Death Row

When you work the graveyard shift at a prison, you see some messed up stuff.

And I’m not talking about the kind of stuff you’re thinking of right now. Inmates killing their bunkmates, screaming all through the night, shitting themselves and rubbing the shit all over. Hell, since I’m the only female guard on night watch, I get these guys nutting through the bars as I walk by at least once a month.

None of that is unusual. That’s the basic stuff. The kind of stuff that makes you get mad and shout.

I’m talking about the kind of stuff that makes you go quiet. The stuff that, when you see it or hear it, you go pale, your eyes go wide.

Something happened recently that slots straight into this category. It’s hard to even put into words honestly. To explain it to you, I’ve got to go to the very start of the story.

I was doing my rounds on an otherwise normal night. Fucko Phil had been shouting for a while, as he usually did, so me and my night watch partner, Armin, had gone in and beat him quiet. Phil had made a habit of shouting all day and all night about how he was innocent, and god damn was it annoying. Beating inmates was business as usual for us because there was no other way to reel them in when they got rowdy. You might think it harsh, but it’s just the way we do things.

Anyway, apart from Fucko Phil being Fucko Phil (we don’t know how he got that nickname, by the way), it was a normal night. Until we got to Lee’s cell.

Didn’t think much of it at first. Lee was a lifer, in for killing six rival gangers in a shootout. He was sitting on the ground, at the far end of his cell, with his back against the wall, and his knees up against his chest. Wasn’t unusual for inmates to stay up late jacking off or doing not much of anything, so my partner and I walked on by. Wasn’t worth our time to force inmates to go to bed. Least of all a stone-cold guy like Lee.

After patrol we typically kicked back in the control room, watching the cams for a couple hours. . . . Actually, to tell you the truth, neither of us really bothered to do what we were supposed to be doing in there. I mean, hell, there were like twenty of these cams, and there was never anything worth looking at on them. Just a series of long hallways, dimly lit and all grainy. (I’m sitting in Control right now as I type this, and looking up, there’s not a worthwhile thing to be seen!)

Anyway, after a couple hours we headed out on our second patrol. And when we got to Lee’s cell, he was sitting the exact same, staring the exact same.

“Lee?” I called to him. “Get to bed already.”

He didn’t answer or move or anything. Even in the dark the whites of his eyes were bright, and when I swung my flashlight on him, the glow shimmered off his arms and his forehead like he was sweating buckets. I looked up at this bunkmate — he was fast asleep, snoring soundly.

I looked back at Lee. “Lee? I’m not gonna tell you again. Get to bed. Lee? Answer me!”

Nothing. He was frozen like a statue, only this statue was shaking a little. And those eyes . . . god damn, they looked like they were about to pop right out of his head.

“Fuckin’ freak,” my partner muttered. “C’mon, Meli. Ain’t worth it.”

I nodded and went along, leaving Lee to his shenanigans, but it didn’t sit right with me, the way he was just sitting there and staring. I felt like he was staring right through me.

As my partner and I got back into the control room, the lights and screens flickered a little. Didn’t think anything of it; our slammer was one of the older ones. We got back to scrolling our phones till the end of our shift.

About Lee: you’re probably thinking that he was just a loony like the rest of the inmates, and that loonies do loony shit all the time, right? You’d be right, usually. Basic stuff.

But get this. That morning, right when I’d gotten home after my shift, I got a call from work — first time they’d ever called me at that hour. Then another first-time thing: the prison warden himself was on the line. “Meli,” he said, “what the fuck happened with Lee?”

“Uh, he was acting a little odd,” I told him, “but that’s all, sir.”

“Meli,” he said, “Lee is dead. Dawn patrol found him with his throat torn out.”

My first thought was that his bunkmate did him in. Basic stuff, right? But apparently, his bunkmate woke up when dawn patrol went in there to investigate, and the bunkmate was so damn scared by what he saw that he literally pissed himself. Dawn patrol swore that it couldn’t have been an act.

Well, they pinned the murder on him anyway. Bunkmate got life, on top of life. Basic stuff, that. We don’t do the whole court case thing in our prison — you know, where cops look everything over and witnesses take the stand and ultimately smart people decide who’s guilty and who’s not. Nah, usually we just pick whoever looks most suspect in a given situation and the judge slaps another life sentence on ’em, doubling or tripling the life sentence they first came in for.

The next night I went by Lee’s cell again on my patrol. They’d cleaned the place up, and his bunkmate was still in there. Kinda fucked up honestly that they didn’t even move him, but that’s basic stuff.

Things got even weirder then. Lee’s bunkmate — his name was Walter — was awake and crying in the cell. I figured he was crying because of the new life sentence, which meant that he no longer had any chance at parole (not that he was getting parole anyway, seeing as he killed his wife and mailed parts of her to her family out of spite). But that wasn’t it.

He stood up when I got to his cell and grabbed the bars, so fast that I leapt back, hand on my baton. “You gotta do me in!” he barked.

“I — What?” I stuttered.

“Make it quick! Do me in! I’m begging!”

Armin, my partner, chuckled. “What’s your deal, Walt?”

“It’s coming.” Walter spat that out, literally: I had to wipe my face with the back of my hand.

“It?” Armin drolled.

“Got Lee. I’m next. Do me in, please. Quick and painless. Please!”

Armin and I exchanged glances. He was smirking; I was frowning. “Walt, nobody is coming after you,” I told him. “Except maybe us.”

Walter began to cry again as he pressed his cheeks against the cold bars. “Please,” he begged.

“C’mon, Meli,” Armin rumbled. I followed as he continued on down the hall.

Walter started moaning, “No . . . no . . . no. . . .” He thumped his head lightly against the bars as we walked off, rattling them.

Armin scoffed, shaking his head.

I looked at him. “Any idea what that was about?”

“Heard inmates whispering about it now and again. It’s like a folktale for lifers.”

“A folktale?”

“A fairy tale, spooky story, whatever you wanna call it. Don’t let it bother ya.”

I shrugged. “Didn’t know inmates had folktales. Thought they were too stupid to come up with anything like that.”

“Hah. You’re probably right. A visitor must have tried to spook one of ’em one time, and it happened to take hold.”

We didn’t talk for the rest of our rounds. And luckily Fucko Phil was actually quiet that night. All in all, it was an easy patrol.

We got back to Control, grabbed a coffee each, and kicked back. As usual, neither of us bothered looking at the displays. The control room was a glorified break room, and it almost made the other crap we had to deal with on that job worth it.

I was lost in some Twitter thread when the lights went out. There was a loud zap and snap, and they were off. The displays were still on, but crackling. Even my phone was flickering.

“God damn!” Armin shouted. By the look of his face against the glow of the screens, he wasn’t mad — he was rattled.

I’d never seen Armin rattled before. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Power outage?”

He was staring at the cams, eyes bouncing from one screen to the next. The lights were out in the halls, too; the cameras were lit in a greenish hue as their night-vision kicked in. “Nah. No way. The cells are power locked — we have like five backup generators for that exact reason — and I don’t see anyone busting out. Besides, the screens are still up, right? So the lights are just whacked out.”

“Holy shit, Armin,” I whispered. “What about the regular locks? The ones we have keys for?”

“They’re old as shit,” Armin said. “Everyone knows it, including the inmates. Could kick through those things easily. It’s the auto-locks that keep ’em shut.”

One of the cams caught my eye. “Armin. Look there.”

“What the fuck?”

We both stared in silence at the cam at the end of Walter’s hallway. It caught his cell at an angle, enough so that we could see him still standing there, where we’d left him.

He was slamming his head against the bars. Not lightly like earlier. He was throwing his whole damn weight at them.

I looked at Armin. “We should — ”

“OH SHIT!”

I nearly fell off my chair at Armin’s shouting. I looked back at the cam. Walter’s cell door had opened — oh, shit, the power was out — and he was stumbling over the space in front of his nook. “Fuck! We gotta lock the door to Control, gotta radio for backup!” I snatched the radio from the table beneath the cams, clicked the button and . . .

Nothing. The radio was out. I tried my phone. It was still whacked out.

“Meli!” Armin gasped. “Look!”

Walter was still outside his cell. He had grabbed the bars — from the outside this time — and was going at it again, ramming his head against them. There was black spreading across the bars and the floor at his feet. Blood, probably.

Somehow, that wasn’t the weirdest part. The weirdest part was that the other inmates hadn’t tried to bust out. They hadn’t even walked up to their bars — not one of them. These dudes would squeeze their faces against the bars any time anything the least bit interesting happened, yet now they were all tucked away.

Armin and I were frozen, as though something bad would happen if one of us got up. I could have sworn that the air was colder than usual in Control; for a moment, I even thought I saw my own breath visible in front of me. I felt like I was in a bad dream. It all felt surreal, and went against everything I’d experienced in that prison.

Just then I thought I saw . . . something. At the end of the hall, down from Walter’s cell. It was like the light reaching the cam from that place was scratchy.

For an instant — and I can’t be sure, because the night vision was blurry as hell — it looked as though Walter turned his head to the side, looking down the hall toward that distorted place. I opened my mouth to mention it to Armin, but then Walter wound up and threw himself at the bars hard.

Didn’t need high definition to see that his neck snapped. He collapsed, his head dangling around his torso like a melon in a sack.

I yelped. Then I screamed, because the lights came back on with a loud zap and snap.

“Damn,” Armin muttered. “Radio should be back up. Let’s call it in.”

“Call what in?”

“Uh,” he stammered, “uh, power outage, broken out prisoner, and . . . uh . . . prisoner suicide. Psychotic break.”

I did as Armin asked. The radio was back up. Everything was back to normal, and for what it was worth, nobody else had broken out. The doors were probably back up.

We locked up in the control room as we waited for backup. No way were we going to chance it out on the block until it was a sure thing that the cells were secure.

We didn’t speak much while we waited. “Fuckin’ schizo,” was all Armin said, mostly to himself. Not a label I liked to use, personally, but it was true that the inmates were often sick in the head. Walter had clearly been sick in the head.

Finally backup arrived. Took all of five minutes for the contracted mercs to confirm that the cells were secure. Apart from the mess Walter had made, everything was in order.

Dawn was coming round and it was nearly time for me to head home when one of the inmates called me over. It was Mike, the lifer who had a thing for kids. I didn’t want to talk to him, honestly. He liked really young kids. . . . But he insisted, and with the weirdness of that day, I figured I’d hear him out.

I walked up, crossed my arms. “What do you want?” I didn’t look at him.

He was frazzled, more than what’s usual for guys like him. “You gotta talk to the warden. Shit, talk to the governor if you gotta. Tell them the prison ain’t safe anymore, that the doors ain’t working. Whatever you gotta tell them, tell them. Just get us transferred.”

I nearly laughed. “Transferred? This isn’t the kind of spot where you get to request transfers, Mike.”

“Not just us inmates. Yourself too. Believe me, ma’am, we needa get out of here.”

“And why is that?”

His mouth snapped shut. I glanced at him and saw something in his eyes I’d never seen before — and that’s saying something, because you see all kinds of weird shit in eyes like Mike’s.

He opened his mouth and spoke slowly: “Our turn’s come. Bad fuckin’ luck. It . . . it won’t leave until it’s had its fill.”

“What are you on about?” I asked. I didn’t want to give Mike, of all people, the benefit of the doubt, yet my voice was a little uneven.

He swallowed, then whispered, “Stalker.”

I rolled my eyes. Without another word I stepped away and made toward the exit, eager to be done for the day.

“Listen to me!” Mike begged. “It’s for your good as much as mine!” He kept going, getting louder as I got farther away. “God damn whore!” he shouted, giving his bars a kick that drew the attention of one of the morning guys. He got hushed up real quick as I left the block.

As I drove home after that shift I felt stupid because I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mike had said. Walter had mentioned something similar as well, before his . . . incident. It was something Armin had heard of too apparently. I resolved to ask my partner about it next shift. He’d laugh at me, but better that than talking about it with that thing called Mike.

I had a hard time sleeping that night. And when I finally did fall asleep, I had a nightmare. You’d think this nightmare would be about throats torn out and heads smashed against bars, right? But no, the nightmare was me in a hallway. It was an empty hallway of stone walls and cement flooring, dimly lit by those cold lights we have at work.

But it wasn’t really empty. At the far end of the hallway, the space there was . . . wrong. The air was wrong. Hell, I can’t explain it. I told you at the start of this story, didn’t I? It’s hard to put into words. Shit, just trying to write this is giving me chills, making me feel all cold.

Anyway, I got to my next shift, said hey to Armin, and we got going on our rounds. You might think it unusual that we would just carry on at the prison despite the recent happenings. Thing is, from the point of view of the higher ups, these incidents weren’t that big of a deal. Death and gore are business as usual in a prison like ours. You had to be there during these events to really grasp that what was happening was particularly messed up.

During patrol, Armin acted as cool as ever. I couldn’t tell you whether that was a front or not. I hoped it wasn’t because of what I was about to say.

“Have you heard of a thing called the stalker?” I asked him.

He looked at me sidelong for a split second. “Man, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”

What was that supposed to mean? I kept quiet as we rounded a corner, dropping into Walter and Lee’s hallway.

“Don’t listen to that shit,” Armin said. “These guys are crazy, Meli. Don’t take ’em seriously.”

“I’m not taking them seriously. I’m just curious, dude.”

Armin sighed. “Alright then. I’ll tell you. Relax.”

We walked past the cell that Lee and Walter had lived in for years. It was empty now, as you’d expect; at least until they fixed up the door. They’d cleaned the place up but you could still see faint brown stains along the bars and the floor.

Armin continued. “Like I said the other day: it’s a kind of myth for these guys. They think the stalker is something that comes after people like them.”

I frowned. “People like them?”

“People who have done terrible things.”

“Huh.” I shrugged. “Fair’s fair. More power to the stalker.”

Armin grinned at me. “That’s what I’m saying! Makes our job easier, eh?”

I chuckled, though I didn’t really find it all that funny. We carried on in silence, our footsteps echoing off the walls and ringing across the block. The inmates were quieter than usual, and when we’d walk past their cells, they’d eye us warily. Even Fucko Phil was chill — that was the second shift in a row that he had been. His best streak yet in the two years I’d worked on that block.

A while later Armin and I were back in Control, coffees and smartphones in hand. I was reminded of the early days on the job, because for the first time in ages, I felt compelled to look at the displays. I’d try to find something interesting to distract me on my phone, but my eyes kept drifting up at the cams. I stole a glance at Armin and saw that he was the same, and like me he was trying to keep it on the down low.

I was feeling a little cold, so I told Armin I was going to go grab a hoodie from my locker. He nodded without a word. I stepped out of the control room and made for the end of the hallway where the lockers were. As I was slipping my hoodie over my head I saw the glow of the locker room lights through the fabric — and for the briefest moment, I thought I saw them flicker.

I yanked my hoodie all the way on and looked around the room. Things seemed normal. I started back toward Control, walking quicker than I had when I left.

A nearly leapt right back out of my hoodie when a resounding zap and snap rattled the hallway. The lights went out all at once. I was in pitch black.

I fumbled for my phone, which was in my pocket. As I drew it out, I lost hold of it. It clattered and slid on the concrete floor. “Shit!” I gasped as I felt frantically along the ground. The cement flooring was so damn cold under my hands.

I heard another snapping sound from the far end of the hall. I was still blind, my phone unrecovered.

Then an orb of light appeared from where the sound had come. It seared my eyes against the otherwise pitch black. I gasped as the orb began to hover toward me.

My phone. I needed my phone. I looked down at the now-illuminated floor and saw where it had fallen. I snatched it and held it up, swiping frantically, trying to get my light on.

My flashlight came on just as the orb came within five feet of me.

“Armin? What the fuck?”

“Meli . . . Wasn’t sure it was you out here. Sorry.”

“Who else would it have been?” I growled. “You could have said something instead of scaring the shit out of me.”

Armin gestured with his hand, pressing his palm downward. “Quiet! The fucking power’s off again.”

He was right. The power was off and the inmates could break out again, same as the last shift. I shut my mouth and nodded. Armin helped me up. I dusted myself off, taking a few deep breaths, just trying to calm the hell down.

I shouldn’t have taken my time. The door opposite of Control — the one that led to the block — flew open, slamming against the door stopper so hard it crushed the thing entirely. That door was supposed to be locked, but we never bothered with that since it just made patrols more tedious. Another mistake, that, because now Hector, one of the biggest and baddest of our inmates, was barrelling down the hall straight for us.

“Oh shit,” Armin roared. He snatched his baton from his hip — that was when I realized I had left mine in Control — and stood ready as Hector ran at us. I held up my phone, shining a light on the inmate.

“Ain’t no FUCKIN’ way,” Hector screamed as he thumped down the hallway. “Ain’t no goddamn WAY I’m stayin’ in there!”

Armin leapt up to meet Hector, swinging his baton as hard as he could. The big guy didn’t even seem to notice him. Maybe he was blinded by my flashlight, or maybe he just didn’t have time for either of us. In any case, Armin’s baton made clean and brutal contact with the side of Hector’s head, sending the giant tumbling to the ground. He damn near fell on me.

We thought he was out cold. We were wrong. As we approached, Hector swung at Armin with a punch that would have killed him if he hadn’t ducked away, letting the fist glance off his head instead of crushing it.

“DO IT!” Hector shouted. “FUCKIN’ DO IT OR I’LL DO YOU IN FIRST!”

The giant was grabbing Armin now, slamming him against the wall. I had to act, had to somehow neutralize him.

I ran at Hector, leapt, and kicked his head. I guess his skull was already fractured from the baton hit earlier, ’cause when I laid him out against the wall, his head caved in entirely, with a crunch that I’ll never forget.

A zap. A snap. The lights came back on.

I turned away, not wanting to look at what was left of Hector, and then I saw it: at the far end of the hallway, right next to the door Hector had broken, was that same sort of wrongness. The air there wasn’t right. The air was . . . bent. Or twisted.

For a moment, that twisted air started to take a shape that vaguely resembled a man. Then it faded. The end of the hallway was normal, aside from the fact that a goddamn prisoner had destroyed the door to the block. A prisoner who I had just killed.

“Shit,” Armin cursed as he shoved Hector off himself. “Oh, shit. Oh, god no.”

I strained to listen, feeling lightheaded. Were any other inmates free of their cells? I couldn’t hear a thing from the block. All was quiet.

I stood and walked toward the busted door. “Meli?” Armin whispered from behind me. “Meli! Stop!”

I ignored him. Reaching the end of the hall, I turned and looked out at the block. Everything was quiet. Apart from Hector’s cell door — which had blown off its hinges so fiercely that it fell down from the second storey and onto the tables below — everything was normal. Not a single pair of eyes peeked past cell bars at me, despite the fact that every last one of those prisoners had heard the commotion.

My memory of the remainder of that day’s real fuzzy. I know that we called in the breakout and the downed inmate right away. Then we got cleaned up. Then we got interviewed by the warden, then by the police. Then we went home, ’cause we weren’t in any trouble or anything. We had only defended ourselves. Basic stuff, right?

Both of us were offered paid time off. I took the two weeks, but, Armin being Armin, he turned down the offer. He said he was fine and wanted to keep working, so they let him.

I used the two weeks to get my head right. I flipped my sleep schedule to what’s considered normal, then I saw some family, saw a ball game, saw an old friend — the works. The days were great. The nights weren’t. I’d toss and turn, that image of Hector vivid in my mind. Eventually I’d fall asleep, and every damn time I’d dream of that cold hallway, and that wrongness. And let me tell you, waking from nightmares in the dark of night was way worse than waking in daylight.

By the time I got back to work I was relieved. Working through the night and snoozing during the day suited me just fine. I had a hop in my step as I got back to the clink. I’d nearly forgotten all that nonsense about the stalker. The Hector thing was far from gone, as you’d expect, but I could push that aside well enough.

Simon, the fella who had filled in for me during the two weeks, briefed me before my shift, and he had some great news: at long last, those useless old locks had been replaced with new ones that no amount of strength could bust through. So now, even if the power went out, the inmates would stay in their cells. Thank god for that.

But Simon also had bad news: During my two weeks off, eight inmates had died. All suicides. He also told me that Armin hadn’t been acting right. Honestly, that spooked me more than anything. Armin of all people, tilted? I figured Simon was exaggerating and brushed it off.

After the briefing and getting changed, I paced down the hallway to Control, taking care not to look at the spot where Hector had . . . laid. Stepping into the control room, I found Armin looking down at his baton. He smiled big when he saw me and gave me one of his bear hugs. I could tell he was glad to have me back.

“How’s things?” I asked him as I sat in my chair.

“Eh, you know,” Armin said without looking at me. “The schizos have been doing schizo things. The usual.”

I’d more so meant to ask how things were outside of work, but I didn’t press for that. “Yeah, I heard. Eight suicides? God damn, we’ll have a state level investigation come down on us soon.”

“Hah,” Armin chuckled. “Already in the works. Investigators will be here in a few weeks, but not state level — even higher. A couple CIA agents will be coming down. Weird, huh?”

My stomach fluttered a little. “Shit, weird for sure.” I saw that vivid image of Hector’s caved-in skull in my mind’s eye. “You don’t think we’re in trouble, do you?”

Armin raised his eyebrows. “No way, Mel. Don’t sweat it. It’s not us, it’s the schizos that are the problem.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “Let’s just keep doing our thing and let the big wigs sort out the crazies.”

The first half of the shift went by pretty quick. On our first patrol, Fucko Phil was back to his hollering, so we hushed him up, though he gave us a mouthful and a half about how “he was safe because he was innocent.” A few of the other inmates asked for transfers, including that rat, Mike, but Armin and I just ignored them. I tried joking with my partner a couple of times as we went, but he just smirked back.

It was when we were pivoting to head back to Control from the far end of the block that Armin froze.

I didn’t even notice at first. I walked a dozen or so paces before realizing he wasn’t at my side. Spinning round, I saw him frozen midstep, as though he were playing a game of Red Light Green Light and the light had just turned red.

I gave an awkward smile. “Armin? You alright, bud?”

He was staring to my side, eyes wide as hell. I looked to my side, saw nothing there at all. Frowning, I said, “Armin? You’re creeping me out, man.”

Suddenly he shook himself and said, “One sec, I gotta hit the bathroom.”

I wanted to ask what his deal was all of a sudden, but he had turned and gone toward the bathroom before I could even open my mouth. Confused and a little annoyed, I went back to Control on my own.

When Armin got back in five minutes after me, he acted all normal. “Armin,” I said to him, “we gonna talk about what happened out there?”

He shrugged. “Taco Bell.”

“Armin, cut the shit.”

He grinned at me. “Mel, what do you want me to say? The Taco Bell from earlier wanted to come out all at once. Matter of life and death, you know?” He patted his belly. “I’m feeling all better now, though.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “If you say so.”

We grabbed our coffees and our phones and settled in for the hour-long break before our next patrol. I glanced over at Armin while I kicked back and saw him staring at his baton more often than not. His eyes also darted over my shoulder a few times, at the control room door. It was one of those doors that had a glass window built into the top half of it. His staring at it creeped me out, but I didn’t want to look over my shoulder and make it a whole thing, you know?

It was nearly time for our next patrol when I came across a video I thought was hilarious. “Oh man, Armin, check this — ”

Armin stood up so fast that his chair rolled back and clattered against the back wall. At the exact same time, the lights flickered.

“Armin, what the hell!”

“Gotta get something from my car. Be back in a sec.”

“What? Armin!”

He burst out of the room, running down the hall toward the front of the prison. I was stunned for a moment, thinking to myself about how right Simon had been about Armin. Then I got up and turned around to go to the parking lot and see —

I tripped over myself and fell backward when I saw who — or what, rather — was standing behind the door’s glass window. My breath rose in a visible plume in front of me as I stared.

A . . . corpse . . . stood there, all blurry and scratchy. Or at least, I thought I had seen a corpse for a moment, but I blinked and then there was nothing at all. Distant visions of a cracked open head and a bloodied body echoed in my mind, but otherwise the only thing I saw through the window was the stone wall beyond.

Holy shit, was I losing it too?

Brushing my tangled, wriggling thoughts aside, I went out and after Armin. I dashed out to the parking lot, and looking at his go-to parking spot, I saw that he was gone. I looked around the rest of the lot, knowing it was futile because Armin was a creature of habit and he always parked in his usual spot. His car wasn’t there. He was gone.

Bewildered, I went back inside. It was bad enough that I left the block unattended for those few minutes; I needed to get back in there and close out my shift. I told myself that Armin’s Taco Bell predicament had hit him again, hard enough this time that he needed to see a doctor. He was the type to be embarrassed over stuff like that and too proud to talk about it, so he ran off without a word.

It was the next evening, not long before my shift, that the warden himself called me to tell me that Armin had quit. I didn’t believe him at first, but when the warden started getting pissed at me for questioning it, I realized he wasn’t kidding around. Armin had quit — no notice or anything. My partner of two years and my good friend left without a word. I texted him right away and even tried calling him, but he ghosted me.

I went into work that night, because what else was I going to do? Simon filled for Armin, and I wondered if he was going to become my new fulltime partner. He was friendly — and cute, I had to admit — but he wasn’t nearly as easygoing as Armin had been.

Simon and I were on our first patrol when it happened to me again. We were strolling down the block when, for a fraction of a second, I saw a dude peeking out from around a corner, from a spot where there shouldn’t have been anyone. It was the faintest thing and at the edge of my vision, but I could have sworn there was a big guy standing there, one eye and shoulder poking out from behind the wall.

“Meli?” Simon asked with a frown. “You alright?”

I shook myself. “All good. Have a headache, that’s all. Let’s keep going.”

I started to worry that I was actually losing it. A lot of fucked up shit had happened on our block recently, and my mental was all rattled. Maybe I needed to take another break — paid time off be damned. A couple weeks, or maybe a month. Maybe I needed to go on a proper vacation, to hit the beaches and really unwind.

I was thinking about that in the control room when I happened to glance up at the cams to see that corpse once more. It was gone again after I blinked, but this big dude had filled every goddamn display like he was right up by the cameras, and the afterimage in my mind was more vivid somehow. The eyes were blank and glowing. The mouth was drooping and half open. The one side of the skull was caved in, ropes of brain dangling out over the face. It was nauseating even through the grainy display.

I looked over at Simon and saw him chuckling at something he was watching on his phone, unperturbed. I decided that I really was losing it right then, and after my shift, I put in a request to get some time off. The warden was pissed since Armin had just ditched too, but I was upfront about my mental being in bad shape, so he gave in and told me he’d let me off in a few weeks once he’d found someone to cover for me.

And that brings us to the present day. I’m still waiting for my vacation, but hanging in there. Simon’s been a godsend; he really looks out for me. Even now, he’s gone out to get us coffees. Good coffees, not the shit we make here in Control.

I’ve been having my . . hallucination . . . more than I’d care to admit. It’s this same goddamn guy, peeking at me from the edge of my vision and from arond corners. The part of my mind that isn’t rational tells me it’s Hector haunting me. The sensible part tell me I need a break from all this shit.

Anyway . . . I thoght sharing all of this with you people on the internet might help me unwind a bit while I wait for my time off. It’s crazy workin in a place like this and definity not something i’d recommen.

Damn, my fingers are geting stiff. Too cold in here. Should prob post this and hop off til i get my coffee and warm up.

Hah. And now the lights are flickering.

Let me guess! Next a zap an a snap, and lights go out? Hah. right.

Thanks for reading.