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  "Why didn't you take Robert first?" I asked.

  I couldn't keep the fear from my voice. Everything about prison management was orderly. The guards wouldn't pick an inmate at random when it was time to escort the prisoners to the showers. They always started at one end of a cell block and worked their way down. Unless they had reason to deviate from that plan, such as taking an inmate for an unauthorized shower where a crew of inmates would be waiting to beat, rape, or kill that prisoner. I had no illusions about the guards. Some were clearly aligned with one of the gangs that vied for power within the prison; others were just open to bribes. All it took was a letter to someone on the outside and cash could then be mailed to a guard's home or hidden in some clever place, such as a wheel well on the guard's vehicle.

  The prison was a large place and there were security cameras in the common areas, such as the mess hall and overlooking the rec yard, but at least half of the facility had no cameras and therefore the guards had no accountability. I was nervous, but there was no way to escape my fate. The guards led me to the exercise room. My heart was pounding with fear when they opened the door, but the room was empty. They removed my cuffs and then closed the door. It was difficult to relax. I walked around and around the room. It was nothing but cinder blocks and a rough concrete floor. We were still underground, but the lights in the exercise room were brighter than in my cell. There were pull-up bars bolted to walls, but otherwise the room was just empty space. I walked and walked, waiting for the door to open again and revealing my enemies, but nothing happened.

  When the door finally was opened, I saw that the guards now had Tate, the elderly prisoner whose cell adjoined mine. Tate had thinning gray hair, and his skin hung like oversized clothing off his wilting frame. It was obvious that Tate wasn't well, but the prison system isn’t sympathetic to an inmate’s health issues. Tate wouldn't meet my eyes, even though I tried to give him a look of encouragement.

  The guards cuffed me again and led me to the showers. I still didn't understand why the guards had skipped Robert. I stripped and dropped the foul smelling paper-thin coverall, undershirt, and boxer shorts into a bin marked dirty laundry. Then I stepped into the small shower room. Unlike the showers for gen pop, the solitary shower was just a single stall. It had probably been an administrator's private quarters at one time. The water was hot, but I knew that wouldn’t last long and I was thankful that the guards had started the shower rotation on my end of the corridor. I quickly lathered and rinsed off, using the harsh bar soap even on the stubble of hair that was left after the prison barber shaved my head. Then I dried off and pulled on the same clothes shared by every other prisoner in Tucker. The jumpsuit was dull white with large black stenciled letters, ADOC - TK.

  The guards led me back to my cell. This time, I could see what should have been Robert's cell. It had a solid metal door, no grate, no oversized hinges. I knew immediately that something was wrong. There was at least an inch between the floor and the bottom of the door. It couldn't possibly be an inmate's cell.

  "Why is Robert's cell different?" I asked the guards.

  "Shut it!" said one of the guards.

  "No, I just want to know about Robert."

  "There is no Robert," growled the other guard. "Back up to the door and get on your knees."

  I complied, my mind whirling.

  "Who is in the cell next to mine?" I asked desperately once my cell door closed.

  The guards were unlocking the cuffs on my wrists.

  "Tate," said the second guard.

  "No, on the other side," I said.

  "There ain't no one on the other side!" said the guard irritably as he slammed the metal slot on my cell door closed. I sat on my bunk with my head in my hands. I didn't know if I was going insane, but it seemed the most likely possibility. I had seen movies where people with schizophrenia saw and heard people who simply didn't exist. I hadn't seen Robert Ducet, but I had heard him. On the other hand, why would my mind make up such a strange story? I didn't know, but I had seen heinous things since coming to the prison. I had done some horrible things in my life. I thought that perhaps my mind was breaking with reality.

  It was several hours before the guards finished the shower rotation. Then I was served a meal of cold meatloaf, which couldn't have been made with real beef. Even the ketchup tasted like some chemical concoction that had never come close to a tomato. There were green beans that tasted like the can they came out of, and a few pieces of chopped lettuce that was supposed to be a salad. I ate my food slowly, trying not to let it remind me of my wife's cooking. She had been so talented at everything she did. Her memory was like an open wound. Just thinking about her made me ache with loss and hatred so deep that I couldn't finish eating.

  I had wanted to hear more of Robert's story, but I was also afraid that I was going insane. I lay on my narrow bunk with my face close to the wall until the lights went out.

  Nights in prison are the worst. The only reprieve from prison life is sleep, but in gen pop sleep is hard to come by. The cell blocks are open, with old style prison doors made of steel bars. Some inmates cover the bars with newspaper, trying to give themselves a sense of privacy, but the newspaper doesn't stop the sounds which echo around the concrete cell blocks all through the night. The long stretches of darkness are pierced by screams and shouts, some frightening, but most simply disgusting in their exaggerated lewdness. The gen pop cells are all double occupied, which means there is always the threat of physical violence in the tiny confined space. Violent men with no outlet for their frustration often turned on one another in the late watches of the night.

  Solitary confinement was different. It was never fully dark in the gen pop cell blocks, but in the solitary confinement wing, when the lights went out it was as dark as a deep cave. The sounds of human misery and despair mixed with the scratching and scurrying of rodents in the dark corridor. Fear became tangible through the long nights, and madness seemed to hover over me in the darkness. That night was one of the longest of my life. Guilt at not saving my wife scorched my soul and whenever I could tear myself from the memory of seeing her broken body in the morgue, I was plagued by the fear that I was going insane.

  In the darkness, dreams and reality blend together. I woke up at one point with the certainty that someone else was in my cell. I knew that was impossible, yet it felt so real. I could almost hear them breathing. I tried to reason the fear away. It was impossible that someone could open my cell door without the rusty hinges squealing, but the presence lingered. I couldn't see anything, not even the hand in front of my face, yet it felt like something was in the tiny room watching me. I felt a terror that reminded me of being a child. I felt so weak, so vulnerable, and I lay in my bed trembling, unable to sleep for hours.

  When the lights finally came back on, I searched for evidence of the visitor in the night. Of course there was nothing to find, but the investigation killed time until breakfast arrived. After eating, I went back to my cell door and waited. Once the guard had come down and picked up the empty trays from each cell, I whispered into the slot on my door.

  "Robert?" I said tentatively.

  "Yes," came the slightly accented voice.

  "Are you real?"

  "Of course."

  "Why are you here?"

  "It is a safe place."

  "No it isn't," I insisted. "It's hell on earth. Why would anyone want to be in prison?"

  "Prison isn't a bad place unless you are a prisoner."

  I refused to talk to him after that. Days passed. I heard Robert call my name, which usually resulted in Tate launching into long bouts of mumbled prayer. I felt my sanity slipping away and tried to reason that it was the cost of my failures as a man. I tried to get Tate to talk to me, but the older inmate refused. He was deeply withdrawn into himself, as was the case with many long time prisoners. He had sunk into a fantasy world of his own device and I wondered if I was slipping away too.

  Finally the temptation was too great. Robert
called to me and I felt as if his story was a hot branding iron on my soul, searing into the very fibers of my being. I needed to be released and knew that I had to deal with this vampire, either real or imagined, if I was ever going to be free again.

  "What do you want?" I said, my voice shaking.

  "I want to talk with you my friend."

  "I'm not your friend. I'm not even sure if you're real."

  "Of course I'm real," Robert said.

  "But no one knows you're here but me."

  "That's not true. Tate knows I am real."

  "Don't drag him into this."

  "Why do you despise me?"

  "You're a vampire."

  "And that means I have no right to live?"

  "Vampires are monsters."

  "That is fear talking. No, I'm an intelligent being, with feelings and desires just like you. I'm not a prisoner here, but I've been waiting a long time for a chance to leave this place. I can do it with your help."

  "Shut up!" I demanded. "Just leave me alone."

  "Don't you want your freedom?"

  "I'm not a monster."

  "The Hensley family might argue otherwise."

  His words stole the breath from my lungs. It was like being punched in the gut with no warning. I curled up on the filthy floor, struggling to breath. My own crimes were public record, but I had never shared the details of my story with anyone in the prison. I couldn't help but wonder if my consciousness was fracturing under the weight of my guilt and the despair of my life in the prison system.

  "Don't..." I managed to croak.

  "I read the coverage. The internet has made everything immortal, every word we type, every dastardly deed we commit."

  "Shut up!"

  "Tell me he didn't have it coming," Robert said, his voice echoing the thoughts in my own mind. "He murdered your wife, John. The police arrested him and locked him away in a mental hospital, but two years later he was released. He was walking around on the streets, enjoying his life while your wife rotted in the ground."

  "Shut up!" I begged.

  "So you did something about it."

  "No," I said, as tears fell hot down my cheeks.

  "You kidnapped him and tortured him. You broke nearly every bone in his body, John. We are not so different. I am driven by hunger, you by revenge. I don't kill, and neither do you. We are the same."

  Fits of screaming rage were common enough, but this was my first. I wailed against the walls and screamed until my voice was nothing more than a ragged whisper. Tate began to pray, and Robert finally fell silent. Eventually I passed out on the cold concrete floor.

  When I woke up, it was dark. Life in solitary confinement revolved around the sleep schedule. I groped around until I found my bunk. Then I pulled myself up and slumped onto the thin mattress. My whole body ached, but especially my throat. It felt like I'd drank a quart of acid.

  "John."

  My heart nearly stopped beating. I recognized the voice at once. It was Robert. He said the J of my name with a slight Z sound. It wasn't his voice or what he said that scared me, but the fact that he was in my cell.

  "How did you get in here?" I asked in a hoarse whisper.

  "I've been here a long time, John. I know a lot about locks."

  "The door, it didn't squeal."

  "No, I'm a patient man. The hinges are silent if you open the doors slow enough."

  "Are you here to kill me?"

  "No," he said with a chuckle. "I don't do that, remember. I'm here to assure you that I'm real."

  I scooted back on my bunk, pressing my back against the wall. I was looking around, even though I couldn't see anything.

  "Relax," Robert said. "There is nothing to fear. I have fed already. You asked why I chose to come here, and the answer lies in the fact that it is a place of easy nourishment for me. Once my own transformation was complete, I needed a place to hide. No one looks for someone to hide in a prison. Plus, no one believes it when a convicted felon tells stories about vampires drinking their blood in the night. I thought at first it would be the perfect sanctuary for a vampire and perhaps it was at first. Down here there is no sunlight, no roving guards, no record of my being. I am in many ways the ghosts that the inmates speak of in hushed whispers. I can move freely in the darkness, and the locks do not restrict me. But changes are planned, John. This facility is badly in need of updating. It is only a matter of time before the security systems here catch sight of me."

  "I thought vampires couldn't be seen on cameras."

  "If only that were true," he said, and I detected a note of sadness in his voice. "I was a foolish young man when I was turned. I had an unhealthy interest in the supernatural. I wanted to know and touch and experience what other people only whispered about around campfires and in darkened movie theaters. Carlos showed me the way. I had to kill, to do the unthinkable. I was under his spell by that time, convinced that life as a vampire was true freedom. I thought it was better than slaving away at a job I hated so that I could pay bills and have a week off in the summer.

  "I started slowly, like so many others. I killed a cat. Then a dog. I began to break down my own revulsions. Carlos cheered me on. It was the first time in my life anyone had praised me. My own parents were poor and miserable. They took their frustrations out on me and my sisters. I saw no hope in a life like that. I saw the sailors in New Orleans wasting their precious time away from the slave labor on their ships by carousing in the bars and brothels until their meager pay was spent. That was no kind of life for me. Good work was hard to get in those days. I had no real education. There was talk of war and I knew what that meant. I would be drafted, or forced into service some other way, then sent to the frontlines where only one in twenty men survived, and only one in a hundred came home whole. So I did what I had to do, John. I killed a sailor with my own hands. I drank his blood. The transformation didn't happen immediately. I had to do it again and again. Each time I killed, I became a little less human and a little more powerful."

  "I thought you said you didn't kill people," I whispered.

  "Becoming a vampire is a difficult process. Most people don't make it. I did what I had to do to survive, just like you did, John."

  "I'm not like you."

  "Do you really believe that? I know better. I know you couldn't have lived knowing that Ronald Hensley was a free man. Your honor wouldn't allow that. You could have killed him, but you said yourself that death was too easy for him. He needed to live with the consequences of his actions and you made sure he did. You drove him to the hospital, after days in that abandoned warehouse where you kept him alive with IVs. You made sure he lived, even if that meant you would be caught. You didn't say a word throughout the entire arrest, investigation, or trial. You didn't defend yourself."

  "That doesn't make me like you."

  "What about Owens and Parker?" he asked.

  "Shut up."

  "You couldn't stand life in gen pop, so you did what you had to do to survive."

  "They were killers."

  "True enough, but now so are you."

  "I was defending myself."

  "But not with Walter Browne. He wasn't a threat to you."

  "He was," I argued.

  "His affiliation with the Aryan Brotherhood was tenuous at best."

  "He was my cell mate. I couldn't trust him."

  "You can't trust anyone in prison, John. That's no excuse."

  "I did what I had to do," I hissed.

  "And so have I. But now we need to leave this place, John. We need to find a new sanctuary."

  "You want me to go with you?" I said.

  He settled in beside me on the bunk. My skin crawled and I felt cold.

  "I need your help, and you need mine. You know you have nothing to look forward to here. You'll die in prison. Eventually, they'll put you back in gen pop, that is if you don't go mad first. If you stay here, you are throwing your life away."

  "But it's my life," I said.

  "Of c
ourse it is, but what kind of life is it? Come with me, John. We'll find a better way to live. You don't deserve this."

  I sat thinking in the darkness. I still wasn't sure I wasn't going insane. Time passed and I felt Robert move away from me. Eventually I grew tired and fell asleep. When the lights came on the next morning, there was a book on my small table. I picked it up and realized it was a journal, leather bound with a dark red ribbon to mark your place with. I opened it and found a scratchy handwriting. It was difficult to make out, but not impossible. I read it, despite the poor lighting. I felt sick to my stomach as I read about Robert's descent into the madness that now engulfed his life.

  I held the book in my hands, feeling the grain of the leather, the stiff pages, even the smell of it—musty and old, the way books get after years of absorbing dust. It was real and that meant I wasn’t insane. It also meant the vampire had been in my cell. The stone walls, concrete floor and ceiling, and the heavy metal door all seemed impenetrable. I had given up on escape long ago. Prison isn’t an easy place to break out of, yet here was hope. But if I left the prison with Robert Ducet, what kind of person would I be? Not free, not really. I could already feel the threads connecting me to the vampire. They were invisible, yet they were just as strong as the walls and doors that confined me in Tucker State Prison.

  The day passed slowly. Food came and went, but I had no appetite. Robert’s story was growing in my mind, like a cloud. Night fell and I still sat on the edge of my bunk, holding the journal in my hands. The lights out didn’t faze me, and this time I heard the tumblers in the thick metal door slowly turning. There was a heaviness of time in the movement of that lock, the sort of patience that comes with the experience of serving hard time. And I felt my life turning with the tumblers in the lock. I couldn’t stay the same, I knew that. I couldn’t stay in Tucker, pretending that I didn’t know a vampire existed in the world. I would go insane if I stayed, that much was certain.