Fear Me

So he lay there, stiff as a plank, his muscles bunched and his nerve endings jangling like Christmas bells, a scream lodged in his throat in a sharp, cutting mass.

More movement.

Whatever was up there with the kid, it was in motion now, moving along the bunk with a stealthy, slithering sound. It found the wall, slapped wetly against it and started to inch along, making for the bars. Romero was thinking something like a slug here, but big and fleshy and horrible and he didn’t know all what. As it pulled itself along the wall, it made faint chirruping noises, clicking sounds like claws or teeth kissing that concrete.

It would ooze forward a moment or two, then pause…as if checking now and then to see if anyone was listening.

Romero was listening, but not moving. For hearing it was one thing, but seeing…no, the idea of that curdled his guts like sour milk.

And then it… leaped through the air, hit the bars with a splattering sound. Romero could hear it breathing, gurgling. In the wan light from the guard’s station, he could see something large and shapeless spread out on the bars like a huge, rubbery spider, contorting boneless limbs spread out in every direction. It was shuddering and pulsing, taking its time and Romero just squeezed his eyes shut, could not look at that thing any longer, told himself it was a nightmare and the thing was just some nebulous horror that had crawled alive and kicking from one of his childhood dreams.

And then…it was ghe n…it one.

It went right through the bars with a sound like bacon grease dropped in a bucket or mush stirred with a spoon.

Romero was shaking, sweating, doing everything he could not to piss himself or vent that scream buried in his throat. He lay there, trying to catch his breath, wiping perspiration from the gutters under his eyes. Above him, Palmquist was dead asleep, breathing deep and even, lost to the world.

Romero started to think all kinds of awful things, but none of it made a lick of sense and his mind was full of shit and he wondered, really wondered, if maybe he could have dreamt it all.

And part of him latched onto that, told him in an authoritative, reasonable voice that, yes, of course it was a dream…what else could it have been?

About twenty minutes later, though, somebody started screaming.

And the screams…they didn’t last long at all.

8

Of course, the prison came alive.

Sometimes you heard screams at night, guys getting shanked or raped and sometimes it was just some con losing his mind, cracking up from the solitude and the cage they kept him in and dozens of things you would never really know about. His mind would go to sauce and he’d start thrashing around, throwing himself at the walls and biting the bars and throwing his shit at anyone that got near like a monkey in a carnival pen.

Sergeant Warres was in charge of the hacks on the graveyard shift and he came up the stairs to D Block, looking pissed-off and anxious to break some skulls with the stick he was swinging at his hip. He was on his walkie-talkie, wanting to know what in the name of Jesus H. Jumping Clusterfucking Christ was going on up there. He cut some orders straight away over his box and his guards did their thing, told the cons to shut their mother-raping, cunting mouths and go to sleep or the lot of them would be thrown in the hole.

It worked and D Block got real quiet, though everyone had to know that there were only thirty Ad-Seg cells to be had. Administrative Segregation, politically correct title, was where guys went when they got out of line and sometimes even when they didn’t. It was a nasty, dark, buggy place. And if you thought you’d been alone a lot in your life, you had no conception of what real solitude was until you were locked down in the damp, crawling darkness by yourself.

But it worked and Warres came down the corridor, ignorinup g his guard’s request to turn on the big lights. Security lights were fine, he figured. They were spaced every fifty feet and dim, so that the block corridors were thick with shadows. But that didn’t bother Warres, for once the switch was thrown and those doors were shut, nobody got out of their cells…except on the late, late show.

Houle was down there. He was one of the newbies and he looked just as green as frog shit, pale and sweating and about half out of his mind. Warres passed by all those cons pressed up against the bars of their cages, bulging white eyes in black faces and shining red eyes in white faces and damn, he’d never seen them looking so scared before. All the tough-guy, hardass con bullshit had dried up like a pond.

These guys were scared shitless.

Warres got up to Houle, said, “What do you got?”

Houle could barely get a word out without gasping. “Don’t go in there, Sarge…Jesus, Weems…I think it’s Weems…he’s all ripped apart…”