Red Sky: Chapter 31
“You again?” Goodwell wasn’t pleased.
“You killed an inmate this morning.”
“It was an accident. He slipped and hit his head. I tried to catch him and failed.” I kept my lie.
Goodwell could kill me any time he wanted, but he had other considerations. That’s why he sent the Lion to do it for him and why he would be reluctant to do it now. The moon had thirteen guards and over one hundred inmates. The newts were agitating. If he killed me, there could be a full-blown riot. He had bosses to answer to. What would it look like if he couldn’t control his inmates? My story would give him an excuse to let me live.
“You were spared the whip last time, 89. You won’t be so lucky this time.”
Goodwell stood up from his desk and walked over to me.
“I’m going to get through to you. I’ve seen your kind before. Proud. What do you have to be proud about? You’re here because you killed an innocent woman. Do you understand, 89?”
“You’re not here to be rehabilitated, you’re here as punishment for murder.” There was a look of disgust in his face. “There is no room in this prison for a nonconformist. You might well remember that the next time there's an accident.”
Hades led me to my cell. It was still early in the day and everyone was down in the mine. They were going to make me wait. They wanted a show of putting me in the box.
*
I was tied to the whipping post. Hades stood behind me out of my line of vision. My body tensed trying to anticipate what it could not anticipate, not knowing when the whip would slice into my skin. I listened for every breath, every step, every shuffle. Hades was quiet. There had been no speeches, he just stood behind me enjoying his work, enjoying the pain he could inflict at any moment.
I heard a loud scream. It was my voice. An involuntary cry when the tail of the whip bit into my back. The pain was nothing like the prickling agony of the electrocuting lance and collar that courses through a body. This pain was sudden and localized. It arose quickly and then throbbed. The throbbing was the body trying to heal itself, but before it could begin to heal, a second stab into my back like a sharp needle in an open wound. A third stab, and a fourth.
I wish I could say my back went raw, as in numb, but the rawness I felt was different. The nerves were still awake to pain, the more they were worked over the more acute each sting. I wanted to pass out. I wanted my mind to drift away, but there was no escape from the pain of those lashes. As the whip continued hitting my back, I was fully conscious, aware of each lacerating mark.
It was thirty lashes. I think I counted thirty through clenched teeth and closed eyes. I had hoped for only fifteen, I thought that was the rule, but it was my second time in the box. Hades said it was double each time we were put in the box. I guess thirty was the correct number. Such arbitrary rules can be confusing.
When Ginger and whoever the other guard was took me down from the whipping post, I could see small pools of blood on the floor. The rest of it must have been stuck to my back like matted hair.
I was thrown into the box. The outside world disappeared. I was locked in darkness once again.
Dreams and memories came to me. They were worse than the sting of the whip. The one night I wanted to forget came back in a rush. Goodwell was right about me after all.
*
I could see her body on the ground. I half-remembered an argument with hateful words thrown back and forth, a violent passion rising in me. The space-time jump took away that memory and now the box gave it back.
I could see a pool of blood like the pool that developed below me on the whipping post. This blood wasn’t coming from my body, it was leaking out of another. It started as a small drop no different than a drop of sauce accidentally spilled in the kitchen. It grew. Into a puddle collecting in a depression in the floor. Into a pool the size of a small wheel. Into a giant lake I could bury my hands in.
Why wouldn’t it stop? I tried cupping it in my hands, the stickiness of the blood like glue on my fingers. It continued to flow.
I remembered running from her apartment. I remembered the waves of guilt like the waves of the ocean making my stomach turn and flip until I was retching into my kitchen sink. I had run from a pool of blood in her kitchen to a pool of vomit in my own. The smell was horrible. It was the smell of a decaying body, of a corpse that hadn’t been discovered for days. I turned on the sink to get rid of that smell, to get rid of the evidence of my guilt.
That lake of blood haunted me as I lay in bed curtains drawn down, covers pulled up. It was so unbearably hot. I took off all of my clothes save my undershorts and slept, running away into my unconscious.
The Lion's death unlocked memories. His cold body lying in the dirt was no different than Aya’s lifeless body on her kitchen floor. I stood over them in the same way, waiting for them to be revived, thinking sudden actions hadn’t ended their lives. I shivered in the box as these memories came back. Shivered with fright and rage and cold. I was the killer they claimed I was.
The shivering stopped. The coldness went away. Now there was heat, anger boiling up inside of me. The heat rose from my feet to my legs to my chest and my face. I flailed about with the intensity of the possessed. Rivers of blood washed around me.
I stopped moving. The anger did not stop. I thought of Ray and his justifications. I now felt the same because I was no different than him or any of the other convicts. As long as I blocked out what I had done I could pretend I was different. After the memories came back, there were no more illusions. I was broken. Goodwell and Hades had won. Not because they were stronger than me or smarter than me, but because they were right. I deserved this. I was a murderer.