Loose

Loose

The prisoner woke with a strangled cry, lungs aching to taste the ripe air as he stirred in the blackness. Something’s wrong. His first breath was a ragged wheeze. His second slower, steadier. The third a hunter’s hush, as sunken eyes darted to scan his surroundings.

He saw nothing, because no light reached his gaze. Darkness was home in the Warren, but its inhabitants were all too human, craving to see something, anything. It was a great mind who had decided on locking the monsters away, leaving them with their hopeless doomed stares into the gloom. A gaol for the worst criminals in the world, snatching them away from the sun and casting them down into darkness, where the inky blackness fed on sanity day by day.

The prisoner could hear his compatriots hooting and howling their madnesses even now, filling the close atmosphere of the tunnels with echoing hate and whispered blasphemy. A lifetime ago the prisoner spent his waking hours beating his head bloody on the rough walls, trying to drown them out. Now he just lived in sullen silence, deaf to the insanity of his home.

There was warmth on the fetid air. The prisoner shed his filthy blankets in the unfamiliar heat. Sweat-slick and tense with adrenaline he forced his hungry eyes closed and focused on the senses remaining to him. The scent of his tiny cell was acutely rich; the strange warmth driving the familiar smells of damp stone, crusted nitre and foul bilge into the air with oppressive vigour. And something else… Split lips pulled back from filed teeth in an instant of realisation. Blood. Blood and smoke. The prisoner’s expression could never be called a smile.

An asthmatic breeze played upon his face, setting his skin to shivering gooseflesh in an instant of sudden realisation. He raised a hesitant hand, clutching nothing but air where the iron chill of the door should have been. He was moving as soon as he realised, hunched and prowling. Old, hard-won instincts reawakened within him in a blossoming of purpose. Hugging the walls, he moved in sure silence, withered muscles crying out from sudden use after decades of torpor.

There was meat in the hallway. A ruptured body, fresh. His nostrils flared to the scents of open bowels and the too-rich marrow of cracked bones. Now the prisoner smiled. A supremely unpleasant baring of teeth. Kett lay dead at his feet. The guard hadn’t been killed; he’d been destroyed. Were all those small kindnesses over the years worth it, weak man? Did they save you? Did they earn you even a second of mercy?

He didn’t spare old Kett another glance. He was moving again, hearing distant echoes come into focus as his path turned from gritty dirt, to rusted iron. Observation gantry? Perhaps. Atavistic bellows and wild laughter twinned in the air, punctuated by sweet screams of pain and the rising crackle of flame. Already the sting of smoke was acrid on his tongue. He knew he wasn’t the only prisoner free from his fetters. They were all free…

Flickering shapes danced across his eyelids, indistinct phantoms moving through an orange-pink haze. Light. There’s light in the Warren. His every fibre yearned to open his eyes to this wondrous news, but he crushed the urge with grinding teeth. Would he cripple himself with tears of pain in this moment of fortune? Smoke thick on the air, and dancing firelight after so long in the gloom. No. He wouldn’t accept any weakness. Not now.

Prey… He whirled in an instant, hearing the muffled footsteps and whisper of a blade just in time. He slammed his ambusher to the wall by the throat, his huge hand wrapping a spindly wrist which had been spearing for his heart. His nostrils fluttered in ecstasy as he heard the crack of a skull; scented brain open to the air and the leak of sweet, thin fluid. Orgiastic for a single second, he wrenched, reducing the man’s wrist to shards as he allowed the body to fall. The shiv clattered to the iron walkway, and then there was silence.

He could feel the other rats crowding his crouched form, suddenly uncertain. Five of them. He made out the smack of cracked lips being licked, then a soft voice, nasal in accusation. ‘You killed Seach. He killed him…’ Seach’s friend almost sounded confused. His fun had clearly been spoiled.

‘You’re dead now, you know that?’ Piped up a second voice, heady with anticipation. ‘We’ll have you. Slow too…’

‘Seach was one of us.’ Agreed the first.

‘One of us,’ sniggered another.

The prisoner’s heart was a low thunder, hungry and insistent. He could hear clammy hands shifting excitedly on weapons, smell old sweat. Now. Do it. Don’t wait. Now.

‘Stop. Yaen, wait.’ A sombre voice sounded urgently from the back of the group. Too late for caution. Far, far too late. The prisoner rose with ponderous grace, upright for the first time, on two legs like the man he had once been. He dwarfed the reedy-voiced men who ranged before him. He knew they could see him in the cavorting half-light born of their rioting… See the way he had marked his body. ‘Oh fuck, Yaen. Yaen, that’s him. It’s him!’

His low rumbling breath scattered the vermin, who sprinted away as fast as their wasted legs could manage, faster than he could follow. No matter. No matter… While they ran he had no way to catch them without use of his eyes, but down in the darkness he could follow their fear-smells and yelping cries with ease. Hunching back down, he let the pads of his digits splay in the grime, almost fancying he could still feel the coward’s retreat thrumming through the metal.

The ghost of another smile rose to his massive features, gone the second it arrived as bloody spittle stringed his chin. The points of his grinding teeth had reopened the stump of his severed tongue. Yes. His breathing grew urgent now. Time to move. He would let the other fools indulge themselves, painting pathetic evidence of their diseased minds on the walls in blood and filth.

The monsters were loose, but so was he. Down in the deepest black he would hunt one last time.