There was a saying that surviving the first three weeks of going cold turkey is a remarkable achievement. There was also another saying that said that surviving the first four days of being a prison guard for the Agres Prison is an achievement of no other.
The few people who do rarely suffered setbacks. Their cold, lifeless eyes stared at the frightened prisoners scurrying like the critters they were. Darrel Clemens had worked in the prison for years. The puny political prisoners whimpered at the far-right corner of the canteen. Darrel’s eyeball had the color of a sepia television. Political prisoners wore puking green with a dash of red. A particular face had the blues of the Pacific Ocean and the eyes of a paranoid gerbil, fearing for its life from being a subject in the new experiments offered.
A roaring sound came through the microphones planted on the ceiling’s corners. “Today’s Sunday, please bring Harrison Miles, Mr. Clemens.” A white-haired man on the chairs near Darrel shrieked at the end of the announcement. He turned his head, mouth gaping at Darrel. Darrel walked towards him with no emotion, his back straight. Harrison’s heart skipped a beat, his eyes screaming, and he boosted himself from the chair, leaping away from Darrel. He landed on his legs, turned his head around to see the emotionless Darrel aiming his eyes on his head, and made a run for it. He tried to charge into the crowd queuing for food; the plan being to confuse Darrel with the thousands of green shirts and red shirts, war criminals. His leg felt a harsh punch and Harrison collapsed to the floor, slamming his face onto the floor. His calcium deficient teeth wiggled and he groaned. Darrel’s right hand stayed up at the air, pointing where Harrison’s feet were. The gun’s smoke stayed visible and dissipated. There was no sound except the clacks of the dishwasher cleaning and the groaning prisoner.
“Harrison Miles, charged for life for the murder of Samuel Oaks, has been strapped for Experiment #42315.”
His left leg was tangled with towel wrappings soaked in old blood. The man, proud of investigating the corrupted governor’s, Samuel Oaks, drug deals, shivered alone in the white padded room. He was strapped onto the wall. The doctors did not sanitize his injured leg and left it to rot. In fact, the bullet still stayed at his shin, rusting away. The minute he got out of the room, he had to saw his leg off to save himself from being infected.
“Officer in charge, Darrel Clemens, had just arrived.”
Darrel entered the room, skimming through some papers, and muttering lines out of it. The only human in the room grimaced at Darrel’s entrance. Darrel finally made eye contact with Harrison and went back to the stapled papers. Harrison tried to take a glance of the papers but only made out his name out of the jumbled up letters; squinting did not help him.
According to the report, Harrison had 30,000 previous punishments. The most memorable punishment of all the punishments was when a masseuse was employed to handle this case. Harrison remembered her pimpled, mountainous face enveloping his vision; her lips literally being the cliffs of Mt. Masseuse. Her stubby fingers grabbed Harrison’s trembling fingers and touched it softly. Then, he felt his thumb grasped tightly. CRAAAACK! The masseuse pulled his thumb as far as possible. Harrison screamed and tried to let go of her grasp but he was strapped. He felt his bones in his thumb disconnecting, cracking, and blood pouring to fill the gap. The masseuse’s hands danced her way to his index finger. She held it tightly and twisted it like a merry-go-round carousel. Harrison gave out an unpronounceable shout that he would always remember. All of his fingers, left and right, dented and it took him a year to recover. He wouldn’t dare to do any forceful action with his fingers anymore. Nothing was more evil than having all your fingers, toes, ears, and nose twisted, bent, pulled, pushed to the point of no return. This day’s punishment might be painful but nothing beats that. If anything, it might be a bit worse than putting his legs into the clean, bacteria-free boiling water for ten minutes.
“I realized something, pal,” a sinister smile appeared in Harrison’s face after he croaked, “that this room is a total irony.” Darrel started his usual scribbling of notes, taking few glances at the bashed man. “Ya know those stories that features color a lot? Bible also does this a lot of times, I think. Black’s evil and white’s good. This room is a irony, pal.” The prison guard cared less of his sardonic humor and his iris lined up with Harrison’s.
“Experiment #42135 convening.” He shoved his hands into his pockets for the latex gloves. Their urine-like color was tarnished with actual urine, the dried out semen from prisoners who masturbated in prison and was punished by chastising, and the usual color of blood. The nauseatic combination of smells bothered Harrison when he came here first but that smell was part of everyday routine. Darrel wore a surgeon’s mask which cracked Harrison’s actual cracked funny bone; their surgeries were never safe, case in point, his lame leg.
Darrel’s right hand grabbed a metallic mechanism. Harrison’s eyes shined and mouth in awe of the new terror he faced. The shape looked like a car jack but was smaller and more compact. The dark silver lining had some brown spots; rust never ceases to appear. Darrel noticed Harrison’s mouth gaping and he stuck the mechanism into Harrison’s mouth. Taken aback by surprise, Harrison’s tongue swiveled around the mechanism. Darrel grabbed the lever and pushed it downwards. Harrison’s mouth extended half an inch and his vocal chords rasped. He shut his eyes, tears developing. Darrel took out a ziplock bag from his pocket. Inside the clear bag, cockroaches and rats deprived of oxygens stayed bereft of life. The stolid man took out a dead cockroach and shoved to the helpless Harrison. Harrison’s tongue wagged faster than a dog’s tail but the force of Darrel’s shove went through and Harrison successfully swallowed a cockroach by force. His tears fell, shattering into pieces. The broken glasses reflected Darrel’s shoving giant rats into Harrison’s throat.
… And Harrison finally swallowed the last rodent in the ziplock bag. Darrel took out the mechanism, unlocked his chains and Harrison fell to the ground, coughing. Harrison put his index finger on the end of his tongue to perform bulimia. He felt the acidic pool of dead rodents and cockroaches coming up his throat and he puked it out onto the white padded floor. The pad, stained with the yellow color and remains of the experiment, would make anyone with a faint heart collapse.
Harrison coughed up more but noticed something strange. Usually, the annoying jingle that went “Duhn-duhn-daaa!” came on after the experiment. Darrel left the padded room promptly without uttering a single word. Harrison’s mouth quivered with the yellow solids on his lips; this was the first time such a case happened.
Darrel saw everything happened through a live video feed in the security room a few doors away. The Agres Prison obtained permission to use NAIL. A vial that looked empty stood at an empty table was labeled as NAIL. Darrel put the vial into a tube and the vial got sucked in. It flew inside the tube and ended up crashing into an air grate, not coincidentally the room Harrison Miles was in. The live video feed showed a number with the percent symbol beside it. On top of the percentage was the words, “NAIL Toxicity Level”. It grew from 0% on a steady pace to 10%. Harrison, hysterical, glanced at random locations. His fingers began to itch. The toxicity level turned to 20%. A pink rash appeared in his left elbow; Harrison rubbed it while surveying. Then, the toxicity level had risen to 50%. Pink rashes had covered his body. The man scratched more frequently, his fingernails digging more deeper into his flesh than usual. At 65%, lacerations appeared and Harrison started laughing and crying. By 70%, he pawed his injured left leg, leaving lacerations so deep people could see his muscle tissue. His abdomen had similar lacerations but it got worse when toxicity level reached 80%. Harrison’s abdominal muscles was visible. His skin was torn apart by his blunt fingernails, the insides of their nails filled with dead skin. Harrison laughed even more and scratched his abdomen because it looked like the pink rashes. Blood seeped out and his pain converted into sick laughter. At 100%, he stroked his face, tearing apart every facial feature he could put his nails on. He started screaming in pain, a volume that everyone anywhere in the world could hear. The experiment went on for a minute and Harrison laid on the floor, lifeless and torn apart. Toxicity level gradually went down, seeping back to the normal percentage of 0%.
Darrel entered the padded room. A corpse, not bearing any human features, muscle tissue swishing into the padded floor, blood tainting the holy white color, laid before Darrel’s very own eyes. Yet despite its inhumane appearance, the corpse seemed to be human before. Darrel’s eyes aligned with the corpse’s poked eyeballs. Heard by the ordeal, more prison guards entered the room and stood side-by-side. They looked directly at the corpse’s eyes. No humans stayed inside the room but monsters as hideous as the corpse were there.
And they smiled for the first time.
