by L. A. Cruz
Helia headed toward her spot on the other side. As she crossed the floor, she found herself breathing out more than in. The stench was as bad as before, bad enough to ruin whatever appetite had started to build.
The chamber was so cavernous that her boots echoed on the concrete ceilings. During her first entry, her heart had been beating so loudly that she hadn't noticed any of the other sounds. Now as she passed each of the cells, she heard gurgling, as if the rotting process were eating up the creatures’ stomach lining. She also heard hissing, almost like snakes tasting the air, but it might have been nothing more than gases escaping the tiny holes in their decomposing flesh.
Some of the more recent acquisitions growled as she passed, their vocal cords only half rotted. Some scratched at the concrete floor and other ground their teeth on the walls, trying to sharpen them. One of them was wearing a neck tie. It dangled from the sinews of his neck, straight down his sternum, stiff with vomit and blood.
She was about four cells from her post on the far wall when she heard a hiss. It sounded almost like a whisper. She stopped and turned her head slowly to the cellblock.
“One. One. One.”
The Keeper whom she would be standing parallel with against the far wall was watching her. Remembering her experience with Makab and Fanning, she thought better of approaching the inmate.
“One. One. One.”
As she passed, she glanced into the darkness of the cell. She could see the basic shape of the inmate in the dim light. It was standing against the iron bars and was hanging on. Its legs had withered and were nothing more than crooked sprigs.
“One. One. One,” its whispered, its throat still intact.
Helia ignored the creature and walked swiftly to her post. At the far wall, she turned and stood at parade rest with her back to the brick wall. The other Keeper, a man whom she guessed was in his mid-30s, nodded at her presence.
“One. One. One.”
Helia stood against the wall, quite certain that the hisses that she had heard coming from that cellblock were indeed words. Based on the degeneration of the inmate’s flesh and the tattered clothing, far more decrepit than that morning's new arrival, she would guess that the inmate had been incarcerated for a number of weeks. According to Lawless, the creatures lost their brain function within days. Their vocal cords too. And yet here this inmate was, trying to communicate.
In her experience, those who saw the world and the evildoers in it as defined by the one bad thing they had done in their lives were unwilling to see the possibility of redemption.
And what of these inmates? Had they even done anything wrong? Or was their only crime being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Were they not worthy of consideration?
SHE STOOD with her legs slightly bent. It was the way they had showed her to stand in training. It kept the blood from pooling in her feet and reduced the risk of fainting.
The cellblock was mostly quiet now, quiet enough that she could hear the breathing from the other Keeper who stood about ten feet to her left, although she couldn't be sure if it was her own breathing as the high ceiling seemed to magnify every sound.
A tiny speck of rust catching the dim light floated down from one of the diamond-shaped holes in the catwalk overhead. With nothing else to do but to stay vigilant, she followed its descent with her eyes.
Like a feather, it drifted down to the floor. But then it suddenly stopped its downward float and whipped up, did a loop, and traveled horizontally until it disappeared into the darkness.
She looked up. On the ceiling, between the two sixty watt light bulbs and the glass dome which she assumed was the alarm, was a large stain. If she squinted, it took the shape of Florida.
The draft had to come from somewhere.
CHAPTER 22
After an hour, she rotated with the Keeper to her left and got a new perspective on the day room. Slightly. Straight ahead was the back of the iron stairs that led up to the second tier. They slightly obstructed her view of the Keeper on the other side of the cellblock.
She stood watch behind the stairs for another hour and then a rectangle of light spread across the floor as the main door opened. Heavy boots crossed the cellblock floor.
The figure’s stride was long, quick, and confident, his chest up. Almost too confident. She knew before his face came into the light that it was Dunning.
“Go get some chow,” he said.
It was dim, but the twinkle in his eye took a pause, maybe a wink.
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“It’s Helia, right? Did I pronounce that correctly?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“When no one else is around, you can call me Matt.”
No one else was around.
“Yes, Sergeant.”
IN THE MESS HALL, the eight off-duty soldiers were sitting at the small round tables. They were similar to the tables in the visitation room when she used to go visit her father and she assumed that all their furniture had been commissioned by the same company.
She grabbed a tray from the far wall and went to the food counter. Behind the sneeze guard, stood a man in a white apron.
“So you’re our new recruit?”
“Correct,” Helia said.
“I’m Joey, food services,” he said. “What would you like this morning?“
Helia looked at the offerings. The food was kept warm in little stainless steel basins. There wasn’t much choice. Scrambled eggs, triangles of toast, already toasted, pancakes, and fruit salad.
“I’ll have the fruit salad and the toast.”
“Roger that,” Joey said. He filled a plate and handed it to her. It was a real plate, not a disposable one, and she supposed it minimized the need to call for supplies from the outside world. But how the food got down below was still a mystery. Certainly, food trucks headed toward the cemetery must have set off alarm bells among the conspiracy theorists.
She took her plate of food and stood beside the Colonel’s table. He was drinking from a small round glass of what looked like watered-down tomato juice.
“Do you mind if I sit here, sir?”
“Go right ahead, Corporal.”
Helia straddled one of the seats and sat. She took a bite of the fruit. It was a bit slimy, a bit over-sweet, a bit tingly on her tongue. Slightly fermented. Which was fine. The stench from the day room still lived in her nostrils and she didn’t have much appetite. She was mostly eating to keep the other Keepers from saying anything.
“So what's on your mind?”
“Sir?”
“Rather than sit with a commanding officer, generally soldiers are more inclined to sit with those of similar rank. So unless you're buttering me up, I can only assume there’s something you’d like to discuss.”
He was perceptive, all right. Helia mushed the fruit against the roof of her mouth and swallowed it.
“In the cellblock this morning, I thought I heard one of the inmates trying to communicate with me. I was under the impression that once the process began, their powers of speech and thought disappeared quickly, but this one definitely had something to say.”
“You’re positive?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What was said?”
“One.”
“One?”
“Yes, like the number one.”
Colonel Gates nodded and took a long sip of tomato juice. He winced at the taste and then washed it down with a swing of coffee.
“And which cell was this?”
Helia counted the cells in her head. There were thirteen on each side and voices were coming from the second to last cell, the one neighboring the new inmate.
“Cell number twelve.”
Colonel Gates swirled his coffee with a spoon and then took another sip. “It's awful early for you to start hearing things. Usually that doesn't happen until you’re underground for a couple of weeks.“
“Is that a joke, sir?”
“Yes, Corporal.”
<
br /> “So you’re saying that I'm just imagining things?”
“No. I’m not saying that you're imagining anything. I'm just saying that we spend a good deal of time in silence and sometimes our brains like to fill in the gaps. That day room is full of all kinds of noises.”
“If it’s okay with you, I would like to attempt to communicate with one of the inmates. I'd like to know if they're capable of any kind of recognition, sir.”
“And what would that accomplish?”
“Have there been any studies conducted on these people?”
“Lots,” Colonel Gates said. “Ongoing. A secret wing at NIH has been studying them for decades.”
“I mean other than medical studies. Like social studies. Ultimately, I’d like to know if rehabilitation is possible. Has anyone tried it?”
He tongued one of his canines. “You’d best stop thinking of them as human, Corporal. They're not. I assure you that. Communication is fruitless. Unless you want to open up a vein and start feeding them, those inmates are as good as rotten. And somehow, I don’t think the community will rally around a blood drive to keep those monsters breathing long enough to find out.”
“But what’s the harm in trying?”
“Excuse me?”
“What’s the harm in trying to communicate with them, sir? There’s nothing else to do while I’m on my shift. I have two eyes, sir.”
Colonel Gates stood abruptly and wiped his mouth with his napkin. The tomato juice left a red stain. “I gave you an answer, Corporal. Enjoy the rest of your breakfast.”
He returned his plate to the receptacle on the other side of the counter and left the mess hall. None of the sitting soldiers stood to salute him as he passed.
CHAPTER 23
There was a strange rhythm to the boredom.
Helia imagined life in this underground facility was not much different from if had she enlisted in the Navy and went to work on a submarine. She had never thought that she would describe work in an Ultramax facility as boring, but when the inmates never got fed, never went to work, never went to the library, never went to AA meetings or the infirmary, never went to rec time, nor the mess hall, there was nothing to do but stand and watch for hours at a time.
The days went on the same as any other, marked only by the glowing red digits in the living quarters. Each morning, she woke up at 4:00 a.m., did her pushups and sit ups, did a two hour shift, showered, went back to a two hour shift before breakfast, had chow, went back for a four hour shift where she rotated through each of the four posts in the day room, before she was relieved for lunch.
After lunch she got an hour of recreation time which she spent reading on her cot or on the beach in the mood room. Sometimes she napped depending on how bad her dreams had been the night before.
After rec time, she returned to the day room for another four hour shift. Then, it was off to dinner and then she did another two hour shift before she was allowed to retire for the evening around 9:00 PM.
Night duty was exactly the same as day duty and after two weeks, the Colonel turned her schedule upside down and she switched hours with the Keepers working opposite of her. This had the effect of doing nothing but throwing her internal rhythm off.
Thankfully, the cut on her shoulder never developed the bull’s eye that Colonel Gates had warned her about and after a few weeks, all that was left was a small nick in her tattoo.
TIME over the next three weeks was marked by the rotting of the inmate in cell twelve. At first, it was skin and bones with a bit of adipose tissue leaking out of the rotting crevices, but then the fat all withered away, and it shriveled up to the point where it could no longer stand and its legs bent crooked and it kneeled, no skin, directly on its knee caps. The skin on its face sagged away from tis eye sockets and its hair grew ragged.
Each time Helia passed the cell, she listened closely, but she could decipher nothing that sounded like language, only the hiss of the gasses escaping from the inmate’s lips.
By the end of Helia’s first three weeks, the inmate was just a pile on the floor. Its bony fingers tapped the concrete and the cartilage and the tendons between the bones dried up fell off and left hard little rubber bands on the floor.
In the middle of Helia’s fourth week, Dunning caught her pausing outside of cell twelve and looking at the pile of bones among the rags.
“Looks like we'll get a little break from routine soon,” he said.
“What's that, Sergeant?”
Dunning took her spot on the wall. “Come back to reality, Corporal. Your shift is reality. Your vigilance is reality. That pile of bones is not.”
Helia had been thinking about her first leave. Five months to go. Then she’d get two weeks off. She craved the sun in a way that she never realized before. She craved fresh air, greenery, and Wheel of Fortune. If she was honest with herself, she even craved shopping—if only to see people above ground doing normal things.
“Save your reveries for the mood room,” Dunning said. “We need you mentally present. At all times.”
The nice thing about the mood room was that it was the only room in the facility that you didn't need to swipe into. This was both a blessing and a curse. It was nice to be able to step in and catch some sun on a whim, but it also meant that there was no privacy, no warning when the door would open.
For Helia, there was a heightened sense of claustrophobia when each door in the facility locked behind her, and somewhere deep inside, not consciously thought, but omnipresent, was the worry that at some point the systems would fail. All they needed was some kind of electrical shortage and each one of the rooms would become its own containment unit, its own special-housing isolation cell.
No, the mood room was not sufficient for allaying her anxieties.
“I was just thinking,” she said. “Has there ever been a shut down?”
“What do you mean?”
“Have the systems ever failed down here?”
“Not that I’m aware of it. It’s solid. Multiple backup generators.”
She nodded, unconvinced.
“I think you’re worrying about the wrong things,” Dunning said.
“Oh? And what pray tell should I worry about, Matt?”
He smiled at hearing her use his first name. “The inmates, dear Helia. The inmates. Obviously.”
She glanced at the pile of bones. They hadn’t had a new arrival since her own arrival and most of the inmates had wasted away.
“I’m not afraid of a few bones,” she said. “Are you?”
AFTER LUNCH on the Monday of her fourth week, Helia entered the mood room and flipped the switch on the wall. Immediately the daylight-balanced bulbs buzzed to life and the tiny fan in the projector whirred to life.
The corner of the big blue screen on the white wall flashed the word INPUT and she grabbed the remote control from the tiny plastic holder mounted to the wall and pointed it at the projector mounted in the ceiling. She switched it over to internal memory and found the forward button to choose the looping video clip of a dock that looked out over the still water. The video had been shot somewhere near Martha’s Vineyard.
Feeling a little tingle of anxiety, she unbuttoned her uniform shirt and trousers, pulled off her boots, and stripped down to her underwear. Then she angled the lounge chair to face the daylight bulbs and lay down.
She hoped to God that no one walked in, especially since it was after lunch and her belly was a little bloated from the turkey sandwich, but she so desperately craved any kind of warmth on her skin. Although the daylight bulbs were not tanning bulbs, just feeling the light on her bare stomach was a godsend.
She closed her eyes and lay there for twenty minutes. Through the bars of her eyelashes, the water almost looked real. It felt good to squint, the chair angled so that the rays of sun were right in her face. She imagined she could feel the sun warming the snake on her bare arm and the constrictor on her bare leg and she lay there like a free woman.
One month do
wn, only five to go, she thought.
She made a note to leave herself at least about ten minutes before the end of her hour-long recreation break to go use the communication booth at the end of the hall. She hadn't checked in with Tita Annabelle in a week and she wondered how her mother was doing and if there had been any word from her brother.
Suddenly, the door opened. Her eyes popped open and she covered up as if she were naked, one arm for her breasts, the other arm for her crotch.
It was Dunning. He grinned.
“Still so modest, Crane?”
She could feel his eyes crawl over every inch of her exposed skin.
It wasn't so much the modesty, or the exposed skin, as she had grown more comfortable walking between the living quarters and the bathroom in nothing but a towel, but there was enough pressure in her belly from the turkey that she didn't need any rumors circulating.
She sat up and pulled on her trousers. “Whatever happened to knocking, Sergeant?”
“I didn't want to,” he said. “That is one hell of a tat on your leg. What’s the story behind it?”
“None of your business, Sergeant.”
“I thought we had agreed to drop the formalities.”
“Did we?”
He grinned. “No need to get so testy.”
Her eyes dropped to his crotch. “Nor you.”
He turned red, adjusted himself, and cleared his throat. “Sorry about that. Other than you, I haven’t seen a woman in months.”
“What about Pinder?”
“She doesn’t count.”
“I’m very flattered that you’re attracted to me because of a lack of options, Sergeant.”
He stepped closer. “It’s more than that.”
She stuck her arms into her shirt sleeves and buttoned up her uniform. “So is there something I can help you with? Or is this sexual harassment?”
Dunning smiled. “A little bit of both. I was wondering if you were ready for a break in the routine?”
She stood and turned off the projector. “What kind of break?”
