Red Cells by Thomas Jeffrey

Author:Thomas, Jeffrey [Thomas, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DarkFuse
Published: 2014-03-17T20:00:00+00:00

Nine

Components

Again, a human guard and a robot removed Stake from his cell so that he might be brought to the warden; to relate what he had seen, the human guard explained gruffly. The guard was Flaquita, not Hurley. Hurley had gone on before Stake to be interviewed by the warden separately. So had Stake’s surviving cell mate, Kofi.

As the flanking guards escorted him away from his cell, prisoners roused from their sleep by the commotion stood close to the barriers of their own cells looking out at him. As he passed, they called, “What was it, Stake? What did you see?” But he couldn’t linger to reply.

When the three of them at last entered into the tubular corridor connecting to the administrative wing, Stake was already craning his neck and looking sharply from side to side, watching for interstitial life forms out the windows that lined the tunnel. He was not disappointed. The creatures were more readily apparent this time, closer to the windows and seeming to gaze inside as if they had been expecting the trio. Though widely varied in form, all of them were white and luminous. Clinging to the outside of the tunnel was that large animal with the multiply jointed crab legs. Eel-like forms swam in place, their tails rippling. And a creature resembling a trilobite, with a segmented shell, hovered in place with the help of its wavering fringe of legs, like those of a centipede—or the cilia of a microorganism.

Stake stopped in his tracks, his eyes locked on the trilobite-thing as it floated out there, stationary, at face level. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed.

Flaquita spun around and seized his arm. “What are you doing?” he said. “Come on.”

Stake pointed. “That thing! You see that?”

Ignoring him, the guard tugged him along. “I said come on.” The robot took hold of Stake’s other arm.

Stake looked back over his shoulder. That clinging spider-creature, its long white legs curved like a human rib cage. Those eel-things, rippling like long hair fluttering in a breeze. And that circular trilobite, like an ominous mask devoid of features…

“That’s its face!” Stake cried, struggling against the two guards, but they only gripped him more tightly, forced him along more insistently. “Will you just look? That’s the face of the thing that came into my cell!”

Flaquita stopped, and so the robot followed suit. The human guard glanced back down the corridor the way they had come, perhaps a bit spooked after hearing of his fellow guard Hurley having fired at an unidentified intruder. “What are you talking about? Where?”

“Outside the windows,” Stake said. “It’s those interstitial animals!”

Just then, the lights went out.

For a moment, the three of them were swallowed in utter darkness, except for the interstitial life forms themselves, glowing against the churning blackness like a field of stars. But then a string of red lights came on in the ceiling as an emergency backup power source kicked in. This was no mere power fluctuation…not this time. The corridor’s regular lights did not return, and a loud buzzing alert had begun to sound.

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