Marcus Pelegrimas - The Breaking

A simple glance to either side was enough for him to see the bunk bed frame with a mattress that was about half an inch thick on one side of the cement room, and a squat metal cylinder that smelled too bad to be anything other than a toilet on the other. The cell across the hall was identical, but contained a skinny little guy who sucked air in through his mouth as if he was trying to consume as much as humanly possible before someone else in the room beat him to his share.

“What’s your name?” the inmate across from him asked.

“Whoever you are,” Cole said, “just leave me alone. I’m sick of introducing myself. I’m sick of this damn place and I’m sick of this whole fucking world.”

“I hear that, bud.”

Another guard walked down the hall and slowed down just long enough to throw Cole a threadbare towel that was presumably too weak to support his weight if he tried to hang himself and a set of paper-thin stained sheets. “You be good, Lambert,” he said while shooting a quick glance at the cell across from Cole’s. He then turned and walked away while talking to one of his coworkers on a small handheld radio.

Going for the most cover he could get, Cole chose the bottom bunk and started flipping his sheets over the lumpy mattress. He waited for any number of comments regarding the living situation or his space on the inmate sexual pecking order, but all he heard was the steady rasp of Lambert’s breath. Something about the way the skinny guy stared at him from across the hall made Cole less than anxious to turn his back on him. The guy might have been barely wide enough to make a dent in his rumpled jumpsuit, but his eyes were sharper and more alert than some of the inhuman predators topping the Skinner watch list. “So,” Cole said. “Lambert, is it?”

“Yeah,” the other guy breathed.

“You prefer to go by any other name?”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

Cole nodded slowly to himself. Here it comes.

Rather than try to sidestep the confrontation until it snuck back to bite him when the inmates were within easier reach of each other, Cole grabbed his bars and met the glare coming from the occupant of the other cell. “Just making conversation, okay?”

“So you want to talk now, huh?”

“You don’t want any part of it,” Cole said, “that’s fine.”

Lambert pressed his face against the bars as if he meant to shove his head through them. He looked to be a few inches shorter than Cole and would have seemed even smaller if his thick, spiky clump of black hair had been shaved. Wiry fingers curled into fists and then stretched out again to waggle at the end of hands that looked more like knotted collections of veins and faded tattoos. He watched Cole intently while rubbing his bottom lip against the edges of his teeth. “You’re damn right it’s fine,” he said. “Why so nervous?”

Since Cole couldn’t think of an appropriately tough or funny response, he kept quiet.

A scowl eased across Lambert’s face in the same way a piece of bad pork might work its way through his bowels. Judging by the smell coming from the direction of his cell, it seemed to Cole that might have been the case not long before his arrival. Scraggly eyebrows flicked upward and an appraising moan gurgled from the back of Lambert’s throat. “What’s that on your neck?” he asked. “Some kinda tribal? Ain’t from no gang I ever seen.”

Cole looked down, spotted the traces of black stretching from the base of his throat, and pulled up the collar of his jumpsuit to cover more of it. The Nymar tendrils were common among vampires that had an active spore inside them. Black filaments stretched out and made themselves at home within their host’s chests, but Cole’s spore was gone. Although the markings weren’t moving beneath his skin, they were still more visible now than they’d been a few days ago. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just left over from a bad night.”

“I hear that,” Lambert chuckled while unbuttoning his jumpsuit.

Despite the distance and bars between them, Cole stepped away from the front of his cell. “Uhh, what are you doing?”

The other prisoner grinned widely while continuing to undress. He unbuttoned and peeled away the front of his jumpsuit to reveal a pale sunken chest covered in stringy black hair. Opening the jumpsuit farther, Lambert displayed a set of ribs that looked more like a xylophone covered in skin that had been transplanted from a fish’s belly. “Take a gander at that,” he said.

As much as Cole wanted to resist, he took the gander that had been offered. On Lambert’s ribs, written in a flowing script accented with ladybugs and lip marks, were the words, Sweet Sarah Sunshine .

Lambert nodded and waggled his eyebrows as if he’d just shown Cole the lost pieces of an ancient text. “Wanna hear about a bad night? I met this lady when I was baked off my ass. I smoked so much weed and drank so much Jim Beam that I got convinced a bunch of blinkin’ streetlights were transmitting code to me. Seriously.”

“That sounds a bit more than just being drunk,” Cole said.

“All I can tell you is it was fuckin’ weird. Anyway, I met her that fuckin’ weird night and we got along real nice. Gave her a ride home.”

“Sounds like you were in great shape to drive.”

“Oh yeah. I went between not knowin’ where I was headed and not knowin’ where I came from. Could’ve been worse, though. I’ve driven when I didn’t know either. Anyhoo, I made it to her place and she repaid me with the best head I ever got.”

“That’s not something I’d expect to hear from a guy in maximum security prison,” Cole mused as he inched closer to the bars so he could get a better look at Lambert’s tattoo. The lettering was done to look like it had been written in ribbon held up by the ladybugs. After what he’d just heard, he had a pretty good idea why the lip marks were there.

Suddenly, Lambert pulled his jumpsuit back up. “Why wouldn’t you expect to hear that from me?” he asked indignantly. “You think just because I’m locked up, I want some dude to suck my dick instead of a woman?”

“No. I meant I didn’t think I’d ever hear a maximum security prisoner say the word ‘anyhoo.’ ”

When Lambert laughed, he followed it up with a dry, hacking cough that rocked his entire upper body. He let his hands fall away from his jumpsuit as he headed back to his bunk and sat on the edge of the mattress. “That bitch went down on me right there in my car in front of her apartment building. Hot damn, she was good.”

Cole gave him a moment to reflect while pressing his cheek against his bars. Keeping Lambert inside his peripheral vision, he surveyed as much as he could of the area beyond his cell. There wasn’t much to see. Directly in front of him was the walkway that led all the way down the row to the elevator. From what he could see, the other cells had the same look as his and Lambert’s. Something might have been moving in one of the other nearby cages, but the one next to Lambert was definitely empty. Guards were posted at the end of the hall with the elevator, and the opposite end led straight into a solid concrete wall.

“Damn, she could work some magic with that tongue of hers,” Lambert continued. “I knew she’d be able to make my dick sing. I could read it on her face, hear it in her head, that she loved givin’ head. At least I could tell she was good at it anyway.”

“What? Oh yeah. Sweet Sarah.” Cole looked between his feet. There was something on the concrete that looked as if a shadow had dripped from the ceiling to stain the floor. When he wasn’t able to rub away the dusty grime caked onto the floor, he licked his thumb and tried again. This time he managed to confirm that the stain was another marking taken from the same runic alphabet as the ones etched into the bars. “Sounds like that wasn’t such a bad night.”