WWC WK14: Freedom

Author's Note: This story was written for (and won honorable mention in) HarperCollins and Inkpop's Weekly Writer's Challenge #14, their horror short fiction contest. I took vampires and played with them, as well as with the concepts of quarantine and plague.

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The Prisoner hasn’t seen the sun in months.

The Prisoner: that is my name. If I had one before this, I don't remember what it was. I don't care what it was. That part of my life is over now.

Pain is my constant companion. My prison smock, filthy and crusted with pus from the oozing sores on my legs, crackle every time I move. The backs of my eyes ache from trying to pierce the blackness all around me. What thin, tasteless slime they give me can’t ease the hunger pains in my belly. The one blanket they leave me cannot keep me warm.

Only the rats can do that.

I used to wonder how long they planned on keeping me here, imprisoned for a crime of which I was innocent. After days in isolation, with no sustenance but the human food they provided—food which the afflicted could not consume—I thought that would prove to them that I was clean.

When my hair began to fall out and I lost the strength to pace my tiny cell, I stopped wondering. I tried to stop caring altogether as the weeks blurred into months.

At least, I think they were days and weeks and months. There are no windows in my cell, no clock, no light, no sounds but the ones I make. The door is solid mesquite wood, some of the hardest in the world. I know, because my father built the door himself.

Tears burn my eyes when I think of my father, but I just sniff and scrub at the wetness dripping down my cheeks. Crying is pointless. In the first weeks, I screamed myself hoarse, sobbing for my jailers to let me out. No one came. I only received food because the computerized system the prison had in place deposited the slop in the same corner of the room every day from the silver-washed mesquite wood dispenser.

They made everything of mesquite wood in this place. The psychiatric institution known as Palo Verde Mental Hospital in Tucson, Arizona—up until the epidemic, that is—had used the grant money they'd received to study the sickness afflicting the US population. The head scientists discovered that even the smallest traces of the chloroplasts found in tree bark burned the sick ones like acid. The effects were increased when the wood was brushed with a thin glaze of silver nitrate.

Everything in my prison was made that way. Mesquite wood held up longer than almost anything except oak, but where would they get oak trees in a desert? There weren’t enough trees to supply enough wood to confine all the afflicted all over the country, all over the world. My father, a carpenter, had told me this while swiping the glaze brush across a wooden door similar to the one that imprisoned me.

I should've known this would happen. Once the Epidemic of 2178 began, the littlest things turned neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend...father against child. The littlest thing...including the fact that garlic made me violently sick.

In the backwoods town that Tucson became over the course of the hundred years following the first outbreaks, fact and fiction interbred freely until no one knew what was truth and what was myth. Popular opinion stated that if wood and silver were lethal to the afflicted ones, then garlic had to fit in there somewhere. I don’t know if that's true, but it doesn’t matter, because it got me trapped in here anyway.

I can hear the rats scuttling around in the darkness beyond me. I have to hold very still when they come. If I spook them, they might attack. Humans weren’t the only creatures affected by the Epidemic. City animals like dogs, cat, and vermin became increasingly violent. In Tucson and other desert cities, including capitals like Phoenix and Nevada, coyotes began attacking humans in droves. According to my father, wild dogs and other desert predators used to only mob a human if they were starving. Now, anything with teeth is a threat.

Greasy, matted fur brushes against my oozing foot. I don't even flinch. Contact infection from the vermin doesn’t concern me anymore. I know that my imprisonment will have one of three outcomes: death, madness and then death, or becoming one of the afflicted through a diseased rat bite.

Imagining myself as one of the afflicted brings my hands flying up to my mouth. My lips crack and bleed when I peel them back to check my teeth. Probing fingers discover my gums have receded even further from dehydration. I have fangs now. Lovely. If that were all I needed to become one of them, I'd be all set. Unfortunately, it isn't. My body shows the signs of the disease, but that's all. No super strength, no speed, nothing.

Another rat comes close, scrambling over my hand. My father once told me rats can sense danger. I doubt that, because they keep returning to my cell.

When the little beast begins nibbling on my motionless fingers, I snatch it up. It squeals and writhes, attempting to gnaw on my hand to force its release. Unfortunately for the creature, that kind of pain doesn’t faze me anymore. It's nothing compared to the burning in my legs.

I snap the rat's neck with a sharp twist and before I can force myself to think too much about it, I sink my teeth into its plump belly and bite down. My long teeth pierce the thin skin easily. Blood squirts into my mouth, and I suck.

There's no other way to survive in this place. The food the "doctors" offer isn’t enough. It is blood, or death. My time here has given me new sympathy for the afflicted. Is that the choice before them—blood or death? I can't see the evil in that, really.

Can't see the evil in that? Finally, you're speaking sense! The voice in my head is back.

After the beginning of my time in the darkness, when my voice was a breath of air in my ravaged throat, a man's voice began whispering to me, speaking to me. It only came when I didn’t speak. If I tried to talk to it aloud, the voice vanished and didn’t return for what felt like days.

It didn’t take long for me to realize I was hearing things, but in the silence of my prison, an imaginary voice was better than nothing. What took me longer to realize was who spoke to me.

The voice belonged to my twin brother, Rafael.

I know this to be impossible. My brother had been one of the first in our town to become afflicted, and my father had taken great pride in telling everyone that he wouldn’t hesitate to "stake any of the bloodsucking bastards and send them straight back to hell."

That included flesh and blood. Rafael, my father had explained to me then, had sold his soul to the Devil, and so Father rammed a stake through Rafael's heart without a qualm. I didn’t see it happen, but when drunk, my father would recount it in full, bloody detail. Apparently, blood spurted up from my brother's chest like a geyser, contaminating everything within fifteen feet of his corpse.

Why my father felt I needed to know this, I have no idea. With everything I've forgotten about my life before the darkness, I would love to forget that detail as well, but I can't. That staking happened before they reopened the institution. People talked about trying to find a cure. As if that would ever happen.

Trying to shake off the dregs of memory, I listen for the rats. Do they come? I think I hear them scurrying about again. When I kill one of their number, the pests hide for a time, but never for very long. They're stupid enough that I don't feel bad about feeding on them. They flock to me like moths to a flame, lambs frolicking to the slaughter.

You're finally thinking straight, Robin, my dead brother's voice whispers in my mind. The strong were born to prey on the weak, food is food, survival of the fittest, blah-blah. About time.

I want to say, "Shut up, Rafael," but if I say a word, the voice will disappear and I'll be alone. So I don't say anything. I just listen to the scurrying of vermin, and wait for another to come to me. I'm still hungry, and my belly is a pit of white-hot pain.

Close your eyes, Robin, Rafael's ghost says. Trust me on this.

Close my eyes? Why? This is the first time my voice has ever ordered me to do anything except eat. For a time in the past, I refused food, hoping death would come quicker. In the end, I gave in and ate.

Do it now. Close them.

I do. There is no difference in the blackness. Eyes open, eyes closed, it's still black as midnight in a cave in this prison.

A light flicks on.

Pain explodes in my eyes, ricocheting around in my skull like a thousand bullets. I cover my face with my hands, keening. The agony would've left me screaming, but I'm too weak.

Work through it, the voice tells me. It's still here? With all the noise I'm making? Your eyes will adjust in a moment. You have to be able to see.

After several moments curled into a ball, covering my eyes with my hands and the sleeves of my prison smock, the pain lessens. Fades. Vanishes completely. I can look around and see.

My prison door is open. A boy stands in the doorway holding a candle. That dim, flickering flame blinded me after so long in the pitch blackness of my prison cell.

Heart pounding, I slowly scan the boy from the toes up. He's barefoot, his fish-pale feet streaked with black grime from the corridor. His raggedy jeans, with words in black ink scrawled all over the denim, seem familiar. My heart jerks sideways in my chest when my eyes travel up the scrawny, fifteen-year-old chest and find the face I know so well.

"Rafael?"

"Hey, Robin."

He sets the candle down on the floor and steps inside. His eyes, so familiar despite the washed-out corpse gray color specific to the afflicted, take in what I haven’t seen until now: the rotting rat corpses littering the floor of my prison, the human filth that hasn’t been collected in weeks, the maggots that writhe and the flies buzzing around the five-by-five cell.

"Father said..." I trail off, unable to confess what our father had said about Rafael.  

"He lied."

"But you are..."

"Afflicted," he says without inflection, striding toward me. In two steps he's at my side, kneeling. "You are not."

"No," I whisper.

"Brace yourself," he says, so softly I barely hear him.

"What?" I croak.

He bares his teeth and sinks them into my neck. As his incisors rip into my throat, I scream. Darkness clouds my vision. My heart stutters in my chest. I can feel the disease burning its way through my veins. I'm afflicted now.

I don't know how Rafael got down here or how he's survived this long. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is, he's saved me. I'm either going to die or I'm going to be like him. Either way, no more darkness. No more feeding on rats and being tormented by nightmares only to wake up to pitch black. No more imprisonment, no more starvation, no more any of it. I'm free now.

As my blood drips down my neck and chest, soaking into my smock, I smile. My brother gulps my dehydration-thickened blood. Even though it hurts, I start to laugh.