Red Cells

FIFTEEN: THE RAGE

Stake looked to Hurley as they walked toward one of the cavernous chamber’s alternate exits, and said, “So where are you taking me? If you put me in my cell I’ll be backed into a corner if that thing decides to come for me again, after all.”

“I’m going to put you in an isolation cell for now. A change of scene if it does decide to look for you.”

“I’m not sure how much good that will do. There’s no telling when it’s watching… where it’s watching from. The individual animals, like those fishy types, look like they move through air vents and things like that. Take physical routes in and out of the prison. But the way the assembled being appeared in my cell, and how Blur described the attack he witnessed – bonded together they seem to be able to apport from one spot to another through a channel they generate, like their own little temporary wormhole. From outside the prison to inside.”

“You won’t be in there long, okay?” Hurley said impatiently. “Just until we can get this crazy damn Orange Bunch boarded on their boats.” He switched from speaking to Stake to addressing several of his fellow guards over his helmet mic. “Anderson, Grau, Pulver – I’m taking Stake to solitary for now until we can ship him out with the rest of Red Block. I’ll be right back. You got things covered okay?”

“Make it fast, man,” Stake overheard one of the guards respond. “We’re already short of people now that we’ve got men taking those two injured prisoners to the infirmary.”

“Dead prisoners,” someone else corrected, cutting in. No doubt one of the guards who had been conveying the bodies of the Tin Town Maniacs. “You watch yourself with that one, Hurley.”

“I got it under control,” Hurley replied.

The two men had almost reached the exit, located at the opposite end of the great room from the doorway the prisoners were filing through, when a sudden uproar caused them to halt and whirl around.

The prisoners at the end of the line were looking above them and pointing at a ghostly white ribbon that circled overhead like a tatter of ectoplasm.

“Hey!” Stake started to call out.

And then, a figure the general size and shape of a man, but resembling more the animated skeleton of a demon, seemed to step straight out of the air. No flare of light or puff of smoke; it suddenly just was. Its blank face, armored as if with chitin, framed by wriggling millipede legs like a flower of bone.

As the prisoners at the tail of the queue cried out in surprise, the eel-like harbinger shot down to the figure’s head and joined its streaming mane. Became part of the whole… its job done, as if it had helped open the way, a key in some unfathomable lock.

The prisoners near the phantom spun away to scatter. Hurley slapped his hand to his gun. Yet they were all too late.

The demon thrust out its arms to either side, and just as quickly as Stake had caught hold of both Tin Town Maniacs, it seized two prisoners by enclosing their heads in its long fingers. Between those bony fingers, Stake saw the blue eyes of one of the men gone wide in horror.

But a second later, all three of them were gone. The entity vanished in a blink, just as it had manifested. The departure of the two trapped prisoners, however, was more messy. Twin detonations of vivid redness made Stake shut his eyes and turn his face to the side involuntarily. Even from this distance, he felt fine drops of blood and a few nuggets of flesh reach the skin of his face.

When he looked back, there were two great splatters on the rec yard floor where the men had been standing. Other prisoners closer to the scene than Stake and Hurley looked as though they had just emerged from swimming in a lake of blood.

A scream echoed in Stake’s mind, dwindling slowly like a siren down a long tunnel. At first he had thought it was a half-blurted cry from the throats of the two prisoners, but they hadn’t had time for that. He knew it was the cry of the entity, instead. Not heard, but felt in the very folds of his brain like ricocheting electrical impulses. Alien impulses… not his own…

The last of the cry of rage faded away into nothingness.

From the doorway Hurley had just been about to usher Stake through, a stream of men suddenly trotted into the rec yard: Colonial Forcers, helmeted and dressed in gray-and-black urban camouflage, boots clomping, carrying bulky assault engines in their arms.

But the monster was already gone.