Animal: A Prisoned Spinoff Standalone Read online

  That seemed to work because his hands moved to the bars, his face pushed into them, and he screamed. It was high-pitched. Piercing. Frantic.

  Everything I wanted.

  Everything I needed.

  It made me close my eyes and remember the first time I’d heard that noise.

  In a haze of Ambien and Valium, I found myself wandering the cell block. It made no sense to stay in my room. I’d only slept three hours, and I knew I wouldn’t sleep any more than that. The drugs didn’t work that well. But at least they worked. I couldn’t say that about anything else, not the weed I smoked or the vodka I drank. Just the pills, and I took a shit-ton of them.

  It hadn’t always been this way.

  Life had been good for a long time.

  When that had changed, I’d started taking meds.

  I hurt.

  I stung.

  I wanted to torture and kill—but for a whole different reason than before.

  Everything had lost its brightness. Nothing had any real color. No heat, especially no heart. Food didn’t taste all that good, everything smelled like shit, and the only time I liked to be touched was when a chick’s lips were at the end of my cock. No fucking, just head—and even that was too much sometimes.

  My hearing was the only thing that had gotten better. It was so sensitive now, it was like megaphones were pointed at my ears.

  It seemed like I was constantly searching for a sound. I didn’t know why. I just knew I couldn’t find the right one.

  In the cell block, there were all kinds of noises—things hitting the metal bars and cement, puke pouring into the toilet, inmates pissing on the walls.

  But, as I walked around down here, there was one sound making its way through the cloud over my brain. My feet were dragging me toward it. The noise was from a girl who was inside her cell. She wasn’t crying out the names of the people she loved or her last wishes. She was screaming, like she was fighting for something.

  Like the sound coming out of her mouth would change her sentence.

  Like it would save her.

  I fell to my knees halfway to her door. It felt like millions of electrical currents were sparking through my body. Since my legs no longer wanted to work, I crawled across the concrete, and when I reached her cell, I turned around and leaned my back against it.

  I breathed.

  I listened.

  And I breathed again.

  It was the most perfect fucking sound I had ever heard.

  It filled me.

  It made me feel.

  It made me want to dig my way out of this haze. That was more than I’d wanted to do in a long time. Because, for a while, I hadn’t been living. I hadn’t even been breathing. I’d just been existing in this prison.

  Scream for me.

  As if she had heard me, her voice got louder. It made me feel even more. It made the numbness start to lift, and suddenly, there was tingling inside my limbs, and I knew I’d be able to walk if I tried.

  Scream for me.

  But I didn’t try. I didn’t want to move. I just wanted to hear her sounds and never leave again unless I absolutely had to. I wanted to bury myself under her music and let those screams of desperation tuck me in.

  Eventually, she lost her voice and turned silent.

  I pulled myself up off the floor and went back to my room. When I lay on my bed and closed my eyes, I slept for two days. I didn’t dream. I didn’t wake up every few hours, thrashing in bed, tossing off the covers, throwing more Ambien down my throat.

  I slept soundlessly.

  And I never had to take another pill again.

  I clung to the screams for a few more seconds, letting the noise fill my body, like it was liquid. Then, I walked toward the office where I hoped I would find the guys. The side of the prison I was headed to was called The Eyes. It was where the guards—Shank, Diego, and I—hung out and where the sweepers, our helpers, would come ask for orders. They did the cleaning, burying, and dumping—all the bitch work.

  I pressed the six digits into the pad outside the office door and waited for it to open.

  “Good to have you back, brother,” Diego said. He got up from the main desk and slapped my shoulder as he hugged me.

  “It’s good to be home.”

  Wasn’t that the goddamn truth? I’d missed the screams more than anything.

  “Did you get some good pussy while you were away?”

  Several yards of rope were wound between Diego’s hand and bicep, which told me he was getting ready to go to one of the cells and that the prisoner was a chick. As soon as he got his hands on her, he’d tie that rope around each tit, weave it down the center to her navel, through the lips of her pussy, and back where it met before it looped around her tits. That was his signature knot.

  “So much fucking head,” I said. My hand dropped to my balls, shifting them around.

  “That’s my man,” Shank said, standing from the other side of the desk. He used the hand that wasn’t holding Demon—his pet rat he took every goddamn place he went—and pounded the fingers that hadn’t been on my balls. “One chick or…”

  “Two,” I said.

  “Pay up, motherfucker,” Shank said to Diego.

  Diego reached into his pocket and slapped a hundred onto Shank’s palm. “I thought you’d settle on one girl. Shank guessed two.”

  “I’m almost offended that neither of you assholes picked three.”

  “It was your first trip back,” Diego said. “Next time, I’m going with four.”

  “Five,” Shank said.

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “Jesus, I hope I don’t have to go through that many to find one who can really suck.”

  “You’ll be all right,” Shank said. “I’m sure your dick can handle the practice.”

  Damn, it felt good to be back with my boys.

  I’d known Diego for at least fifteen years. We’d gone to high school together and grown up in the same neighborhood. Shank had been my best friend since I was nine. We were practically brothers and had lived together for more than half my life. When my mother had taken off, leaving a twelve-year-old to fend for himself, Shank’s father, Bond, had taken me in. I’d lived at their place until I graduated high school.

  “When do you head back to the States?” I asked Diego.

  Time off rotated between the three of us, and the amount depended on the number of inmates. When we had more than a few days off in a row, the two of them would usually go stateside. I’d stick around Margarita Island, the island where we’d built the prison, which was just off the coast of Caracas. This last trip to Miami was the first time I’d been back in a while.

  “Next week,” Diego said. “Going hunting for a little bit, and then I’ll be fucking at the beach for a longer bit.”

  “You’re not going to fuck while you hunt?” I asked.

  “He’s got a hell of a point,” Shank said. “You were in the cabin upstate when you blew that girl’s ass out. The one who would only do anal because of some religious bullshit.”

  “That happened after hunting,” Diego said. “I remember because I was covered in rabbit blood, and I made her put on the pelt.”

  “He’s into fur now,” Shank said to me.

  We kept a tab—nothing written down, just a mental list of all of Diego’s fetishes. This was Shank’s way of adding a new one to the list.

  “God, I miss that girl,” Diego said. “She had an ass as tight as a keyhole.”

  I knew they were laughing at the same thing I was, and that was how normal this conversation was for us. We weren’t right in the head. You couldn’t be in the type of business we were in. But we all had different reasons for being at the prison, for doing what we did. Some people consumed a shitload of drugs, and some liked to fuck out their anger.

  We killed.

  And we got paid a ton of money to do it.

  “I gotta get back to work,” Diego said, smiling as he looked at the rope, the door closing behind him.r />
  I took a seat at the desk and pulled up the footage from the individual cells. Diego wasn’t just a rope master. He was also techie and good at welding. He’d built cameras into the bars of each cell and microphones into the ledges of the windows.

  We saw everything. We heard everything.

  And whatever information we collected, we would report back to the client.

  It’d all started ten years ago when we saw a need for a service like this, and we’d built the prison to satisfy a growing list of buyers. Each customer had certain information they were seeking from the inmate. Sometimes, they’d request a specific punishment. Other times, they’d leave it up to us. But, from the day we’d opened, we’d had more than a steady stream of business.

  “Who’s the new one?” I asked Shank, pointing to the far left screen, which showed a guy, stripped naked, curled up in the corner by the toilet.

  He must have been dipped in one of the chemical baths and dragged through the glass and dirt pile because he was covered in dark brown filth.

  “He’s someone Dad hired us to kill.”

  “What did this one do?” I asked.

  “He wanted a higher cut of the south shop,” Shank said, scratching his arm, leaving long red marks on his skin.

  I knew he didn’t feel the scratches or the droplets of blood that pooled under his nails. Shank hardly felt anything.

  “I’m guessing that means he threatened to rat out Bond if he didn’t get an extra point on the sales?”

  Shank nodded.

  “Fucking idiot.” I zoomed in to check out everything Shank and Diego had done to him.

  He had slashes across his back. Deep ones. They were on his shoulders and arms and went all the way down his legs. His feet had been mauled to hell, too.

  “How long has he been in?” I asked.

  “Two days.”

  “What’d you use on him?”

  “The blades and the babies.”

  The babies were the rest of Shank’s rat collection, the ones he didn’t treat as pets and take everywhere. He’d use those fuckers on the inmates, letting them feed on their skin and muscle, whatever they were able to reach and gnaw.

  “The dude hasn’t said a word,” Shank continued. “Dad thought he might be working with someone else, but if he were, he would have caved and told me by now.”

  I increased the size of the screen to see if I had missed anything. Shit, it turned out I had. “You hacked off only two of his toes?”

  “Check this out.” He pointed at his monitor, so I wheeled my chair closer to his side of the desk and looked at the live feed of The Pit. “There they are.”

  The Pit was where we kept the body parts before they went into the incinerator. His toes were sitting in the middle.

  “Is that his hand?” I asked.

  A nipple was also in there, but it was too large for it to be his.

  “Yep.”

  “Diego sawed it off with the ax?”

  “That was all me. I’ve been trying to improve my aim when I swing that fucking thing. I usually land it in the forearm, right by the elbow, but I’m getting better. I only caught a little bit of the wrist this time.”

  “And his toes?”

  “The babies. Those motherfuckers were huuungry.”

  I laughed so hard, I almost fell out of the chair.

  Those goddamn babies. I didn’t know how many there were. Shank had started with one a few years ago, and there were at least a hundred now. They had their own room, and their long nails were always scratching on the door.

  “For real, did you have a good time on your break?” He pushed his chair away from the desk and turned toward me.

  “It felt weird to be back stateside ’cause it’s been so long, but, yeah, it was all right.”

  “When Diego returns from hunting or beaching or whatever the fuck he’s doing, I want you to go back to Miami.”

  “Nah—”

  “Don’t fight me on this, Beard. I cut your week short because we’re at capacity here. That’s not fair to you.”

  “You’re not my boss.”

  Shank and I had opened the prison together and taken Diego on after we were already up and running. Shank and I were equal partners; we made every decision together. He had no right to tell me to go back to Miami, and I didn’t have to listen to him.

  “No, but I’m your best friend. I’m telling you to take the few days. You need it.” He pounded his fist on my shoulder and left the office.

  I knew his order was coming from a good place, but he knew how I felt about going back there and why I liked it here more.

  Maybe that just meant I needed to find some screaming in Miami.

  I tapped a few buttons on the keyboard, and the screen split, showing all twelve cells. The inmates were quiet—some because the drugs we’d used to transport them were still in their systems, some because the torturing had caused them to pass out, and some because they’d screamed so much, they lost their voices and couldn’t yell anymore.

  With nothing to listen to, I took one of the tablets out of the drawer, making sure the volume was on and that the screen showed each cell, and I went into the kitchen. Diego fucked a townie who owned a restaurant, and she would give him bags of food every day. It was only for us, not the inmates. No one in this town knew about the operation we were running here.

  I grabbed two of the meat empanadas she had made and headed for our apartment.

  The three of us lived on the main two floors of the house, the prison beneath us in the basement. When Shank and I had renovated the place, we’d flown in all the furniture and electronics. This wasn’t just a crashing pad. We spent almost all our time here, so we wanted it to feel like home.

  It did.

  I was more comfortable here than anywhere else.

  Our bedrooms weren’t large, but each of us had our own bathroom, and we shared a kitchen and living room. We’d never even talked about getting our own places. There was no reason to since there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do in front of these guys. With the kind of lives we lived, we didn’t let that petty roommate bullshit affect us.

  We just lived, we had fun, and we killed.

  Once I got inside my room, I kicked off my boots and crashed on my bed. My phone was in my back pocket, pushing against my ass. I took it out and held it in my hand.

  Layla had said she would need a few days to get some things together. If I gave her even more time, I wondered if her list would be better. I opened the text screen and started typing.

  Me: I’ll be back in two weeks. Get it set up.

  Just as I was about to drop my phone onto the bed, it dinged.

  Layla: I’ll be ready for you. Looking forward to seeing you again, Beard.

  It’d only taken her seconds to reply.

  I liked her already.

  Tyler

  Six Years Ago

  I sat in my bed, tucked underneath my scratchy wool blanket that had been my older brother’s before I went to college. My sheets had been on my younger brother’s bed. They had dinosaurs on them.

  Fucking dinosaurs.

  When I’d told my mom that a freshman in college, who was going to be living in a dorm, couldn’t have dinosaurs on her sheets, she’d told me I was lucky she had a spare set to give me.

  Growing up in our house, we never had a spare of anything. Not when Dad had been on disability, and Mom had worked two jobs that only covered some of their bills. Back then, not having the extras hadn’t bothered me so much. My town wasn’t exactly fancy.

  But, as I looked over at my roommate, Wynter—who had a closetful of designer clothes, three makeup bags’ worth of pricey tubes and palettes, and a comforter fluffier than the end of a Q-tip—I couldn’t help but be jealous.

  Within the first few hours of moving into our dorm, after seeing what little I had, Wynter had told me I could borrow anything of hers that I wanted.

  I never did.

  I just didn’t feel right about it. Why t
ease myself with something nice when I’d eventually have to get a shitty version of my own?

  Wynter had quite a social life and always invited me to go out with her. She’d ask every night, and every night, I’d turn her down. I was on a full academic scholarship. A high GPA was the only thing that would keep me in college. I couldn’t blow that. If my grades dropped even a tenth of a point, I’d be back home, sleeping on my parents’ couch, slicing deli meat at the grocery store.

  I wasn’t going to go back there.

  I was never cutting meat ever again.

  But it was tempting to say yes just one time.

  And it was Saturday night. My textbook was sitting on my lap, showing multiple graphs on cognitive psychology and the difference between sleep, consciousness, and hypnosis. Boring stuff. I had an exam on Monday morning, and I still had three more chapters to memorize.

  Wynter stood in front of her full-length mirror, twisting to the right to view the side angle of her dress and then turning to the left.

  “It looks great on you,” I said. “That color is perfect with your tan.”

  She didn’t spend money on just clothes and makeup. Wynter was high-maintenance, a level I never saw in my small town in Kansas. After class and before her evenings out, she was always going to some appointment to get sprayed or picked or plucked or tightened.

  “You really think it looks okay?” she asked.

  “Definitely.” I lifted the book and rested it over my chest, laying my arms across it. “Don’t even question it.”

  She took another spin and walked over to her closet to find a pair of shoes. “You should really come with me tonight. It’s going to be so busy and so much fun.”

  “Can’t.” I squeezed the book, wishing the text would soak into my brain. “I really need to study.”

  “On a Saturday night?” She waited for me to respond, but I didn’t. “You never say yes to me. Say yes this one time. You can’t spend the next four years stuck in this room, only leaving to go to class. You need to live a little, too, Tyler.”

  She had a point. I hadn’t gone out since I arrived at college. Not even once.

  “But my exam is on Monday.”

  “That gives you all day tomorrow and Monday morning to study.”