| |
Like I said, it’s almost impossible to hear anything outside these doors, telling me whoever is doing the screaming has one hell of a set of lungs on him. Both Blood and I jump out of our bunks and approach the narrow window. I go low and he, being much taller, goes high. What we see takes our breath away. And trust me when I say, Blood and I don’t scare so easily.
“I guess this answers the question of whether or not that thing has pulled an Elvis and left the building, Blood,” I say.
“What we witnessing,” he says, “is truly FUBAR.”
“Fucked up beyond all recognition,” I say.
Outside the guard shack, yet another guard is being consumed on the spot. The max gator is chomping on his legs and about to eat his mid-section. The victim is still very much alive, blood flowing not only from his lower extremities, but from his mouth and nostrils. He’s issuing a high-pitched scream that doesn’t rattle my bones so much as breaks my heart.
I feel my blood racing through my veins and my temples throbbing.
“Why the hell don’t they shoot the beast?” I say.
As if on cue, two of the guards standing nearby, shoulder their AR-15s, take aim and fire. But the bullets have no effect on the creature. In fact, the bullets don’t seem to penetrate the hard reptilian skin at all. I might be a Yankee, but this much I do know about south-of-border gators and crocs. Bullets will kill them when they are hunted down.
“Rubber bullets,” Blood says. “Those guards aren’t armed like we thought they were. They only got rubber bullets.”
“Makes sense,” I say. “It’s only a matter of time until a crazy inmate jumps one of those guards and steals his weapons. And every inmate inside this joint is certifiable cray-cray...’Cept you and me of course.”
“All the inmates are crazy killing bastards with no regard for human life, Steele,” Blood adds.
“Just like the gator,” I say.
“The gator just doin’ what come natural,” he says.
The useless rifles are dropped to the floor while the two guards grab their stun guns from off their utility belts. The guard on the right aims the pistol-like stun gun at the beast’s head and presses the trigger. The wire that shoots out the barrel of the yellow stun gun connects with the gator’s head, but the effect is like peeing in the ocean.
He gazes at his partner and mouths something that I interpret as “It doesn’t work.”
That’s when the second guard pulls a taser off his belt. I’m not sure if he’s nuts or not, but he makes his way to the feeding beast and presses the taser against its snout. You can see the electrical impulses discharged into the beast. But it doesn’t slow the giant gator down one bit. It just pisses it off all the more. The gator stops feeding on the now-dead inmate and quickly bites the hand off the guard who was doing the tasing. He screams and backsteps toward the guard shack, blood spurting out of his wound like water from a hose.
Arty shows himself then and demands that the one guard left standing, “Get the hell away from that thing.”
Blood and I can make out Arty’s panicked, high-pitched voice from all the way up here. The guard sprints for the guard shack.
“Guess you don’t have to tell him twice,” Blood comments.
The gator calmly resumes eating the rest of the guard, head and all. The beast belches when it’s done. It then looks slowly over both shoulders, while a combination of dark-red blood oozes from his many fangs onto the gray concrete floor. It’s clear it’s trying to decide what variety of human being it wants to consume next.
When it begins to head directly for one of the cells located on The Oven’s first level, I know precisely what the max gator is craving. A Black inmate by the name of Reginald.