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  The Butcher nodded slowly. “That’s right.” He stopped fondling himself and brought his right hand up for Cal to shake. Cal glanced at it.

  “Uh, I’m not sure I want to… ah, you know what? What the Hell? Cal. Cal Carver.”

  He grimaced as the Butcher’s hand enveloped his. His arm was jerked violently up and down by Eugene over-enthusiastic shaking. “Pleased to meet you Cal-Cal Carver. Sorry they’ve put you in here. I guess you really annoyed the warden. If I’d known you were coming I’d have let them empty the bucket.”

  “What? No, it’s fine. Really. I like it,” Cal said. “It adds to the ambiance.”

  The Butcher released his grip, smiled a rubbery smile, then turned back towards the bed.

  “And it’s just Cal, actually.”

  The Butcher stopped.

  The Butcher turned.

  “What did you say?”

  “It’s Cal. My name. Not Cal-Cal.”

  The Butcher’s stare bored into Cal, his scarred features twisting into a scowl. “Did you just call my momma a slut?”

  Cal’s face went through a number of expressions in a very short space of time, trying to find a suitable one. It came up empty. “Um, no. No, not that I noticed, no.”

  “You know what I did to the last person who said mean things about my momma?”

  Cal shook his head. “No, but I’m hoping it was something nice.”

  “I turned them outside-in,” the Butcher drawled, advancing slowly. “Not inside-out, mind. Inside-out’d have been too good for them. Outside-in.”

  “Right, but the thing is—”

  “Outside. In.”

  “And quite right, too,” said Cal. “But, you see, the thing is, I didn’t say anything about—”

  There was a scream from beyond the cell door, followed by a drawn-out gurgling gargle, like sewerage burbling through the pipework in a poorly-designed downstairs bathroom.

  The Butcher stopped and turned his head in the direction of the sound. Seizing his chance, Cal sprung off the wall, swinging with his fist. He connected hard, driving a punch across the bigger man’s cheek and snapping his head further to the right.

  For a moment, it looked like the Butcher was going to shrug it off, but then he wobbled unsteadily, and toppled like a great oak. There was a thud that managed to sound painfully solid, yet worryingly damp at the same time, as the Butcher’s forehead met the metal frame of the bed.

  The big man flopped onto the tiled floor. His semi-naked body twitched and fitted for a moment, then fell still. Cal swallowed, his mouth becoming dry.

  “Eugene?” he said.

  He nudged a bare leg with his toe.

  “Eugene, you OK?”

  The Butcher gave a final twitch. A slowly-expanding circle of blood began to spread outwards across the tiles where his forehead rested.

  “OK, so that’s not good,” Cal whispered. He raised his voice. “Hey, Eugene, you appear to have tripped and fallen, resulting in you hitting your head on the metal bed frame. I hope you’re not too badly hurt.”

  There was another thud – this time from outside the door. Stepping over the Butcher’s motionless body, Cal ducked and peered through the narrow serving hatch.

  “Jesus!” he yelped, spotting a pair of eyes staring back at him. “Audrey? Is that you?”

  The guard’s unplucked eyebrows were knotted in a lump above her nose. Her nostrils were drawn up, her mouth fixed in an animal-like snarl. There was something on her face. It coated one cheek, plastered her hair to her head and congealed in one ear.

  “You’ve got, I don’t know, it looks like blood on the side of your face,” Cal said, motioning to his own cheek. “It’s sort of here, and down here and… Well, it’s everywhere, really. Are you hurt?”

  He jumped back as Audrey battering-rammed her head against the metal door, shaking it in its frame. She screamed, not in pain, but in rage - an ancient, primal sound that billowed from her throat like an escaping toxic gas.

  “Audrey?” said Cal. “Look, I know we don’t really know each other too well or anything, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you’re acting out of character. Is there someone else there I can talk to? The warden, maybe, or—?”

  The guard drew back again. Through the gap, Cal could see blood oozing from a tattered line of skin where her forehead had met the door.

  “Ooh, that is going to leave a mark,” he commented, then he dropped to the floor as a gunshot rang out and Audrey’s head exploded like an over-inflated balloon.

  Cal knew the sensible thing would be to stay down, but he’d never been one for that sort of thing. He got to his knees and tried to look through the door gap while keeping a reasonably safe distance from it. Audrey was nowhere to be seen, other than a few bits of her which dripped from the top part of the hatch. Through the gap came the sounds of screaming, and more gunfire – further off, this time.

  Another guard danced into the corridor outside, twisting and clawing at himself. No, not at himself, Cal realized. At the hundreds of oily black insects which crawled all over him.

  “Get them off me! Get them off!” he squealed, then he suddenly stopped and snapped to a sort of half-hearted attention. As one, the insects fell to the floor and scuttled away, leaving the man swaying gently from side to side.

  “Hey!” Cal whispered. “Hey, you. What the Hell is going on?!”

  The guard blinked, like he was waking from a dream. He held his hands up, flexing the fingers in and out, in and out, in and out, as if seeing them for the first time. A figure in an orange jumpsuit hurried past and the guard set off after him, face all bunched up in fury, hands clawing at the air.

  They both ran beyond Cal’s narrow field of view. He leaned sideways and peered through the slot, trying to follow them, but all he saw was a gray brick wall being decorated in a spray of crimson, and all he heard was the prisoner screaming and gargling his way to a chillingly final silence.

  Being careful not to make any noise, Cal shuffled backwards on his knees away from the door. A hand wrapped around his ankle and yanked his leg, sending him crashing to the tiled floor. He twisted in time to see the Butcher raise his head, a deep gash pouring blood into one of his eyes.

  “I don’t like you,” the Butcher growled. “You’re not my friend.”

  “That’s hurtful, Eugene,” Cal said. He drew up his free foot and drove it once, twice against the Butcher’s wounded forehead. “I mean, probably not as hurtful as that, but hurtful all the same.”

  Hissing in pain, the Butcher released his grip. Cal leaped to his feet. He raised a hand to bang on the door, then the screaming and gurgling and gunfire outside made him think better of it.

  He turned to the Butcher, just as the brute used the bed to heave himself upright. “Look, we got off on the wrong foot,” said Cal. He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the door. “There’s something going on out there – a riot, maybe - and I think it’s in both our interest if we work together. Or, you know, at least don’t actively try to kill each other.”

  The Butcher growled and began to advance.

  “Even just on a temporary basis?”

  The Bucher stopped. His gaze drifted past Cal. “Huh?” he said, his scarred brow furrowing in confusion.

  “Come on, Eugene, I’m not going to fall for the old ‘hey look, there’s someone behind you’ trick,” Cal told him, putting his hands on his hips. “We’re in a locked cell. How could there possibly be--”

  Someone grabbed Cal from behind. Two someones in fact. Cal’s head whipped round and he caught a glimpse of a pair of matching metal masks.

  “Hey, what the Hell?” he managed to blurt out, before a needle punctured the skin of his throat, and the world rolled upwards into darkness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was the humming that eventually fluttered Cal’s eyelids open. It was low and monotonous – the humming of an engine or other machinery, rather than of the tuneful
variety – and annoyingly insistent.

  The room he was in shimmered in blue, and for a moment Cal thought he was underwater. He frantically closed his mouth, realized he was bone dry, and opened it again.

  Or, at least, he tried to open it, but there was something across the lower half of his face, holding his jaw shut.

  His arms, too, were trapped, shackled down by his sides. The head clamp and mask combo meant he couldn’t look down to see what was across his wrists, but whatever it was, it was cold against his skin, and could really have done with being loosened off a notch or two. He could feel the edges digging into his flesh whenever he tried to move, and quickly came to the conclusion that staying still was a better option for the moment.

  He was propped up and fastened to something solid. He could just get the vague impression of a metal frame at the edge of his peripheral vision if he forced his eyes all the way to the right. The whole thing reminded him of something, but it took him a few seconds to figure out what.

  “Silence of the Lambs,” he tried to say, but the device across his face resulted in it coming out more like, “Smm um t Lmbs.” Still, he knew what he meant, and as there was no-one else around to hear him, that was all that mattered.

  His head ached.

  His mouth felt as if he’d been gargling desert.

  All things considered, he thought, he could really go a lemon drop.

  The room was pretty much the same size as his prison cell. Unlike there, though, there was no bucket of excrement in the corner, no bunk beds along one wall, and – most importantly – no enormous angry psychopath attempting to kill him. Despite the raging headache and whole Hannibal Lecter situation, Cal reluctantly had to chalk this one up in the Win column.

  The humming continued. It seemed to radiate from the walls themselves, but if he concentrated he thought he could pinpoint it as originating somewhere below. Or maybe above. One of those, anyway. Wherever it was coming from, it was starting to get right on his tits.

  “Hmmo?” he said. Given the mask, it was as close as he was going to get.

  No-one answered, but the flickering blue light which had been dancing across the featureless walls swept towards him, gathering together into a tall, thin blinding beam. Cal hissed as the light hit him full in the face, forcing him to screw his eyes closed.

  Even through his eyelids, he could see the beam sweeping across him. Right, left. Left, right. Down, up, and back again. The brightness of it made his eyeballs ache way at the back, and no matter how tightly he screwed his eyelids shut, he couldn’t screw them tightly enough.

  The glow faded. Cal counted to ten in his head, just in case it came back. He chanced opening one eye. An aura of blue was still burned into his retina. He blinked a few dozen times, trying to clear it away.

  The lights had gone their separate ways again, and were back doing their shimmering dance across the walls. Cal opened his other eye and decided to keep quiet for the moment, in case saying anything else brought the beam rushing back.

  For some reason, the light had triggered a tickling in his nostrils. He clenched and unclenched them, trying to resist the urge to sneeze. He enjoyed a good sneeze as much as the next man, but sneezing in a head restraint, with a mask covering the lower half of his face, he reckoned, was unlikely to be pleasant.

  He sneezed.

  As he suspected, it wasn’t a great experience. His head jerked in the brace, hurting his neck. His mouth tried to open, but the mask was having none of it. His nose was – mercifully – largely uncovered, and much of the snot explosion was ejected into the air in front of him, rather than trapped in the mask with him.

  The snot wad spun into the air, looping and tumbling at what was, by anyone’s standard, quite a leisurely pace. It soared across the room in two or three slow moving bubbles. Despite their mucusy contents, Cal found them oddly beautiful.

  Weird, obviously, the way they were floating like that. But beautiful all the same.

  Directly ahead of the flying snotballs, part of the wall slid upwards, revealing a man decked out in a black leather and metal ensemble that looked like an S&M version of police riot gear.

  Cal guessed it was a man, at least, but the full-face metal helmet made it difficult to tell for sure. He held his gun in what felt to Cal like an overtly masculine way, which was usually a pretty good indicator. The gun itself was not a make Cal had ever seen before. In fact, it was only thanks to the way the man was holding it – one gloved hand on the handle, the other on the stock, the barrel idly-but-deliberately indicating his leather-clad crotch – that he recognized it as a gun at all.

  The mucus bubbles hit the mask in slow motion, splattering gently against the darkened glass visor. The helmet tilted just a fraction, as the head inside turned to see what the hell had just hit it. Cal felt he should probably apologize, but he didn’t want to risk the light again. Or the gun, for that matter.

  The man took a step into the room, clanking noisily on the mesh floor. His boots were made of scuffed, dented metal, and comically large, with a series of blinking lights running across the toe of each one.

  The lights flashed and flickered with every jerking step as the man lurched across the room like Frankenstein’s monster. Cal gave the wrist restraints another try, but the bands of pain where they cut into him quickly proved too much.

  The man clomped and clanged off towards Cal’s left side. As he passed, Cal saw himself reflected in the polished glass of the helmet’s visor. Yep, he definitely had a serious Hannibal Lecter vibe going on.

  For a moment, Cal thought he could make out features beneath the other man’s mask, but they were so distorted, so far removed from human, that he decided he must have imagined it.

  Or hoped he had, anyway.

  The sound of the man’s footsteps continued until they were right behind him, then stopped. Cal tensed, holding his breath, waiting for whatever new terrible thing was about to be added to the list of terrible things that had already happened that day.

  The metal frame holding him shuddered. His stomach lurched as the whole thing toppled forwards. He clenched his teeth and braced himself for the jarring impact of the floor, but instead of falling, he and the metal frame glided gently towards the door.

  Behind him, the erratic clanking of metal boots on metal floor resumed. Cal’s frame bobbed through the air, and he got the impression it was being pushed along by the armored stranger. That made sense.

  The fact it was floating made less sense, but when combined with the other evidence – the floating sneeze, the unearthly blinding light – the explanation was very clear.

  He’d had an aneurysm. That had to be it, because the alternative was…

  Was…

  Cal floated through the door. The universe reflected in the widening pools of his eyes. His frame had bobbed out into a long curved corridor, with windows taking up most of one wall. Through the expanse of glass dead ahead, he could see… everything. At least, that was how it felt.

  Night stretched out before him, but a night filled with more stars than he’d ever imagined. There were billions of them. Trillions, maybe. They dotted the darkness everywhere he looked. Even those patches of black which he’d initially thought didn’t have stars in them turned out, upon closer inspection, to be packed with the buggers.

  It was like a child had made a picture of outer space, and the last person to use the glitter shaker had forgotten to screw the top on properly.

  And the colors! Pinks, purples, blues, all swooshing and swooping in vast patterns that covered most of the sky. Cal had seen the Northern Lights back when he’d been travelling around Europe, but the Aurora Borealis had nothing on this.

  The frame turned sharply left, and the view of the universe was replaced with a view of a door. Cal tried to force his eyeballs out of his head so he could get another look at the stars, but they refused to entertain the idea and he reluctantly pointed them ahead of him instead.

  Wer
e he at home, he’d have assumed the door belonged to an elevator, but he had a growing suspicion that ‘home’ was a very long way away. He couldn’t begin to guess where the door actually led, or what new astonishing, mind-bending thing lurked behind it.

  It opened with a ping. His framed floated through the doorway.

  It was an elevator.

  There was no clanking behind him. The footsteps hadn’t followed him in.

  The door closed. The pressure in the elevator car changed, and Cal suddenly found himself feeling heavier than he had since waking up, and arguably heavier than he’d felt in his whole life.

  The metal frame stopped floating. It hit the floor and teetered uncertainly until a clamp whirred and snapped into place somewhere near the frame’s bottom end. At least, Cal assumed that was what had happened, but he still couldn’t move his head far enough to check.

  “OK,” he muttered, then he screamed through his gritted teeth as the elevator rocketed upwards.

  Cal felt his spine compress. A pressure pushed down on his eyeballs like a pair of giant thumbs, making them swim with hoops of color. His scream faltered and died as a rush of oncoming air snuffed it out in his throat, choking him. His feet tried to sink through the floor, as his stomach and lower intestines attempted to force themselves out through his rectum.

  He was just starting to think that maybe the Butcher’s cell wasn’t so bad after all, when the elevator jerked to an abrupt stop that rattled his teeth and made his spine jab upwards into his brain.

  “Ow,” he muttered, concentrating on the pain rather than on the sudden and near overwhelming desire he had to vomit. If sneezing in the mask was bad, then blowing chunks would’ve been cataclysmic.

  The wall in front of him slid open, revealing an enormous room with zero charm, and a uniformed man who somehow managed to convey even less.

  The uniform bore only a passing resemblance to the one the man in the mask had been wearing. There was no mask, for one thing, and a distinct lack of metal. It was still mostly black, but with a long narrow strip of white that stretched down from the neck to the stomach, like a priest who’d got a bit carried away with his dog collar.