Dead Cells - 01 (3 page)

Any man, Shane didn't care how crazy, would realise that the chances of succeeding in finishing off a guard were slim, and the probability of either escaping, or surviving the requital of the other guards, was so slim that it was practically anorexic.

Yet that man hadn't
cared
; his sole purpose was to cause as much damage as possible.

It was his eyes
, Shane thought to himself. His eyes had been empty, dark,
infernal
.

Being in one of the toughest jails in the state, you came across evil on a daily basis; it was everywhere. If you turned your back in the shower, you made sure that your cell-mate – providing he wasn't your main rapist – was spotting you. Items would go missing; anything that could be carved, or shaved, into a weapon would mysteriously disappear, only to turn up a few days later covered in blood. Shane had lost three toothbrushes this way.

The volition of the damned was an unstoppable force.

Yet that man –
Carlos
, Michaelson had called him after blowing the top of skull off – had not been just evil, or the misplacement of what should have obviously been a secure hospital transfer. He had been
Death
itself.

'You think he wasn't right,
don't
you?' Billy said, without looking up from his uproarious volume. 'Hey, I've seen some things since I've been in here, man,' he continued, 'but I ain't
never
seen anything as crazy as
that
.'

He turned the page, as if his statement had been nothing more than a footnote.

Shane sighed. He'd seen his fair share of shit, too, and this was also at the top of his list of
things I
never want to see again, ever.

'I don't know what happened out there, Billy,' Shane said, wiping the sweat from his brow. It had become increasingly hot in the cell in the last two hours; another thing the prison tended to do when an inmate stepped out of line was turn the heating up to almost intolerable temperatures. 'I think he wasn't crazy. I think he was controlled.'

'
Controlled
?' Billy said, finally allowing his humorous novel to fall into his lap. 'By
who
?'

Shane shook his head. 'I don't think he was controlled by anyone,' he said. 'Satan
himself
?' he added.

This brought a massive laugh from Billy Toombs. 'So you think that the man was
possessed
?' he sneered. 'I'm the token fucking Red-Indian around here. Shouldn't I be the one who makes up inexplicable shit about forces and ghosts?'

'He wasn't a ghost,' Shane said. 'But do you honestly believe that he was human?'

There was a moment of silence whilst Billy pondered the farcical question offered to him. How could the man have been anything
other
than human? Monsters didn't exist, other than the kind that raped children, or burned down the houses of pregnant women in an effort to prevent them from having the “
wrong coloured
” baby.

'What are you talking about, Shane?' Billy asked. He placed the book on a table beside him. This meant that he was either genuinely intrigued, or severely pissed off.

Shane sighed. 'Don't you just think that what happened out there was gravely wrong? I mean, that guy was fucking
ill
one moment, and the next he had the force of a panther.'

'The guy was just
pretending
to be weak,' Billy said, sniggering. 'We've all thought about it, about trying to outsmart the guards. This guy had the balls to actually
try
it. He failed, and now he's missing the top of his head.' He picked his book up and returned to the page that was bookmarked. 'I wouldn't look too much into it if I were you.'

Shane smiled. 'You're right, Billy.' And yet he knew that
he
was right, that something bad was about to happen.

So near
, he thought,
and yet so far.

Freedom, he surmised, would have to wait.

*

Marla Emmet pulled up the tray of dangerous-looking implements. She was beautiful, yet not in the conventional sense. She had the eyes, the lips, the breasts, and yet it seemed that her confidence was her main appealing factor. She was the type of woman that needed
no
man; her own strength and sassiness were more than enough to get her through the working day. Her dark black hair trailed down her back, aiming towards the voluptuous thighs that nestled neatly in her prison-issued garb, and yet such shallow descriptions could never take away from her the fact that she was the only female graduate in the prison-system in the state of Phoenix, and that she could count cards better than any professional poker-player on the circuit. She could, in fact, complete a Su-Doku puzzle in less than a minute, and had even won awards for her paintings, which one critic said “
reminded me
of an early Renoir.
”

'Is this gonna hurt, Doc?' Tyler said, whimpering like a child visiting the hairdressers for the very first time.

Marla glanced casually at the wound, then said: 'Probably. It was a deep bite, so I wouldn't be surprised if it stings a little.'

Tyler allowed his eyes to roll. 'Fucking typical. I get the chunk taken out of me, and he probably gets back to his cell with a meal and a goddamned certificate of virtue from the crims. I hate this shit.'

Marla laughed. 'Brace yourself,' she said as she dipped the cotton wool in the Iodine. 'This is gonna sting.'

She wanted it to sting, to be perfectly honest. Officer Tyler had been nothing but a lecherous pest to her since her arrival. She'd tried to present a case, but there just wasn't enough evidence, and he'd walked away a free man, knowing that his advances had been inappropriate. What was it about the prison-system that awarded the male staff complete immunity? Marla Emmett had no idea. So yes, she hoped that it stung like a
motherfucker
. The bastard deserved it.

He gasped as she applied the wool to the leg; he even drooled a little, like a child refusing to take his medicine. '
Fuck
! That shit
hurts
,' he grimaced.

'Really?' Marla asked, uninterested in his pain. In fact, she had expected a little more response; she had laced the Iodine with salt in an attempt to induce more agony from the demoralising pervert. 'Shouldn't really. It's just Iodine.'

'Well it feels like pure acid to me,' he managed through gritted teeth. The ailed expression on his face made Marla want to laugh; he looked for a moment as if he was apt to pass out. She hoped that he
would
, but when he gasped again and blinked the pain away, she knew that it was unlikely.

She dabbed the wound and placed the bloodied wool on the aluminium tray. 'Looks like you're going to need a good few stitches in that,' she said. 'That man sure chewed you up pretty good.'

That delightful, wonderful man
, she thought.

Looking toward the open wound on his leg, Tyler shook his head. 'He was like a fucking wild
animal
,' he said. 'An absolute
maniac
. I didn't even have time to taser the bastard. Shit, I couldn't even pull my leg out of his mouth.'

This made Marla smile. The though that Tyler, the sexual predator, had felt hopeless for even a second seemed to lift some of the darkness that she had felt during the tribunal.

'I'm gonna make that bastard's life a misery when I get fixed up,' Tyler snarled. 'He's fucked with the wrong guard.'

Marla hesitated for a second, and then said, 'Did they not
tell
you? They shot him in the head.'

Tyler blinked, unable to comprehend the new information. 'They
what
?'

'Apparently, Michaelson answered your call for backup, but by the time he got there things had already gotten out of hand.' She kept her eyes trained on the needle which she was expertly threading. 'Made a hell of a mess. The guy's down in the mortuary right now.'

Tyler thought about this for a moment, then smiled. 'Serves the sonofabitch right for messing with me,' he said. 'Good old Michaelson. Always
knew
that guy had the balls to kill someone.'

'Yeah,' Marla said, positioning herself more suitably for the surgery ahead. 'Anyway. Here we go. You may feel a little discomfort.'

She used very little anaesthetic.

He felt a
lot
of discomfort.

*

That night, the night when Officer Tyler had been stitched together so painfully, Carlos Silva lay on a trestle table, or at least, most of him did.

Doctor Jacob Strauss, a short portly man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, stood over the body, a dictaphone in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other. Between bites he added new observations, sometimes with his mouth still stuffed with bread.

Strauss was good at his job; he had to be. Working at the prison had taught him many new things about cadavers, and although many of the bodies passing through his mortuary had certainly appeared to die from natural causes, more often than not there were other possible theories.

He stuffed the remainder of the sandwich into his already crammed mouth, and pulled on his double-thick autopsy gloves. Then he spoke into the dictaphone, announcing the time and date of the autopsy. It was, however, pretty clear what the cause of death had been; the man on the table had no cranium. Strauss chuckled to himself. 'Yeah, that'll do it
every
time.'

He began to slice through the breastbone, speaking as he did so. He wondered why he bothered though as most of the tapes were filed under N, as in Never to be listened to again.

As he crunched through the sternum, the stench hit him almost immediately. It was at this point that he realised he had forgotten his face-mask. He seldom wore one, anyway, but as the rancid fetor stung his nostrils and the back of his throat he wished he had on this occasion.

Regaining his composure, he continued to talk aloud, although it was laborious; in all of his years as a mortician, he had never smelt anything so vile, and it was all he could do not to upchuck all over the poor bastard on the table.

He reached for the shears and put them in place. A few crunches later and he had opened the chest cavity completely.

At first, he thought he was hallucinating, that what he was seeing was purely imagination, or the effects of too little sleep or not enough food. He blinked, glaring down at the mess.

Where the lungs should be there was just a black mass, so dark that it was almost impossible to determine where they started from the rest of the indescribable organs. The pericardial sac was blacker than the darkest night. Everything was covered in a liquefied goo. It looked like a sewer, not a person's insides.

'Holy shit!' Strauss panted. 'What
is
this?'

He picked up his camera and began to take photographs of the anomaly in front of him. When he'd been taking exterior photographs a few moments prior, he had never envisioned that what lay within would be so disturbing.

What is it? What the fuck is all of that black stuff?

He took a few more photos and placed the camera down on the table. Still speechless, he stepped closer, gazing again down into the horrible chasm of black sludge and unidentifiable viscera. The stench seemed to be worsening, too; the entire room now smelled like a trucker's sock. For a few seconds, Doctor Jacob Strauss thought that he would vomit, but he closed his eyes and eventually the nausea subsided.

Glaring down at the dead man's open chest cavity once again, he decided to examine further. He reached across and picked up his scalpel. Not knowing where exactly to cut – and not being able to see clearly – he opted to just aim for the heart and see what happened.

His own heart was racing.

He allowed the blade to slide across the black lump that had replaced the heart. In his ears, he could hear the terrible
hush-thump
of his own heart beating.

'Fuck it,' he said.

He pushed the blade into the darkened organ.

Immediately, a sickening geyser of dark slush erupted from the glob. Strauss had no time to close his mouth, which was instantaneously filled with the putrid liquid. He tumbled backwards, crashing into the table, sending tools and equipment clattering onto the mortuary floor. The noise was immense, deafening, but the doctor was spitting and choking, trying his damnedest to rid his mouth of the vile substance. It tasted like off milk. Its warmth made him want to vomit.

When the equipment had settled, and the room once again fell into silence, Strauss managed to pick himself up off the floor, pulling at his tongue with his gloved fingers, trying to get every ounce of stinking fluid out of his mouth. He thought, right there and then, that he would never get the taste of it out, that his tongue would forever smack of it.

After a few minutes he allowed himself to swallow. He ignored the dead cadaver, and made his way to the sink, where he drew some cold water and polished it off greedily.

'Nasty fucking shit,' he spat. His ass was sore from the fall, and his elbow had hit the aluminium table with such force that there was a small pool of blood soaking through his smock.