Lights Out by Nate Southard Read Free Book Online Page B

anything, in fact, and with his throat all ripped up like that, Maggot didn’t expect him to make any kind of sound. The doctor lay twisted on the floor, near the large bodies of two prisoners. They were mangled together, and there was an awful lot of blood. The other guard, the one who should have been in the hallway, lay in two torn pieces on either side of the room.
    Maggot turned to Officer Nicholas, who was looking around with eyes so wide the whites showed all around the irises. He looked funny, like a clown or something, and Maggot laughed. He could not help it. The fat guard looked like he had just seen a ghost, and the way his jaw was trembling and making both of his cheeks shake was so funny!
    Maggot let out peals of laughter that echoed through the small room, and he did not even care that there was so much blood in the room. He did not care that the only man who called him by his real name was dead. It just made everything that much more hysterical! Even stop when Officer Nicholas whipped him in the stomach with his metal baton, he did not stop laughing. He did not stop as he crumpled to the ground, fresh tears chasing each other down his cheeks, and the fat man was running out of the room and telling him, “Stop that fucking laughing, if you know what’s good for you!” Try as he might, could not seem to make himself shush, though. He just kept guffawing until his laughter turned into a chain of body-wracking sobs, and he realized that it was not funny anymore and that he was terrified of the blood-spackled room, if the cloying scent of destroyed life.
    “Help me,” he cried as a bunch of clomping feet ran into the room, bringing with them angry voices--confused voices.
    Frightened voices.
    “God, please help me.”

 
     
     
    Six
     
     
    They avoided the light, staying close to the shadows as they traveled through Burnham’s catacomb-like hallways. A voice called to them, telling them exactly where to go, and they moved with new speed, new grace. They felt a great new strength course through their muscles, felt warm blood boil in their bellies. None of this felt strange to them. It was just a fact of their new existence. Reborn in old bodies. The same, yet somehow different. Improved.
    They saw no more meat, not even when the alarms started going off, piercing their newborn ears like hot ice picks, so they kept moving, drawing closer to the voice. It sounded comforting, yet powerful, coaxing and commanding at the same time, and soon they found themselves in the tiny room with the hole in the floor. They crawled through the rough opening, scuttling through the earth like beetles, and soon they found their new father, the one with the voice, the great and terrible one who had made them. And they found two others with him, others who looked somehow familiar. Hunger hovered around the pair like a scent. It was dark, but they could still see, and though they had fed, their hunger was already beginning to call to them once again.
    Patience, the voice said. They listened.
    One of them, a creature that remembered the name Webber as though it belonged to somebody else from a long ago age, shuddered violently in the small cavern. Its body ached, muscles constricting not out of will, but out of pain. It remembered poisons it had long ago put into its body, and it remembered a similar pain once the poisons had no longer been available. The pain had been very bad before, but now that the creature’s senses had grown more aware, more powerful, the pain was all but unbearable. The creature mewled, allowing long, high notes of anguish to slip between its lips. Its new father ran cold and gentle fingers through its hair, and the pain receded the slightest bit. The father pressed a wrist to its mouth, and it bit with its new teeth, sucking the blood that pulsed warm and wet into its mouth. The pain almost disappeared, and it sucked harder at the wound, but its father pulled away.
    Enough.
    More. Please.
    No. Wait.
    It