Episode 6: Look at Me

The Unguarded Condemned : Episode 6 : 12/16/25

---

Written by M. Majeris

---

Something’s not right.

Like a tiny mouse, I sit still, listening, for the first time in decades, not recognizing her.

I don’t remember the faces of the girls they said I killed, or even if it really happened—too many decades passed since, ancient memories mercilessly shredded by time. Yet, I know every tiny sound she speaks to me with: a high-pitched sigh of wind squeezing through the crack in the kitchen’s window glass, a distant clank the outer gate emits when it opens to let the delivery trucks in, how each and every infirmary’s floorboard creaks when stepped on.

Jane.

Some inmates think I’m crazy humanizing the prison I’ve been calling home since I was sixteen. Grampa Walt gone coo-coo, they say. Fools. Let’s see how you fare after witnessing entire generations here lose the spark of hope or their lives altogether, whichever comes first. Like those two morons next door, sleeping off their shanks or whatever. You may think you still have a life ahead of you, while I… I only have Jane. She’s the only one who truly knows me—a rambling old man, and I know her.

Oh my gentle girl. What’s wrong?

My eyes started to fail somewhere around the turn of the century. It didn’t just happen—the blindness crept on me at snail’s pace, not triggering any motion sensors, until I realized I didn’t have much use for sight anyway. By then, I had touched every square inch thousands of times and knew them all by heart, along all the tiny squeaks, rustles, twitches, snaps or groans that came with it.

Whistles, clatter of dishes, cells being opened. A cacophony of steps heading in one direction or another. Crackle of guards’ radios. It was a well versed symphony in my head. One that I’ve been relying on to keep the track of time—better than any clock—for as long as I can remember. Until this goddamn morning.

Something’s definitely off. Too quiet.

At the tail end of my infirmary night shift, when a guard burst through the entrance (Brendan, betrayed by the sound of his left foot scraping the floor just a fraction of a second too long), I assumed he was here to take me back to my cell. Yet, he ran past the sanitary supplies closet I was in at the moment, straight into our nice doc Miss Jennifer’s office at the end of the hallway that made up the entirety of the prison’s medical ward.

I have no idea how a young woman ends up in a place like this. It could’ve been some kind of messed up medical residency program that placed her here, but where she lacked in the prestige of the workplace, she certainly was compensated by attention from the residents—inmates and staff alike. Yes, including good old Brendan.

I kept still, listening, their anxious whispers not low enough for my sharpened eardrums, guard’s words like “hurry” and “mandatory evacuation” intertwined with the woman’s weak protests wafting in through the open door. On their way out, she stopped briefly in front of me, God bless her, only to be forcibly dragged off by the white knight in a uniform. Leave him—we don’t have time for this, he spat, voice trembling with fear, the whitecoats from the basement have already fled, like rats that they are. We got seconds to get on the last transport, then they’re sealing the gate.

I now just stand there, pondering what that means, when I feel the lights go out. The ghostlike vibration of the old wires and the faint hum of the breakers is gone, replaced by eerie silence.

Not now, Jane. Don’t go silent on me.

As I cautiously step out of my hidey hole, a chorus of soul-piercing screams erupts outside, then stops just as abruptly.

Wincing at the echoing sound of my own steps, I head for the gate at the end of the hallway, left ajar by Brendan’s hasty escape.

Barely a few strides in, a shattering crack of a breaking window followed by another set of shrieks of terror and pain coming from somewhere down below leaves me petrified. It takes a few moments to will myself into breathing again.

Another step, another glassy explosion drowned by cries of agony. Closer this time. Engulfed in gooey panic, I inch further, the pattern repeating, the sinister racket drawing nearer.

I’m almost at the gate when a different sound draws my attention: a frantic scratch of fingernails on wood, frenzied like a trapped cat clawing its way out, desperate for help. Stifling the instinct to flee, I shuffle back the way I came. There, a door to one of the cells rattles, jerked by someone trying to get out. Hurriedly, I cover the rest of the distance and pull the handle.

The door swings outward, burst open by the weight of a man’s body, knocking me off my feet.

“Oh thank God!” He exhales, clumsily crawling over me and out of the way.

I ignore him, my attention glued to the inside of the room. There’s something there. A presence like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

Look at me, says a voice inside my head.

I can’t, I want to retort, almost apologetically, but stop short, shocked by images piercing the perpetual darkness of my world. Two young girls, twins, arguing over who’s turn is at the swingset in the playground.

No, no, no. It can’t be, it was so long ago. I shake my head, chasing the vision away.

Don’t resist! Comes a harsh order. Just give in.

“Some help?” A cry sounds to my left, pulling me out of a haze I didn’t realize I was in, invisible tendrils snapping.

As I struggle to my feet, an angry hiss rings out from inside of the room, sharp clack-clack sounds of talons hitting the tiles heading away in the direction of one of the cell’s beds.

“What the fuck was that?” Gasps a voice in the dark.

“I don’t know,” I utter, struggling up, “but we better get moving.”

As the infirmary’s outer gate clanks shut behind us and we limp on, my shoulder weighted by a massive sagging body, fragments of an intensifying whisper waft in from behind:

“No.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I won’t!”