Brick was doing push-ups in the narrow space between the bunks when he heard the cell block door creak open. It was impossible for anyone to come into their hall unnoticed. The doors on either side rested on heavy metal hinges, so they squalled when anyone came through.
"You're taking up the whole cell," Kindle complained. She perched on her bunk, her lanky brown legs pulled up to her chest.
"What you gotta do down here that's so important?" Brick grunted. Ninety-two, ninety-three. He listened to the footsteps in the hall with one ear.
"Nothin. But it'd be nice to know I could," Kindle sniffed.
"Come down here, gurl!" Tina said. She straddled Brick's back. She'd declared her purpose to be extra weight and someone to keep count of reps, but she did a poor job of both. The girl couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds. "Thirty, thirty-one..." she counted. "Where was I? Oh yeah, seventy-two."
"No thanks," Kindle sighed.
"You okay, kid?" Brick asked.
She didn't have time to answer before a shadow fell across them. Tina gasped and scrambled up, kicking the back of Brick's head.
"Dammit, Teeny, why'd ya...Oh."
Tina bounced up to the cell bars to greet Rocko. "It's my new boyfriend! Dang, Rocko. You looking foine. You got a booty like pow. Dat booty don't quit!"
Rocko, backlit by a halo of light from the hallway's florescent fixtures, frowned and tilted his head. A lock of jet black hair fell into his eyes, and he huffed it away. "What a mouth!"
"What you gonna do, wash it out with soap?" Tina asked, dancing in place.
Brick hauled himself to his feet. His head still throbbed after the brawl earlier, and the pushups, not even a third of what he could usually manage, had taken a toll on his back. He supposed he was 'no spring chicken', to use one of his daddy's colloquialisms. Brick sometimes forgot that thirty-eight years of his life had already passed. But Rocko, who must have been at least a decade younger, stared at him with an expression that made his toes curl and his pulse trip-trap in his wrists.
"Actually, no, no, don't do that, yuck. The soap thing. That's gross," Tina said.
"Step back, please, so I can open the door," said Briggs, who'd escorted Rocko into the block. Brick hadn't noticed him standing there before.
"They're not going to jump you," Rocko assured him. He touched the guard's arm and lingered a little too long, pulling away with a little too much drag. Anyone else would have barely noticed. Brick tried to banish the gnawing sensation from his gut.
"Let you in? Why?" he asked.
"I'm your new cellmate," Rocko said. Briggs opened the door to let Rocko step through, then closed it again with a final sounding clank.
"No, you're not," Brick said.
"Sweet," Kindle said. "Can I have your old cell? These guys stink."
"They smell fine to me," Rocko said, ignoring Brick's protest.
"I said you can't stay," Brick repeated.
"Why?"
"Because..." Brick's mind raced. There was no way he could sleep in the same cell as Rocko, with his chiseled arms and gorgeous hair, and eyes that were pitch black but full of light, like the night sky over Menoetus. He wouldn't be able to resist. He'd wind up going down the Garden, just as he'd done with Mordecai and Emmett, and where had that gotten him? He shook his head. "It's too cramped in here."
"I won't take up much space, I promise," Rocko said and slung a small bundle of clothes into the corner. "Which bed is mine?"
"This one," Tina said, gesturing to her own bunk.
At the same time, Kindle giggled behind one hand and pointed to Brick's bed with the other. "That one!"
"None of 'em," Brick said.
Rocko shrugged. "Okay, don't tell me. But don't be mad up if I get confused and wind up in yours," he said: to Brick, of course.
"Don'chu dare."
Rocko looked at him solemnly, standing so close that Brick had to look straight down to meet his gaze. "I ain't no porcupine," he said, straight-faced. "Take off your kid gloves."
Brick recognized the nonsensical lyrics. It was a song he'd heard often as a kid, one of a few ancient Earth songs played by single station his family's radio picked up. He and his daddy used to set that radio on the bed of the truck when they worked the fields, blasting it as loud as it went, and they'd sung along to the same song Rocko now quoted, belting out the words tunelessly and at the top of their lungs.
"Are you ready for a thing called love?" Rocko continued earnestly.
Brick couldn't help it; he laughed. Rocko grinned.
"What the hell is a porcupine?" Kindle asked.
"Something that needs to be handled with kid gloves, if the song is to be believed," Rocko said.
"Smart-ass," Kindle snorted.
The door at the end of the hall squalled again, this time slamming open with a bang that made all four of them jump. This was followed by the even more disturbing sound of a man laughing, but the laugh wasn't right. Unearthly. It might have been the chortling of demons, or even the throaty wickering of the bird king himself, something like a loon's call. It wracked a shudder down Brick's spine.
He reached automatically for Rocko's hand, and found it. Rocko squeezed back. Kindle scrambled off the top bunk to join Tina on hers. They huddled together against the wall, their arms wrapped around each other.
"One of the messed up ones," Rocko said. "The empties."
Brick didn't know what he meant, but the words poked icy fingers of fear into his chest. The sounds drew closer. Over the impossibly loud cackling rose the harried voices of guards.
"What are we supposed to do with it?"
"Just dump it in one of the cells."
"Aren't there other prisoners here?"
"Look, the other blocks are all more full than this. They'll just have to...fuck! It bit me!"
By this point, they'd staggered into view of Brick's cell. The single prisoner was hauled down the corridor by two guards. The shackled man - Brick was reluctant to call it a man, but couldn't think of the right word - thrashed between the Hyperion guards.
At first glance, it appeared to be a pot-bellied bandit with arms like as wide around as Rocko's waist. But something awful thrust from its shoulders where a neck should have been: a long, ropy red viscera that reminded Brick of his animal's coiled side. At the top was the thing's screeching head, nothing more than a small skeletal lump with bulging white eyes. Tina let out a wavering cry and buried her face in Kindle's shoulder.
"Do you think it's contagious? Are you gonna turn into one of these things?" one of the guards asked, the one who hadn't been bitten, his voice climbing to a tremulous pitch.
"Fuck, fuck, don't say that. Goddamnit," moaned a dark haired guard that Brick recognized, again, as Cash.
The bandit continued to produce that hideous burbling laugh.
"I don't know, man," the unbitten guard said, backing away. "You seen those movies? When folks get bit...they change..."
"DAMNIT. This isn't a movie!" Cash cried. He clutched his face in his hands. Brick could see the bite now. I was a relatively small ring of bleeding welts, but deep. The blood already ran down his arm and dripped from his elbow, spattering the concrete floor.
The other guard backed away as far as he could from Cash and the mutant. "M-maybe I should call someone, and let them know-"
"NO!" Cash dropped his end of the chain and whipped the SMG off his hip. He fired a burst into the abominations head, popping its skull. The lifeless body slumped to its knees, wobbled, and fell forward onto its belly.
The other guard staggered back. "Whoah, whoah, don't-"
Cash laughed - a crazed chortle, as if the monstrosity's laugh, at the very least, had been contagious - and emptied the rest of the SMG's clip into the other guard. The man fell back against the bars of the cell across the hall, dead.
"Shit!" Brick cried.
Cash whirled around. Gore flecked his cheek, and his features were twisted into a grimace. His eyes, emptied by terror, bulged from their sockets.
Rocko stepped forward, arms raised in submission. "Cash, baby, it's okay! We saw everything. That guy was going to kill you!"
Cash only gaped, so Rocko continued.
"He saw you get bit. He thought it gave you some kind of virus, so he reached for his gun. Isn't that what happened?"
"Th-that's right," Cash said, a sly cognizance creeping back into his gaze. He slicked back his hair with a shaking hand. "He was going for his gun."
"And you defended yourself," Rocko finished.
"I had no choice." Cash's eyes darted between the bodies on the floor, then back up to Rocko. "You don't think it's really contagious, do you?"
"Don't worry, I know about those things. They're the ones from the breeding farms, the ones that didn't turn out right."
"Bandit breeding farms. I've heard about those. So...it's true?"
"Yep. That's all, nothing that can spread."
Brick had never heard of the breeding farms, but it didn't sound reassuring. It seemed to comfort Cash, though, because he holstered his sub-machine gun at last.
"I should call someone in to clean up this mess."
"Sure, absolutely. And we should probably keep this cell block closed off for awhile," Rocko said.
Cash hesitated. "Why?"
Rocko placed both palms flat against the bars and curled his fingers around, a slow roll that started at his index fingers and ended at the pinkies, until he clenched the bars in loose fists. "Well..." he hummed. "We're friends, right? I'm here, and this is the only occupied cell on the block. It would be easier for you to visit if we stayed the only ones. And if you opened the doors, of course. Hard to get any privacy in a cell with four other people."
Cash grinned. Flashed his teeth, really. Brick's fists balled at his sides.
"You're smooth. I better watch out for you," Cash said.
Rocko chuckled, but there was no music in it now. "You can watch me all you like, gorgeous."
"Eh. Sure. Why not? I'll give you run of the block. You've always been my favorite, Rocky."
At the utterance of that nickname, Rocko loosed his hold on the bars and stepped back. His voice was chilly when he said, "I know. You'd better call someone now, or it won't look right.
Cash winked before disappearing from view. A few moments later, Brick heard him swing open the door at the end of the block and yell out; "Help! We got an emergency!"
Briggs was the first to arrive. Cash didn't put on any show for him, just shrugged and tousled the horrified guard's hair. "Just a little mess. No biggie." As if he hadn't been freaking out only a few minutes before. "Medics will be here in a sec, though I doubt they'll be able to do much."
"God," Briggs said. "What a mess."
Brick, Rocko and the girls retreated to their bunks to wait while the medics filed in, followed by people with gurneys to haul off the bodies. The guards left with them. The door slammed shut again, leaving the four prisoners alone.
"How'd you like the welcome wagon?" Kindle asked, breaking the silence.
"Very welcoming. Felt like I was back in the clan," Rocko said.
"A bandit clan?" Kindle asked. "Then you've seen the breeding farms?"
"Yes, and no. I'm not actually sure the farms exist. As far as I know, none of the clans in the Highlands had them."
"But, that freak...I've never seen anything like it."
"I've seen a few, all a little different. They're from somewhere west of the Divide. It might be farms. Folks say some bandit clans have underground facilities where they keep women to breed with, and when the babies are born, they get hooked up to machines and pumped full of chemicals that make them grow fast. That sometimes they grow up wrong. Their parts get larger at different rates, or their brains don't develop. They get to be like big, insane babies."
Brick shuddered.
"Bullshit," Kindle said. The two girls lay out together in the same bunk, arms wrapped around each other, eyes wide in the shadows. "That's impossible."
"You're probably right," Rocko admitted.
All at once, the lights turned out, plunging the cell into darkness. It was pitch-black. They might have been deep under the sea, or in a void. Brick's gut cramped with Pavlovian panic.
Tina's cheerful voice rose from that impenetrable darkness. "Let's tell more scary stories."
"No way! I mean, I'm not scared. Just tired," said Kindle.
"Please please please please please! I got a reeeeaaaaally scary one. It's prob'y the scariest thing I ever heard, a total pants pisser."
The was a momentary silence as Kindle struggled with her curiosity. "...Fine. One story. What is it?"
"Yay! Okay. On a dark and stormy night, I saw...yo' face!"
Brick heard the rustling of fabric, followed by Tina's squeal, then her total collapse into hooting laughter. "N-no fair! No tickling! AHHHHH!"
"Noisy kids. Good thing we got the block to ourselves," Brick said. The knot of tension that gripped his spine when the darkness came down finally began to unwind.
"I'll talk to Cash tomorrow about the specifics, but I think he'll give us the run," Rocko said. "I used to have eight cells in my old unit, and this block might be even bigger."
"Wow, a whole eight cells," Kindle snorted. "You're like royalty."
"Better than being crammed into one," Rocko said. The girl had no argument for that. They were quiet for awhile, tossing and turning and trying to get comfortable on the ratty old bunks.
"Let's pray," Kindle said after awhile.
Brick blushed. He hadn't prayed in front of anyone in years, not since he was a kid. Not since Emmett.
"Pray by yourself, kid," he said.
He expected some scathing retort from Kindle, but her voice was kind when she said, "You don't have to be embarrassed. I'll pray, and you can just say amen. Okay?"
Kindle recited the familiar prayer and the less familiar second verse, and when she closed it with amen, Brick said it, too, and was shocked to hear Rocko and Tina do the same. They were almost like a family for a moment. Then someone let loose a hellish fart, and the moment was over, the cell filled noxious smell and the sound of Kindle tickling Tina into submission.
Soon silence fell, interrupted only by the stillness of breathing from across the room where the two girls slumbered in a heap.
Brick dozed. He dreamed about Mordecai.