>>/other-ways-to-get-to-the-same-place.asf
Instead, tonight, it came for me.
It crawled up my nose and down my throat, greasy and invasive. The kind of smell that felt like it left an oily film on your tongue. Rot. A festering rot. It rolled through the air in heavy, unseen waves. My stomach turned, but more than nausea, I felt… anger. I didn’t understand. I hated it. With every breath I took, I could feel my chest tighten; how my nails bit into my palms. I wanted to tear the cell apart. Smash the walls open, tear the bars from the floor, and rip its blackened skin with my bare hands.
White, unblinking eyes, staring at me through the cell doors. Its cloven hooves clacking against the cold concrete floor. Vic would lay there motionless, asleep.
I could feel the rush of blood pounding in my ears. For a moment I wasn’t thinking like myself at all. I was reduced to something less than, consumed by the irrational certainty that if I could do something, hurt something, then maybe that suffocating feeling would finally let go of me.
There was no texture to it, no fur to catch the light, no detail to suggest flesh or bone – only a perfect silhouette, a cutout of absolute blackness, deeper than any shadow around it.
Its white eyes – two flat discs suspended in the void. They did not gleam like an animal’s eyes caught in lamplight, nor shimmer with any natural reflection. They were blank, matte, and utterly still, as if painted on by an indifferent hand.
When it moved, if it moved at all, I never truly saw it move.
It wasn’t fast, so to speak. Rather, it advanced in a series of imperceptible omissions. Each new posture arriving where the last should have followed. My mind, searching for the connective tissue of its movement, but finding none. Its head tilted slightly. By the time I realised it had shifted, it had already done so again.
My jaw clenched so hard it ached. My hands trembled, with the insatiable urge to close around its throat, to snap its thin black legs, to tear those branching antlers from its skull. The need was so overwhelming, that it frightened me only distantly, somewhere deeper within. All I wanted now was to grab a hold of it. Destroy it. Stomp it into the ground, until the shape of it ceased to exist. Something inside me knew that I would know no peace, until it was dead.
I found myself crawling toward it, drawn by some subconscious pull. The impact of my hands and the brushing of my knees against the concrete floor sounded unnaturally loud in the silence, but neither did Vic awake, nor did it react. And yet, the closer I got, that sharp, irrational anger that had gripped me just moments before had now ebbed into something almost embarrassingly tender. I couldn’t explain it.
With each step I took, I realised how little I understood it. The need to be closer became almost magnetic, overriding whatever caution had wreaked havoc in my mind. I lifted my hand slowly, afraid that any sudden movement might startle it. My fingers trembled as they rose into the cold air between us. For the briefest instant, I felt its breath against my fingertips. Like touching still water in the middle of winter.
And then, just when my hand had reached through the bars of the cell door, just when I though I was about to touch it, I woke up.
Vic lay there, just as she had before, resting her head on my hand. It was still the middle of the night, and the sun wouldn’t be up for another couple of hours.
I saw what she meant. I couldn’t help but think about it. A lot of it I could barely remember. As a kid, I used to get sleep paralysis quite a lot—I remember that much—but after a while it just seemed to stop happening. Maybe I aged out of it. This was the first time in a while I’d even gotten so much as a dream, let alone a nightmare. Was it though? A nightmare? I couldn’t really tell. I’ve so many mixed feelings about it. Nightmares usually end poorly.
As the night went on, I kept hearing chatter from downstairs. Thought it must have been the guards doing their patrol, but certain things kept bugging me about it. Too many footsteps. A different gait every time. Something was up.
Two hours in, it began as a dull tremor through the walls, subtle enough that I thought it was nothing unusual. At most, I worried that it might wake her. Then came the noise, rising all at once from somewhere deep within the block: metal striking metal, a violent, repetitive clanging that reverberated throughout the cell. Shouts followed, not one voice but dozens, then suddenly hundreds, overlapping into a chorus of distant barks.
Something had happened and everyone had only just taken notice. Someone must have broken loose. The thought wasn’t convincing, but it was a start. I shook Vic, and she hazily woke up. The look I must have had on my face must have been terrible, because she startled wide awake when our eyes met. I want to tell her, talk to her, but there’s no time.
The walkway outside our cell flickered with erratic light, fluorescent strips strobing as if the power was faltering. Boots pounded across the concrete downstairs. Someone screamed. Another voice barked orders that were immediately drowned beneath the roar of the inmates. The sound of something heavy being dragged scraped across the floor, followed by a crash so immense it seemed to shake dust from the ceiling.
Then, for a moment, nothing. Silence. Vic perked up and held me by the shoulder.
A siren blared through the block, shrill and mechanical, bathing everything in a pulsing red light. In that crimson flash I saw figures rushing past—guards, prisoners, impossible to distinguish at a glance, all reduced to blurs in the chaos. One slammed into the bars, fingers curling around the metal before being yanked backward by unseen hands.
It was a riot, and it spread like wildfire.
Doors were forced open somewhere down the tier, hinges shrieking as they opened. Men poured into the corridor like floodwater breaching a dam, faces slick with sweat, mouths open in snarls, laughter and screams. Some clutched broken lengths of pipe, others makeshift shivs hidden under bedsheets, improvised weapons gleaming in the red emergency light.
Smoke began to crawl along the ceiling from somewhere deeper in the block, black ribbons twisting through the siren-lit dark. The shouting grew closer, more frenzied. A guard dragged himself past the front of our cell, his baton skittering across the floor, before immediately being swallowed by a crowd of bodies surging around him. Every impact—fists against flesh, boots against doors, metal against bone—seemed amplified by the concrete walls until the entire prison became engulfed in conflict.
The lock on our door opened with a click. Opened remotely, from some unseen control room deeper within the prison. Had they breached that far in already?
Vic walked outside right beside me, her breath ragged, one hand gripping my wrist hard enough to hurt, dragging me onto the walkway.
The corridors had become arteries pumping blood and dead bodies through their length, every corner erupting with violence, every shadow concealing another burst of brutality. Somewhere glass shattered. Somewhere else a voice laughed with the edge of madness. The red light pulsed again and again, turning each frozen instant into a separate, hellish frame: a face twisted in rage, blood on the floor, streaks along the walls, a baton raised to strike.
And through it all, beneath it all, I could still feel the phantom cold lingering in my fingertips.
Victoria grabbed my head between her hands and pulled me close. Looked me straight in the eyes. Sobered me up a little bit.
We walked straight into the chaos. Bodies slammed into us from every direction, shoulders, elbows, fists, one singular surging mass of ceaseless violence. Somewhere to our left, I could see two men were on the ground, one straddling the other and driving his fist down in wet, rhythmic thumps. Streaks of blood dragged across the wall every time the man raised his fist. To the right, a guard was chased around the corner by three men. They snapped his arms and broke his legs, before driving a rusted steel pipe down his throat.
We turned the corner straight into two inmates. One, a thickset man with tattoos snaking up his neck, gripping a length of pipe like it was a club; the other, a lean and twitchy woman, holding a sharpened toothbrush with blood running down her face from a split eyebrow. The strobing only added to my unease, but I could recognise the man as one of Nazi Boy’s old hitlerjugend. He recognised me too, and he clearly wasn’t over it, because his expression soured the moment he saw us.
His gut clearly told him to just take a swing and think about it later. The pipe hissed through the air toward my head. I dodged under it, but I felt the rush of air as it smashed into the wall behind me, showering me in concrete dust. As he tried to pull it out, Vic kicked him in the knee, which made a dull crack, as his leg folded beneath him. As he roared in pain, the woman swung at me, moving quickly, her weapon flickering in and out of view as the emergency light strobed. I backed away until my shoulders hit the wall. No more room.
I almost caught it, but she lodged the shank into my arm. Pain shot through my forearm. I fell to my side, as she lunged for my throat. She climbed on top of me. Her face was only centimetres from mine, twisted into a grin. I could briefly feel the stink of her breath on my skin, before I saw her face shatter into a warm, wet puddle of blood and bone. Vic threw the metal pipe onto the floor, and wiped away the chunks of brain that were stuck to my face. She slapped me across the cheek. Sobered me up, again.
Sister, I’m gonna need you to fight back a little harder. I know you’ve been through some shit, but I need you to pull your weight a little more for me. Ok?
Ok.
How’s your arm?
Good. I lied.
Move. Victoria hissed at me, pulling me forward. I tuned to look; the tall one was just dead. I was zoning out. Needed to keep focus. When?
We ran past open cells, painted red like gaping wounds in the wall; corpses strewn among overturned meal carts and scattered trays. Some of the bodies had bullet-holes in them. Either the other inmates had found the armoury or someone had given the command to fire at will. It made Vic visibly nervous, but she didn’t say a word.
We split off from the crowd and passed through several empty corridors. We walked for minutes without a soul in sight, but for a moment, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye: At the far end of the cross-corridor, something just turned the corner. Something terribly out of place.
…a scarf?
Did you see that?
I don’t want to know. I’m trying to get us out of danger.
A scream erupted somewhere behind us. One that cut through the noise—singular, sharp, abruptly silenced. Vic turned her head toward it but did not slow. Her grip only tightened.
We burst through a set of unopened doors, but the prison corridors kept twisting into a concrete maze, every turn opening unto new gruesome acts of sadism. Men fought in stairwells, grappling and crashing down steps slick with running water and blood. Fire spread from smouldering corpses in the rec hall entrance, illuminating the walls in a flickering orange. Somewhere overhead, gunshots cracked, followed by another explosion which shook chunks of plaster off of the ceiling.
There it was again; I caught a glimpse over my shoulder. The sea of violence, the frantic momentum of it all, stopped dead in its tracks. The crowd in the main hall had split, but there it was, several metres closer, in the middle of it all, walking through the riot, unbothered, as they were making way for him. A scarf.
A prisoner lunged at him from the side, wild-eyed and swinging a jagged piece of metal, then crumpled onto the floor, vanishing beneath the feet of the stampede. Someone staggered in front of my line of sight, but when I looked again, he was gone. It was a different colour.
At the end of the next corridor, through a gap, I could see another one, standing over a dead guard beneath a flickering light, one hand resting against the wall, staring right at me. Teal. The fluorescent tube popped, plunging the hall into darkness for a heartbeat, and when the light sputtered back – both gone.
Each time we turned a corner, I found myself searching the edges of the chaos for that silhouette. That thin, tall, dark figure that always seemed ahead of us. Always behind us.
Vic, something’s wrong
She grimaced in a way that told me she had known it longer that I had. She dragged me into a service corridor, narrower and darker than the ones leading to the main block.
They’ve been funnelling us in a certain direction, trying to lead us somewhere. Herding us like cattle. I think this whole riot is a trap.
A trap for what? Prisoners? We’re already locked up!
Ivy, I think they’re looking for someone—
We barely made it ten steps down the service corridor, before a guard burst through a side door in riot gear, stripped down to the essentials – vest half-unbuckled, baton in one hand, the other slick with blood that probably wasn’t even his; several teeth sticking out of the pleather of his glove. His face was flushed and wild, eyes darting over us, adrenaline pumping through those veins – someone who’s been fighting a lot today.
You two! On the ground—
Victoria dove forward, before he could finish, slamming her shoulder into his chest. The impact sent him stumbling backward into the wall hard enough to rattle the pipes. He swung his baton in a wide arc toward her head. But I caught his wrist with both hands. He was stronger than I expected, and the force of it flared the pain in my wounded arm. I tried to slam his hand against the wall to try and wrest it from his fingers, but the pain got too much; I wanted to let go.
The corridor was too narrow to move freely. The guard twisted, trying to wrench the baton free, but Vic drove her knee into his stomach. The air burst out of him in a wet grunt, and I could finally tear the baton from his hand. He looked at me with bloodshot eyes, as I cracked it across the side of his helmet. The sound was brutal – plastic, bone, metal, all colliding in a singular point. He went down hard, crumpling awkwardly against the floor.
At the far end of the corridor, beyond the melee, beyond the writhing knot of bodies fighting beneath the siren of the alarms, was the main lock gate. Everyone’s first though about a way out.
Screams echoed from every direction. Somewhere deeper in the block, gunfire erupted in sharp bursts. Automatic weapons. We had no time to breathe before another wave of bodies spilled into the hall from the main corridor – a swarm of inmates, all fleeing from something even worse behind them.
One of them collided with me, grabbed at my shirt, then swung his fist at my face. I hit back. It’s been some time. The punch landed harder than I thought it would; my knuckles exploding with pain against his jaw. He reeled sideways into another prisoner, and suddenly both of them were on the ground, cursing and screaming as the flood of people trampled over them.
Vic and I pushed through. Elbows, knees, fists, boots. Every few steps someone grabbed at us. A guard with a broken visor lunged from a stairwell and Vic slammed him against the railing. Some bitch tried to put me into a headlock, and I threw her onto her back against the concrete floor. Moving even a footstep forward felt like it took hours. One after another; never-ending, ceaseless conflict. Just this relentless forward motion, where you cannot slow down or pull over. We were swimming against the current.
The flood of bodies eventually crashed against the main gate, with us in it. Nowhere further to go. The ceiling arched high overhead, ribbed with beams, catwalks, conduits, pipes, and suspended lights. Red lamps, rotating in slow, pulsing sweeps.
The colossal wall of interlocking plates and steel bars stretched from floor to ceiling. Thick hydraulic pistons ran up the walls, covered in dangling cables, sealed into massive concrete housings on either side.
Somewhere ahead, inmates had overrun the control room. Gears, hidden in the walls, screeched against one another. With a deep, iron groan, the lock gate started rising. Heavy bars dragged upward with agonising slowness. Prisoners fell prone on the ground, clawing and kicking their way through the narrow gap, while others tried to force it higher with pipes, shoulders, even their bare hands.
And yet, a thought settled coldly into my mind: The riot had been too sudden, too coordinated, too perfectly catastrophic. Entire cell blocks had gone up at once. Security doors had failed in sequence. Fires had started in places that forced movement through specific corridors. The chaos had funnelled everyone—not just us, everyone—toward this single point. The path of least resistance.
Just as the gate finally raised and the cold night air washed over me, I saw them. Floodlights blazing through drifting smoke, chain-link fences, razor-wire-topped walls.
No, not floodlights. Vehicle lamps.
A whole line of them. Just like before.
Spread shoulder-length apart, stood armed guard in black tactical gear, rifles already raised. Their silhouettes were sharp against the blinding beams of the transport trucks and armoured vans, casting long shadows towards us. Visors down, fingers on triggers. Locked and loaded. Orders to shoot on sight.
The main gate was a kill zone.
Anyone who ran straight for it was dead. We’re all dead. Fucked.
The realisation stuck a second before the first burst of gunfire.
Their automatic weapons opened up in a deafening roar. A hail for bullets tore through the first line or prisoners, turning them instantly into mincemeat. Their bodies jerked and collapsed onto the wet concrete in unnatural, folded shapes. Some of the inmates tried to run backwards, only to find that more armed guards had appeared on the catwalks behind them. Muzzle flashes burst overhead, each shot answered by screams and the wet thud of bodies hitting the floor. Some threw themselves flat. Others who tried to make a run for it, were turned into a fine red mist, bullets tore through their flesh and reduced them to nothing.
A body slammed into me from the left, knocking me sideways. Vic grabbed my arm, pulling me back on my feet.
Rounds ricocheted off of the steel fencing and concrete walls. Screams of agony filled the air, already saturated with the sound of gunfire. Alternating bursts of white muzzle flare and red light lit up the walls.
And then she cried out. She got shot.
A sharp, involuntary sound. She got shot.
I turned and saw Vic clutching her side, fingers already dark with blood.
If I could scream, I would have. I just sat there, unblinking, utterly spent. Done.
Another burst tore into the floodlight mount above us, showering sparks over our shoulders.
That’s it. There’s no way out. My eyes darted across the yard, but I couldn’t see a thing. We’re dead. She’d dead. I’m dead. We’re all dead. She pulled my arm over her shoulders.
She dragged me forward and we crawled between the bodies. Another wave of gunfire ripped across the yard, forcing us flat against the ground as another three inmates bolted toward the open gate and were immediately cut down. The guards were firing in arcs, catching anyone that so much as moved. The piled-up bodies took most of the bullets aimed at us, bursting into squirts of blood a giblets. More came running.
Another body fell atop me. Then another. Then another.Get it off. Get it off of me. The pile settled in slow, grotesque shifts, as muscles relaxed and blood drained, and limbs slid against one another. Someone’s arm. Someone’s leg. Another body above me convulsed violently as another volley tore through her. Her warm blood seeped out and ran down the side of my face and into my ear.
I can’t. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t.
I closed my eyes and the gunfire stopped. I could still feel it all, but it just wasn’t there. Now sleep. Don’t wake up. One moment the yard was a storm of muzzle flashes and lead whizzing through the air, the next there was only the ringing in my ears and the guttural sound of dozens of people choking on their own blood. The smoke began to settle and dissipate. Bodies lay strewn across the yard in broken, unmoving heaps, while the survivors pressed themselves flat among them, terrified of being the next thing to show any signs of life.
I stayed down.
My cheek was pressed against the cold cement, slick with blood. Beside me, Vic’s breathing came in short, pained pulls, one hand clamped over the wound in her side. Her fingers dug into my sleeve.
A singular voice echoed across the yard.
Miss Vandenberg?
Me? Vic whispered something beside me, but I couldn’t hear her. The thumping in my head was so unbearably loud I couldn’t think of a single goddamn thing. Me?
I opened my eyes and waited to hear it again. A few minutes passed, and there it was again. And again. And again. Me.
She struggled to prevent it, but I tore my hand free from Vic’s clutches. Probably thought I was insane, the poor girl. Slowly, I moved aside the mass of limbs and bodies above me.
The armed guards outside the main gates lowered their rifles as I stood up. It was the kind of treatment that made a girl feel special around these parts. Part of me wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if they had put a bullet between my eyes the second my little head popped up from the corpse pile. Regardless, I just slumped down against someone on the side of the pile. Which part of someone, I couldn’t rightly tell. All of them started eyeing each other and looking me over. Least they could do is offer me a cigarette.
From between the vehicle headlights emerged a line of men in dark coats, each with a scarf wrapped around their neck. Their silhouettes were almost identical—tall, thin, out of place. The scarves blew slightly in the cold wind.
One of them stepped ahead of the others. Took his sweet time coming over too. Lacquered shoes. Fitted pants. Pressed shirt.
He knelt beside me.
From inside his coat, he produced a knife.
It was small. The steel blade glinted in the light, as he turned it in his hand and offered it to me hilt-first.
For a moment I simply stared.
His voice was low, careful, almost as if asking for a favour. Nonetheless, he said it with a smile:
Kill yourself.
Next chapter: Late June