eBook Short Story Competition Runners up Page 4

  Usually there’d be guards barring us from going up the corridor in front unless your work detail took you there. Now, however, it was clear. There was just the light coming from the overhead lamps. When you were in an institution like this it was strange not to be under any authoritative eye. The Warden didn’t have CCTV installed though and for good reason.

  The felons I was with had expected there to be no guards but I could tell its strangeness wasn’t lost on them. The demeanour of the experienced criminal was waning as we continued.

  It wasn’t a long distance to the Warden’s office at all, barely any time to consider what we were doing. We took a left a while later and were now in an obviously less institutional part of the prison. The floor was laminate wood and the walls were not painted a blinding white that’d muddied to dull over the years but were wood panelled too. The doors had brass knobs rather than metal handles and weren’t anonymous copies of each other. Each one had a name on it. There was one light on in the middle of the corridor where the office we wanted was, as if guiding us there. There was no guard. I felt a tingle of excitement rise right up from my balls.

  We advanced to the door and waited either side of it.

  “Remember our roles. We do it quick, we do it brutal and we finish this,” whispered Pietro.

  The blood rushed into my head and thundered there, as if it was clotting up and those clots were colliding with each other like heavy clouds. I caught Rex looking at me. I knew I must be smiling like I was on drugs.

  “You enjoying this?”

  “I’m going to love it. Aren’t you?”

  “Hell yeah,” he grunted.

  Pietro tipped him the nod and he slammed his foot against the door with a grunt.

  It gave in two blows. We rushed in, ready to finally catch sight of our nemesis and shove a weapon into his throat and watch the life drain from his eyes. We felt like men possessed, perhaps we all were in some way, how could we not be when we so fervently wanted to end a life?

  There was nobody here. It seemed to take a while for everybody to compute this. We gazed into every dark nook and cranny as if he’d minimised himself and was hiding down one of them. We gazed up at the ceiling in case he was hanging there like a bat.

  His room was distinctly mediocre. Square in shape, four walls painted a dull brown, an ordinary desk with an ordinary chair sat behind it. Yet it seemed to take on a different aura before us. The moonlight sliced through the Venetian blinds behind and cast an eerie veneer and the space of the empty seat seemed to yawn at us like an invisible maw. The air seemed thicker, so much so that I saw the slats of moonlight as knife wounds across the room.

  The only abnormality in the room was a picture. It was titled “The Overseer”. It depicted a pit full of rats with berserk, bulging eyes, scrabbling over one another and biting lumps out of each others’ flesh as above two men held sticks with cloth wrapped around the top, aflame, directing the heat below, maniacal grins fixed on their pointed faces.

  That wasn’t what caught Pietro’s attention as he walked up to it, although the sight of the tortured rats was as intoxicating as it was horrific. It was the far more inconspicuous tower that rose behind proceedings. Rain lashed the room the top of it but the man inside remained dry. He was a dark figure, unidentifiable, with his hands in his pockets. There was no sign of emotion or expression. There was just a presence.

  “What the fuck…” breathed Pietro under his breath.

  “Where the fuck is he?” growled Rex, still looking around the room.

  I held up the shank to the moonlight and turned it around in my hand. A hungry little mouth seemed to open up on the blade. It moaned for blood. I grinned.

  “Well. I guess this means I should be stabbing myself in the neck, right?”

  Pietro didn’t react straight away. The picture still had him in a stranglehold. Eventually he turned with a dazed expression.

  “What?”

  “I said I’d better stab myself in the neck, hadn’t I?”

  “Why would you do that?” he asked, his expression confused.

  “You said I should stick the Warden as soon as we got in here. Now we’re here and I suppose I should be stabbing myself, right?”

  It took a second for it to dawn on him but by then it was too late. I felt a burst of excitement, the kind of emotion I’d had to swallow down for months to avert my true self. The razor punctured his skin and the blood ran gloriously warm down my arm.

  “I think I’d rather stab you,” I said softly, watching the light fade from his eyes.

  The others should have killed me by now but the plan had worked perfectly. As I’d stuck Pietro they’d turned round and found Donovan and Crawley stood behind them, rifles raised.

  “Breaking into the Warden’s office, inmates? That gives us jurisdiction to shoot you.”

  They lowered their weapons towards the inmates’ legs. Rex, Alistair and Bread Boy were suddenly on the floor, howling with pain. Crawley dropped his rifle and pulled the “Carmela” out, seeing the rats beckoning to him in the pit. Donovan did not join in the grotesque violence that followed but nevertheless his grin remained fixed.

  The bloody affair was finished in a minute. I surveyed the damage and briefly wondered how much the blood was going to cost to remove from the carpet. I sighed and left the shank stuck in Pietro’s neck.

  “How do you feel, Warden?” asked Crawley, wiping the blood off “Carmela” nonchalantly.

  “Fantastic,” I grinned. “It was…interesting, to wear someone else’s skin, to be somebody else.”

  I’d been about to add that it was also interesting for the shepherd to be amongst his flock but that wasn’t apt, not apt at all. A shepherd didn’t slaughter his sheep. Alsatians…now that was more appropriate. But Donovan and especially Crawley, they were the Alsatians. I was the one holding the leash.

  I looked down at Pietro’s body, his vacant eyes and I felt a tingle knowing that I’d been the last thing he’d ever seen. The scumbag had deserved it but it was not a sense of retribution I felt, not a sense that I’d done right over wrong. There was no right and wrong in my prison.

  What I thought and felt the most was how fun it’d all been.