Horror 100 Volume 2

Astoteph

Warden Raymond Haines looked at himself in the mirror and shuddered. His face was flabby and the color of dough, his eyes were bloodshot and worried, and his once black hair was losing its color.

He looked down at his hands, and they trembled slightly.

With a sigh, he moved away from the mirror and toward his desk. He sank down into his chair with a grunt, and tired to focus on the paper before him. The words blurred, and he couldn't have wrapped his minds around them had they not.

He looked up at the clock above his door; it was 11:00.

His stomach rolled. He shuddered, and opened his desk drawer. Inside he found his bottle of Tums, and plucked them from the midst of papers and loose staples. He wrestled with the top, his clammy hands jittery, and finally removed it in a cascade of multicolored tablets. He popped several into his mouth, and struggled to sweep the rest back into the bottle.

That done, he looked again at the clock; only six minutes had passed. His gaze traveled to the door, his stomach settling into a horrible, hallow quiet. He licked his dirty lips, and yearned for a cigarette. He had quit seven years before because Brooke realized that they weren't exactly young, and feared losing him. The patch worked well; he only had cravings after a good meal, a good lovemaking, and on nights when Astoteph came to visit.

He stood, and paced around the small, lambently lit room, his unseeing eyes darting from his many plaques and certificates on the walls to the clock and the door.

He moved to the window behind his desk, and peered absently out. The night was brightly afire with the many lights along the razor wire fence. Beyond the outer gate, across a dark, barren gulf, the small red light of a radio station tower blinked rhythmically, like a beacon to wayward alien crafts.

Haines moved back to his desk, and then back to the window in indecision. He finally moved back to his desk, sat down, and rummaged around in his desk until he found the small transistor radio that Paige had gotten him for Christmas years before, when she was still a scrawny, brace-faced kid in school, relying on her daddy's bedtime stories to lull her to sleep.

He smiled thinking of her. She was just like her mother: smart, beautiful, endlessly compassionate, and hardheaded as hell.

Mind miles away, Haines switched on the radio, and found WGRQ a deep pit of static. He turned the dial up and down the band, and finally settled for a station playing Kesha.

He ignored the music, his mouth dry and throbbing for a smoke. He thought of finding Jim Dumfries, the assistant warden, and bumming one off of him, but decided against it. Brooke would smell it on his clothes and give him hell.

Soon, the song ended and a newsflash came on. Obama was giving a speech at a banquet somewhere in Washington, a hurricane that nearly obliterated Cuba was heading for Key West, an immigration protest in Phoenix turned violent, the Dow had lost big time...

"Tonight at midnight, convicted murderer Charles Jackson will be executed by lethal injection at Shawnshank prison in Marion..."

Haines scrambled to turn it off, not noticing until then that he was biting his nails.

Folding his hands in his lap, Haines looked up at the clock. 11:18.

With a perturbed sigh, he stood and switched off his lamp. He moved to the door, opened it, turned the overhead lights off, and shut the door behind him, his chest tightening.

He clap-clocked down the lonely hall, his eyes vacantly scanning the yellowed walls and bare piping as he went.

Shawshank South had been built in 1953 after an agreement between the governments of Maine and Virginia; Maine prisons were overcrowded, and Virginia prisons were overcrowded with violent felons. South was connected directly with a prison in Maine, the original Shawshank, and any inmate who entered either prison could be transferred to the north or south, thus becoming the problem of the other state, if the need ever arose.