MoonFall by A.G. Wyatt Page B

of men and women waking from nightmares. Noah figured he’d be one of them soon enough the way things were going. But cutting through that was another sort of scream, the sort that came from real, coherent pain.
    Some of it was arguments, prisoners yelling back and forth at each other, continuing fights that the guards had broken up during the day. That died down within an hour of lights out, an inability to reach each other preventing the arguments from ever reaching any climax, leaving the contenders to trail off into disappointed silence.
    Then there were the repeated noises, the ones that started with a panicked yelp or a plea for mercy before descending into rhythmic grunting and muffled cries. Those sounds filled Noah with a terrible, gut-gripping horror for what his future held. But there was a sense of shame as well, as he remembered Mary the wheelbarrow lady from Tyrone’s caravan and her own cries following him through the forest as Half-Skull did his dirty work. Could Noah have done something to save her? Probably not. Would anyone step in to help him if he fell victim to the same hideous crime here? Again, probably not.
    But for all of the deep torment caused by those muffled sounds; for all of the dreadful grunting noises Blood Dog made in his sleep, like two pigs getting down with a baboon; for all of the nightmares that left people screaming and mumbling somewhere in the darkness; for all of that, the most immediate and pressing noise keeping Noah awake came from the next cell over. Because that noise, more than any of the others, that noise was persistent.
    Whoever was in the next cell clearly had a lot on his mind. As the rest of the cells fell quiet, he was still muttering away to himself, his voice sometimes rising until another prisoner yelled at him to shut up. Which was how Noah learned that the mutterer’s name was Iver, the way that other prisoners spat his name at him like a curse.
    Iver’s muttering might almost have been soothing if it had stayed nice and low like a bedtime story or the babbling of a brook; it could have eased Noah down into sleep. But, of course, it didn’t stay quiet. That would have been too easy. Once the rest of the inmates were asleep, with no-one but Noah left to hear or protest at the sound, Iver’s voice rose and fell – sometimes steady for long stretches as he jabbered to himself, sometimes jerking up and down from one word to the next. It was like listening to a broken radio as the dial was turned from station to station, unable to keep ahold of a channel, the subject skipping from fragments of songs and poetry to chanted nonsense to rambling discourses on medicine and books.
    If he was this confused and distressed to listen to, Noah dreaded to think what it was like to be inside Iver’s head. No wonder the guy couldn’t sleep, with all this shit tumbling helter-skelter through his brain, not leaving him any rest behind the darkness of his eyes. With the walls pressing in on his own jittery mind, Noah could understand that kind of distress, could understand how it might chase away any hope of sleep.
    And without sleep to help him through the night, Noah figured he might as well try to get some space. He rose from his bed, carefully avoiding crumpling the precious magazine, and winced as a creak of the wire frame disturbed Blood Dog. The criminal’s snores fell silent for a moment and Noah clenched in fear of another confrontation. Then Blood Dog shifted, rolled onto his side, and started to snore again, the noise even more choked and bestial than before. No human soul should make a sound like that, but based on everything else he’d seen, Noah really wasn’t sure Blood Dog had a soul. Hell, he might not even be human.
    The moment of danger having passed, Noah rose to his feet, careful not to stand in the spot where he’d puked. It didn’t seem likely the guards would clear that up. He wondered if they’d even give him the tools to do it himself, or if they