Chapter 5

Jason paced back and forth in his tiny cell, pulling back his hair over and over again and trying to not to throw up for the umpteenth time. He had been told about what Colleen had suffered, how she had been raped for hours on end in her high school by three of her classmates. He had heard about the injuries she had sustained, their severity, and the psychological trauma it had left her with. He wanted so badly to get out of this prison and see her, to comfort her. His little sister ... how could this happen to her?! He was supposed to protect her, to watch over her! While he had been locked up in this dingy cell, quarantined like a rabid animal, his baby sister had been brutalized and tortured! He had actually punched Professor Nelson in the face when he admitted that he should have seen the effects of the Black Stigmata in Colleen.

The only silver linings to this were the fact that the nail had been taken from Colleen and was now in possession of the BSC, and that it had not made her a Host, so her mind would not be contaminated like Jason's. But to be treated so horribly, to suffer so much at the hands of three of her classmates ... he couldn't imagine Colleen ever being able to trust anyone ever again. It would have been bad enough if she had been gang-raped by three men, as horrible as it sounded, it was almost expected in men. But there was supposed to be some kind of protection and understanding between women, some sort of unity that would prevent them from selling each other out to such a fate. Or least, that's what Jason had hoped, that there was some kind of sisterhood that girls had that would protect them from sexual assault. If it was the girls on her sports team that had done it, would Colleen ever be able to place trust in anyone ever again, man or woman? He just had to wait for her to heal and for the influence of the Black Stigmata to fully leave him.

Christi stood outside Colleen's hospital room with a look of pained uncertainty on her face. She and Colleen had been good friends since she started dating Jason, and Christi had always been there for her and even once tried to hook her up with her younger brother. But now that friendship was struggling to hold itself together, as for every time she tried to go in and comfort her friend, Colleen would freak out and become hysterical. The psychological trauma she had suffered was fully manifesting itself, costing her the ability to recognize Christi and inducing horrendous flashbacks. After all, Christi did resemble Anna, the blonde she-beast and one of the heartless trio that had brutalized her.

Jason was in jail and Colleen had suffered a fate that Christi couldn't imagine enduring without praying for death. She wished there was something she could do, some way she could help the two of them. It seemed like everything was spiraling out of control and there was nothing she could do to protect the people she cared about.

Professor Nelson took a long drag from his cigarette, accelerating the ember tip to the point where ash was falling off the end like rain. He was standing in the woman's bathroom at the bus station in the middle of Portland, facing a corpse strung up from the ceiling. Using this corpse, the ritual for the creation of new nails had been completed, and the Black Stigmata were long gone from the pulverized eyeballs. The Homunculus (man or woman, he couldn't tell) was dangled from a 2x4 in the ceiling by a noose made from the victim's intestines, painstakingly braded for strength. All the joints in the body were broken, twisted near to the point of tearing open the flesh.

Even to the trained eye, there was no way to tell if the victim was a man or woman. Homunculi were immune to fire or decay and remained eternally like radioactive waste, yet the corpses would show signs of grotesque post-mortem changes. These changes caused the remaining subtle hints of the gender to completely disappear, from the length of the fingers to the size of the pelvis. As for the twisted joints, every Homunculus had some form of unique torture, something to distinguish them from the others as per the nails' instructions. But with the Black Stigmata not wanting to waste valuable canvas or cause the early death of their victims, Hosts were kept on a short leash and their work often repeated.

A very select few of forensic investigators were examining the scene, one of them a member of the BSC and the other two sworn to secrecy, even against the higher-ups in their departments. The station had been cordoned off and the Homunculus was going to removed and placed in BSC storage. Since Homunculi neither decayed nor burned, destroying them was next to impossible. Even throwing them into a wood chipped just made the toxic influence more spreadable. Like Black Stigmata, Homunculi had to be locked deep underground in vaults built to hold radioactive waste, at least until it was feasible to begin shooting them off into the sun.

Staring at the corpse, Nelson felt a familiar shiver crawl up his spine. The Black Stigmata were growing more powerful, their influence acting with greater speed than before. Barely a week and a half had passed by and more than a dozen bodies had been found. This had reached epidemic levels and now the BSC was sealing off the city of Portland. Under the guise of both a terrorist warning and the arrival of a new virus, public notices were being put out for all citizens to keep alert for suspicious activities. Anyone showing signs of heightened violence or hallucinogenic influence was to be reported.

The time it took for Black Stigmata to multiply always varied, their strength waxing and waning over the course of decades like the economy. Sometimes nails would remain stagnant for months or even years, sometimes they would cling to one host for an extended period and take their time in implanting the directions for the ritual, or sometimes they could incite mass violence in anyone within a kilometer range. But nowhere in his records had Nelson found any sign that this speed had been witnessed before.

Were the Black Stigmata truly growing more powerful? Was their endlessly increasing numbers strengthening their hold on the minds of humans? As this thought passed through Nelson's mind, the room around him vanished with a splash of black, as if he had been transported to the darkest recesses of space.

'Great, a hallucination. This ought to be fun, ' he thought to himself as he put out his cigarette.

As he mentally braced himself for the horrors he would likely experience, the darkness was replaced, this time with a scene from a barren wasteland. The sky overhead was as red as blood and the surrounding landscape was the city of Portland, or what remained of it. Every building had been smashed to pieces or stood like skeletons, cars rusted and curled like chips of paint, and a powerful wind blew across the landscape, kicking up razor-sharp dust and smelling like blood. Bodies lay strewn about for as far as the eye could see, immune to the effects of time. They hung from crooked street lamps, were nailed to crumbling brick walls, and lay in twisted heaps in random spots. The blood in their veins had turned to dust ages ago, but not a single body had even been touched by a carrion bird. The bacteria that would have assailed the dead flesh the moment life abandoned them no longer existed, for this Hell was incapable of supporting life of any kind.

Professor Nelson could not look directly head, for a bright light obscured his view like a curtain hanging in front of his face. He could not even tell how large the apparition was, it was like staring straight into a colossal smelting oven. However, the deathly serenity of the post-apocalyptic world was broken, as with a crash that sounded like the breaking of a billion skeletons, the bright light in front of Nelson vanished, revealing a towering tree made of iron, as dark as volcanic obsidian. Barren of even a single leaf, the branches stretched out like sharpened pikes. Like the foes of Vlad the Impaler, a body hung skewered on the tip of every branch, dangling in the burning wind. The size of the tree was truly unmatched, with the trunk's diameter equal to a mountain, its highest branches reaching into the vacuum of space, and the branches themselves numbering in the millions, if not billions.

Nelson stared at the tree quizzically, having never witnessed a hallucination like this, nor in any of the reported hallucinations by any Black Stigmata hosts.

"Achieve death..." Nelson muttered without ever knowing why.

"Sir?"

The voice of one of the forensic investigators shook him from his delusion, bringing him back to the bus station bathroom.

"Sorry, my mind wandered off there for a little while. How is everything coming along?" he asked while straightening his glasses.

"We've found several latent prints on the body and the rope used to hang it. We'll start checking the database immediately. As for the body itself, the BSC is already sending a containment chamber."

"Damn it, we're going to need a new salt mine to dump these things in..." Nelson said to himself as his hand instinctively began grabbing at the pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket.

"ACHIEVE DEATH!"

The people hanging in the air around Jason all screamed this line in unison over and over, forcing him to cover his ears and think of anything that could distract him from their bloodcurdling voices. It was another hallucination, one that was very different from anything he had yet experienced. As always, he was set in a black backdrop, but while there was no actual source of light, he was able to see himself and all the screaming humans clearly. They all looked like they had been nailed to an invisible wall or were dangling from nooses made of rope, barbed wire, and even intestines. Blood gushed from their wounds like popped zits, raining gore down upon Jason and leaving him wanting to throw up.

None of the people were familiar to Jason, yet their identities seemed to change every time he looked away from them. The only thing consistent was that they were all naked and all had sustained some kind of fatal wound. Regardless of the injuries they appeared to bear, every stranger was sporting a euphoric grin from ear to ear and with their eyes as wide as could be. Even with blood pouring from their bodies, they had the expressions of kids running through the parking lot of Disney World. Achieve death, they screamed that line over and over again, yet Jason had no idea what it meant. Normally he would be hearing the instructions for creating new nails, but this ambiguous term was playing in his mind like a broken record.

Once their voices reached a volume where the two words they had been repeating could no longer be understood, the nightmare advanced to its next step. Dripping off their bodies along with their blood, globs of liquefied flesh rained down as if the screaming apparitions were actually wax sculptures over a fire. Layer after layer of skin was peeled away in viscous drops, while in their limbs, their joints twisted and snapped until the bones broke free of their restraints. With melted skin now running down the invisible wall and painting it a sludgy mix of tan and crimson, the next layer of flesh on the apparitions began to fall away.

Like piano strings snapping and lashing out at the nearest surface, strand after strand of muscle was severed and shot off. The muscles cords were peeled away, falling down towards Jason. Pelting the marsh of gore Jason was forced to kneel in, the severed muscle cords squirmed and writhed like worms in sunlight. Swimming through the thick blood and melted flesh, the crawling abominations grew spindly legs like centipedes and began swarming to Jason. Screaming in terror, he tried to swat them away and keep them at a distance, but with insatiable bloodlust, they crawled across his body and ravaged his skin with unseen stingers. While he fought hopelessly against the horde, the people dangling along the walls continued their chant, their voices completely unhindered by their exposed organs turning to ash and the last of their muscles being stripped away.

As the eyes melted from their skulls, a bright red light shone from the depths of their skulls, just like the bloody star Jason saw in every dream. Increasing in intensity with the exposure of each beam, the red light filled the chamber like a gas cloud. Down at the bottom, Jason was still fighting fruitlessly against the stinging crawlers. They had all swarmed on him at once and every inch of skin had now been torn to pieces, yet the tiny horrors refused to let go of him. He felt like his whole body had been lit on fire, while the flames themselves weighed his body down while they devoured him. More and more of these human flesh centipedes crawled onto his body, enveloping him like a sheet, then like a thick winter coat, and finally as just an amorphous pile. Reaching out for something he could grab onto, he watched the crawlers move in front of his eyes, obscuring his vision and leaving the red light outside as the last thing he would ever see.

The banging of a fist against his cell door woke Jason from his delusion, prompting him to immediately throw up into the nearby toilet.

"Stevens, you got a visitor!" the guard outside barked.

Glad that he had someone to talk to and distract him, but also wondering if he had the stamina for a visitation, Jason slowly got up and moved to the door as it was opened. As per routine, he stood as still as a statue in the doorway while the guards secured him in shackles, both for his hands and feet. Even if he wasn't a real inmate of this prison, he had to follow most of the rules. Real prisoners in solitary confinement would of course never be allowed the luxury of visitations.

Being led down the hallway with his chains rattling and guards on either side, Jason tried to figure out the time. He was never allowed to see a clock unless he was in the visitation room, but it seemed too early in the day for his family, Christi, or Professor Nelson to be visiting him. Either way, he tried to shake off the remaining jetlag-like effects of his nightmare. This was beyond torture, he felt like he was actually dying every time he woke up. If this didn't end soon or at least get better, he might not even be able to keep from killing himself.

As usual, the visitation room was empty. It must not have been proper hours. He was probably the only "prisoner" who could meet with someone outside of visiting hours. Being sat down at the round table in the middle of the room, he watched as his visitor was checked behind a wall of reinforced glass. It was a man, portly and with a dark complexion. Hispanic? Jason's vision still had not recovered enough for him to make out the details, but he knew that this man was a stranger to him. How did he know Jason? How did he know he was here? Why was he visiting him? He certainly wasn't dressed like a lawyer.

Looking like he had just seen a ghost, the man was let into the visitation room and slowly walked over to Jason's table, taking small steps.

"You're Jason Stevens, right?"

"Yes, do I know you?"

"No, no uh ... we haven't met before. I'm uh ... I'm Miguel Hernandez, I'm ... Tim Jones' brother in law ... or former brother in law, after my sister's death."

"I'm guessing you want to know what happened to him? I'm sorry, I have no idea what he did or where he is."

"No ... uh ... I didn't come here for that. I was told to come here..." Miguel said shakily as he sat down on the other side of the table.

"Told? Who told you?"

Miguel leaned forward with his head in his hands. "I don't know what to do. I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can't even think straight. This is tearing me apart, I just want it to stop!"

A terrifying shiver snuck up Jason's spine. "Who told you to find me?!" he demanded fearfully, preparing to jump out of his chair.

"The whispers ... they just don't stop! They keep telling me to do things and they hurt me if I don't obey! I've fought against them for as long as I can, but I can't take it anymore!"

Jason hurried to his feet. "Guards! Guards! He's got a weapon! Someone get in here and help me!"

Hearing his alarm, prison guards streamed into the room from both the entrance and the exit, charging towards Miguel before he could use whatever weapon they thought he had. Reaching into his pocket, Miguel drew a Black Stigmata, the twin to the one that Tim Jones had found, both men having come across the body that had bore the relics and each one taking a nail.

"WE MUST ALL ACHIEVE DEATH!" Miguel screamed at the top of his lungs, holding the nail high above his head and triggering a blinding flash of red light.

Blood, Jason could taste blood, and a lot of it at that. He couldn't close his mouth, something was stuffed into his cheeks. Gum? No, it was softer than gum. His stomach also felt full. Had he been bleeding into his stomach? Was he wounded? Forcing his eyes open, he stared up at the ceiling of the visitation chamber. He could hear something ... something wet and squishy ... as well as ... laughter. Pushing himself up, he looked around to try and figure out what was going on. The tables and chairs in the auditorium had all been pulverized, and only one guard of the original swarm remained. He was busy painting the walls red with blood, using sundered body parts of his former coworkers as paintbrushes. He laughed as he smeared the torn muscle and flesh against the beige drywall, having completely lost his mind. It was obvious that the guards had all died horribly, probably in a large psychotic brawl.

Looking around, Jason paled as his eyes fell on Miguel, laying just a few feet away with his face torn off and his throat completely destroyed. It looked as if a wild animal had torn into him ... or a possessed human. Rolling his tongue around in his mouth, Jason summed up the taste of the man's blood and immediately vomited onto the floor. Spurt after spurt of human blood and chewed up flesh poured out onto the white tile, with Jason mentally begging for any god that may exist for it to not really be from Miguel. He didn't know if he could live with himself, live with the knowledge that he had not only killed, but EATEN a person. Coughing several times on something bulbous in his throat, he was forced to face reality when one of Miguel's eye dropped out of his mouth, still with the stalk clinging to it like a strand of spaghetti wrapped around a meatball.

Realizing what he had done, realizing what had been in his body, Jason screamed at the top of his lungs, shouting at the messy floor until the veins in his scalp bulged and his face became beat-red. Hearing his screams, the deranged guard stopped what he was doing and turned to him. Having clearly gone mad, the man limped towards him with his club in hand, the end broken into a sharp tip. Now facing Jason, the wounds he had sustained while fighting his coworkers were visible, such as several broken fingers, a piece of one of the metal chair legs in his shin, multiple deep lacerations across his face, and a chunk bitten out of his arm.

Hobbling over with one leg barely able to hold his weight, the guard laughed as he raised his nightstick above his head, about to plunge the broken end straight into Jason's chest or simply beat him to death. Fueled by adrenaline and acting on instinct, Jason kicked the protruding spike of metal in the man's leg, forcing it all the way through and sending him toppling to the floor. With crippling pain temporarily breaking the hold of the Black Stigmata, the man was wide open. Having learned to stop hoping everything would turn out to be a bad dream, Jason quickly crawled over and wrapped his chains around the guard's throat. His teeth bared, his lips pulled back, and red foam dripping from the corners of his mouth, Jason pulled on the chain as hard as he could, kneeling on the guard's back to keep him pinned. The man struggled against him, but his attempts only enhancedJason's fear and thereby increased his strength.

After several seconds of his heart beating in his ears like a war drum, Jason finally felt the guard go limp, dead by his hands. Shaking all over, Jason looked around with new eyes and ears. He could hear sirens, gunshots, explosions, and countless screams of agony both in and outside the prison. Was there a riot going on? Had the Black Stigmata triggered a revolt with that flash of red light? This place was no longer safe, he had to get out!

'Wait, the Black Stigmata ... Where is it?'

He looked around, trying to find the nail that Miguel had brought in. He wasn't holding it (he had learned to check), they weren't in his pockets, and a quick search of the room brought no results. Had someone come in and stolen it? No matter, it was better that he didn't have it. Just being around it could cause him to do ... what he did to Miguel.

With so much adrenaline in his veins that he felt like he would suffer a heart attack, he checked the dead guards for the keys to his chains. After all the nightmares he had experienced from the Black Stigmata, no corpse and no amount of blood could scare him. Jammed into the mouth of one of the guards, he found a ring of keys and managed to finally free himself. After a second search of the corpses, he retrieved a few cans of pepper spray and a pair of bloody clubs. With a baton in each hand and enough mental stability to know that he looked like a clueless idiot with a baton in each hand, he ran out of the visitation room in search of an exit. From the way that guard had acted, it was clear that this riot was the work of the Black Stigmata, and that meant that he was essentially trapped in a giant box of metal and concrete with a pack of rabid dogs. He had to escape if he were to have any chance of survival.

Leaving the visitation chamber, he ran down the hallway leading towards the scanning area, where visitors to the prison were searched for weapons. Somehow, Miguel had managed to sneak the nail in past the guards. Perhaps the Black Stigmata as a whole had learned that metal detectors could lead to separation from their Hosts. The hallway was stained with blood, all of it still wet or at least gelatinized. Reaching the first checkpoint door, he grabbed the metal bars and shook them wildly, trying to overpower the electronic lock. Beside him was the window to the small office holding the controls for the door, reinforced so that prisoners like Jason couldn't just smash their way out. Lockdown was in effect, so there certainly wouldn't be any doors open to him. Cursing his luck, he doubled back and returned to the visitation room. There had to be another way out of this place, THINK!

'The yard... '

He had seen the prison yard when he first arrived, an expansive field of sparse grass and sand surrounded by wire fences. Like all prisoners, this yard was secured by guard towers, armed with sniper rifles. But with the Black Stigmata screwing with the minds of everyone in the prison, there was a strong possibility that the towers would be abandoned or that the guards would be too crazy to even aim at him properly. It would just be a matter of climbing the fence. But that meant ... crossing the entire prison.

So he had two options: hide and wait for help to arrive in a prison full of possessed killers, or cross said prison and try to escape. No, he had to get out of there, if not out of fear from the other inmates, then to get away from the Black Stigmata before it could push him into the same psychotic stage as everyone else. Taking a deep breath, he walked over to the twin doors leading to the rest of the prison and opened them wide.

Jason ran as fast as he could down the corridor of the first cellblock, hoping to be unnoticed in the carnage. Every inch of the floor was slick with blood, the air was heavy with smoke and tear gas, and a choir of screams and laughs alike served as an endless soundtrack. The corridor was three stories in height with cells lining each side and catwalks for the second and third levels. Possessed by the Black Stigmata and robbed of what little humanity they had left, the prisoners were torturing, raping, killing, and devouring each other. They weren't alone; guards were also taking part in the bloody riot, having completely lost their minds. Most often, the victims of the group assaults were the few inmates who seemed mostly immune to the affects of the Black Stigmata, but that only allowed them to suffer with more clarity.

In one cell he passed, several inmates were ganging up on a single prisoner, using shivs to carve holes in his torso through which to sexually assault him, all while he howled in agony and begged for someone to help him. Jason could see the prisoner's hand reaching out between the bodies of the men piled on top of him, desperately trying to grab something that would let him escape or reach for someone that would help him. His fingers twisted and curled with his screams, projecting every particular bout of agony.

In another cell, Jason found several possessed inmates brawling with shivs in their hands, completely unaware of the injuries they were sustaining and focusing only on harming each other. The more they slashed and stabbed each other, the more of their blood was splattered across their walls and ceiling. Like the guard Jason had killed, they laughed as they attacked each other, and laughed even harder when they themselves were hurt. They seemed completely immune to their injuries, continuing to fight even when their organs were stabbed, their throats were slashed, or their eyes were gouged out.

On the other side of the hallway, guards and prisoners alike were feeding on each other, resembling a pack of zombies around their victims. Tearing into the guts of their coworkers or fellow inmates, they slurped up intestines like lengths of spaghetti, squeezed severed limbs like oranges to drain the blood into their throats, chewed on brains, eyes, and the toughest cartilage like gum, and ate until they would throw up, then resume eating. Their attention would sporadically change and they would attack each other, as if bored with devouring corpses and wanting to once again taste the flesh of the living.

From the railways of the catwalks, prisoners hung from nooses made of bed sheets or even human intestines. Many of the lynching receivers kicked and fought with the "ropes" around their neck, while spectators cheered beneath them. Those that weren't left to suffocate were lit on fire, turning into dangling torches after being doused with prison-made alcohol or flammable chemicals and then ignited with lighters or prison matches.

Turning a corner onto the next cellblock, Jason found himself facing a mixed group of prisoners and guards. They were all holding makeshift spears made of anything from mops and brooms to the frames of cots. They were holding their spears high above their heads, laughing at the skewered corpses dangling atop them. With each jostle, the corpses' blood rained down onto the killers and was ravenously licked up and swallowed. Fearing that they would turn their attention to him, Jason ducked into a nearby cell.

Trying to think up his next move, Jason nearly shit his pants at the sound of automatic fire just outside. At the other end of the corridor, SWAT officers were mowing down the crazed guards and inmates, but they did so with bloodshot eyes and sadistic smiles behind their transparent helmets. As the butchered carcasses hit the floor with smoking bullet wounds, the officers turned on each other, emptying their clips into their comrades or beating each other with the stocks of their rifles.

'Prison guards aren't allowed to carry guns, even the riot control guards! Were they from outside?' Jason thought to himself, slowly crawling out from under the cot of the cell and returning to the hallway.

Casting aside the batons he had taken, he sprinted over to the corpses of the SWAT officers and searched them for weapons. They had used up all the ammo for their automatic weapons, but he was able to take two sidearms and a few spare magazines. Thinking back to movies and TV and feeling more like an idiot than a badass, he checked each pistol for a chambered round and moved on to the cafeteria.

Much like the visitation chamber, the cafeteria consisted of a large auditorium with dozens of round tables and a counter across one side of the room where the food was given out. Like the rest of the prison, the cafeteria was filled with both inmates and guards, slaughtering each other in the most brutal and bloody ways possible. Screams emanated from the kitchen as the chefs dissected and butchered captured victims, burned their faces off on the grills, or drowned them in the boiling grease tubs.

Hearing a laugh, Jason turned to the entrance of the kitchen, finding himself staring at a blood-soaked chef, scrawny and with a tan complexion. There was a wicked grin on his face and a carving knife in his hand.

"Stay back!" Jason fearfully shouted, aiming both pistols at the man with trembling hands as he saw the chef raise the knife.

"We will all achieve death!" the chef cackled.

Swinging his arm, he stabbed himself in the throat with the handle protruding just above his collarbone and the tip of the blade being deflected off his spinal column. Already in the process of bleeding to the death, the chef pushed down on the knife with all his strength, cutting down through his chest and torso. Maneuvering the blade around his sternum, he sawed through his ribcage, shredded his heart, cleaved through his entrails, and pulled the knife out just above his pelvis. With his dying strength, he pulled the flaps of his torso open, letting Jason see his insides while his torn organs poured out onto the floor.