by L. A. Cruz
“Has anyone here ever gotten bit?”
Colonel Gates sat down on his cot and laid back. He interlocked his arms behind his head. She kept her eyes on the floor.
“You mean one of the Keepers?”
“Yes.”
“It’s simple, Corporal. Don't let it happen. Vigilance and keeping a tight ship is the key to survival down here,” he said and adjusted his crotch. “Vigilance, Corporal. Remember that.“
Helia raised her head, but didn’t look at him. She fixed her eyes to the shelf across the tiny cell. They were full of books about military history.
“If you’re not going to answer my question about the arrival or about your tattoo, you’re dismissed,” he said. “Close the door gently on your way out.”
Helia walked past the cots in the living quarters. On the bunk with the empty shelves, a new bundled uniform had appeared. It was accompanied by a new set of combat boots. A bag of toiletry items sat next to it: a razor, a toothbrush, a comb, and rubber shower shoes. Also an empty mesh bag, which she assumed was for laundry, and two pairs of underwear, two T-shirts, and a towel. She looked at the underwear. Plain white. Grandma panties, the female equivalent of tightie whities.
A key card with a coiled up lanyard sat on top of the bundle of clothing. There was no picture on the ID, just a faceless silhouette for an avatar and no other identifying information.
Sergeant Lawless keyed into the living quarters and stuck his head into the door. She caught a glimpse of a bucket and a mop in the hallway behind him.
“Drop your current clothes in the laundry bag and I'll take them down to the incinerator, ahem, the laundry, for you.”
It felt like a ploy to see her naked. “Thank you, Sergeant, but I don’t mind taking them myself.”
Lawless shrugged. “Thought I’d save you some time, that’s all. Get some rest.”
He stepped out of view and there was a squeal as the bucket rolled down the hall. Helia sat on the bunk and unlaced her boots. She pulled off her socks and slipped her bare feet into the rubber shower shoes. They were brand new and the squeak from the rubber made her shiver. She rubbed the back of her heels. She was not looking forward to breaking in a new pair.
The most awkward part of basic training had been getting used to the shower situation. It looked as if it would be no better here, as there was one bathroom for all of them.
She might as well get it over with, then come back and try to grab a half hour nap before the morning shift.
With a bundle of clothes in hand and her toiletry bag tucked under her arm, Helia traipsed down the hallway, her shower shoes smacking the concrete. It was a cold trek from the living quarters. She swiped her new card through the reader on the doorframe and a tiny LED blipped green and the door unlocked.
The bathroom was tiled white and a bank of fluorescents lights buzzed overhead. On the left side was a row of six sinks. Above them, six mirrors, each no larger than a magazine. On the other side, were three stalls. Under the partition, she could see the base of a stainless steel toilet. Beside them, were three tiled shower stalls. At least the showers were not communal.
Sergeant Dunning was standing at the far mirror. He was wearing boxers only. He was leaning into the mirror, its steam cleared with a swipe, his bicep flexed from the effort of holding the razor steady, his shoulder a tense tear drop.
Pinder stood at the sink next to him. She too, was shaving, but dressed only in underwear and a sports bra. She had a leg up on the sink and was tracing the razor around the curve of her knee.
Both heads turned when Helia entered.
“I’m sorry. I’ll come later.”
“Don’t be silly,” Pinder said. “We’re all friends here.”
“I see you found your way to the hot house,” Dunning said. “Don’t ever forget your shower shoes.”
“That’s right,” Pinder added. “Dunning here wears a condom at all times to keep the toe fungus off his dragging dick.”
“And Pinder mops it up with her jungle cooch,” Dunning said.
Pinder blew him a kiss. “If you need a real man, sweetie, you know where to find me.”
Helia said nothing. Such talk had been commonplace at basic training, but nothing compared to Catholic school. She went to the shower stall and brushed aside the curtain and stepped inside, clothes and all. She pulled the curtain and removed her tank top and her trousers and her underwear and draped them over the curtain bar.
“You’re gonna get your clothes wet," Dunning said. “It takes a week to dry down here. You might as well take them to laundry.”
“There’s no shame in showing off those toothpick legs, honey,” Pinder said. “We've seen it all before.”
Helia ignored them. She reached out the stall and hung her clean clothes on the hook on the wall and then pressed her bare back to the tiled wall as she turned on the shower. The shower head coughed for a moment and spat cold water and she retreated, her skin so tight it hurt. The gauze on her arm pulled away from the tape and she kept her back against the wall to keep it from getting wet.
On the other side of the curtain they laughed. She couldn’t tell if it was a joke between them or if they were laughing at her.
When the water finally warmed up, she grabbed a bar of soap from her toiletry bag and scrubbed up as quickly as she could and then shut off the water.
“Oh god,” she whispered to herself. She had forgotten her towel.
A moment later, a hand came past the curtain.
“Thought you might need this,” Dunning said. He was holding a towel. “You left it on your bed.”
She took it. His hand hovered there for a moment.
“Thank you,” Helia said quietly. “You can retract your hand now.”
“You need anything else?”
“I’m good,” Helia said.
“Just checking,” Dunning said. “Make sure you towel off all your lady parts. Its awful damp down here.”
Chapter 20
Finally clean, Helia sat down on her cot and placed the matted ball of her dirty clothes in the laundry bag on the shelf behind her head.
Two beds over, Dunning was lying on his back and snoring gently. Across the room, Pinder was asleep too, lying on her back with her right arm draped over her eyes.
Helia lay back and closed her eyes. The moment everything went black, that thing in the cage lunged at her. She opened her eyes. It was gone. She closed them again. The image came back. She blinked rapidly. No use. That thing kept coming. It might as well have been carved into her retinas with a laser beam.
She turned over onto her side. Then she turned over again. She couldn’t shut her brain off. Not that she was thinking about anything in particular, it was just revved up, firing a thousand more images, mostly ghastly.
She rolled onto her right side, the springs on the cot squeaking. Across the room, Pinder changed her position and snored loudly.
Helia pulled the thin blanket, as rough as burlap, up to her ears. The cot was low and a thread from the blanket just barely touched the floor. She watched, it twitched slightly. She held her breath. It kept twitching. There must have been a slight draft in the room.
She glanced at the corners of the living quarters. The brick wall met the concrete ceiling at tight angles. Yet, there was a leak coming from somewhere. It occurred to her then that the elevator wasn’t the only way out. There was the shaft through which the creature had been dumped. And there must have other vents for fresh air, or else they would all suffocate.
Her eyes returned to the dancing thread. It was going to drive her nuts. She’d have to ask the Colonel if he had a pair of scissors. She went to turn over, but her eyes caught a tiny bit of white paper sticking out from under steel legs of the cot.
Unable to sleep, she sat up, stood, and lifted the head end of the cot. The paper was stuck between the plastic cap and the hollow steel rod. She pulled it out. It was no bigger than the corner torn off a paperback book, only white because of its contrast to th
e dark steel. A number was at the top, probably a page number. Twelve. And next to it, scrawled in pencil: One of.
One of twelve?
What the hell did that mean?
On the nearby cot, Dunning stirred. She slipped the piece of paper under her pillow and lay back down and pretended to sleep.
Helia crossed the visitation room. It was similar to a school cafetorenasium. There were round steel tables, about twenty of them, each of them roughly eight feet apart.
The walls were home to four different vending machines. Snacks. Candy bars. Sodas. She was dressed in her full battle dress uniform, a black armband on her sleeve.
Guards stood in the corners. One in each. After all of her training, she would feel much more comfortable joining them than sitting at the table. It felt strange being the visitor.
Five inmates were in the visitation room at this particular time. Each inmate had someone sitting across from him, all women: a wife, a girlfriend, a mother, a daughter. No men had come to visit the inmates, only the stupid women who had either been duped, still believed in change, or regretted a lifetime of bad decisions.
Women like her mother.
A relatively short man sat at the table of her destination. He was only an inch taller than she was. She knew it precisely because she had believed with all her heart that one day she would grow taller than he was. She waited and waited and she turned eighteen but it never happened.
The man had the cheeks of a bulldog. His jowls were as thick as pillows, his hair gray, his nose straight and long. She had gotten her mother’s nose. She remembered when she was little, her mother would pinch her nose and try to pull it out of her face like it was a feature in one of her pop-up books.
“You have no nose, Bell Bell,” her mother would say.
Whenever they had been out in public together, no one ever believed that she was actually his child. She had heard the comments so often that she had come to question it herself. Maybe she was adopted. Comments like are you babysitting today? Or where did you steal that baby from? Or worse, when she was older, her father would get a slap on the shoulder and his friends would grin and say, “Where’d you get the mail order bride from, Rodney?”
“Look at you,” Rodney Crane said. His hands were folded on the table in front of him, his wrists handcuffed together. “You’re all dressed up like one of those clowns in the corner.”
Helia said nothing. She just stood there, rigid.
“Did you bring the change like I asked?”
Helia fished in her pocket and planted eight quarters on the table. From training, she knew that inmates weren't allowed to have currency inside the prison as it could be used for extortion. In its place, other things had value, like cigarettes and stamps.
“What do you want, Dad?”
Rodney looked over at the glowing vending machines. She could see his tongue moving inside his mouth, as if his saliva glands had been fully activated.
“Cheetos and a Pepsi.”
Helia scooped the change off the table and cut a straight line over to the vending machines. In the hard plastic window, superimposed on top of the snacks, his reflection was sitting there, his shoulders slumped, his head hanging.
She slipped the quarters into the slot and the electronic spiral rotated forward. The bag of Cheetos fell down the chute and she reached inside and pulled it out. At the neighboring machine, she got a soda. The snacks all had to be eaten while the inmates were in the visitation room. Obviously, they could not take the soda cans back to their cells with them, and all the trash had to be deposited in the bin by the door before leaving. The guards were watching.
Helia brought the snacks over to his table and put them in front of him. He went for the bag of Cheetos first. He fumbled in his handcuffs at getting the foil open, but then succeeded and picked one out daintily between his thumb and his forefinger and touched it to his tongue and closed his eyes and put his head back in ecstasy.
“Oh man that's the shit,” he said.
Helia watched him chew the snack as if he had just discovered some other-world delicacy.
“Did you get the book I sent you?” she said.
Her father nodded a mouthful of orange. He popped the soda tab and took a long swig of Pepsi. “I got it.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Did you read it?”
He chewed loudly and took another swig of soda.
“Books are supposed to be read. That’s what they’re for.”
“Why don’t you send me something useful for once. Something like stamps. Or why don’t you smuggle in some cigarettes. You could carve out the pages in the book to hide them.”
Helia glowered.
“Hell, I got a better idea. Why don't you work here? How perfect would that be? You could get your old man all the things he needs. Like a good daughter for once.”
Whatever hopefulness had been hiding in Helia’s cheeks hardened. The book in question had been about meditation and self-discovery through revisiting one's poor decisions and she had hoped that it would at least open up a dialogue between them.
She knew now that was impossible.
Her father shoved a handful of Cheetos into his mouth. He chewed even more loudly. Then right before her eyes, those orange Cheetos turned into chunks of flesh. His teeth sharpened and blood escaped the corners of his mouth and accentuated the lines between those heavy jowls. It ran down his chin and around his Adam’s apple and down between his prison scrubs, the orange neck reddening with gore.
Chapter 21
Helia’s eyes popped open. She had fallen asleep.
“Rise and shine, Corporal.”
Across the living quarters, Pinder was sitting on the edge of her bunk and tying up her laces.
It took Helia a moment to remember her surroundings. Then she pulled back the thin blanket and pulled on her trousers. She had only been asleep for a few minutes, the whole dream taking place in an instant.
She laced up her boots and headed for the door.
Sergeant Lawless met her in the hallway. His glasses were bright and shiny under the lights.
“Sleep well?”
“Well enough,” she said. Ten minutes would be enough to get her through the day. Then she’d crash tonight.
“Morning shift first, breakfast at eight,” Lawless said.
She followed him down the hallway, down to the central chamber with the elevator. Her first duty was to shadow Lawless throughout his shift in the main cellblock.
As she walked behind him, she noticed that his buttocks were clenched tight, as if he were smuggling contraband between his cheeks. It gave him a slightly awkward gait, his boots duck-footed, but she chalked his stiff walk up to nothing more than a high-speed desire for promotion.
After crossing the chamber with the elevator, she stood at the door to the main cellblock while Lawless retrieved his card from his breast pocket. She noticed that someone had drawn a tiny little heart on one of the subway tiles. She couldn't tell if it had been made with a little bit of blood or maybe chocolate syrup from the mess hall.
Lawless swiped his card through the reader and the deadbolt disengaged. They crossed into the main cellblock and day room. It was just as dim as had been when they delivered the new inmate a few hours ago and for the first time Helia got the sense of how truly out of whack her circadian rhythms were about to become; already, she had no sense of the time, the sun, nor the weather.
Upon entering, the Keeper to her right did an about-face, turned on his heels, and exited. The Keeper on the far side of the chamber, nodded and marched toward the door.
“It's a diagonal swap,” Lawless said. “You'll take the position on the far left, and I'll take the position here on the near right.”
The Keeper whose position she was taking exited and the door closed heavily behind him and the deadbolt rammed home.
“Basic duties are to keep a watchful eye. If you notice anything out of the ordinary, hand signal like th
is,” Lawless said and pointed at both of his eyes and then pointed toward whatever cellblock might be in question. “Their hearing seems quite good, so it's hand signals all the way. It must be something to do with the way the brain is wired. As their heads rot away, it must make a larger tunnel inside the ear canal and magnify the sounds or something. Any questions?”
“Why are we needed in here if there are cameras in the corner?”
Lawless raised an eyebrow.
“I mean, the inmates are never let out of their cells, correct? So why station us here?”
“It’s protocol,” Lawless said.
Protocol this, protocol that. She had been in the Army less than a year and already knew that getting a straight answer was harder than two crooks getting their answers straight.
“Anything else?”
“No, Sergeant,” she said.
“Then off you go.”
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.”
