INMATE WARD
A FEW WEEKS AGO
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The first rumble was enough to make him roll onto his stomach on the rickety bed and sink his face into the pillow.
Claiming the hours of sleep that he still had left, he twisted his lips under his thick mustaches and let out a growl that died out on the worn cloth that smelled of drool.
The second rumble was enough for him to return to his previous position, face up. He took the pillow by the sides and used it to cover his ears. Did no one respect the sanctity of the night anymore, damn it?! Why didn’t they let him sleep in peace?!
The third rumble, however, sounded so close and so vivid that his bed trembled as if someone had shaken it.
Simon Pesha woke up, startled.
Wait a second! Those noises weren’t the blows that the damned guard—Spinola was his name?—made by slamming his truncheon against the bars of the cells as he walked down the narrow corridor. The bastard liked to wake them up like this; maybe that made him feel like he was a real prison guard and not some poor fool who had been sent to guard a bunch of retards in the cells of a small military base.
Then those hideous: THUMP, THUMP, THUMP! were caused by the demolition hammer. They were doing repairs to the ugly structure of the building, right behind his pavilion, and the damned rattling of the machines had made him jump out of bed several times this last week, and…
No. The automatons worked construction during the day, and when it was daylight, the corridor in front of his cell had the lights on, and Spinola paced it while talking out loud with the unfortunate Grenadier on duty guarding the entrance. Now everything was dark. So, no. It wasn’t daylight, and the bulldozers did not cause that noise, much less by that idiot Spinola.
Simon sat up on the bed and wiped the drool from his mouth. His thick mustache and stubble felt like sandpaper at the touch. Until he finally woke up and thought clearly: Explosions! The rumbles were explosions!
He pricked up his ears and heard something that sounded like a bull lowing mixed with the BOOM! of the detonations. It was the combat alarm. They were under attack!
Who were the lunatics who launched an attack against a military base? Had the Rowdy Ones finally grown some balls?
Simon jumped out of the bed, but his muscles were still numb, and he almost ended up kissing the floor. He threw himself against the bars and stuck his face as far as he could between the cold steel bars, trying to see if there was anything weird out there in the corridor.
Nothing.
The greenish glow coming from the security system was the only thing standing between what little he saw and total darkness.
Although the lamps, had they been on, would not have done much for him either. His cell was the last one in the corridor, and he had concrete walls on the sides and front. The worst view they could have given him.
He had woken up there a few nights ago after being knocked out in a bar, so he didn’t know how many prisoners he shared the pavilion with, nor who they were, or what they looked like. He could only hear them. So, he paid attention to what they were talking about; maybe one of them knew something and he could get an idea of what was coming: the hour of freedom or the hour of death.
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He heard some wondering what was wrong and another who couldn’t stop coughing. He also heard the snoring of the jerk on the other side of the wall. No surprise there. From the way that inmate growled, he sounded more like a bear than a human; those blasts wouldn’t affect his sleep.
Dammit! The outside world would collapse, and he would die locked there.
He tried to force the bars. Nothing. He tried it with a kick. He hit his boot toe against the steel and all he did was treat himself to a sharp pain in his toes, besides offering a pitiful show, which luckily no one witnessed.
Then, for the umpteenth time, Simon tried to remove the Cerberus shackle, a bracelet-shaped metal device he wore on his left wrist. He hit it against the concrete floor and then against the bars, over and over again. And, for the umpteenth time, he failed.
“You in the back!” someone yelled at him. “Quiet, dumbass! I’ve got enough of the explosions!”
Simon stopped, not because they asked him, but because he couldn’t bear any more pain; his arm was numb, and he was about to break his wrist. He waited a few seconds until he felt the blood rush down his arm again and tried to rip the bracelet off one more time, now using his fingers. All he got, of course, was more pain and more frustration.
Hell! If that miserable Spinola hadn’t put that damned shackle on him, by now he would have blown the bars off with a Photia. He hated feeling so miserable!
Although he had to accept it; he was miserable—and in so many ways. Bah! In every single way! One had to accept oneself, right? Wasn’t that what his father used to say to him as a child?
His father, Simon Senior, had been a sturdy lumberjack who used to cut logs with as much precision as when he cut his son’s aspirations.
“Pesha, little one, what are you trying to do with that?” his father had told him on one occasion, in the woods, when he tried to imitate him by taking an ax and trying to cut a log.
Simon senior watched passively as the handle escaped from his son’s hands, and the blade of the ax drew a swing in the air to end up burying itself in the ground.
“Don’t you realize you’re a wimp, Pesha? All you’re gonna do is to slice off your leg or arm. Go to your mother and do the laundry, will you? This is a job for real men, Pesha. Now, scram. I’ve got a lot to do here.”
Worst of all, his father said it not with contempt, but in a condescending way and full of resignation, as if he was addressing an inconsolable Nancy-boy or his daughter, Simon’s little sister.
Oh, his father! How he hated his father!
‘Papa’ Simon had always been right, though. He was good-for-nothing, and over the years he’d learned to accept it. Had he been stronger and in better shape, he would have been able to withstand the full treatment with the Fluo-Pink; he would have had implants in both wrists and could have thrown Photias from both hands; maybe that way the incident at the bar would have ended very differently.
That night he had gone to drink for a while, waiting for sleep to knock on his door. What better than alcohol to calm anxiety, so that he can hit the rack for a few hours?
He had had five or six beers and had even accepted an invitation from an old dude who offered him a few shots of whiskey, even though it was hot as hell and the whiskey multiplied by a thousand by the suffocating sensation of alcohol in the throat.
The old dude had recognized him from somewhere, and he wanted to enlist him in a small job related to drugs and other nonsense. Simon, who had already drunk his usual beers—perhaps more than the usual ones—with excruciating dizziness, a burning sensation in his throat, and a killing breath, not only drank all the old dude’s whiskey, but declined the offer, and decided to give him a few punches.
To his misfortune, three Markabian soldiers had just entered the bar, also looking for calm in alcohol and arrested him.
“Calm down, you idiots!” he told them, drunk. “I was once a slave to the Empire too, but unlike you, at least I had the balls to send them to hell.” And, not happy with that, he turned to one and said, “Hey, I remember you!” He was lying. “We were in the same platoon, right? I remember you used to go to the bathroom, and there, behind the wall…”
And then he had no better idea than to spit in the soldier’s face, punch the other and threaten the third with a Photia.
It was enough for the soldier, whom he had spat on, to hold his left arm from behind and bend his wrist to block the implant and disarm him. And it was enough for the other soldier, whom he had threatened with a shot, to prop a hook in his stomach to make him fall to his knees, throw up all he had drunk, and squirm on the floor like the pitiful drunkard he was.
And now he was there. In that dank cell, wearing a hideous yellowish prisoner’s jumpsuit and a Cerberus shackle on his left wrist.