Earsplitting

Work Release isn't like an ordinary prison.

If you're unfamiliar with how the prison hierarchy works, let me explain. You have Maximum Security institutions, places with barbed wire on the fences, and men in cages inside concrete structures, whose days are basically dictated by the guards' will. Then you have Minimum Security, which is mostly dorms that look like summer camp cabins, with bunk beds, belongings stacked neatly in lockers, and Inmates who have a schedule and go about their day as they choose, within reason. Then there's Community Custody, which is more like a halfway house. Inmates living in Community Custody have jobs outside the facility, earn their own money, and get to wear regular clothes most of the time. They have one foot in the real world and usually cause very little trouble.

This post is deemed too dull for most officers, but after three years of running and gunning at Stragview, I was ready for something boring. The Major that runs the Midnight Ridge Work Camp is a friend of mine, you see. He heard I was looking for a change and decided to make me part of his team. So, I put in my transfer, waited my customary three months for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, and finally got my marching orders. I thought that after three years of hassle and bull crap, I had finally arrived at a sort of early retirement.

I had no idea.

There are three shifts at work release. First shift handled the morning, the busiest time of the day, and organized the vans and the carpools that took our inmates to work. They monitored their GPS tracking and generally fielded phone calls and questions from the brass or family members. Second shift was responsible for the logistics of bringing everyone home, coordinating arrivals, and making sure that by the time Third shift arrived at eleven, everyone was snug in bed and dreaming about tomorrow's busy day. That's where my shift comes in. Third shift was, by far, the easiest of the three shifts. You sat behind a desk for eight hours and watched the GPS points for the day run by on a big monitor. You monitored recorded phone calls, called in the counts to the control room, and try not to fall asleep.

Other than that, not much happens.

Third shift is also the only shift with just one person at the helm. That's because you don't have to deal with anyone until the sun rises unless there's an emergency. I'd ridden the eleven to seven shift for three months, and I have to say that it was the best post I had ever had. I had to run chow at four am and send three groups of loggers out at five-thirty, but other than that, I rarely ever saw an inmate unless I wanted to.

That's probably how I lost my focus.

I was out on a compound check when I first noticed the sound.

Every night at midnight, I have to walk the compound and make sure everything is locked up. Aside from two dorms, there's a tool shop, a laundry room, a chemical shed, a motor pool, and a lawn shed where we keep the lawn mowers and weed eaters. It's also important to walk around and make sure the grounds are free of garbage or that no one has tried to drop off any "care packages'' during the day. I've been told that people will sometimes do drug drops when all the inmates are at work, so we walk around periodically and check the drainage ditches and look for turned-up turf that someone's hidden things under.

I was walking the grounds with my headphones on, listening to Spotify as I made my way around the ground, when a harsh noise cut into my music. It sounded like tv static or the high REEE of power lines. I took my headphones off to clean the jack, thinking they were the culprit. When I slid them off, I realized that it wasn't the headphone, though. The sound was coming from the yard. Figuring it was an extra energetic cicada, I kept making my way around as I tried to find the source.

By the time I had checked the last shed, the noise had stopped.

I walked back in and set about the difficult task of finding something to watch on Youtube in between hourly rounds.

An hour later, I was sitting with my feet on the desk and listening to a creepy reading when something caught my eye on the security monitors. Most of the compound is wired with cameras. You've got one in the control room, one in the kitchen, one in each dorm, one in each of the shed, and four that sit at various locations around the outside. One of them faces the only road in, another sits on the parking lot, and the other two face the rec yard and the backwoods. I looked at the cameras again, sure I had seen something blip across the back cameras, and nearly flipped my chair when I caught sight of the rec yard cam.

Someone was standing in the rec yard, right in the middle of the basketball court, looking at the woods.

The center had once been a Lumber Camp, and it's pretty far back in the woods. There's only one access road, and I hadn't seen anyone drive up to it. We don't get a lot of foot traffic out here, being about 5 miles off the nearest road, but we do get visitors from time to time. The signs on the road are usually enough to deter visitors, so the idea that someone had just walked out of the woods and onto my rec yard this late at night was hard to believe. I unlocked the cage where we kept the shotguns and headed out nonetheless. It wasn't an inmate, they were all locked down for the night, so it had to be someone from outside the camp.

I came out a side door, barrel leading, and peeked around the edge to get an idea of what I was dealing with. They were still there, standing on the blacktop and staring at the woods. They were tall, around six feet, and a hood obscured their face. The spotlight on the court showed me jeans and sneakers, and I began to think it might be a man.

As I took in his profile and sized him up, I started to hear that same high-pitched buzzing noise. It followed me as I crept quietly to the tool shed, and I had to squint as it seemed to buzz against my fillings. It was worse than before, the sound slinking across my mind like an ice skater, and as I swung around to challenge the man, I could feel my left eye twitching from the noise. I leveled the barrel at him as I challenged him in my loudest voice, the words stilted as the loud REEE raked at me.

"This is state property. You are not authorized to be here. State your business before I…"

Before I pointed my shotgun at an empty basketball court.

I swept the barrel around, trying to listen for footfalls or heavy breathing. The guy had been there one minute and been gone the next, so if he were still here, I should be able to hear him. There was nowhere he could have made it in the two seconds it had taken me to come around the shed, and I was certain he had been there. I had seen him, the camera had seen him, and I started walking around the sheds as I tried to flush him out, challenging him every few minutes as I did so.

It took a minute to realize that I could have heard him at all because the loud ringing had disappeared from my ears.

Thirty minutes later, I had to accept that he had gotten away.

The cameras, though…

I made my way back to the control room, opening the door with my key, and sat down in front of the camera bank. I should have called Stragview, which is only about a mile up the road, but I wanted something more concrete than my word on it. The fact that he had disappeared had shaken me, and I needed someone else to have seen him. I rolled back the footage by an hour, panning forward slowly as I checked for figures. Maybe the camera would show me where he'd gone too. I could go back out and find him, cover him until backup could get here, and have a little excitement for a change.

When I got to the point where I had noticed him on the camera, though, the blacktop was empty.

I kept watching, thinking maybe I had been wrong about the time, but when I rounded the corner with my shotgun a few minutes later, I rewound and looked again. There was no one there, the court was empty until I got there, but I knew I had seen someone on the camera. Hell, I had seen him when I rounded that shed. How could he just not be there now?

There would be no more youtube for me that night. I bird dogged those cameras, my eyes sliding from screen to screen, trying to catch anything that might vindicate what I'd seen earlier. I knew what I'd seen, I had seen a person out there, but there was nothing there now. The longer I went, though, the more I second-guessed myself. Maybe it had been a shadow. Perhaps I had been seeing things. Maybe I had just wanted there to be something there.

I was looking at the yard when something blipped near the woods. I was used to seeing raccoons or possums as they went about their business, maybe even an owl or a hawk, but whatever this was had been big. I panned around to the other camera and thought I saw a similar large shape lopping around near the woods. It was too big to be a dog, maybe a mastiff, but I suppose it could be a large cat or something. We did get bears and cougar sightings every now and again, but this was too weird on top of the prowler.

When the courtesy phone rang, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

The guy on the other end sounded as scared as I was.

"Officer, it's Tabish in Dorm A. We have a problem out here."

The courtesy phone was how the inmates contacted me after the doors were locked. If one of them had a medical emergency or a fight broke out, that was how they got in touch with me. I had only heard it ring a few times, and mostly it was because I was late opening the door for chow. Today, however, the guy on the other end sounded pretty scared.

As scared as I felt, in fact.

"What's going on?"

"Well, something big ran past the window, like a cougar or something. Now there's something loud on the roof, and it sounds like it's trying to get in."

"The roof? What's on the roof?" I asked

"I don't know, sir. It sounds pretty big, and it's…" but suddenly there was a loud ripping sound from overhead, and I heard Tabish's scream overtopped by the same ringing I had heard earlier.

I slammed the phone into the cradle and picked up my shotgun as I turned towards the dorm. It took two steps for logic to rear its head, and I realized that charging off without letting someone know what was going on was a great way to end up dead. I picked up the phone again, dialing the number for the control room of Stragview and praying that they weren't having some kind of problems as well.

Someone picked up on the second ring.

"Stragview Reception Center, control room sergeant Clease speaking."

I gave Clease a short rundown on what was happening, and he assured me that he would send some officers around to help me.

"Just don't leave the control room. Lock the doors, and stay put until we get there. ETA is probably about fifteen minutes, but it could be half an hour. We're are majorly understaffed tonight."

"Do I need to call the police as well? Maybe the…"

"No," Clease came back quickly and decisively, "we will handle this. Stay put and don't do anything stupid."

Then he hung up, and I could swear I could hear that weird static creeping in again through the lines. I went around and made sure the doors were locked and tried to keep myself from moving towards the back. I was very curious about what was going on in the dorm, and I found myself walking towards the kitchen before thinking better. I should, after all, go, make sure the kitchen was secured. It backed onto the rec yard, and the dorms were beyond that, so if the doors weren't locked, something might get in.

I had slid the key into the lock that separated the offices from the kitchen when I heard the frantic pounding of fists. I threw the door open and saw a handful of scared inmates at the backdoor of the kitchen. They were pounding on the glass hard enough to send cracks through it, and some of them were looking behind them with terrified, jerking glances. Some of them stepped back when they saw the shotgun but pounded with more fervor when they saw I was holding it.

"Please! Let us in! These things are going to kill us!"

I glanced out the back window over the drop sink and saw an abattoir spread across the blacktop. The overhead lights near the woods and over the blacktop had burst, casting the whole space in moonlit shadows. I could see large, loping shapes chasing scared inmates in the semi-darkness before burying them and savaging them with huge jaws. Their screams were a cacophony that I was surprised I was only now hearing, and many of them lay dead and bleeding across the blacktop.

In the middle of it all stood the hooded man. He stood there amidst the chaos, taking it all in mildly from beneath his hood. The beasts moved around him, long chitinous bodies moving gracefully, and I almost sensed his approval of it all. Had he brought them here? Were these his pets? My mind tried to make sense of it all, even as that skeletal reeeing drove an icepick into my skull.

He turned then, his eyes meeting mine through the window, and I heard the din of screams dim as though it were a bad radio signal. His eyes bore into mine, and I could feel him root around in my brain, like fingers over my scalp. The inmates at the door kept shrieking, but I hardly noticed when something came along and drug them away. Many of the things seemed to be dragging my inmates towards the woods, but the man in the hood commanded my full attention.

When he spoke in my head, it didn't even seem odd.

"We don't want you, Watchman. Sleep, and live to tell your friends what you have seen here. Oh, and be sure to give the Warden a special message for me. Be sure to tell him that Reece sends his regards."

When he stopped speaking, the loud ringing reached a fever pitch, and I felt warmth trickling down the sides of my head. My knees cut loose, and I split the left knee of my uniform pants as I crashed to the kitchen floor. I was suddenly assaulted by the loudest ringing I had ever heard, and it felt like a bolt of lightning was rocketing through my skull. Fortunately, I didn't have long to suffer.

I blacked out just as my hands came up to try and cover my bleeding ears.

I wasn't aware of anything else until someone slapped me across the face, and I realized I was on the ground.

They brought me to the prison and tossed me in a holding cell. That's where I awaited the Warden while he compiles a report from the Work Camp. From what I was told by the yard sergeant, a blunt man who came to interrogate me like a freaking inmate, all the inmates at the center were gone. I told him about the things, about the man, the bodies, and the blood out on the rec yard, but he didn't believe me. The sergeant says that they haven't found any blood or bodies there. The only person they found was me, asleep on the floor after making a disturbing call to the prison about someone attacking the work camp. The doors to the dorms were opened, the locks missing, and they expect that there is now a roving band of inmates out in the Stragview Woods.

The only person that seemed that believed me was the Warden.

When I first came here, he met me at the gate, asking me what had happened and what I had seen. I told him everything. I told him about the big creatures, things like hunting cats that had broken into the dorm, and the blips on the camera I'd seen as they moved around. I told him about the phone call from Inmate Tabish, where he told me about the creatures trying to get into the dorm and the static burst as they had made it inside somehow. I told him about the man in the hood, even giving him the message that he had left for him.

That was when the Wardens carefully constructed cool had evaporated.

"Hold him until I get back. I will have more questions for him."

When the sergeant came back about three hours later, though, it was to let me out and inform me I was on disciplinary leave without pay until my punishment could be decided upon.