The Empty Prison

The birds chirped. The sun shone. The wind blew. Even the frogs made the weird little ribbit sounds they made. Jeremy thought he could see an alligator walking between the trees in the woods, so that made him increasingly impatient about getting inside the facility. He already spent like a solid 20 minutes waiting in his car for the gate to open, and not only did nobody accept his calls, there wasn’t even a person in the guard booth for him to talk to. He was seriously contemplating just going inside that booth and opening the damn thing himself. Jeremy Nealson was a fairly busy detective with a lot going on right now. Okay, he didn’t really have anything going on, and this was the only case that the office had available, but there were definitely better ways of spending his time than just pointlessly waiting on others.

The case itself didn’t mention anything other than the fact that this warden had some sort of bizarre personality change. Sincerely, that was it. That was how slow things had been lately. On the one hand, Jeremy idealistically wanted there to be no crime, but then he also didn’t know what he’d do with his life if it just turned into this all day. He wasn’t a therapist! Bad enough he had to meet the warden at his prison for some reason, but he also had to wait outside of it before he could ask the man any questions about how he was alright, or how he was doing. Put that way, it was all a waste of time.

Jeremy looked back and forth around his car to see if anyone else was around. The guard towers were far away but pointed inward at the prison. Maybe people were in there, maybe there weren’t. Only the cameras were really pointing anywhere in this direction. Really, the entire prison was surrounded by two layers of giant barbed-wire fences, and Detective Nealson’s car was stuck at the only port that bridged the land inside the prison with the normal world. It was a big set of concrete buildings over on that other side; Jeremy wondered if it’d take even longer to find Warden Ross in all of that.

He stepped out of his car. Jeremy flashed his badge at the camera up on some concrete pillar breaking up the wire fences, and pointed angrily at it. He mouthed a scathing complaint and request that he be brought in immediately. Thereafter he waited. Tapping his foot on the floor a few times, he flashed the badge a few more times, outstretching his arms as far as possible to make the badge viewable in the camera lens. While waiting for 10 more minutes to pass, Jeremy stared the camera down with malicious eyes.

Nothing. Maybe they didn’t see the badge well enough. Nealson scanned his surroundings for something to stand on, and he found a wooden crate, one designed like an old, classic pirate ship crate. He pushed this crate to the proper position with his body, then he stood atop to face the camera. There, he even more dramatically brandished the detective badge in front of the person behind the camera to get his point across. This time, as he mouthed the request (demand), he spoke aloud, hoping there would be some audio receiver inside the camera as well. Then the crate collapsed.

Jeremy fell straight into the middle of the crate, as there was nothing in it. His weight caused the top of the container to snap, and now Jeremy scraped his pants against the tough wood of the crate on his way down to the ground. The sheer force of the snap also propelled a sharp wooden board into the detective’s car, and while the damage was minimal, it was still apparent to Nealson that the plank left a mark on the car’s paint job.

“ARGHHH!!!” Jeremy agonized through clenched teeth.

Now they had to come, right? He did all of this in front of the surveillance people. No, nobody came, even after Jeremy paced back and forth, and cursed at himself for 15 minutes. The man berated the cameraperson a few times, then he grabbed the wire gate like a madman and shook it a few times. Another 25 minutes elapsed. The entire collective waiting time was staggering. The facility was already supposed to have been warned about Detective Nealson’s visit, and yet, there was no sign that anybody was going to come out and welcome the man. Jeremy’s sense of importance in the world dwindled by the minute. This was the worst way to treat a man of power and authority, according to him.

His ears picked up rustling in the distance, down the road he drove to get there. It was a dirt road with shrubbery growing fairly close to the actual road part. Inside the shrubbery, Jeremy swore he could actually see hungry yellow eyes looking back at him. Fine. He decided to give up on waiting for the reception.

He wasn’t quite in a position to refuse the work given to him. In the first place, he was doing this precisely because he did some unseemly things in his other cases that warranted he be given smaller cases like these. So while it was the case that crime had been low, it was also the case that Jeremy was simply given busy work to prevent him from having any more “incidents”. Despite that, the detective was about to lose it. He seriously contemplated breaking the window of the guard booth and opening the door from the inside. If he did that, he could just open the gate by himself.

However, Jeremy was currently trying to stow the aggressive detective work for the sake of his employment. Sure he was already given so many chances, but he still didn’t know every time if that time was it or not. Over time, he had learned some sensibility for what was going too far and what could legally be deemed acceptable for the sake of justice. Here he projected that, were he to break the window open, he could make a reasonable case for himself that he was pursuing an important cause. The only problem was that his office knew this wasn’t really anything important.

Jeremy looked back at those ravenous yellow eyes from the bushes and they were gone. Okay, now he could say that his life was in danger. That was also usually a reason people in the task force could cite as justification for their actions. Nealson retrieved a crowbar from his car and smashed open the booth window. Careful of the glass, he maneuvered his arms through the new opening to approximately where the door knob was, finding and unlocking the simple locking mechanism. Once inside, he stepped over the scattered shards to where the buttons were to open the wire fence gate.

The gate was an automated one, that lifted a small square in the fence upwards for any cars to pass through. Was that the right call? Nealson pondered this as he took his car inside the lot. He prayed this would only lead to an infraction – one of the small ones that didn’t make it to the record. He silently cursed the missing security guard. It was that guy’s fault Jeremy needed to exert necessary force. Maybe he could get ahead of the complaint by finding and scolding that guy into submitting that he obstructed Jeremy’s work. Jeremy also briefly thought about how he would close the gate once inside the compound, but he concluded that was an issue for the security person to worry about. Who Jeremy was quick to remind himself, was at fault here to begin with.

There was a small parking lot inside the compound. It was a little nerve-racking to be this close to a bunch of felons, but there was another layer of security in the form of a tertiary layer of barbed-wire fences outlining the prisoner’s area. Besides, there were also prison guards with guns to keep the convicts in line. Jeremy left his car, and treaded the asphalt expanse to where the entrance of the prison was.

Heartland Correctional Facility. Jeremy drew up a few complaints and points he’d like to get across to the next unfortunate soul he would happen to stumble upon. However the inside was empty. Not only was it bereft of families coming for conjugal visits, but there were also no employees in sight. No guards were stationed around the perimeter of the entrance lobby, and the person that would normally go behind the glass wall where the receptionist’s office was made no cameo. In fact, Jeremy walked up to this glass window and peered inside to find absolutely no one inside that room either.

His alarm bells rang. Nealson pulled away from the window immediately and drew his gun. Only after drawing the gun, did he try asking if anyone was there.

“Is anyone here? Hello?” he shouted.

That was a little hasty; it was probably not the best idea to keep his gun drawn in a place where other people were armed. Nobody could see him right now, so Nealson withdrew the firearm. No harm, no foul. He recalled what that guy who came to the office said, and unless there was an immediate, identifiable threat, there was no need to brandish a firearm. Although, right now Jeremy suspected something was very wrong, as when he peered around the corner down a hallway that led further into the prison he saw no signs of life. The detective compromised by holding onto the gun while it was in his pocket.

“This is Detective Jeremy Nealson. I’m on an important visit to meet with the warden. Is anyone there?” he asked.

Still nothing. As bad as the day was going, the detective imagined it could only get worse if he had to wait an increased amount of time in the barren lobby, so he marched forth into the building. Better to be done with the warden sooner than later, he argued.

Prudently, Nealson knocked on every door and announced his presence so as not to scare anyone that might be armed. This was his way of doing things more so by the book after that last event with the booth. Regardless, it didn’t matter because there were no people in the rooms, whether it be prisoner, visitors, or prison guards. That confiscation room was empty. The locker room was empty. It was all seemingly abandoned. To be clear, none of these rooms appeared disheveled or ransacked in any manner, however they definitely looked untouched, and untouched for merely a short span of time.

Jeremy picked up the pace. He was getting riled up within, ruminating about the stupid warden that his boss was making him talk to, so he started speed-walking down the halls and asking for people to come help him. In his mild frustration, he adlibbed a few lines about the service down there and the lack of professionality coming from these prison guards. At one point he even went political about government programs and the budget cuts he and everyone else were experiencing. Luckily, no one was around to hear his whining.

Before he knew it, he made it startlingly far into the correctional building. Quite far indeed, as he noticed beyond the open metal gate were already some open rooms furnished with beds. Checking the surrounding zone he didn’t really see any traditional cells yet. However this was already most alarming, and Jeremy’s anxiety was through the roof. This was the entrance into the prisoner’s section. The only gate keeping the criminals from just walking out and fraternizing with the public was completely ajar, and there were no professionals around to close it.

“Hello?! Is anyone around?! Hello?!” Jeremy screamed.

His hands began to shake. He whipped his head all around the area to check for threats, and at this point, he brandished the weapon again. At this door into the prison there was also a junction that led to two other halls, neither of which Jeremy particularly wanted to check. Nobody bothered to come out though. Jeremy foolishly tried to close the metal-barred door that would normally function as the separator between the prisoner’s domain and the rest of the world, but with the way the locking mechanism worked, if the door operator didn’t have a key with which to lock the door, the door slowly swung back to its neutral open state. Therefore, Jeremy’s frantic actions were futile.

“Warden?! Warden Ross?!” he shouted.

Flailing that weapon around would be a big problem were the warden to actually show up. Jeremy wasn’t even exercising good trigger discipline. Thankfully, that warden never appeared then. Instead, the detective narrowly avoided shooting some blank wall by accident, running into one of the adjacent rooms on the non-prisoner side. There, he rigorously examined the entire room for spaces for felons to hide, and thereafter, he brought out his phone to call the warden, the prison staff, or whoever could possibly answer the phone line in this unique predicament.

A phone on a desk in this new room rang. It was the only phone on the only desk in that room, which was clearly the warden’s office, as evidenced by his portraits. Jeremy put his own cellphone on hold so that he could intercept the call ringing on the warden’s phone, only to receive silence on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

Jeremy snapped his head back a near 180 degrees. He heard something he could’ve sworn originated from behind him, right at the door he came from. At the inert, unmoving door, Jeremy pointed his firearm while balancing the warden’s phone between his head and his shoulder. Nothing yet again. There was also no activity coming from the other end of the call, so the detective slowly lowered his gun, freeing one of his hands to hold the phone, maintaining eye contact with that office entrance.

“Hello?”

The sound came back. It was behind Jeremy once more. The detective quickly whipped his whole body around once again to face the threat, almost dropping his gun from the lack of preparedness to turn around so fast.

“Who’s there?! Hello?!”

The voice spoke again, though it was just repeating the exact thing that Jeremy was saying. As predictably as anyone but Detective Nealson could have figured it out, the mystery sound was just the sound of Nealson’s own voice coming through his phone. Jeremy tested this out a few times by holding each device side by side, and taking note of the response time it took for him to speak in one device to hear the output come out of the other. Clearly that’s all it was; Jeremy had a conversation with himself via the warden’s phone. He was stressed, to be sure. That introduction at the gates didn’t do anything to alleviate the negative feelings already brewing from his soft demotion, and now he was faced with the most bizarre horror situation a man of the law could experience.

He put down the warden’s phone. The situation was evidently a dangerous one if the warden wasn’t at his office, where even the warden’s assistant was nowhere to be found. The detective couldn’t just leave though because he still had to talk to said warden, otherwise he might face a real demotion. He already came up with an excuse to blame the broken guard booth on someone else, but the failure to reach the warden might really constitute a sign of profoundly negative degeneration of policing skills to the chief commissioner. As a result, he couldn’t even call for backup; that would only add to the image of incompetency his superiors held.

Then he had to do it alone. Jeremy steeled his resolve, and gripped his firearm firmly to assure he wouldn’t be unprepared. If he held it like that, then he felt much safer. Creeping up to the door of the warden’s office, Nealson cautiously examined the hallway both ways. There was not a single soul. At this point, if the detective didn’t find anyone, living or dead, in this outer portion of the prison, then he would be forced to brave the inner portion, past the steel bar gate.

Keeping his handgun down, Jeremy gingerly leaned against the door until he reentered the hall. There was virtually nothing on that end of the hall beyond the warden’s office. So, Jeremy checked the other end of the hallway, taking cover as best he could in an empty hallway, slowly walking past that dreadful gate, to its left. Some supplementary rooms that looked like they could be used for multiple things – like confiscation storage, short interrogations, briefly holding incoming prisoners – but overall they held no one. What the detective feared the worst was reality. He had to go deeper inside the prison.

Jeremy Nealson took cover again, behind a corner, peeking down the recess of the big iron gate. As he saw previously, there were considerable rows of holding rooms already visible beyond a certain distance into the corridor. The area was wide, and if there was any positive thing to say about it, it was that the wide, open nature of the corridor allowed for little in the way of hiding space (for the prisoners). That said, Detective Nealson often saw the negative side of all things positive, and he concluded that this fact only meant that the rooms the corridor led into would hold the ambush.

Before stepping through, Jeremy obsessively eyeballed the different rooms along the side. It’s true that many of these were cells, but they were a special kind. Where the internal cells of most prisons (in this state and this city) tended to be “open-air”, with little in terms of walling and privacy, these cells were singular rooms outfitted with three or four beds. These were cells reserved for good-behavior inmates, who generally held the unofficial task of welcoming new inmates into the facility. Most of them were seniors.

That was about the extent to what Jeremy knew. He hadn’t visited this prison facility before, or many other prisons for that matter. His knowledge of prisons largely originated in descriptions given to him by coworkers. Also, he liked TV shows set in prison. In fact, the TV shows he watched were what shaped his overall impression of prison more than anything else. Prisoners were crude, violent animals depraved enough to do anything for survival. Some committed worse crimes in prison than out of prison. At least, that’s what Jeremy and his peers came to believe.

As such, Jeremy took one step forward, now raising his firearm back up expecting some sort of horror to pop out. His eyes scanned and rescanned and rescanned the same open doorways revealing their contents. The majority of what could be seen through those doors, from Jeremy’s distanced perspective, were a few beds with clumps of sheets on top. The entire space inside was otherwise obscured. Jeremy racked his brain, trying to remember the exact position of each crease on each prison blanket in each place, to make sure nothing moved without his permission. As he did, he took a few more steps into the corridor.

Soon, the detective made it to the first stage of rooms – just a single room on his left, as he stood halted in the passageway. He went inside, but in a way where he never compromised himself to the open hallway and the other rooms. Inside, he tried to close the door behind him. It was pertinent that he keep his vision locked to the contents of the room, so he attempted to close the door without looking at it, maneuvering his arms behind him. However, this was very awkward, and Jeremy struggled not only to locate the door handle, but after he located the handle, he suffered great adversity in getting the door to budge.

After a few minutes of being unable to close the door, Nealson picked a moment where he felt like he observed the room long enough to feel safe to then turn around and address the problem with the door. The handle was fine; it moved freely, and it clearly wasn’t locked. The bottom of the door also didn’t have anything physical restraining its movement à la some door stopper. The hinges seemed to be normal as well. Yet the door refused to give in to Jeremy no matter how much force he exerted on it.

Frustrated, Jeremy gave up and kicked the door. For some reason, he held the slim hope that his rage would somehow break the door into closing, but it didn’t. The detective immediately regretted his decision, as he was now realizing that he wanted to maintain as much stealth as possible in this situation. Now, he was paranoid that an ambush hadn’t occurred yet because he simply wasn’t discovered by the opposition. With that, Jeremy rushed through the room search – it was only a pair of bunk beds, and Jeremy pointed his gun at each bed as he yanked the sheets from each mattress – so that he could head out of there and recover his stealth advantage.

With one room investigated, Detective Nealson set his sights on the rest of the corridor. As before, he strained his memory to assure himself that no changes had appeared in the environment around him. Though it was nice to have a corridor that was so open and free, Jeremy felt like there were eyes watching him from everywhere and he had no counter. In a painstakingly slow, grueling march, Jeremy made it to the next break in the corridor, a pair of two rooms on either side of Jeremy.

This was like a nightmare, more so than previously. Jeremy had to fight to make sure his body didn’t seize up. With two rooms on either side, the detective’s imagination conjured up all kinds of losing situations where he was attacked from both sides, able to see one attacker but not the other. The conundrum was this: he needed to pick the correct side to go in, and clear it before going immediately for the next room. But which one?

The detective slammed against the wall on his right. He had a position where he could see the room on his left, and he could obscure himself from the denizens in the right room. In that way, Jeremy braced himself before jumping off the wall, and charging in with his gun raised high.

“Freeze!” he shouted.

Much like the last room, there was nothing and no one inside. The room had an unfortunate metal cabinet that received a lot of physical abuse from the detective as he searched it for prisoners. Beyond that, nothing, so the detective updated his objective to the sister room. A new involuntary thought emerged in Jeremy’s skull, telling him that, while his back was turned inside the rooms, a dangerous threat could slip behind him and go into one of the previously searched rooms that he cleared. In this way, Jeremy was never safe. No amount of rooms he could clear would ever truly assure him that a particular place in that prison was devoid of threat.

Nealson charged into the other room with this notion in mind. He was not going to let the prisoners get the best of him. He sprinted across that hallway without looking both ways, hoping that he wouldn’t be caught off-guard. In his mind, he’d use the next room he was in as a sort of refuge to turn the tables on his enemies – make them feel like they were the ones being hunted, and not vice versa.

He went inside that room, ransacked the poor, unsuspecting bed sheets, aimed his gun at all the empty corners, and came running back outside to keep track of everything, affirming that nothing moved. The detective nearly dropped his gun from just how scared he was at this next thing he saw. His extended, belabored efforts to memorize every single detail about the corridor and the adjacent rooms was all for naught; that much was true. This was because, instead of anything happening in those rooms, there was an anomaly right in the middle of the hallway, facing the only way out that led to the steel bar gate. In between Jeremy and that gate, was an entire bed with neatly folded sheets, arranged orderly in the direct center of the walking path.

Nothing else was there, but this was enough to drain Jeremy of all his life force. Hell, it was enough to age him a few years. He looked down on the floor as well, and there were no streak marks along the floor. Where did it come from? Detective Nealson was already expending an absurd amount of processing power on the exact memorization of that corridor, but in the face of this new variable, he could not, for the life of him, remember this random bed being in the hallway from the outset. Surely this lone bed was never there.

No, there was something else dangerous about this. Nealson saw through the ruse and quickly spun around with his firearm pointed squarely down the other end of the hall. Nobody there. Puzzled, Jeremy waited for a moment for an ambushing party to take advantage of the bed distraction, however nothing came. Then Jeremy swore he heard ruffling cloth behind him. That terrible, soft sound was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It sent all kinds of spiraling chills up and down Jeremy’s back. He escaped down the hallway further into the prison, with a kind of speed he had never been able to achieve before, even when he was at his physical peak.

From what he could tell, Jeremy took a left, then a right, forward past two junctions, and then another left. It turned out to be a poor series of decisions, as he soon found himself at a dead end. Trapped, there was no other option but to aim his gun the other way and pray for the best. The detective screamed and accidentally fired off two bullets into the opposite direction he ran. In his craze, he continued to pull the trigger on his handgun, however one of the bullets seemed to jam the slider on top, lodging it in place. Therefore, he fired no more than two bullets. Two bullets turned out to be just enough however, as the wall that was all the way down the direction where Jeremy aimed his weapon was no longer a threat to him.

The detective couldn’t believe his eyes that no one had chased him down that entire way. The prisoners must have been much sneakier than he thought. Just like that, they have cast him entirely into the darkness again, and now he was as vulnerable as was before he took flight. Jeremy required multiple deep, stabilizing breaths to return to a conscious, thinking mind. There was actually another lone bed down the hallway below the bullet holes Jeremy left, but Jeremy’s memory was so sporadic during that getaway that he didn’t remember if it was there from the outset. He decided to chance it, and assume it already was.

That warden got himself into serious danger. This was no longer going to be a therapy session, but a rescue mission. Nealson cursed the warden in his head, silently denouncing a man he had never met. In his mind, he might even be convinced to leave the warden be, if the man was unworthy. Since he was feeling magnanimous, and this did have something to with surviving the chase just a second ago, Jeremy decided to give it one chance. He would retrace his steps first, so that he could retain his bearings. He also thought that this would throw off his pursuers.

Before he set off, he slapped his gun a few times with an open hand, trying to get the jammed bullet out. That open hand turned into a fist, as Jeremy really tried to put some force into it. That bullet was right in the crack where the casing was, ideally, supposed to fly out after the last shot. Jeremy’s sausage fingers didn’t quite fit into that crack, so this beating method was the only course of action the detective had. The slider just wouldn’t budge. Giving up, the detective angrily threw his gun on the ground.

The gun slammed onto the ground and shot once. It created what looked like a bigger bullet hole in the wall right in front of Jeremy than the bullet holes down the hall. The impact and shrapnel of the bullet, as well as the close proximity with which Jeremy stood next to a gun he didn’t intentionally fire, scared the absolute daylights out of him. He jumped up and nearly slipped on his own piece. Fortunately, this did mean that the gun unjammed itself somehow, so this time his brute force method was arguably successful. As for the three new bullet holes in this prison, Detective Nealson figured that if he couldn’t pass it off to some rogue inmate, that he could justify his actions by pretending like someone had currently been attacking him. To him, this was already a dire situation with a missing warden (and other staff), so there was at least some reason for him to fire that gun anyways, even without the immediate threat of danger. The cameras? Since no one was there, this was just another task Nealson added to the list.

First order of business was to retrace those steps. The exact order he took to go from the entrance to this dead end was a left, a right, forward, forward, and another left. Hence, a right, forward, forward, a left, and another right would suffice as the way back home. Firing a gun should really have the opposite effect, but Jeremy felt much calmer going back the way he came after releasing those three shots. Not only would it serve as a warding effect, but it became a distinct reminder in the detective that he could always defend himself were it to come down to life or death. Still, he maintained vigilance, always assuring that he checked the details in every room he passed to make sure no furniture moved.

Most of the rooms that Jeremy walked by were now much simpler to vet. Whereas the previous rooms were small, temporary bedrooms with a few nooks and crannies with which to conceal oneself, the rooms deeper in the penitentiary complex were wide open, and more than visible. There were a couple of game rooms, a library, and a mess hall. All of which, sparing the library, were realistically furnished with many stainless steel tables and chairs too skinny to provide cover. Some were bolted to the floor. Perhaps it was designed that way on purpose, to put the guards at ease. The only odd thing about these rooms were the considerable lack of inmates to populate them.

It was off-putting, but at least Jeremy could confirm that there were no ambushes in each room. On the left turn that he was supposed to make, Jeremy peeped a much larger hall dedicated to housing what looked like more permanent cells for the inmates. There were no bars to separate these cells. It was all open-air, with these short, waist-high concrete brick walls to indicate which areas were designated to be cells. Each cell had three beds. And despite the sheer amount of beds, there was not a living person in sight (to be fair, Jeremy didn’t have a clear vantage of the entire room). All around, this was unsettling.

One more right – the last right. Jeremy turned the corner to face the entrance of the prison again, but to his most foul dismay, the entrance was nowhere in sight, and actually, there was just a flat concrete wall to meet him. It was right up to his face the instant he turned the corner, almost as if to insult him. So close was he to this wall that he could hear himself accidentally clanking his gun against it. The detective slowly backed away, befuddled. He turned around, looking back down at the junction he just turned, and he was almost, nay, definitely confident that he traced every step the exact way he calculated. He even had a vivid mental map, and where the wall stood in place, there was supposed to be that long hallway with the mysteriously-appearing bed.

He took a few more steps back to really get a 3-dimensional sense of things. This was the last spot where he had to make a turn toward the exit. It wasn’t there. That meant that something went awry in the journey there. Using that clear mental map he conceived, Jeremy made his way backwards, this time paying express attention to the pathway he walked, as well as to all the surrounding rooms and potential pathway branches. To begin with, he already felt like he paid express attention to everything, but this time he forced himself into an incredibly lucid state of wakefulness where every little detail transmitted directly into memory storage.

He walked by the first right. A little up ahead, there was a junction preceded by that rec room he saw. He continued that same junction, to see that same rec room (no threats inside), and sure enough, up ahead he spotted that same other junction where he initially panicked and ran by, as you guessed it, forwards. By all accounts this was the correct layout he had in mind. In fact, the more Detective Jeremy walked up and down that same hallway, surveying every misplaced crack and odd archway, the more he felt the kind of familiarity one could only achieve from having run by the same exact area multiple times. Though he was definitely anxious and scared when he first ran down here, he felt that this was definitely the area that he ran down during that event.

After marching down the reverse order of Jeremy’s prison map, Jeremy eventually reached the exact same hallway dead end that he reached only a short moment ago. He stood there perplexed and utterly baffled by the hallway. There it was. The configuration was the exact same, and the hall across from the hall he stopped in was the same. Jeremy peeked his head out of the junction a little to see if that library or the mess hall were anywhere in view, and he could spot one of the shiny steel tables of the eating area through the small slit of a doorway from that angle. Detective Nealson scratched his head and looked down the wall he shot down, and gasped.

The lone bed that was there was still there. However the main thing that changed was the lack of bullet holes. He distinctly remembered shooting his gun twice down that hallway and seeing the bullet holes of his duress on that opposite wall. Actually, from the position he stood at that junction, he was much closer, and should definitely be capable of seeing those bullet holes. Yet nothing was there. The wall had a solid finish that blended in with the rest of the wall where those holes were supposed to be. The detective quickly whipped his whole body around and threw out another gasp; the third bullet hole formed in Jeremy’s rage was no longer there either.

He glided his bare hand across where it was supposed to be. This thoroughly shook him. Where his memory told him the exact location of the hole was, there was smooth, dry, concrete stone instead. He started pushing into that point harder, with his fingers, and the wall put up the same natural resistance that one would expect it to. It did everywhere. Gradually, it felt like Nealson’s memories began to cease, as it no longer knew what patch of wall was once the bullet hole.

Open-mouthed and aghast, Detective Jeremy searched his surroundings. The halls were barren, with only the “gun misfire” hall containing the lone bed. Jeremy stomped over to that bed to begin an investigation. After all, he was a detective and that was his specialty. The sheets hid nothing; Jeremy cast them aside. The bed was now just a cheap wireframe with a cheap mattress on top. The detective checked that he was alone (as he had been), lowered his body, and actively molested the top of the mattress. Jeremy was in a frenzied state, desperate to find some reassuring clues to give him the upper hand here.

Nothing seemed to be hidden inside the padding, so he placed his hands beneath the mattress to flip it over onto the ground. As he did, a cloud of dust plumed from the old mattress, smelling aged. Underneath was a basic, rather weak-looking wireframe. Unable to make anything of his investigation, Jeremy kicked the wireframe bed until it did a midair flip. When he felt like he had been stuck in one place for too long and his nerves started to get the better of him, he briefly perused the wall with the two fixed bullet holes, then left to go back to the entrance.

That’s right. In the first place, Jeremy wanted to trace his steps backwards so that he could truly begin the real investigation into the missing people of that prison. Since he had gotten all the way back to that dead end, it was time to retrace that path back to the iron gate. Jeremy monotonously passed all the rec rooms, corridors, and libraries he was getting used to seeing. On the way he nearly jumped, because an unforeseen bed appeared right in front of him when he turned the left corner of his visual map. With the other two beds there was still uncertainty regarding their sudden appearance, but this one Detective Nealson was positive did not exist before he walked by there. There had to be some conscious entity(ies) doing this. And to what end, Jeremy needed to figure out. He defiantly kicked this bed much harder than the previous stuff he’s kicked, almost injuring his foot by doing so. He grit through the pain and charged past the upended distraction.

He was sure he took the same route as drawn in his head, but doing so led to the same, sudden confrontation with a concrete wall. Astounded, he looked over the wall from corner to corner: a flat, cold slab of stone connected to every wall of the corridor. With the way it was built, it almost didn’t make sense to have an incredibly short hall like this, with a dead end so close to the start of the hall. Yet, it was there. As a result, Jeremy had no choice but to retreat for a moment and contemplate the way he came once more.

Now this was getting tedious for him. He recognized the exact same corridor that led to the first right turn, and it was almost pointless to go down that way because this direction was not the problem, however Jeremy insisted in doing so just so he could prove himself right that this was indeed the correct way to get from point A to point B. The detective arrived at the right turn, looked around the corner, and it was just as he remembered it, the hall leading into a moderate distance through two junctions that needed to be skipped. Except, there were two new beds and a rolling soda can in the middle of the first new junction.

Raising his gun, Jeremy Nealson charged at this junction, screaming, “Stop doing this to me! Show yourselves!”

At the junction with the anomalies, Jeremy spastically checked either sides of the halls that branched off (this first junction split off left and right). He brandished his gun and nearly shot it again three separate times when he thought he saw people in the distance. There weren’t any people, and luckily there were no more beds to deal with. As if to prove a point, Jeremy knocked over the two beds that were in the junction center, picking up and slamming the empty soda can into a nearby wall only to realize it was not empty. He avoided getting wet, but some soda splat onto his shoes.

Detective Nealson reached into his pocket to retrieve his phone, while slinking back into one of the halls for cover. It was about time to check the clock, and make a measurement of how many hours the detective already wasted on this fruitless venture. Jeremy was on the verge of making a judgement call about cutting his losses and making his way home once the opportunity presented itself. He would just have to take the hit, and conjure an excuse to his boss. Though if anything, this prison situation was starting to look dire. Nealson pat his pocket, reaching into the other to see if his phone was there. That’s strange, he thought. He reached into his jacket pockets to make sure it didn’t end up there somehow.

The detective pat his entire body up and down, letting out a foul, lengthy string of curses once he learned that his cellphone went missing. He desperately went through the surrounding mess he caused in the hopes that the device was somewhere nearby, however this search was just as fruitless as the search for the warden. Jeremy cursed again, kicking a permanent bend into the bedframe next to him. As he contemplated going down one of the other, unexplored hallways to possibly find an alternative way back to the entrance, he now had to check the exact same tedious route he had already gone up and down so many times.

In his mind, the phone couldn’t have been very far, nor could it have been at the “abrupt dead end” hall. He headed to the “disappeared bullet holes” hall. On his way, he checked the blank walls and corners of the corridors as much as he could in case the phone was just flat on the ground somewhere. Right at the turn where the bullet hole halls were supposed to be, a few feet before, the detective actually found two new bullet holes embedded right next to him. His heart shrank and goosebumps ran all the way from his gun-wielding hand across his shoulders to the other hand. Jeremy stroked the new holes with his fingers, stretching to an excruciating level the limits of his memory to identify these bullet holes as the ones he made before.

No, he thought. These were obviously different holes, because they were at an impossible angle relative to where he shot those first two misfires. Down the hall, up the junction ahead was where the holes ought to be. For confirmation, he treaded a few steps in that direction. As he thought, that exact corridor where the two holes disappeared matched the image Jeremy painted in his mind. And there that bed was again – the one that Nealson distinctly remembered when he shot twice in that direction.

The detective turned his back just to make sure the third bullet hole was still missing, only to be met with a damaged wall. That same wall where he accidentally threw his gun down and created a bullet hole now had a new hole in roughly the same spot. Actually, was it the same bullet hole?

No, he thought again. His memory of that hole, and the embarrassment of causing it, was considerably stronger than anything else. He knew it had to be 5 centimeters to the left to be the real hole. He knew the shape had a different fractal pattern to it, and if he paid even more agonizing attention to the shrapnel of the wall, he noticed that it had been moved as well.

Jeremy checked for enemies. There was still no one around. It was infuriating. More angered than afraid, Detective Nealson sprinted down the hallway to catch this mischievous fiend. He had to be able to catch someone, otherwise he had to acknowledge the existence of something supernatural, and thereby impossible. Potentially that would mean an acknowledgement of some internal fault, which in this situation, was definitely nonexistent. He didn’t even spare so much as a passing glance at the reorganized bullet holes, or to the three new beds that spawned around the corner.

The detective retraced his steps, but pivoted in the middle to a new path. He chose the second junction where normally he would have to trek forwards, to take a left instead. To be clear, the detective was sprinting at this point, the strategy being to catch his enemies off guard. Forget the phone; Jeremy needed at least one victory against these prisoners. He ran by an exit into the prison courtyard. Out there, he could see four unmanned basketball courts, and a section littered with weights for muscle building. Deciding to remain inside, Jeremy ran past two more branching paths, and a cell block for inmates. Jeremy ran past that last cell block, but something within instructed him to go back to that block and investigate that area.

Jeremy stopped in his tracks to make a 180, kick another mystery bed that just appeared, and march over to that cell block. Without being aware of it, Jeremy exhausted himself thoroughly, unadjusted to the activity of running for any distance longer than a few feet. This didn’t mean he would take a break though, as the detective jogged merrily into the prisoner’s holding area to finally seize something tangible. As with the cell block Jeremy spotted kind of a while ago, this room was a series of organized, no-bar, open-air cells that were immediately visible from the moment that Jeremy walked in. He had a vantage point to essentially everything; there were few blind spots, in the form of very low walls, where an actual full-grown human being could hide.

Jeremy strutted in. The detective, always ready to discharge, crept further into the cell block, sticking to the left row of cells. Each cell he passed was empty, but he had a feeling that there was someone in here. His hearing wasn’t so great, especially after he already fired his weapon three times earlier, but he could swear that he heard someone breathe. He passed two more cells and that premonition grew. The faint “breathing” did not get louder, and at times, Detective Nealson thought he might have even been hearing himself breathe instead. Because of that, he stopped once or twice to hold his own breath and scan his eyes all across the cell block. Even with his own breath held, he felt like there was something just barely registering on the precipice of his ears.

Unfortunate though it was, the detective had no ability to close the door leading into the cell. That was just another annoying quirk of this prison; none of the doors seemed to be in working condition. As a result, he had to pause his advance a few times to look back at that door and make sure no one thought to assault from the rear. That was another reason why he strained his ear’s hearing power, but the relatively low quality of them meant Jeremy needed to rely mostly on his eyes.

Another few rows of empty cells, and Jeremy was almost at the end of the room. There were only two or three cells left. The absence of life up to this point has been a confused mix of relief and stress that the detective had difficulty processing. However that was about to change, as the detective glimpsed part of the final cell in the left corner up ahead. The beds, Jeremy was already accustomed to. But to see a lone clump of sheets? What’s more, Detective Jeremy could swear he saw this small, oblong clump of sheets move. Just once. His eyes were firmly locked on this mound in the middle of a cell, obstructed partially by the cell’s low, defining walls. Now Jeremy didn’t even bother with looking behind him, as he was more concerned with never letting this new potential threat out of sight.

Detective Nealson revealed more of the mound to himself as he stepped up to the front of the cell, a wide opening where the defining walls separated. Before him was a small cell of two beds on either side, a toilet with no stall, and two quaint drawers at the ends of each bed. In the middle was the inert pile of blankets, the width and length of an average adult human male. Jeremy scoffed; those sheets couldn’t fool him. Proud of his achievement, the detective aimed his authority at the pile, raising his voice.

“Take the sheets off, slowly, and put your hands on the floor, now! No shifty movements or I’ll shoot!” he yelled.

The pile of sheets didn’t respond. The detective kept a firm grip on his pistol as he repeated, more or less, the same thing.

“I know you’re in there! You aren’t fooling anyone! Take the sheets off, now, or you will be in much bigger trouble!”

The cloth lied immobile.

“I am Detective Jeremy Nealson! You are under arrest for…”

The situation was obviously wrong by all accounts, but Jeremy couldn’t think of an actual specific reason to cite against the perpetrator. The only thing he could think about was himself, and what he thought of as what that prison did to him.

“Under arrest for harassment, and obstruction of justice! Take the sheets off, or you will face dire consequences!”

The sheets stayed where they were. At this point, Jeremy was becoming increasingly aware of the place he stood, and the attention he attracted to himself. He had no backup, still. He threw a couple of quick glances toward the exit just to ensure that nobody else snuck in yet. Now there was burgeoning uncertainty that he and the blanket clump were the only ones in that room.

“I have a gun pointed at you right now! I’m going to count to 5; begin taking off the sheets! 1! 2!”

The sheets didn’t react to the counting.

“3!”

The sheets remained unreactive. Skipping 4 and 5, the detective decided he had enough. He steeled his resolve to the maximum level possible for him, bracing himself for any kind of attack, or reach for a weapon that the man underneath the sheets could possibly do. He brought his pistol down first. Then, with a free hand, he clasped onto a healthy grip of the sheets, in turn coming into contact with what was underneath the cloth. Yes! It was warm; there was definitely somebody beneath. Violently, Detective Nealson yanked the sheets to the side, all at once to reveal the hidden shape quickly.

“ARGHHH!!!”

The detective reeled back and pulled the trigger two times. Compulsively, and relentlessly, he pulled the trigger. There wasn’t a human underneath the blankets, but a hulking, green alligator. The creature yawned. Although Jeremy was pulling the trigger as vigorously as he was, no bullets came out of the gun. That was because the gun had jammed again, on the instant Jeremy pulled his first finger.

“DIE! DIE! DIE!” yelled the detective.

Yet nothing came out. The scaly beast took a couple of steps forward to the detective, and the latter threw his gun at the former, running away screaming.

This time, as one can imagine, the detective no longer paid any attention to the details of his surroundings, bumping into all kinds of new beds and now chairs, as he indiscriminately chose random hallways to scramble down. Jeremy screamed when he went back some familiar hallway he came from, because there was now another suddenly-appearing dead end with two alligators waiting for him. The alligators opened their mouths and waddled over to the human that just arrived to them screaming.

The detective screamed some more, always full of vocal energy, down several of the other halls as he tried to get away from the reptiles. However, no matter how far or how fast Jeremy traveled, there were always a pair of yellow eyes waiting for him at the end of some corridor, or in some adjacent room that the detective tried to hide in. Of course, the detective never found any people, his phone, or his thrown handgun at any point during this chaotic meltdown.

“Send in more people dressed as alligators,” Castro said.

He zoomed in on camera 14a, the corridor leading out of the second library to the dining area. As he predicted, the detective stumbled his way through the library out into that corridor, right where the camera was pointed. Sitting on Castro’s left, Rick belted out a hearty laugh, picking up his transceiver to give his own instructions.

“He’s going down the aisle toward the courtyard; move, like, three new beds over there,” he said.

A few other people were in the room giving similar orders through walkie-talkies. Though they were criminals, they were quite organized, and in fact, courteous to one another about the structured usage of the walkie-talkies, so as to ensure nobody talked over anyone else. On their security screens, everything was visible. There were virtually no blind spots for the detective to hide from. Pedro, another inmate, communicated orders for the cement crew to set up another wall in a hallway they missed, to seal off a potential exit for Jeremy. Then another, Tyler, gave orders to the same construction team to dig bullet holes down the hall with camera 23b, where it seemed like Jeremy might eventually edge towards.

The poor detective tripped over himself and clawed his way through the hallways while many different prisoners trailed behind, careful not to expose themselves. Castro told a joke that the entire room laughed about, as Jeremy snagged his foot on one of the wireframes of the beds. At around the same time, Warden Ross came into the room, with coffees for everyone.

“Who’s ready for a pick-me-up? What’s the news on Nealson? Is he failing, or managing?” the warden asked.

“No, sir. It’s just been the same thing. Actually, I think he’s really starting to lose it. Do you want us to stop?” replied Pedro.

“Nah, leave him like that for a bit. You guys have fun. But I don’t think we’re hiring him back after this… Pathetic.”

The warden said this as he placed his coffees on the table. Seated next to him, the commissioner of the Monarch County Police Department jotted down a few lines on a piece of paper.