Dead Lost (Kiera Hudson Series Two (Book 8))

by O'Rourke, Tim

With the noise of the crowd cheering like thunder, I was deaf to the sounds of the guards that came running across the yard towards me. Using their arms like shovels, they hooked them through mine and dragged me back across the yard towards my cell. With my broken and twisted stilts still strapped to my legs, I watched Beau stoop down and take the red flag from Governor Bank’s hand. Beau then waved it ceremoniously above his head. The prisoners went wild and started to chant all over again. With his free arm, Beau cradled Chrissie against him. She had her head hung low and the broom handle still stuck out at a peculiar angle from her leg. I looked away, lowering my head with exhaustion as the two guards dragged me back into the prison.

  Reaching my cell, they lowered me face-down on the floor.

  “You put on one helluva show,” one of them said.

  “Maybe next year, Dark,” remarked the other.

  They left without closing or locking the cell door. They had stopped doing that years ago. The other inmates, like me, were free to roam about the prison. We just weren’t allowed to leave it. Not because we were deemed by the Governor to be a threat to those living on the other side of the prison walls. It was those living beyond the prison walls who were a threat to us.

  I rolled onto my back, and pulling myself up, I winced in pain as I began to untie the straps fastened to my legs. My fingers twitched as blood ran from the cuts and scrapes across the palms of my hands. Gritting my teeth and narrowing my eyes, I unbuckled the leather ties and threw my stilts clear. They skidded beneath my bunk, the soles jutting out. Using my elbows, I hoisted myself up onto my bed. I could still hear the thunderous roar of cheering and applause from the yard. Reaching up, I gingerly took down my headphones that swung from a nail jutting out of the cracked wall. Using my fingers like tweezers, I gently took them down and placed them over my ears. There was no music to drown out the sound of the cheering and whistling from beyond my cell. The only music I could hear were the songs I sung or hummed inside my own head. I hadn’t heard any real music since I was thirteen – since the thunder came and took the music away. It had taken everything away. Closing my eyes, I mentally scrolled through the track list I had created inside the darkness of my mind.

  Now, what shall I choose? I wondered to myself. I selected Diamonds by Rihanna from my mental playlist. Trying to make myself as comfortable as possible, I rested my aching and weary body against the thin mattress and sung the song inside my head. It reminded me of Joe. I had often hummed it to him as we had strolled around the edge of the vast wall that towered high above the prison. Even with stilts, we had never been able to see over it. We had heard the noises on the other side of it though – screeching and groaning. That’s why I would hum sometimes to Joe. It helped muffle out the sound of the Scorchers who often gathered in packs on the other side of the prison walls. I knew that if I let that noise bury itself deep inside my skull, I might never summon the courage to enter the race in the hope of leaving the prison one day.

  Like me, all of the other inmates were in the prison because of crimes we had once committed. That all seemed like so long ago now – it had all happened before the thunder had come. But not only had the thunder seemed to take with it everything on the other side of the prison walls, it had taken away our crimes, too. Our victims had all been killed by the thunder. Perhaps not all of them as some had died before the storm. I had killed my victim. I had killed him with my own hands. That’s why I was here. But it was like none of that mattered now. Our crimes, however brutal they had been, had now been wiped out by the thunder. They seemed insignificant to the destruction and death the thunder had bought with it. Governor Banks no longer kept us behind the wall as punishment, but for protection. I had been brought to this place just before my thirteenth birthday. The thunder came six months later and I hadn’t left the prison since. No parole, no visits – not that I had anyone to visit with me – and no rehabilitation. None of us, not even Governor Banks, really knew what had happened on the other side of the prison walls the day the thunder came. We sat numbly hour after hour in the TV room at the end of the cell block and stared up at the blank TV screen. We tuned into the radio, but all we heard was the scratchy hiss of static. There were no newspapers. Like I said, none of us really knew what damage had been done. On the day of the thunder – the day the whole earth seemed to shake and the sky turned blood red – some of the guards abandoned their posts and raced towards home in search of their loved ones. Us – the prisoners – were hounded into our cells where we stayed on permanent lockdown for almost two weeks. I remember staring through the bars of my cell and looking up at the crimson sky, wondering whether it was night or day. All sense of time had been swallowed up by the thunder. Then the lightning came, followed by the rain. The sky looked as if it was being torn apart as streaks of black lightning crackled and fizzed overhead. The rain came down so hard that it flooded the yard, mini waves sloshing against the prison walls. During the nights – or was it days – I lost track. I could hear even the toughest of inmates weeping out loud in fear. Some called for their mothers through the bars of their cells. I had no one to call for.

  One day or night, I was looking through the bars of my cell window, when I saw one of the prison vans move slowly across the yard to the gates. The rain beat off the roof and bounced up into the bright red sky, and it sounded like machine gunfire. Walking alongside the van was a guard. He was wearing waterproofs and thick black boots. The hood of his coat was up, and he was bent forward against the rain. Lightning sizzled above, and I watched the guard flinch backwards. The van pulled up to the gate, then stopped. The guard then signalled up to one of the watchtowers by waving his hands above his head. The gate then slowly opened. As it did, the guard in the waterproofs produced a rifle and aimed it at the opening. Once the gate was open wide enough, he peered around the edge of it, then signalled again, this time at the driver of the prison van. Slowly it crept between the gates. The guard waved his hands in the air, urging them to move faster, as if he didn’t want the gate to be open for too long. No sooner had the van’s taillights passed the perimeter wall the guard was waving frantically back up at the watchtower. At once the gates started to swing shut. The guard stood aiming his gun at the narrowing opening until it was closed again. Then turning on his heels and head lowered, he made his way back across the rain-swollen exercise yard.

  Wondering what news the guards might come back with, I went to my bunk and lay down. I must have fallen asleep, because I woke to the sound of screaming. Just like me, the other inmates clambered to their cell windows and looked out onto the yard. I peered out and could see a row of tiny mirrors glinting red beneath the sky from the cellblock adjacent to where I was locked away. Their view of the yard wasn’t as clear as the inmates in my block. To get a clear look, they cupped tiny mirrors in their fists and angled them in the direction of the yard. The gates were open and two guards dressed in waterproofs were firing guns wildly into the gap.

  “Close the gates!” one of them roared. “Close the fucking gates, or we’re all dead!”

  More gunfire followed by the gut-wrenching sounds of creatures howling in pain.

  “Close the gates,” the other guard roared, looking back over his shoulder and up at the watchtower. Then suddenly, he was snatched violently through the gap in the gate. The crimson sky lit up again, but not with lightning this time, but with gunfire from the watchtower.

  I hadn’t seen whoever or whatever had snatched hold of the guard and yanked him beyond the prison as it had happened so fast. The gates omitted a deafening boom as they closed. The sound faded, only to be overtaken by the noise of more screaming. I looked across the yard at the other cellblock and saw the hundreds of mirrors glimmer as they were all turned in the direction of the screaming. I too followed the hideous sound, then clamped my hands over my mouth to stifle my own screams.

  Although there was no sign of the prison van, I could see that the guards had returned. I knew it was them by the strips of uniform that hung from their
burnt bodies. What little flesh they had left looked pinky-raw and covered in blisters. The guards writhed in agony in the puddles that covered the yard. It was like they were trying to quench and cool their seething bodies. Tendrils of smoke coiled up from their feet, which were now nothing more than blackened and charred stumps. They clawed at their eyes, which now dribbled in a melted mess from their hollow sockets. One clutched the boot of the guard by the gate. The guard screamed like a little girl at the touch. At once his uniform, although drenched through with rain, began to smoke and smoulder as if being eaten by invisible flames. Seeing the smoke rising up from his trouser leg, he dropped his gun and began to frantically pat it with his hands. As if hot to the touch, he snapped his hands away and brought them up to his face. Just like the rest of us, he watched in horror as his fingers began to melt like a child’s ice cream left too long in the sun. Groaning in pain, he dropped to his knees and plunged his hands into the nearest puddle. The rain water began to immediately boil.

  Then, as he thrashed his disintegrating hands in the rain water, the other burnt guards sprang to their feet as if suddenly brought back to life. With a jerky kind of speed, they set about their smouldering colleague. He reached for his gun, but had no fingers to snatch it up. The scorched guards set about him, tearing flesh from bone and eating it. I looked away, shaking with fear. There was more gunfire. I glanced back out through my window bars to see wave after wave of gunfire rip into the scorched prison guards. They dropped to the ground, where they lay twitching. It was like they simply refused to die. And if to prove this very point, the guard they had attacked rose up from the puddle that he lay face-down in. He hadn’t even got to his knees when the shell of his skull was flying backwards through the rain like a dropped egg. As if realising that this was how these creatures needed to be killed, the guards in the watchtowers emptied their guns into the creatures’ raw and fleshless faces. For the first time since arriving at the young offender’s institution, I was glad that I was locked away. I wasn’t sure that I ever wanted to set foot out of my cell again.

  With one day rolling into the next, and my restless sleep fractured by the horrors I had seen take place in the yard, I couldn’t be sure of how long we had all been locked away in our cells. Food was passed to us through the hatches in our cell doors. Other inmates called out to those faceless guards who bought us food. They demanded to know what was happening. I didn’t ask. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know.

  It was only when the red sky turned pink, like that of a constant sunset, that the Governor let us out of our cells, one block at a time. We marched numbly out onto the yard, our boots sloshing in the puddles left behind by the never-ending storm. As we stood quiet and numb on the exercise yard, Governor Banks stood high above us in one of the four watchtowers, flanked on either side by a guard. The other guards walked along the tops of the walls, their guns trained at our backs. Even back then, I couldn’t help but notice how Governor Banks’ once clean-shaven face now bristled with a mask of black stubble. His once greased down hair looked an uncombed mess, and his immaculate charcoal grey suit now looked dishevelled as if he had been sleeping in it. Perhaps he had. A murmur passed through the inmates like a whispering breeze.

  Raising a loudhailer to his lips he said, “Your attention, please.”

  All fell silent before him.

  The loudhailer omitted a whiny sound as the Governor drew a deep breath. Some of the inmates covered their ears with their hands and winced at the shrill sound. Then, he said something so strange and unreal, I wondered perhaps if I had unknowingly covered my own ears and had misheard him. He looked down at our stunned faces and repeated himself.

  “Today I become a prisoner just like all of you,” he said. “All of us are prisoners in this place forever more.” He took another breath. “There is nothing beyond these walls. Forget any future you had planned after leaving this place. This is all there is now – we are all there is.”

  “What about those creatures?” a boy shouted from some way behind me in the crowd. “The creatures that killed the guards. Do they now live on the other side of the wall? Have they killed everyone… our friends and families?”

  Governor Banks looked down at our upturned faces. Then slowly, raising the loudhailer to his lips again, he said, “I think those creatures were once our friends and families.”

  Chapter Three

  With the large earphones still covering my ears like a pair of tin cans, I swung my legs over the side of my bunk and sat up. Slowly, I uncurled my fingers and inspected my torn hands. Although the cuts and grazes weren’t deep, they burnt like hell. I thought of that guard with the melting fingers, and quickly pushed the image away. I spent way too much time dwelling on the past, but wasn’t that because, like Governor Banks had said, none of us had a future? But I wasn’t sure whether I really believed that. If I did, why then was I so keen to win the stilts race and risk finding out what was on the other side of the prison walls?

  I got up from my bunk and ran the tap at the basin in the corner of my cell. Clenching my teeth, I let the water wash over the cuts. It was ice cold, pumped from a nearby stream on the other side of the prison wall. The cold water had a numbing effect, and the pain eased a little.

  “Painful?” a voice asked.

  I cocked my head, looking back over my shoulder. Governor Banks stood in the open doorway of my cell.

  Looking back down at my raw hands, I shrugged and said, “They hurt a bit.” Shaking the icy droplets of water from my hands, I turned off the tap. Resting my butt against the sink, I looked across the cell at Governor Banks.

  “You did good, Dark,” he said, looking at me. His black beard and hair was flecked with white, and his blue shirt was open at the throat. The sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and just like his face, his arms bristled with wiry black hair. He looked at least forty-five, but it was so hard to tell with the bushy beard he had grown since the thunder came.

  “So people keep saying, but coming third ain’t gonna get me out of here,” I said, still propped against the sink, headphones still covering my ears.

  “Take those things off, will you?” he said, eyeing the headphones.

  Using my seething hands like a set of claws, I pulled them from over my ears and let them hang about my neck. We looked at each other and I crossed my arms. I didn’t want to be mad at Governor Banks; it wasn’t his fault I had lost the race. Besides, he was the closest thing I had to a father – he was the closest thing any of the young inmates had to a father. Since the thunder came nearly five years ago, he had run the prison and kept us all safe. After the speech he had made that day on the yard, the first thing he had done was give us the keys to our own cells. He then let both males and females integrate as we had been segregated before.

  “This is no longer a prison,” he had said. “This place is now your home. The sooner you accept that, the easier life will become. There will still be rules; every home has rules that need to be respected and obeyed. But a good home is somewhere you can be free, but most importantly, be safe.”

  Some of the inmates had struggled to cope with this new set of rules and they misused the new freedom Governor Banks had given to them. But like he said, there were still rules, and those who broke them were punished. Their keys were taken from them and they were locked back in their cells. It didn’t take them very long to grasp the new rules after their punishment. Some still used their newfound liberty to escape by finding ways to climb over the walls. None of them were seen or heard from again.

  The governor didn’t prevent any of them going, in fact, on several occasions, he opened the prison gates just an inch or two so those who wanted freedom beyond the prison walls could leave. Maybe he saw it as a natural cull. After all, the food in the stores would only last for so long and the generator had died within a month of the thunder passing. But even at the age of thirteen, I figured out back then, those the governor let escape over the walls or slip out between the gap he made for them in the ga
te, were the inmates who were a problem to him and the others now living at the prison. Because that’s what we were doing – we were living. It didn’t take long for me to see the prison not as a place of incarceration – a place of punishment – but a home. In a strange kinda way, the prison and my fellow inmates were the closest thing I’d ever had to a home or a family.

  Once the rebellious inmates had gone over the wall, life at the prison didn’t seem so bad. With our number down to about three hundred, in a prison that could house five hundred or more, there was enough room for all of us to have our own cell and space. But still, the supplies dwindled. The prison already had its own allotment and garden that was tended to by the inmates. Now it was four times bigger than it had been since the thunder had come, and most of our food was grown there. But there was stuff that we needed and couldn’t grow in the vegetable garden or from the trees. People still got ill or injured, and supplies soon ran out in the prison medical centre. Soon paracetamol became like gold dust. Then the water supply to the prison packed up. One of the nearest towns was Leapers Ledge, which was on the other side of the bridge that connected the Razor to the mainland. All around the prison raged the ocean, and to the north lay the sprawling lands of Ungland. It was those lands that were now infested with the creatures we had come to call the Scorchers.

  “What you thinking?” Governor Banks cut in.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “You look lost in thought,” he said. “Thinking about the race?”

  “No,” I said, slowly shaking my head and looking at him.

  “What then?” he asked, cocking one of his bushy eyebrows at me.

  “Why did you stay?” I asked. “Why didn’t you try and leave like the others?”

  “I had a responsibility to you all here, it was my job,” he said.

  “Is it still your job?” I asked right back. “I mean, you don’t get paid, yet you choose to stay instead of going beyond the walls in search of your family.”