INMATE 22

YOU'VE WORK TO HARD TO FIND THEM

There was not much around Morach, just a gas station, one single dinner and two or three houses. Maybe one was Gloria's. Then, nothing. Pure road.

I stayed in the dinner and ordered a couple of eggs and a french toast that soon went cold, without me touching them. It was eighty degrees, yet, I was covered from head to toe. My body was itchy, and I knew why. I waited hours until I saw Jaqueline's car heading to town. Al's photo was laying in my hand.

It was time.

Henry wasn't there when I came back, maybe he was taking his lunch break in the bathroom with Ally. Better for me. I walked down the corridor, showing Jaqueline's ID and saying I had forgotten mine.

Nobody said a thing.

The voices of the other inmates were like music to my ears. Not caring they were describing how nasty they wanted me to do them. The guards tried to make them stop, but I wasn't mad, that meant I was close. Very close.

I waited for him in the interrogation room and after a few seconds of listening to the echo of his chains, the door opened and we saw each other face to face. The dark circles underneath his eyes looked much like the ones he had on his back all the way down to his hands.

Inmate 222 sat down in front of me. I wanted to cry, yell or die but I had to do some things first.

"Hi doc, I think you know by now that I am a dead man" he laughed "It seems that I am also the worst psychopath of the decade"

"I want to talk to them" I said. I had no time to waste. His face turned dark.

"Why?" he replied. The anger crawled up my throat. Alejandra didn't deserve to die, and I didn't deserve to be unable to save her.

"Why did they kill her?" I asked.

He avoided my eyes.

"I WANT her back"

"That's impossible" he denied.

"You are here"

Inmate 222 confronted me, furious, tired, and scared.

"Yes, but I am theirs forever!" he kicked the table "And if you ask me, I would rather be Alejandra and stay three meters underneath the earth so they would leave me the fuck alone!"

I blinked, shocked, I had never told him my daughter's name.

"It's luck, don't you get it? They pick us randomly, and once they do there is no turning back. When they killed me and decided to bring me back was a fucking death sentence. I didn't want to tear those people apart, eat their livers or play with their brains! I was a farmer! And now they are here" he put a finger on his head "Talking to me, torturing me, making me do things I never imagined"

They pick us randomly, and once they do, there is no turning back I repeated internally.

"Alejandra was smart and brave enough to kill herself first before the marks covered her whole body and they came for her"

I remembered the circles on Alejandra's cold neck after I blacked out that night.

The moment he said that he paused. Noticing my clothes. He looked me straight in the eyes, with tears on them. He knew.

"You have it too, right?"

Suddenly, the earth started to shake and the marks on his arms glowed. I tried to scream, but then I realized I had the same shining ones in my hands. The terror choked me.

"You have worked too hard to find them... now you have" he said.

Then, everything went black.