The clank sounded out of place.
Alice Jenkins stopped pushing the laundry trolley and lifted her head. She tossed her long reddish-blonde hair out of her face.
‘Hey, who’s there?’
She was answered only by the repetitive groaning of the huge industrial washing machines and dryers which lined both sides of the prison laundry.
She peered uncertainly into the shadows beyond the giant wire racks, which held folded piles of freshly laundered bedding and towels. Down here in the basement there were no windows and the overhead strip lighting flickered with a sickly insipid yellow which failed to illuminate the room properly.
Alice had only started her job in the laundry two days before. Normally there were other inmates working in here, but this afternoon she was all alone. That was because she’d volunteered to do some overtime, explaining to the laundry supervisor that she wanted to earn a little extra cash for her canteen account.
She hadn’t been in prison for very long. Just a few weeks. She’d been sent down for benefit fraud. Not a major crime but enough to land her inside for a year and three months. But she seemed to be getting the hang of things. Like managing to get this job in the laundry.
There was still plenty of stuff that she was unfamiliar with though, so she wasn’t totally relaxed by any means. In fact, she’d found that this place could suddenly put you on edge when you were least expecting it. Like now for example.
She glanced around nervously.
‘Hey stop messing about!’ she said.
Maybe some of the other inmates – her laundry colleagues – were playing a practical joke on her. She hoped so. Because if it wasn’t them then maybe it was one of the dangerous-looking cliques she’d seen around the prison. Maybe they’d taken a dislike to her for some reason. Maybe they had it in for her.
‘Haha. Try and creep up on Ally. Yeah that’s hilarious. You can come out now.’
She tried to sound breezy but her nerves betrayed her, her voice instead coming out reedy and uneven.
There was no answer. Just the incessant rumbling of the machinery.
Her knuckles turned white as she tightened her grip on the handle of the trolley and squinted into the dim recesses of the cavernous laundry. A burst of excess steam hissed from a nearby pipe. She jumped and gasped, her heart thumping in her chest.
Her mind raced to think what had made the clanking sound. It might be a rat. The prison did have a rodent problem. Or maybe she was just spooking herself out unnecessarily.
‘You silly girl,’ she muttered, shaking her head and pulling herself upright.
She recommenced pushing the trolley, awkwardly manoeuvring its bulky weight towards one of the empty washing machines at the end of the room.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a shadow pass behind one of the sheets that were hanging up, waiting to be folded and placed on the wire racks.
She let go of the trolley and spun around to look. Was there someone there? She could have sworn she was the only one in here.
No. It was surely just a ripple in the material caused by convection in the warm air currents generated by the dryers. She turned back to the trolley, taking hold of the handle once again.
But then in the darkness beyond the racking, just behind the dryers, something caught her eye.
A brief sparkle.
A shiny surface which captured the few photons bouncing around behind the stacks of machinery and reflected them back to her…
She stopped again, momentarily entranced by it as it twinkled in the shadows like a lone star aglow in the distant black depths of deep space. For a brief moment she forgot her apprehension as she tried to make sense of it floating there in the shadows like the needle of a compass… turning… pointing in her direction…
Then a depth charge of cold fear detonated in her gut as she realised what it was.
Long…
Thin…
Sharp…
A blade.
A shank.
Her heart began to hammer inside her chest. Her hands fell away from the handle of the trolley.
‘Oh fuck,’ she whispered.
They’d come to kill her.
They’d decided to come for her when she was all alone. She cursed her stupidity for making the mistake of being down here by herself.
Somewhere along the line she’d messed up and now she was going to pay for it with her life.
She felt a heavy nausea rise up inside her, the fear of impending death.
Slowly, she edged backwards around the trolley to put it between herself and whoever was behind the dryers. She again squinted to try and see more.
In the shadows, silence. A flicker of movement in the darkness. A shadow within a shadow. It was big. It was no rat. That was for sure. It was a person.
She gulped. Her mouth was dry. She glanced towards the doorway. It was at the far end of the laundry. That distant metal door had never looked more appealing. Nor had it ever seemed further away. She glanced back at the row of dryers.
Tensing, she took a deep breath… and bolted.
She sprinted through the laundry, heading towards the exit… weaving through the laundry bins… running away from whatever it was in the shadows… running away from the glitter of razor-sharp steel.
She ran faster than she had ever run in her life. As if something had taken her over. As if there was an animal inside her.
Her breath tore in her throat. Adrenaline coursed through her body. Her trainers hammered on the concrete floor, the slap of her footfalls echoing through the big room.
She ran and ran. The doorway getting closer. Her portal of freedom. If only she could get there. So close now. She panted. Her lungs working overtime to power her flight.
And then a laundry bin spun out in front of her and she tripped over it, crashing onto the floor amidst a cascade of dirty linen.
‘Oh god!’ she gasped. Her eyes filled with tears, blurring her vision.
She tried to scramble to her feet, but she got tangled in the sheets, the white material having wrapped itself around her ankles with an almost malevolent will of its own.
As she reached down to extract herself from the fatal web of dirty linen, she felt a hand grip her hair roughly from behind. The strands twisting into the fingers, winding tight like a winch.
With a sharp yank, her head was pulled back. She gasped in pain as she felt the roots ripping out. Literally one by one. Pop. Pop. Pop. Out of her scalp.
She tried in vain to twist her head to see her attacker but she couldn’t, so tight was the grip. All she could see were her own hands clambering uselessly in the empty space in front of her.
‘Oh god!’ she choked. ‘Please don’t hurt me!’
But her words fell away unheard. Through tear-blurred vision she caught the flashing arc of the blade clutched in a black leather glove as it swooped down from above and sliced into the front of her scalp.
She screeched in agony as the cold steel carved the flesh away from her skull. The searing pain was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. A deluge of hot blood coursed down from the wound, transforming her face into a crimson liquid mask locked in a scream of terror.
With an audible rip, her partially severed scalp was savagely torn away from her head. Blinded by the blood in her eyes and paralysed by the shock of the assault, she was in no state to do anything about the knife as it came round again, this time to cut her throat.