly and ejected two malodorous streams of mucus toward the intruder from glands at the corners of his mouth. At the same time he took hold of his mattress and hoisted it up in front of him as a shield.

This flurry of distractions gave Stake a chance, however brief, to take in the figure in greater detail.

He could see why Blur had called it a skeleton. A demon’s skeleton, at that. The entity was roughly man-like in size and outline, but it seemed to either have the exoskeleton of an insect or to have never developed flesh upon its bony armature. He might have thought the being was mechanical if not for the organic, grown appearance of its composition. Thin arms and legs formed from odd sections of bone. A bare cage of ribs that were curved and yet also, inexplicably, multiply jointed. A complex pelvis, twisted but symmetrical. And a ribbed mask for a face, without eyes or other features, although it was ringed with a fringe of rippling cilia. From the back of its head, like windblown hair, white banners streamed in the air, though there was no breeze in the cell to blow them.

Its hands were raised, long fleshless digits spread wide.

Then it swiped one of its arms in a vicious backhand. The mattress the Dacvibese had used as a shield was torn out of his hands and thudded against the wall. The Dacvibese’s screams increased to an ear-piercing level. He backed against the side of the bunk bed – the farthest he could go.

Instead of advancing on him, however, the creature with its glow like white phosphorus turned its eyeless face toward Stake again, and started forward.

It was just slightly out of focus… insubstantial, or at least not fully substantial in this environment. It hurt Stake’s eyes to look at it. No, not his eyes… it hurt his mind to look upon it. Pinned against the wall, Stake let out an inarticulate cry.

Then, beyond the entity, Stake saw a guard framed in the doorway. The human guard was out in the hallway, on the other side of the red-tinted barrier, but he was raising his pistol in both hands and taking aim.

Stake slid down the wall, into a crouch, out of the line of fire.

The guard fired energy bolts straight through the closed barrier, streaking red like tracer rounds. Right into the back of the unsuspecting creature.

It whirled around. It looked like it should be screaming but it lacked a mouth to do so. If it had meant to feed, it must feed by some other means, Stake thought in the midst of his paralyzed panic. And even as he experienced it, this panic angered him. He had never known such an immobilizing fear before. He had always been able to respond to danger with a trained imperative for survival. It wasn’t so much the creature’s appearance that inspired this new irrational fear, however, but some force or vibration it emanated. Despite the uncountable nonhuman races he had encountered as a citizen of Punktown, this being was something entirely other.

The guard in the hallway triggered more molten red bolts, piercing the intervening barrier.

With the energy bolts seeming to connect with its body and penetrate its animated bones, the creature appeared enraged. Despite its insubstantial aspect, it didn’t seem able to step through the barrier to counterattack the guard. Instead, it suddenly reached to the side and caught hold of the Dacvibese, gripping his head between both its wide hands.

An explosion, then, deafened as opposed to deafening. A soundless nova blast. Bursting in every direction: the Dacvibese’s rotten-smelling blood, black as India ink.

Then they were both gone, like particles of matter and antimatter mutually annihilated.

Immediately the guard was deactivating the barrier. Stepping into a pool of black blood. Calling in other guards over his helmet mic. Stake saw the name in white on the man’s left breast. It was Hurley.

“Jesus mother-loving Christ!” Kofi blurted, cowering on the upper bunk.

“Amen,” Stake murmured, sliding up the wall to stand again. Blood speckled his face.

Hurley looked at Stake, though the guard appeared as faceless as the creature had been. “You all right?”

“Yeah… considering that thing came here to kill me,” Stake said. Because whatever else remained mysterious to him, that much had seemed very clear.