Aftershock & Others Read Online Free PDF

hungers for me! It’s so close now, it’s—
    Something wet and indescribably foul slides across my cheek and lips. The taste makes me retch. If there were anything in my stomach it would be spewing in all directions. But the retching spasms force my head back out of the hole. I tear my arm and shoulder free of the opening and roll away toward the bars, toward the corridor. Who would have thought the air of a prison cell could smell so sweet, or a single sixty-watt bulb a hundred feet away be so bright.
    I begin to scream. Unashamed, unabashed, I lay on my belly, reach through the bars and claw the concrete floor as wails of abject terror rip from my throat. I let them go on in a continuous stream until somebody comes, and even then I keep it up. I plead, sob, beg them to let me out of this cell. Finally they do. And only when I feel the corridor floor against my knees and hear the barred door clang shut behind me does the terror begin to leach away.
    “Doctor Hurst!” I tell them. “Get Doctor Hurst!”
    “He ain’t here, creep.”
    I look up and see Hugo hovering over me with two other guards from the third shift. A circle of faces completely devoid of pity or compassion.
    “Call him! Get him!”
    “We ain’t disturbin’ him for the likes o’ you. But we got his resident on the way. Now what’s this all—?”
    “In there!” I say, pointing to the rear of the cell. “In that hole in the back! Something’s down there!”
    Hugo jerks his head toward the cell. “See what he’s yapping about.”
    A young blond guard steps into my cell and searches around with his flash-light.
    “In the back!” I tell him. “The right rear corner!”
    The guard returns, shaking his head. “No hole in there.”
    “It must have pulled the tile back into place! Please! Listen to me!”
    “The kid killer’s doing a crazy act,” Hugo says with a snarl. “Trying to get off on a Section Eight.”
    “No-no!” I pull at his trousers as I look up at him. “Back there, under one of the tiles—”
    Hugo looks away, down the corridor. “Hey, Doc! Can you do something to shut this creep up?”
    A man in a white coat appears, a syringe in his hand.
    “Got just the thing here. Doctor Hurst left a standing order in the event he started acting up.”
    Despite my screams of protest, my desperate, violent struggles, they hold me down while the resident jabs a needle into my right buttock. There’s burning pain, then the needle is withdrawn and they loosen their grip.
    I’m weak from lack of food, and spent from the night’s exertions. The drug acts quickly, sapping what little strength remains in my limbs. I go with it. There’s no more fight left in me.
    The guards lift me off the floor and begin to carry me. I close my eyes. At least I won’t have to spend the night in the cell. I’ll be safe in the infirmary.
    Abruptly I’m dropped onto a cot. My eyes snap open as I hear my cell door clang shut, hear the lock snap closed.
    No! They’ve put me back in the cell!
    I open my lips to scream but the inside of my mouth is dry and sticky. My howl emerges as a whimper. Footsteps echo away down the corridor and the overheads go out.
    I’m alone…for a while.
    And then I hear the sound I knew would come. The tile moves. A gentle rattle at first, then a long slow sliding rasp of tile upon tile. The stinking miasma from below insinuates its way into my cell, permeating my air, making it its own.
    Then a soft scraping sound, like a molting snake sliding between two rocks. Followed by another sound, a hesitant, crippled shuffle, edging closer.
    I try to get away, to roll off the cot, but I can’t move. My body won’t respond.
    And then I see it. Or rather I see a faint outline, greater darkness against lesser darkness: slim, between four and five feet high. It leans over the bed and reaches out to me. Tiny fingers—cold, damp, ragged fingers—flutter over my face like blind spiders, searching. And then they pause, hovering over my