Prisoner 52 by S.T. Burkholder Read Free Book Online Page B

separate routes you will use to navigate the complex. They are situated at a minimum height of 15 meters above the prisoner at all times. They are completely enclosed by polymer shielding and equipped with rail turrets. There is no gods-damned reason for you to ever venture beyond them. At no point are you permitted to leave these corridors and engage the prisoner without express approval from myself or the Overseer. Is that understood?"
                  He surveyed the tired and silent faces arrayed before him, his arm still leveraged at the schematics of the prison shown massive behind him. It was not unlike the rallies that most of them had experienced at one point or another, the words that loomed large before the fight.
                  "Now," He said. "I don't have to tell you that your life here will not be simple. That these men are dangerous and don't want anything more than to turn your face into a pile of goo. It will be a joy when you are reassigned by the Guild elsewhere to another prison or another detail. But while you're here, you're here. You will be under my command – and you will follow my orders." He said and looked across the ranks with his wild, peeled eyes. "Alright. Dismissed."
                  He and the others that comprised the audience waddled about face and then toward the blast doors that opened at the auditorium's end, opposite the platform from which their Captain spoke. The specters of cryo-sleep kept their lips sealed, their eyes forward. His feet moved for him and sensed the push of those behind and the stall of those ahead. He had a mind only for the lights that shone beyond the threshold of the gateway and he stared at them idly. They blurred into one another as the sweat beaded upon his brow. His veins burned. The old wound howled for the auto-hypos stowed away with his luggage and made an antagonist of the world around him. More so than it already was.

Day 3: Night
                 
    He stumbled through the doorway and crashed to the floor before the toilet and crawled onto the bowl. It rose within him. He could feel it as he would feel a thousand razors following the line of his intestines all on to his throat. The stuff came until it was lodged there and his eyes began to water and his lungs hadn't the air even to wheeze. Finally the obstruction sprayed out of a sudden past his teeth and into the water of the toilet as a great globule. Silver, congealed and foul. Next was the outpour and he was long in purging the metallic fluid from his body and soon it was all mixed with bad alchohol and worse food. A kaleidoscope of wastes that swilled within the toilet.
    She got out from the bed and went to the bathroom. A chem-stick hung lazily from her fingers, long and lithe and bony like the rest of her. Its vapors twirled in the harsh light and dissipated against the ceiling. She stood in the doorway and leaned against the threshold and the outside curve of her hips was white against the blackness of the bedroom beyond. Her arm hardly cupped her breasts as she clasped herself, the other that held the inhalant set upright upon it and leaning delicately away. He looked up from the sink and into the mirror at his pale face and then at her reflection.
    "You should go." He said. "My bracer's on the table by the bed."
    "I can stay if you want," She said. "It won't cost you nothing; you ain't like the rest of em."
    "That's why you should go."
    "Alright, chiefy." She said. "Don't be a stranger."
    She flicked the chem-stick past his shoulder and into the toilet bowl and turned and went out into the dark of the apartment. The hourglass of her body swayed until it faded from the light of the bathroom entirely.
    "Don't worry about the money neither," He heard her call from somewhere in that absence of light. "I won't take more than what's owed."
    He said nothing and triggered the spigot of the sink and doused his face again. It never drove anything away and it