you all. God will forgive you also.” He closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair.
There was a clock over the mysterious door at the back of the chamber. The red second hand ticked its way toward twelve.
“Thirty seconds,” Dicks said nervously. Colts was surprised by the statement. They hadn’t said anything during the dry run. He looked questioningly at Dicks, who was sweating and visibly nervous. He looked at the other men. The Warden and the priest were also strangely nervous, almost afraid.
The Warden seemed to kick into high gear. In a rush, he said, “By decree of the Governor of our fine state, I carry out the ultimate sentence of Execution for your crimes. God be with you as you pay for your crimes.”
“Fifteen seconds,” Dicks called out. He was visibly shaking now. So was the Warden. Even the priest seemed outright scared. He hustled through a silent prayer, crossed himself.
Every man in the room withdrew through the main door, exiting urgently into Death Row. Everything slowed to a crawl. Colts was caught off guard by the unexpected speed-up of the process and found himself a step behind. He looked up at the clock. The second hand ticked twelve.
“Colts! Out now!” Dicks hissed at him.
There was a metallic squeal from the back door as if someone was scraping knives across bare metal. The sound of a deadbolt sliding free. The groan of a sealed door protesting as it was opened. And then the temperature dropped rapidly.
A hand grabbed him by the elbow and yanked him backward toward the door. He lost his balance and nearly toppled to the floor.
A dark figure, a shadow, floated into the room. Colts exhaled. I can see my breath! he exclaimed mentally. He shivered involuntarily. The room’s temperature had dropped so low that he was suddenly freezing.
The figure was instantly at the chair. Colts couldn’t see the shadow’s face, just a shape. Was he wearing a cloak or a cape of some kind? He tried to look away but he couldn’t.
Incredibly long fingers, discolored and with nails that were too long, slid out of the shadows and down the condemned man’s shoulder. Another set of fingers wrapped around his temple from the opposite side.
Colts tried to speak but couldn’t. Was he really seeing what he thought he was seeing?
As he was yanked through the doorway by his colleague, a set of eyes locked onto him. He felt them more than saw them. They were like twin black holes in the inky blackness of space. He knew they were there. He could tell they were there because there was no light where there should be some, but he couldn’t directly see them. He was mesmerized.
And then Dicks was smacking his cheek. “Snap out of it boy! Wake up!”
The sting of the slap jolted him back to reality. “What?” he whispered.
Dicks wore a concerned look on his face. “You didn’t look directly at it, did you?” he asked.
In a daze, Colts asked, “Look at what?”
“Aw Lordie,” Dicks groaned. He looked at the Warden, who shrugged slightly.
“Nothing we can do about it now,” the Warden remarked.
Dicks shook Colts good and hard. It took a full minute to bring him out of the daze he was in, but he came out of it.
Wiping the sweat from his brow, Dicks sighed with relief. “Thought you were a goner, boy.”
“Wha..what happened?”
“Nothing. You’re going to be fine.”
As if on cue, a light above the Chamber door, which Colts had never noticed before, turned green. All of the men present stared up at it. The Warden exhaled slowly. “We’re done here,” he said calmly. “Dispose of the body.”
The priest crossed himself, kissed the cross on the necklace hanging from his neck and walked away with the Warden, leaving Colts and Dicks to clean up the mess.
Dicks seemed much more relaxed now. The fear was gone from his eyes. “C’mon boy, let’s go finish the job.”
As the door opened, a wave of cold air washed over them. Colts felt a chill and shivered. It was a balmy seventy five in Death Row, but the Chamber was more like thirty.
The room was just as they’d left it only minutes ago except for two things that made Colts uneasy. There was frost on all the metal surfaces and the corpse of the dead man looked wrong.
The man they’d put to death was a solid muscular man in his forties. What sat in his place in the Death Chair was a decayed, emaciated husk of an old man in his sixties or later.
“Dude, what the…” Colts exclaimed as they reached down to unstrap the corpse from the seat.
“Don’t think about it,” Dicks replied. “Don’t ask questions and don’t think about it. Just do the job and forget about it.”
“How in the heck does this happen?”
Dicks responded curtly, “I said, don’t ask questions.”
“But…”
“But nothing. All you need to know is that it’s ‘eco-friendly’ and that it saves the taxpayers a huge chunk of change. It also makes the job of lifting him a good deal easier. Now c’mon. Help me.”
Dicks instructed him to grab the corpse’s feet while he slipped his arms under the man’s armpits. As they lifted him from the chair, the man’s head fell back, revealing two small puncture marks over the place an artery would have been if the man hadn’t been drained of all bodily fluids.
“No! That’s impossible!” Colts barked. “There’s no such thing.”
“Just shut up and do your job,” Dicks returned. “C’mon, to the back door.”
The back door. So it was where the bodies went. Well, this should be interesting, too.
They laid the body on the floor while Dicks opened the door. It was frosted and freezing to the touch. “Oh cripes, it burns!” Dicks complained, chuckling a little. “My fingers stuck to the handle like that kid’s tongue stuck to the flagpole in that Christmas movie.” He covered his hand with a shirt tail and pried the door handle back. The door swung slowly open, revealing a hallway beyond. There was a gurney waiting for them. It was shoved against a wall.
They picked up the corpse again and lay it upon the gurney. Dicks went to the front of the gurney and told Colts, “You push, I’ll guide us.”
He knew he was getting the rookie treatment by having to do the pushing, but as the trolley moved easily with just the slightest touch, he kept his mouth shut.
The hallway was quite long and had several turns. Colts used the opportunity to try and get Dicks to verify what he thought he’d seen, but the older fellow wasn’t playing along. He refused to answer his questions, constantly admonishing him to “mind your own business boy. You don’t want to know.” But Colts was persistent and by the time they had reached an outside door, where a hearse from a local funeral home was waiting, Dicks had had just about enough.
“Fine, you want to know? Help me load the corpse into the wagon and then I’ll tell you.”
“Good,” Colts answered.
They opened the back door, flanked the corpse on either side of the gurney, and slid him into the hearse.
“Now, tell me,” Colts asked, even as Dicks was climbing into the hearse to secure the body, “was that Executioner seriously a vampire, or is this some strange new technique the State’s using to recycle blood or something?”
The night air seemed especially cool all of a sudden. Dicks shuddered a bit as it crawled into the hearse and kissed the exposed area of his back just above his pants.
Colts saw Dicks shudder and suddenly became aware of the cold. He hugged himself and shivered.
“Phew, it’s cold out here,” she said, catching site of his breath in the red light of the hearse’s taillights.
There was a leather strap that went across the corpse’s chest. Dicks finished securing it and slid backwards toward the body’s feet. Each leg was to be secured before they closed the door and sent him toward his final resting place. Dicks started to answer as he strapped both legs down.
“You see, kid, the story goes that on Desolation Hill, if a prisoner steps out
of line, he don’t go to the cooler. And dead men never get the chance to meet their makers. And nosy Corrections Officers who ask too many questions…”
He finished strapping the legs down and backed out of the hearse. Wedging his hands into the small of his back, he straightened himself up and closed the door of the hearse. He knocked three times on the back window and the driver sped away.
Dicks turned back to face his compadre, only to find no one there.
“…don’t live to tell the tale. Ah Christ, kid.” He looked up into the night sky, panning the heavens for what he knew was there but couldn’t see. After a few moments, he went back into the prison, locking the door behind him.
It was James Olmos’s first night on the Execution Squad, as he liked to call it. He was excited but nervous. He had worked hard to get to here and he truly considered it the pinnacle of policing. He had served three tours of duty in Afghanistan, the last one as an M.P. That had given him a real taste for police work. It was exciting and dangerous, two things he loved. Combined into one job, he’d found his passion. So when his contract was up, he’d gone into law enforcement. As a decorated veteran, he’d found it very easy to climb the ladder. Of course, being such a highly respected citizen soldier, he’d gathered a few important friends along the way. Those friends had pulled in a few favors and got him assigned to what he considered the most dangerous and desperate place possible-Desolation Hill. And this night, he would serve his country in a new way, one that was just as important as his military service.