Mother is coming, hissed a voice from the dark.

Simon opened his eyes.

Mother is coming to get me.

“Who’s there?” Simon raised his head off the mat. The cell was dark—windowless—and there was no way to know the time of day. It might have been a bright summer afternoon, or a dark winter morning. Prison was designed, Simon had come to learn, to shut the prisoner off from knowing.

Get up, Simon. The voice gnashed its consonants.

Something whined off in the folds of the prison. Simon drew his lips into the space between his teeth, to prevent himself from answering to a voice he knew did not actually exist. He was condemned by order of the state—for his own protection—to serve out his fourteen consecutive life sentences in solitary confinement.

He was alone.

For awhile—seconds or minutes—there was only the damp silence to which Simon had grown so familiar. Then the voice spoke again.

Get up, Simon. Mother is coming.

“I’ve gone nuts,” Simon said to what he knew was an empty cell. They had told him it would happen—and of course it had. Brains needed other brains to work. Alone, a brain was only as healthy as a fire with nothing to burn.

Simon sat up and rubbed his face. There was nothing to do but wait for the light in his cell to go on. There was no way to determine when this would happen. Sometimes it felt as if he sat in the dark for days on end.

Mother is coming.

There was an odor. Earthy. Meaty. Sick. Simon could not remember the last time they had allowed him to shower. Usually it did not bother him. But now, in the dark, the stink of his own filth was too much to bear. He thought of the victim impact statements at his sentencing, the parade of enraged, slobbering parents imploring the judge to condemn Simon Hausmann to rot in jail. Well, they’d gotten their wish. Here he was, literally rotting.

Mother is coming, the voice hissed.

“Whose mother?!” Simon outspread his hands in the dark, incredulous.

The voice seemed to snicker. Everyone’s.

Simon felt the familiar vapors of the Bad Mood gather at the back of his skull. He curled his toes and breathed his own putrid odor.

“I know you aren’t there,” he said in the dark. “My brain’s playing tricks on me. I’ve been alone too long…”

The long fluorescent light tube on the ceiling clicked and stuttered on. Simon’s eyes retreated against each flash, his pupils clenching, his eyelids fluttering. But in each frame, between the initial blink of light and involuntary shutting of his eyes, he saw something.

A dark shape, there in his cell, suspended.

Something in there with him.

Four stubby legs dangled, paddling at the air as if treading water. Patches of matted, wiry hair sprouted from a stout, misshapen body, interspersed by sections of bare white flesh and, elsewhere, rents in the flesh where yellow bone peeked through. Knobby, withered tails traced oblong shapes, as if signaling some desperate, indecipherable message.

Simon slid from his mat and onto the floor, gawping, his heart beating suddenly, violently, against his ribs.

A creature. A monster. It looked like an organ—some indistinguishable organ—left sitting in the elements for many long days. It floated in his cell. It had eyes—or rather eye sockets—both empty. Something like a snout snarled in either abject joy or indescribable pain. A flaky tongue jutted over a bank of brown teeth. Its gums were black.

“God…” Simon gasped, tasting the salt of his own fingertips as they flittered at his lips.

Close. The organ’s mouth traced the delicate cadence of each word.

“What are you?” Simon whispered.

For now, the palm of your hand, said the organ. Then its mouth fell open and its body lurched forward and a sound like a branch snapping came from inside it. Its throat bulged, and something heavy slid from its mouth—like a mare birthing a foal—and thudded to the floor, glistening in the fluorescent light.

Simon, his hand trembling, reached out toward the thing on the floor.

Mother is coming, said the organ.

“Mother…” Simon repeated.

She’s coming to get us.

A drill. An industrial drill with a gnarled bit like a jagged little hand. Briefly, the ceiling light flickered.

“What do I do with this?” he asked.

The organ’s bony tails curled off toward the cell’s gray, iron door.

“They won’t just let me walk out of here. And I can’t fight them off with a drill.”

Again the organ strained forward, and again something snapped, and another heavy object slid from its mouth and clacked onto the floor.

Simon picked it up. It fit in his hand as if it had been made for him to hold. He opened the cylinder. Six gold circles winked at him.

The organ’s empty eye sockets were full of darkness. We cannot let Mother catch us.

“No…”

We must be prepared.

“Prepared…” Simon stood. “More guns,” he said. “And a grenade.”

The organ’s jowls wrinkled at the edges, and its tail flexed. Now, it said, you are starting to understand.

#

“Siddiq, turn up the volume, will ya?” Lenny pointed to the TV mounted over the cash register.

“You have to do it manually,” Siddiq said, whisking eggs with a plastic fork in a plastic bowl and pouring them onto the griddle.

Lenny heaved himself out of his chair, his knees whining, and waddled to the TV. He fiddled with some buttons until the reporter’s voice swam into fruition.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“…no indication yet of the fire’s cause. Residents reported hearing gunshots from the prison early this morning, though we have no corroboration yet from authorities on these reports. As you can see, the fire continues to burn through the bulk of the prison. Again, we have heard nothing from the prison’s officials, though a spokesperson for the Governor’s office stated that the Wallkill Corrections Facility houses nearly four hundred inmates…”

“Would you look at this shit?” Lenny said, returning to the table.

Siddiq grunted. “You want your tomato grilled this morning?”

“Yeah.” Lenny drummed his fingers along the rim of his coffee cup. “Prison’s got to be two hundred years old. I’m honestly surprised it took so long for something like this to happen.”

The door chimed. “Goddamn it’s cold.” Steve entered, wiping his boots on the bristly doormat and rubbing his hands together vigorously.

“Take a look at this.” Lenny gestured to the TV.

Steve squinted at the screen. “Holy Hell.” He whistled. “Look at the size of that fire… They’re gonna have to let the whole thing burn down.”

“You think so?”

“Oh sure.”

“Doesn’t look like they’re really fighting it.”

“You want the regular, Steven?” Siddiq asked from behind the counter.

“Yes, sir.” Steve went to the coffee machine and poured himself a cup.

“News says they have four hundred inmates up there,” Lenny said.

Steve sat beside him. “Sounds right. When I worked up there we had about three hundred, but I retired before they added the eastern wing.”

Lenny watched the aerial footage of flames engulfing two thirds of the old sprawling prison building. “How do they get prisoners out of a burning building?” he asked.

“It depends.” Steve sipped his coffee, winced, then sipped again. “In a situation like this? It doesn’t look good.”

The door chimed again, and a pane of cold air wafted in. Lenny peeled his eyes from the TV. A young man stood on the doormat, blinking around. He was thin and short, with oily hair and patchy stubble. He wore an oversized coat that made him seem even smaller than he already was, and baggy orange pants with matching orange sandals over white socks. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, though he wore a dazed look that made him appear much younger.

“Good morning,” Siddiq called from the griddle without turning around.

The young man shambled into the store, paused near the counter, then turned and shuffled off toward the beer cooler.

Poor drunk, Lenny thought. Going right for the beer at… he glanced at his watch. Not even six in the morning.

Siddiq slapped a paper plate oozing with yolk onto the counter. “Here you go, Lenny,” he said. “Yours is coming up, Steven.”

“Let me get that for you, big guy.” Steve stood, waving Lenny off as if Lenny was going to protest.

Lenny watched the young man at the cooler. He stood close to the glass, nodding slowly, his eyes focused like someone receiving a set of detailed instructions.

“Anyway,” said Steve, returning with Lenny’s sausage egg and cheese sandwich. “Remember how yesterday I was telling you about the family across the street, always having their fiestas every Saturday and going on until three, four in the morning?”

“Hm,” Lenny grunted. The young man glanced at him before looking quickly away, and then whispered to himself, and nodded.

“Well yesterday afternoon I see a pickup truck pull up outside the house with speakers—those big tower speakers like they have at concerts—this high.” Steve held up a hand over his head. “I’m not kidding. God knows what they’ve got in store for this weekend. I should probably plan to go away…”

The young man turned his palms up, as if to receive something from someone who wasn’t there. He whispered again, too quiet for Lenny to hear. From the TV, an advertisement for sleep medication blared.

“Maybe I’ll take Linda up to Mohonk.” Steve took a swig of his coffee and grimaced. “They have a spa there. A nice bar. It’s not cheap, but nothing is. Hell even Siddiq charges six bucks for an egg sandwich…”

The young man continued to hold his hands cupped in front of him. Lenny’s eyes flickered to a spot on the cooler, just above the young man’s head, where momentarily the glass seemed to quiver, to refract the light strangely. When he looked back down, the young man was turning toward him holding a long, black object…

“Gun!” Lenny rolled off his chair and onto the floor, toppling the table.

An enfilade of gunfire exploded through the coffee shop. In an instant, the air filled with dust and splintered wood and plastic.

Steve dived to the floor, landing just next to the table. He looked up at Lenny, his eyes wide. The gunfire paused, and in the lull Steve scrambled—panicked—toward the door before Lenny could tell him not to. There was a flash of red, and the roar of gunfire resumed, and Steve’s body twisted and furled and shattered apart into chunks of flesh and clothing.

Siddiq yelled something from behind the counter.

Lenny curled his arms over his head, his back pressed to the fallen table, the coffee shop exploding around him. He had served in the Russia-NATO War, stationed in Turkey. He had seen heinous violence in his time, violence he had worked diligently for the last fifty-plus years to ablate from his memory. But now, crouched on the floor of the coffee shop in which he’d spent every morning for two decades, a mile and a half down the road from his home, it all came rushing furiously back: The wet crack of gunfire and dual odors of gunpowder and methane, the screams of his friends and the unyielding procession of gore, of blood, of bloodless bodies. He laced his fingers together atop his head and prayed that someone would think to feed his dogs.

The table rocked forward, and Lenny’s back seized with pain.

Then the gunfire stopped.

Lenny took heavy breaths. Something clattered to the floor behind him, and footsteps approached the table. He looked around for something, for a weapon. There, attached to the keychain on what had previously been Steve’s belt: a folding knife. It was small, maybe a few inches long, but it would have to do. Before he could think himself out of it he lunged—but the pain in his back twisted and shot up his spine, and his muscles clenched, and he crumpled there on the floor, all nearly three-hundred pounds of him.

The footsteps stopped near his head, and Lenny craned, trembling, to look.

The young man grinned down, his eyes glistening. Lenny—his lungs, like the rest of his body, cramping—drew a shaky line of air through his teeth in preparation to tell the little shit to go fuck his own mother or something of the like, the little punk-ass piece of shit—but before he could get a word out, a shape appeared in the air beside the young man’s head.

Lenny’s breath caught. His sight was not what it used to be, but it was hard to imagine how he might mis-see what he was seeing here.

It was an organ. A giant fucking organ. It was rotten, with little hairs growing on it, its skin patchy, floating there and staring down at Lenny from two empty eye sockets. A smell like death and swamp gas gathered in Lenny’s nostrils.

“What the fuck,” Lenny managed, spending all his breath, his heart palpitating.

The organ’s snout wrinkled, and then moved with uncanny dexterity, as if speaking, though Lenny heard no words.

“A big knife,” the young man said, holding out a hand, staring down at Lenny with his blank, childish expression.

The floating organ gagged—an awful, brittle sound like a bone snapping—and from its mouth slid the handle of a knife directly into the young man’s waiting palm. The knife’s blade was nearly a foot long.

The young man dangled the knife blade-down over Lenny’s face. “Mother will never catch us,” he said.

Lenny braced himself for death. He had imagined it a million ways, but this was not one of them. He clenched his eyes shut and thought about a girl he’d met only once, when he was fifteen years old.

The clang of pots and pans made him reopen his eyes.

Siddiq rose up from behind the counter, his face and hair caked in gray dust, a revolver gripped in both hands. He leveled it at the piece of shit young man and roared as he pulled the trigger—then kept roaring as he unloaded the cylinder.

Get him, Siddiq, Lenny thought.

Red ripples appeared along the young man’s right side where Siddiq’s bullets shredded him to pieces… Or at least that’s how it appeared at first. But as Lenny watched from the floor, the knot of pain tightening in his back, his stomach turning, a terrible numb horror spread down his arms and legs as he registered what he was really seeing.

The mar of red flesh to the man’s right side was not his own. It was a sheet of viscera, a fleshy wall of innards where the organ-creature had spread itself open along its belly like a book and now shielded the young man from Siddiq’s bullets. The entrail-shield absorbed every round, jiggling like mud, rendering each as harmless as a gnat. The organ-creature’s head lolled off to one side, its empty eyes unfocused, its splayed body vibrating with each impact into its tangle of putrid flesh.

The young man stood, safely concealed, smiling his despicable childish smile.

Lenny had once had a nightmare in which he was lying on his back at the bottom of a shallow pit. Overhead, ruddy clouds churned through the sky. Though he could not see around the edge of the pit, he knew something was there, circling. Every moment he expected it to appear, to leer down at him, though it never did. That was the engine of the nightmare’s dread.

This was what came into his mind now as he lay pinned to the floor with a knot of heat twisting through his back, as Siddiq’s revolver clicked empty and the monster organ folded itself shut and resumed its original rotten shape. It floated beside the young man as he shuffled up to the counter with his long knife, exiting Lenny’s line of sight. A moment later Siddiq’s voice rose up, calling out in Urdu, devolving into gibberish, pitching into screams, dying into silence…

Lenny prayed someone would think to feed his dogs. Again he closed his eyes.

From over the counter, a commercial on the TV promised relief from sleeplessness.