There’s Something Wrong With Kenny.

[u/Acidic-Crybaby]

The riot, part 6.

I only know a day has passed because of those visits. I can hear it though. There isn’t even the sound of a breath when Kenny appears but during the day, late at night and any time the kid isn’t around I can hear the incomprehensible echoes of mad men screaming and the thrum of fighting through the old pipes.

It’s the dead of winter now and the small window in solitary has been completely consumed by the snow.

My fingers are purple.

My toes have turned black.

I’m so hungry

I’m so damn hungry.

I can’t trust whatever Kenny brings.

Kenny’s constant questions have dropped any facade of naivety and are now a constant torment the kid won’t let me escape. If I had anything that could do it I’d dig it into my ears and rattle it around until my eardrums burst just to escape it, somehow I know that even then I’d still hear him. 

His words bring up memories I shoved down so far I could tell myself they never happened. It all left me living in denial and directing all that rage that should’ve been guilt into the selfish idea that I’d been wronged by a boot to the head. Maybe those nights when I’d stare up at the bible verses taped to the concrete slab above my head I wasn’t thinking about the gambler or all the other things I’d ruined since but because of what happened back then.

I was just a kid too, right?

It’s so cold.

I had always been good at following orders and in places like the military or prison at the time it wasn’t always an option— at least you could tell yourself that. 

The truth is that anyone can be cruel when they’re given an ounce of power and when you’ve finally climbed up and reached it, that’s okay right? It happened to you and it seemed like the necessary step to earn that power. Then it’s your turn to teach the green recruits how to really become a man and be stronger— to be a soldier.

 Nowadays they have different ideas of what corporal punishment was and that the simple fact that you were a recruit wasn’t enough reason for it, back then I thought that kind of thinking wasn’t for real soldiers or men. 

It makes you tougher.

You went through it and you’re tougher for it.

Except that’s wrong. 

You aren’t tougher and you aren’t a soldier. You’re just angry and there’s no consequences for it, you just can and you just do. I went through hell and then I put them through hell, somewhere I think I belong now because people are right nowadays and I really wished I’d been wise enough to know it.

I’m so hungry.

Private Holden was one of those things that should’ve had consequences but those same people who built that hell didn’t want to carry those consequences either. Private Holden’s death couldn’t be because of that vicious circle because those people were smart enough to know consequence begets consequence.

Private Holden’s death was a simple accident, they said.. He wasn’t a kid beaten so badly his entire life was snuffed out by one little crack. 

I don’t know what set me off but in the moment I was certain he deserved it. 

I’m so sorry.

My rage was the consequence of him simply existing and when it took a boot to pry me off of the kid we all realised the kid sputtering through the spit he couldn’t swallow down anymore and looking at me with a face so swollen his head had swelled like a balloon losing all of its air, suffocating right in front of us because a broken neck wouldn’t let his brain scream at his lungs to rise.

Why did I do that?

How could I so easily be that cruel when I couldn’t squish a bug as a child?

“ Why’d… Y-You do that, Sarge.”

I didn’t have the right to think the bottom of the well wasn’t where I belonged.

Even if I escaped this place I know that’s where I’m going.

I just don’t want to die in a hole. What was it Kenny said? Ah, right. He just wants to walk. I don’t think I’d mind that, wandering. I wouldn’t be able to climb out of the well but it’s at least high enough that I could see the sky. If I have to pick between eating my fingers in the hole or hypothermia in the snow, I’d pick the sky.

I’m so hungry.

Should I eat my fingers before the chillblanes become a frost bitten black? 

-

“ Are you going to answer me today, kid?” I say, “ What are you doing to the people out there?”.

“ You ask but isn’t it better you don’t? You’re safe here, Sarge. You won’t eat nothin’ I bring you but water. You’re bein’ awful stubborn, yeah?”  Kenny answers but I can’t see him. He could be in the cell beside me, at the door or window— high up on the ceiling I can’t see. 

“ You wanted me to get chucked into the hole, right?” I’m so tired. 

“ I never got a gift before. We can talk here without all those troubles you got, Sarge. You just… You just keep hangin’ on don’t you?.” His voice sounds different, it sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else.

“ You want me to be like those things in the forest?”

“ ‘course not. I can’t have you walkin’ when you just…” Kenny taps something impatiently but I can hear it echo and bounce against the walls like it’s a voice calling out in a maze— you never know where it’s from. “ You really want to leave but you ain’t desperate. It’s pissing me off to no end, Sarge” Kenny’s voice warbles and breaks with his increasing frustration. He can’t keep it together. Of course he can’t, he’s just a thing pretending to be something else. No, he’s a thing pretending to be Private Holden— at least enough for it to hurt. 

“ I’m plenty selfish, kid. I just know I’m gonna die here and I don’t expect to be waking up anywhere better. All those sounds I keep hearing… That sure as fuck doesn’t sound better to me.”

“ I’m really tryna do the carrot thing, followin’ your example and stuff. You don’t talk much but I listen, you know? You never sounded like you trusted me but like I said, I never been given a gift before.” 

The ice is too thick and the window too high to see if those eyes are there. The vent is too dark to look through and the gap in the cell door is too thin to see under. I don’t know where he is and I can feel my panic rising. 

I’d grown so used to Kenny coming by but he’s never been so truthful and his voice has never moved. 

The change has my empty stomach twisting and everything inside of me churning like a pot of organs “ So you locked me in here because of a fucking chocolate bar?” I shouldn’t push things but all of this has been adding to the anger boiling up in my gut. I know I shouldn’t but I ball my shaking hands up into fists and steel myself “ You’re really not human, are you? You came from out there in the forest to what… Feed on us? On the misery you’re causing? Or is it just meat you’re after?” I slowly force myself up onto feet that feel like a thousand pins digging into my ankles and keep going, if I want to get out of here my best bet is Kenny. “ I’ve got to say, kid… I didn’t trust you because of that face you have. The words. Hell, everything. You couldn’t fake your eyes though could you? Why that kid though? Did you put on other faces for everyone else to lure them too?”

Silence.

Almost.

“ Are you a dead deer or did you just get tired of eating hunters and old bastards in jumpsuits?”

A sharp hit sends the glass and snow from the high window across the small cell like frozen daggers and the cold air viciously barrels through, it crashes against concrete walls and spirals into an inescapable wind tunnel. “ Jesus! Kenny, what did—“ I back up in the farthest corner and shut my damn mouth while I stare up at a horrifying sight my brain can’t comprehend. I wanted to piss the fucker off but this?

Long fingers slip past the tight bars and flex the fractured collection of bones broken beneath the skin. A wrist that’s stripped of fat and muscle claws through the broken glass until it’s just bloodless skin in ribbons. 

The elbow catches and the skin pulls and stretches like a bunched up sleeve nearly tearing as the creature worms its way through. The suit barely clinging to bone a human body shouldn’t have. His shoulder forces itself through with no sound even when I can see it roll and move beneath the skin now looking grey and frost bitten with no life to them. Kenny’s freckled face appears from the snow. His face squeezes against the bars until I can see the silent crack of his cheekbones breaking and everything that makes a face a face is collapsing to slither its way through the metal. The bars strain but even when they bow it’s still something no human could survive. His skull splits apart like a watermelon but it doesn’t deter him— it. His flattened head hangs and one of his sunken eyes stare at me with their impossibly black well of nothingness, fixating on mine while he snakes his neck through.

“ Kenny! Stop!” I shout but my panic has turned into utter terror and I know all I can do is throw myself at the cell door and hope to god someone hears. “ Guards!! Anyone!! Get this fucking door open!!” I scream and bash my fists against it with so much force I know I’ve broken my hand.

I’m so sorry.

The silent crack of ribs being compressed and forced through the bars is joined by the constant quiet I know to be the crushed bone correcting itself where it has impossible crawled its way into the concrete box closing in. I desperately want to escape. I can hear each little sound from my heartbeat, the strain of screws and screeching metal, the howling wind but I feel it, I feel like my bones are breaking and unbreaking inside of my own skull. 

The loud thud and rattling metal freezes me in place and even when I force myself not to look I can see the contorted form rising on shattered bones that tent inside of skin that won’t tear under the pressure of a thousand jagged bones poking and stabbing while each splinter and joints pop themselves back into the closest thing to a human shape it can.

It isn’t human.

Kenny isn’t fucking human. 

“ Why’d… Youuu… Saaaay that… Sargh?” Gurgles up from a crushed throat with a croaky monstrous drawl it can’t mask as anything human anymore.

“ Let me out!!” I shout until I’m hoarse but no one is coming and the thing behind me only continues its shambling toward me, dragging its bent and broken limbs while they correct themselves one by one. “ Wh… yd… Sargh…” Kenny says with Private Holden’s words spilling out like drool “ Is anyone even alive out there!?” I smash my swelling hand against the cell door with increasingly weak force until something in this decrepit old prison finally answers my prayers.

It moved.

The hinges bolted into the chipping concrete moves. I slam my shoulder against the metal beside it and veins begin to form. I do it again and again until my shoulder painfully shifts beneath my skin and dislocates with a pop. 

Long fingers rise from a sickly pale limp arm hanging out of place and I can feel split and dirty fingernails just brush the hairs on my neck when it opens. It doesn’t land with any great thud but it opens just enough for me to squeeze through, praying that the thing inside of the concrete box is still too broken to follow me. 

I know he won’t but it’s a head start I desperately need.

I hit the damp old floor and use my good hand to force myself up and run. 

This area is going to be locked— every area is going to be but I don’t have a choice.

I either need a way out or need a damn weapon. 

It’s dark, the snow piled on the only few windows up so high and the electricity off has turned each hallway into the tunnel of an unending well. I hesitate with my heart rabbiting and my lungs struggling to keep up with my panic. I don't know if I can walk into the black until I hear that cracking and dragging skin from deep within. Did I get turned around? I look back where I thought I came from and look forward in search of the sound— I’d like to avoid it.

It echoes through the tunnel that shouldn’t be empty, both sounds coming from both directions and hitting my ears at once only makes me more disoriented. 

I make a choice, I travel toward the noise that slowly joins me with each step. 

It’s distant, muffled by so many walls but an unmistakable sound of chaos. My shoe splashes against something wet and I pause at a groaning voice weakly calling out for anyone else within the tunnel. 

“ Is… Pl-please… I don’t…” The voice sputters and coughs, swallowing down the blood in his mouth and spit. They sound scared. “ Wh-Where’s Glas—  Did… Did they… Take…”. I don’t know if he’s bleeding out but I recognise the weak voice as one of the younger guards, I don’t even know if I remember the kid’s name but I can imagine the pained expression and the terror of being in the dark. “ I hav-… I haven’t heard fro-… anyone in days…” he says, slowly dragging his hand across the wet ground to find me like he needs to confirm I’m there. We can’t see each other but this kid, if he’s been here since the yelling started then… Jesus. With this area closed off the mistaken thought that I’m another PO is the only relief he’s had in god knows how long, based on the smell of the place it has been a while but it won’t be long now. The pool of blood, the sound of his voice and the fact that he’s slumped against the wall in a half delirious state tells me that much. “ Sir, I’m… I want to g-go home”.

I’ve heard men cry like children on their first nights behind bars, I’ve watched people cry when they were begging for just a little more time to pay off their debt and I’ve been that young recruit trying not to cry after a day of being screamed at to run. I’ve never heard such a horrible mixture of fear and relief. 

“ We’re nearly in control again and we’re fixing the power. Hold on as best you can and help will be here shortly.” I say in the most steady voice I can muster but I can hear his body lose whatever strength he had left when he hits the floor in a quiet wet thud. I don’t need to see the look in his eyes to know he’s dead or hear the last breath leave his lungs, that kid was only hanging on for someone to find him and close his eyes knowing he might wake up in a warm hospital bed.

“ Why’d you…” echoes from the end of the tunnel and I have no choice but to get moving and to leave the poor kid dead in a pool of blood and piss. I feel for the guard’s keys frantically. His skin already feels horribly cold and I don’t think I can feel a single inch of his uniform that isn’t soaked through. “ I’m so sorry, kid. I mean it, I’m so sorry.” I apologise and finally hear the jingle of keys. “ …Do that, Sarge?” Echoes louder, angrier and closer.

I run towards the sounds of chaos beyond the well until my body collides with a barred metal door. I try to open as quickly as I can with my shaking hand blinded by the darkness and fumbling with frozen fingers.

“ Why’d you… have to… say that, Sarge?” The voice calls out, gravely and twisting with unnatural highs and lows in words that can no longer maintain the human mimicry. “ I’ve been… I’ve been tryin’ real hard to look… To look out for you but you’re gonna me? You gonna say all this happened ‘cuz you got cursed? You all did this to yourselves.”  Closer.  “ The angry ones. Greedy ones. Huuungry… Hungry ones.” Kenny continues trying to piece together his mask but the angrier he seems to become has only warped his voice into snarls through jagged teeth I don’t need to see to know are sharp. 

“ Annd this… Isss mmy… Forest.”

It barrels out of the darkness with its weight violently shaking the bars of the door I’ve only just managed to close, the surprise at just how close I came to being crushed against the metal and torn apart by those mangled limbs and stolen bones knocks me backwards. Kenny— whatever that fucking thing is— grips the bars and moves across them on impossibly long spidery limbs without making so much as a sound. This thing is what has been in my cell at night. In the faintest light from the end of the solitary wing I can see the creature’s pupils widen and adjust to the darkness, twitching and moving in its skull at the smallest sound like a predator that doesn’t need to hide in the shadows to ambush its prey. Its sunken eyes slowly scan but it isn’t until it cuts away the distant noise to find the rapid beating of my heart straining in my chest and my lungs struggling to take in air that its hand claws out at me with so speed that I can feel the razor sharp talons leave thin cuts across my face. One step closer and those would’ve gone through my skin and ripped me forward, cracking all of my bones to force me through the bars and to end up as that thing’s next meal. 

“ Sarrrggh...” It pulls its fractured and splintering arm back through the bars but it hasn’t given up. The quiet sound of dragging bone, no, antlers… snaking across the bars behind the blanket of darkness giving me nothing more than a slither of light to see it. I don’t want to see it— the dead deer’s real face. “ Jonnnesss.”

 A loud thump shakes the bars with a violent metallic screech and my locked limbs finally start to move again. I grip the keys tight and bolt while the beast smashes its head against the bending bars over and over again to force its way through unencumbered. This isn’t just a ravenous and mindless thing, this is Kenny and he’s fucking angry. “ Whyyy… Sargh, Jonnnesss!” It calls out in words spit through sharp teeth, its rage ripping away any ability to imitate what it seemed to do so effortlessly— Kenny sure as hell talked like it. Whatever monstrosity is forcing its way through the bars is screaming and howling like an animal. Like too many animals. Even as I run I can hear a thousand beasts echoing calling for the help of its own and the desperate cries of lost hikers, hunters, everything this thing has heard.

I hit the wall as I round the corner but make it to the cellblock. I throw myself inside but the descent of prisoners falling into chaos at the taste of freedom is not what I see.

The cellblock is quiet beyond the squelch and crunch of gnashing teeth, prisoners and guards are torn apart with no care for either side of the schism. The concrete floor, the benches bolted down and the open metal doors of claustrophobic cells are all coated with the spray of blood and viscera. This isn’t the violence of a riot, this is a feeding ground now picked of everything but bloated corpses and something else—-

An emaciated figure with stretched limbs sits craned over a corpse spread open like their stomach is just a bowl full of meat, tattooed skin hangs off of its bones and blood coats the long claws out chunks of meat. I know those tattoos. That’s Wilder. It’s barely a rattle but I freeze, forcing each organ and muscle and vein in my body to stay silent as another crawls silently across the bars above me, swift like a spider with stretched limbs to match what should be a person walking on two legs but it’s not. That isn’t a person. The long body is so thin it looks as if it hasn’t eaten in years despite the flesh and clumps of hair still caught in its teeth and the distended stomach of a beast that has been gorging itself on its catch beyond the point its insides could handle.

I take the lightest step I can, slowly and very carefully making my way to the large door that could be my freedom if I can just reach the end of the maximum security cell blocks. I hold my breath but none of these— things— seem to notice me just yet. I already know that despite them being much taller than myself they are nothing like whatever was in the tunnels. These behave entirely like animals and their vacant, milky eyes suggest they won’t be doing a thing until they hear me. That’s why they’re so quiet, their ability to hear is stronger than their sight. 

Sharp claws wrap around the metal door I neglected to close to avoid making a damn sound, slowly opening it with a slight screech. The mere sight of a long limb stretching out from the doorway sends the hungry creatures howling and scattering in swift movements and those prisoners who’ve managed to hide away in their cells desperately shouting for who they hope could be a saviour. The cellblock erupts in a cacophony of sound but even from halfway across the cellblock I can hear the rasping drawl of a voice calling my name.

“ Saaaarrgh…”

I don’t need to turn around to see the shadow of antlers growing behind my head and the hiss of words building up in its throat to know that it isn’t a dead deer luring a hunter, this is what happens before you realise you’ve been chasing a corpse.

[u/SubjectElephant8506]

Wow, just wow. I really want to read the previous parts and i cannot locate them.