Chapter One
Silent Hill: Corruption
Diana looked out from the dingy gray window of her tower. Even after she rubbed the sleeve of her uniform on the glass, her vision was still obscured, so she wrestled the window open and stuck her head out. The air was saturated with moisture. Not raining, but the fog was so thick here you could feel it. Shaking her head, she pulled back inside and sat back on the tall, rusted metal chair that was the only piece of furniture in the place. She was bored out of her mind, but she preferred it this way. Day shift at Toluca Prison was miserable, but working graveyards was bearable with the inmates all snoring away in their cells, out of reach and out of sight. When she pulled tower duty it was freakin' bliss, despite the boredom. All she had to do up here was look out the windows and shoot anyone that tried to get over the wall, and her coworkers tended to forget whoever was up there. That suited her just fine- she was tired of all the office politics, and in all honesty, most of the staff were just as crooked as the inmates. They liked putting her somewhere out of the way so they wouldn't have to investigate reports on all the log discrepancies she'd filed, or have to hide their drug peddling from her inquisitive eyes.
She hadn't worked there long, only a couple of months, but already Diana hated it in Silent Hill. Hoping to land a job as a shift supervisor, instead she found herself back at the bottom of the totem pole after transferring from another facility out in California. She'd regretted that move almost as soon as she'd made it, for not only had the promised promotion not panned out, but she found herself constantly butting heads with her superiors, all of whom were male. It seemed they felt it was their duty to put every female employee in their place, as if their particular type of genitalia somehow affected their job performance.
Perhaps it did, she thought, scowling to herself. Most of the other female officers scoffed at her for being unwilling to unzip her pants for the captains. That was how they'd landed their own cushy positions, after all. Most of them never even had to leave the office for longer than a few minutes, just enough to make it look like they were actually working. Whereas she, and the other staff members not in their special inner circle had to work their tails off in the cold and gloom every night, picking up the slack for those privileged few.
Sighing, she slid from her chair again, too restless to stay in any one place for too long. Grabbing the shotgun off of the rack, she slid the strap over her arm and wandered out onto the narrow catwalk surrounding her post. Leaning on the railing, she peered out into the mist. Rubbing the back of her neck, she shrugged and wondered if it was worth calling Central Control to let them know how badly vision was being obscured out here. Nobody could see very far in this thick a haze, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to see anyone approaching the wall unless they were right in front of the tower. The problem was, there was about a 50/50 chance they'd even answer the phone, once they saw who was calling. Still, she ought to cover her butt and at least try to report it. That way, if something happened the blame couldn't legitimately fall on her head. Not that they wouldn't try, but at least her own conscience would be clean. Reaching through the open window to the little shelf along the wall, she dialed control and put the receiver to her ear. That's funny, there wasn't even a dial tone, nevermind ringing. She smacked the receiver sharply against her palm, but it didn't surprise her that it didn't help. That brand of mechanics only worked in the movies. She hung up and tried a few more times to call, even attempted to call the other towers, but still nothing happened.
"Great, yet another thing that's busted around here," she muttered irritably, reaching for the radio in her hip holster. The only reason she had a hand radio on her was because the people that ran this place were too cheap to replace the base radio. It was that way with a lot of thing, though, when she thought about it. Diana wondered if they gotten around to clearing out the flooding in the lower levels yet. Probably not. She was just waiting for the day when some inmate's family sued them for the abominable living conditions. Then again, the only time the warden seemed willing to dish out cash was to shut people up, so he'd probably just bribe them to keep quiet.
Pressing down on the button, she waited a moment before saying, "Control, be advised, the telephone in tower 4 is down. Do you copy?"
Silence.
She repeated, "Control- do you copy?" Still nothing. Her hands gripped the slick metal railing as she stood there, thinking. Last she'd checked, her radio was working fine. She checked the battery and there were extras in the charger, so she hadn't run out of juice. That wasn't the problem. Perhaps they were having some technical troubles? She hadn't heard the sirens, so it was unlikely they were dealing with any kind of disturbance down there. Her orders stated that she was forbidden from leaving her post until proper relief arrived, or the captain himself ordered it. There was a thought.
She keyed the radio again. "Captain Emerson, this is Henley in tower 4, do you copy?" Nope, that didn't work either.
"Dammit," she hissed, fighting the urge to slam her radio against the rail. "Have they ALL gone to sleep down there? Somebody say something!" Her eyes raked the surrounding area for any signs of life, but there was nothing, not even the pigeons or crows that frequented the prison. The silence was deafening, to borrow the overused phrase, and it was starting to wind her up. Still, if no one was answering the phone or the radio, what else could she do but listen, watch, and wait for someone to pass by so she could holler at them to get someone up there to fix the equipment. This was the only real drawback to working the night shift- all the maintenance personnel were at home asleep in their beds, and dragging them out of there before morning was a royal pain. Worst came to worst, she could report the problem to the oncoming shift, but she hated to wait that long, for she had another three hours before that rolled around. Anything could happen during that time, and she didn't want to get caught with her pants around her ankles.
It was starting to get colder, so she trudged reluctantly back inside to the dubious comfort of her rusted chair and flipped the switch for the space heater as she wrestled the door back closed. She rummaged in the shelves for some coffee grounds and poured them into a filter, hoping that what she brewed wouldn't kill her. You never knew what quality of coffee you'd get around here.
The hands on the clock moved on with excruciating slowness, until every tick of the second hand had her grinding her teeth with impatience. Five o'clock, six o'clock, and finally seven came and went. Her shift was over and still no radio traffic and the phone refused to work. She'd tried every few minutes to get someone to answer her, but still nothing. With a growl, she grabbed the gun again and stomped outside, yelling at the top of her lungs, "Hey! When am I gonna get some relief up here? Where is everybody?"
A faint rustling noise sounded from below, but she couldn't make out what had caused it, and whatever it was didn't bother repeating itself.
"Well, now what?" she muttered to herself, trying to figure out her next move from there. Something was clearly very wrong. Forget the long silent radio and the broken phone, it was more than a little strange that she hadn't heard hide nor hair of anyone wandering the compound. By now she should have at least heard the rattling of the food cart on its way from the mess hall to the various cell blocks. Or the rattle of the utility officer's keys as they wandered to the warden's office with the janitorial staff in tow. But no. There had been absolutely nothing for hours now, and she needed to do something. The problem was, if she left the post to go investigate, that was technically abandoning her post. That brought with it a whole host of potential problems. Unless she ended up having to pull off some kind of dramatic rescue, she would probably be fired, maybe even arrested if they managed to successfully twist her actions into some kind of public endangerment scenario. She doubted they would back her up in court if she told a jury that no one contacted her for hours.
A loud burping sound from inside the tower made her jump. She whipped around to see what had made the noise, and for a moment, thought she had imagined it. Then it came again, and this time she could tell it was the toilet. Frowning, she made her way to the corner of the tower in which it stood, and looked into the rust colored water starting to fill the bowl. The chipped porcelain device was starting to flood, which was weird, since she hadn't even used it recently. Since she hadn't just flushed it, why was it filling up?
Filling up and overflowing, that is. Diana stepped back from the toilet in disgust as filthy water began to spill over the sides and onto the floor. It continued to belch and gurgle, complaining about whatever it was that had clogged it up.
"Maybe this is some kind of divine sign that I should have been a plumber," mumbled Diana, looking around for a plunger. No such luck. First they stick her up here alone with no one to talk to, forget all about her, and now she's got a tower that's rapidly filling up with crap water. Just what she always wanted. She started to holler out the window again when the sight of something amidst all the refuse on the floor cut her short.
Squatting down for a closer look, she was careful not to get any of the sewage on her pants. Riffling through her pockets for something to wipe it off with, she found a pocket pack of facial tissue and pulled out several pieces. Wrinkling her nose, she wiped at the flat square until she could clearly see it was a jewel case with a miniature video disk, the likes of which they put the recordings from the security cameras on. Other than the crap on it, it looked playable if it were washed off. The real poser was what on earth it was doing there in the first place. There was no way it would have fit in the pipes, not intact, anyway. How did it get there? She would have seen it if it had been there earlier though, when she had used it after a couple bottles of soda. It made no sense.
Grabbing another handful of tissues, she picked up the disk. Just then, a low rumble of thunder rolled through the air and the emergency sirens started to go off. She straightened up quickly, pocketing the tissue-wrapped video, and looked out the window. Screw it, no reasonable person would expect her to stay up there where she couldn't see anything, especially if there was an emergency going on. Somebody might need her help. She grabbed the pump-action shotgun with its ten shells and the .22 caliber rifle from the rack and slipped the straps over her shoulder. God willing, she wouldn't need to use them, for if she did, she didn't have much ammo to begin with. Only thirty rounds between the two weapons in all. Maybe if she made her way down to the narrow path between the outer wall and inner fence, she'd meet someone that'd be able to tell her what the hell was going on.
At any rate, she was done waiting. Diana yanked open the trapdoor and climbed quickly but carefully down the ladder into the base of the tower. Her pulse hammered in her throat as she put the key in the lock, pausing for a moment before she turned it. It wasn't in her nature disobey orders, not if they fell within the rules. She'd defied her superiors more than once, but that was always when they tried forcing her to do something illegal or against the facility's 'official' policy. Knowing that the letter of the law was on her side, she'd always been safe from the worst they could direct at her. But this… once she left, she knew they could hang her out to dry and finally have the justification they'd always wanted to get rid of her.
Knowing her conscience could never let her leave her fellows in a dangerous situation kept her moving despite her reservations. Even if they were a bunch of scumbags, she felt honor-bound to protect them as was her duty, even if the rest of them never gave a crap about theirs. She twisted the key in the lock, and with a deep breath, stepped outside. Oddly enough, it was even colder on ground level than it was up top, and she shivered as she locked the tower up behind her.
It was still quiet as she made her way along the gravel path, careful not to stumble into the long rows of razor wire. She didn't know why, but despite the fact that she'd traveled this path many times before, it seemed longer than usual to her. She knew that if she kept following it long enough, she'd end up near the visitation section. The important thing was to try and keep her weapons out of any inmates' reach. At this hour, there was no way there'd be any of them in visitation, and maybe she'd find a working phone. IF she could get inside. Technically, all doors into visitation were supposed to be locked when they weren't supervised, but sometimes the night staff was sloppy and left it unlocked since there wasn't supposed to be anyone in there at night anyway. After all, the inmates had no way to get there without going through several heavy locked steel doors and manned gates. All she knew was that if she managed to get in there and found one of her fellow officers inside, she was going to rip them a new one for not listening to their radio.
When she arrived at the staff entrance to visitation, she found it locked. Great, thought Diana, the one time I want these bozos to be slacking off, they lock me out. Just perfect. She slumped forward and rested her forehead against the rough exterior wall and closed her eyes and sighed. She didn't really know where to go from there. Nobody had answered her, everything was locked, and she was essentially just as confined as any inmate until someone with the right keys came along. She swore quietly, then slowly opened her eyes in surprise when she noticed the sirens were no longer going off. Pulling away from the wall, she shook her head to clear it. She must be seeing things. There was always mold and mildew on the walls of the prison because of the excessively humid air around Toluca Lake, but this was more than she remembered from the last time she was back in this section of the facility. The walls looked crumbly, but held up solidly when she pushed against them. Her forehead creased. Lackadaisical as most of her coworkers were, it didn't seem normal for the maintenance personnel to let things get this bad. The contamination didn't spread very far, but was instead concentrated in this particular area. Looked like she had another problem to report to the warden. Scratching her scalp, she turned to look at the wall opposite visitation and her eyes widened in shock and anger.
"What the…?" she growled in outrage, stooping to look at the hole in the wall. It was small, but not so small that a slender person couldn't squeeze through if they tried. Adding insult to injury, someone had scrawled graffiti over it in small red letters that said, "doWn the rAbbiT holE- retRace her steps". Some cocky little twerp had escaped and was taunting them, she was sure of it.
The only good thing was, she at least had a faint idea of where to go now. Not being very heavy, Diana knew she could fit through it too. Once outside, she'd stand a better chance of making it back in through the front gate and reporting the hole to her superiors. She slid the guns from her shoulder and placed them on the ground beside the hole, pulling herself through with a great deal of unladylike grunting and cursing. She pulled the weapons out after her in case there were any hostiles about, not wanting them to take them from her while she squirmed to the other side. Once they were safely back on her person, she picked her way across the rocky ground in the direction of the front gate.
Too late she saw the yawning chasm in the earth and stumbled over the edge. Quick reflexes and a strong grip were the only things that kept her from being dashed to pieces on a bottom she couldn't even see. "Where'd the ground go?" she yelled in a panic, carefully hauling herself back over the ledge. She lay there for a moment, reeling from the shock and catching her breath, silently cursing the infernal fog that kept her from seeing the massive hole.
"H-how did that get there?" she gasped to no one in particular, grateful that neither of the guns had fallen. Standing on shaky legs, she looked carefully back at the hole in frightened puzzlement. Whatever had made this, she should have heard it back in her tower. But there'd been no explosion, no beeping or rumbling of construction machinery. Just that damnable silence that had plagued her most of the night.
Backing up to the wall, she intended to go back the way she came. However, when she got there, she couldn't find the hole again. Funny, she couldn't remember having wandered that far. Not knowing what else to do, she followed the wall and kept on hand on it, going slowly so she wouldn't have any more close encounters like the last one. After what seemed like an eternity, the first sound she'd heard that wasn't the sirens or her own footsteps met her ears.
It was the sound of water lapping at the shore.
She realized that she'd made it to the shore of Toluca Lake somehow. The wheels in her head were turning, trying to make sense of it all. Something was nagging at the back of her brain until it suddenly hit her. Whoever the escapee was, they'd left a clue- on purpose! The uneven scrawl over the hole was made up of mostly lower case letters, all except five of them. W, A, T,E, and R. Someone had wanted whoever was following them to end up at the lake. But there was no way that person could have been behind the making of the crevasse she'd fallen into, could they? How could any of this have happened without someone catching on?
Confused, she stood there staring through the fog at the placid waters when another sound invaded the silence. It was the same rustling sound she'd heard before at the base of the tower. She turned around to look back in the direction of the prison and saw something at long last. Diana looked in time to see a shape, furtive and indistinct, vanish through another small hole in the wall. Racing after it, she followed it through, without a clue as to what she would find on the other side.