The Condemned (6 page)

   She had no idea how she knew these things, it was absurd really, she was here until she died, that was an effective certainty. Still... something in her heart told her that there might be a glimmer of hope, a spark of a chance and if there was, it lay with the unknown man in the cell across the hallway.

   She pulled her fingers back with a startled cry and dropped to the floor of her cell as the hatch was snapped shut to the accompaniment of cruel laughter. The guard banged on her door once with no apparent purpose other than because he could, and
there was nothing she could do about it. The light in her world dimmed to blackness as they shut off the power, indicating it was time to sleep. Leci crawled into a corner of the cell and sat with her back to the wall, facing the door but not seeing it through the blackness, hugging her knees to her chest and rocking gently back and forth.

   Closing her eyes, Alecia tried to tell the difference to them being open; there was none. Her blackened existence was deeper than sleep and she sobbed quietly to herself, the wet tears leaving messy tracks down her soot-darkened cheeks.

Chapter 6

At some point during the night she had climbed onto her small bunk and when she screamed herself awake into the unsympathetic blackness that still surrounded her, she found herself sat on the thin mattress, her body backed tightly into the corner and her knees drawn to her chest. Her fingers were hooked into claws and held against her face which felt warm and wet, her cheeks stung.

   For a few moments she could not move, was unable to unclench her body, as though it was unwilling to give up the protective posture it had apparently been necessary to wrench itself into in order to face the demons of her sleeping world.   She knew that she had dreamed but already they were fading like distant memories, lost forever.

   She didn’t care.

   Whatever her mind had shown to her behind closed lids had driven her to harm herself in an effort to pull away and back into her waking nightmare. Wherever she had gone and whatever she had seen, it was worse than where she was now. The thought of somewhere more terrifying than this was almost numbing, inconceivable.

   Sleep was lost to her for whatever remained of the night.  
She had no way of knowing if it was day or night, what time, date or even year it might be, but she had been here long enough for her body to establish its own routine based around that of her captors and in her world it was somewhere close to 3 or 4am.

   Alecia closed her eyes, drew a few deep breaths and succeeded in calming her fraught nerves. She clenched her clawed fingers into fists and then slowly extended them, clenched, extended, clenched, extended until the tension in them eased somewhat and her fingertips tingled vaguely.

   Sliding from the corner, she swung her legs down from the bunk and stood, moving by instinct to where she knew the small sink to be.

   When she had first been brought to this room and seen the facilities she had been afraid. Running water was not something she was familiar with and it frightened her, where did it come from? How did they make it so clean?

   As a child who had never known anything but street life she could honestly say that the facilities in this room, however scant they might be, were an upgrade.

After becoming used to the presence of the sink and the toilet, and when her apprehension of them had dissipated, she began to wonder why she had been afforded such a luxury. She finally came to the conclusion that they were no offer of hospitality on the part of her captors, more a vain desire
from them not to have to clean up her or her mess. If all they had given her were a bucket in the corner of the room to shit in, somebody would’ve had to clean it. She wasn’t naive enough to view her amenities as a good-hearted gesture; it was just a way to make her less of a burden.

   There was one tap and it never ran warm, never ran tepid. The water it produced was always ice cold and chilled her to the bones, made her shiver and her teeth chatter when she washed herself. Nevertheless, she ran her hands under the thin stream until they felt clean and then caught as much as she could in her cupped palms. Bending to avoid spillage, she splashed the frigid water over her cheeks, hissing in breath sharply through her teeth as it stung the gouges she had left with her nails.

   ‘Musta been one helluva nightmare, Leci.’

   She shook her head and let out a dry, humourless chuckle. Reaching back towards the tap, she was stopped abruptly as light flooded the room. Raising one arm to cover her eyes, Alecia squinted, using the other to pull the drab grey prison overall more tightly around herself in a protective but pointless gesture.

   Perhaps it was later than she had thought and she had overslept, though her gut told her it was not the usual time for either the food tray or the experiments to begin. The reason for the light could more likely be explained by
boredom; someone taking the night shift had nothing better to do than torment her.

   ‘Bastards.’

   Muttered under her breath.

   Ok, so she hadn’t been planning on going back to sleep but that wasn’t the point. They had probably been hoping to catch her sleeping and to wrench her from it unkindly. She found it vaguely satisfying to know that they had been robbed of this.

   Before she could return her attention to tending to the scratches on her face she was distracted by a noise at the door. The lock mechanism snapped back with the familiar whirr and click and the door swept inwards.

   The corridor outside was in blackness and she could see nobody. She frowned, lifting a hand to shield her eyes from the glare inside her room and tried to see who stood beyond the threshold.

   A heavily suited figure stepped forwards and instantly Alecia knew that something was not right about the situation, they had no reason to be coming in here now and it could only mean something bad. Something in the back of her mind panicked and started to flap around in there like an out of control, dying bird, struggling to take flight one last time. It screamed insistently at her that this was it, this was it,
this was it
! They had come for her, come to kill her, come to turn her into a Clone, it didn’t matter
why
they had come,
just that they were here.

   She vaguely registered a low, pathetic keening sound and thought that she might be making it herself, there was a ringing in her ears that made everything seem too quiet and all of a sudden the bright fluorescents were even more harsh than usual and it hurt to keep her eyes open. Her rump hit the back wall of her cell without her even realising that she had been slowly backing towards it, away from the masked stranger.

   The man, something told her it was a man inside the suit, maybe the body shape; he seemed too big, too bulky to be a woman. The man stood watching her for what felt like a long time but must really have only been a half a minute or so and then he made a noise inside of the awkward hood. The fireproof gear distorted everything they said and made it almost impossible for her to pick out words, but the muffled laughter was unmistakeable, he was getting off on her terror and she hated him for that.

   He suddenly lunged towards her with speed surprising for what he was wearing. She tried to run but in the cramped space there was nowhere to go and he was on her within seconds. His grip on her wrists was painful enough to bring tears to her eyes but through the blur she could see that he had not closed the door behind him when he had entered the room. Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom outside and she could make out the vague shape of the doorway across, the room that held Beriael.  
The hatch was open and though she could not see his face through the shadows, she could see the dim whiteness of his eyes and she knew that he could see everything that was happening.

   While her confused mind registered this, the guard holding her released one of her hands and shifted his grip to her throat, pinning her against the wall. Alecia gagged and choked as she tried to draw breath around the tightness that now cut off her oxygen. She was unable to fathom a reason for the attack and even when her other hand was released and the guard grabbed a handful of the fabric around her neck did she fail to comprehend what he was doing.

   He yanked viciously at the garments she wore and the flimsy overall tore and fell away. Her hands fluttered at her throat like damaged butterflies, weakly attempting to pull him away and regain the air her tortured lungs were badly beginning to need. Yellow lights shone at the edges of her vision and waves of nausea coursed over her. She had a sudden vision of choking on her own vomit and the thought produced fresh tears.

   She barely noticed the gloved hand kneading and squeezing her exposed breast and when a muffled cry of frustration from her attacker was followed by the fresh and unhindered flow of oxygen to her lungs she gulped it down gratefully. She lifted her hands tentatively to probe skin that felt raw and bruised. She looked up, grateful but wondering why the attack had
ended.

   For a moment Leci failed to register what she was seeing.

   She assumed she must be imagining it.

   Maybe she hadn’t woken screaming at all, but was still laying on her thin bunk, dreaming.

   The guard stood before her, the mask removed from his suit. He had tugged off one glove and was removing the second, his attention was completely on the task at hand as though he had forgotten not only the little Firebug stood before him, but the reason he was wearing the protective clothing in the first place.

   ‘Hey, Asshole.’

   Her voice sounded grating and coarse and it hurt to speak, but that couldn’t wipe the grin from her face as he looked up and her triumphant gaze met his.

   She gave him enough time for understanding to register, enjoyed seeing the flicker pass through his eyes as he grasped his own fleeting mortality, and then she set fire to his hair.

   The man screamed and flung himself back from her. Alecia followed him relentlessly. His hands rose to his head and he used the gloved one to try patting out the flames. Might’ve succeeded if she weren’t concentrating so hard on keeping him alight, all that training was paying off. He shot backwards through the open doorway and across the hall. Before she knew what had happened he had hurled himself against Beriael’s door
and the girl watched in fascination as two arms shot through the narrow hatch, grabbing the sides of the man’s head and twisting.

   She watched in bewilderment as the Clone held the dead man, the sleeves of his clothing caught alight from the guard’s hair and she stood, motionless until a voice broke her reverie.

   ‘The key you stupid bitch, get his fucking key!’

   ‘Huh?’

   Beriael’s scream of pain and frustration in place of a reply spurred her into action and she glanced at the limp body of the guard still held against the locked door of the Clone’s cell. The key card was something she
was
used to seeing but had completely forgotten about in the suddenness of the events as they unfolded around her. Every guard or other employee of the prison carried one of these cards. They were secured on a strap that ran over the shoulder and down to the hip of the flame resistant suits. The straps and the cards were coated with the same kind of non-ignitable cover that protected the walls of her cell.

   The card hung from the strap at the man’s hip and she grabbed it, taking a moment to slide her fingers over the smooth surface and relish that she held the prospect of freedom in her hand.

   Beriael uttered a foul string of curses that she took as a
less than polite way of asking her to get a move on. The flames were spreading upwards and engulfing his shoulders, licking his earlobes. With a strange kind of detachment it occurred to her that it was fortunate he had no hair, for if he had, that too would’ve been ablaze by now.

   ‘Ok, Ok, I got it. You can let go.’

   The Clone grunted something unintelligible and released his hold on the dead guard who dropped heavily to the floor, dragging Alecia with him as she kept hold of the key card that was still attached to him. She hefted the item to the small metal box, stuck to the side of the door, that she assumed had to be the lock. Inspecting it closely, the light from the blaze of Beriael provided enough for her to see the darker strip along one side of the card. She had never seen anything like this before, never used one but logic told her to slide it down the narrow gap that ran from top to bottom of the lock. The weight of the guard prevented her from lifting the card high enough to slot it into the top.

   She was mildly aware that she was beginning to panic.

   Her palms were sweating and her heart was pumping so loudly she was certain the only reason she couldn’t hear it was that Beriael’s screams were pretty much the only thing she could hear.

   ‘Shut up, just shut up. I can’t concentrate with you fucking screaming and you’re gonna have all the rest of the
guards here. Shut the fuck UP man!’