Solomonari:Fables/Tales/Lockdown
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//: Lockdown
Red | 1/26/26
“Did something get out!?” On any night that passed for ordinary in a place like this, the volume of D-8611’s voice would have robbed the entire population of D-Block Lima-7 from their precious few hours of uninterrupted sleep, and that would have almost certainly earned him a peek behind the red door — the door to that room he’d seen so many of the rowdier D-Class waltz into only to later shuffle out with blank faces and subdued voices. This night was already proving to be an exception. As the blinding red flares of emergency lights passed over his squinted and bespectacled eyes, D-8611 had to shout from an already sore throat just to be heard over the accompanying whine of at least four different kinds of alarms.
“I’d know if the both of you would just shut up!” D-7495, his ear pressed to the heavy-gauge steel door that looked inadequate compared to his hulking figure, bellowed back to the two sets of adjoining bunk beds situated on the opposite end of the sterile cell that they occupied. The muscles beneath D-7495’s stretched and distorted tattoos tensed excessively as he strained with every fibre of his being to listen, but the clambering of feet and wailing of voices echoing in from the outside could scarcely be distinguished from the rest of the noise.
“I ain’t said nothing, man.” Even as the shrilling of the alarms finally stuttered to a stop, D-9002’s husky monotone came across to the other two men as little more than a jumble of words, his posture relaxed and the topmost sliver of a pattern-balding dome being the only part of his head that was visible behind the veil of an outdated sports magazine.
D-7495 cursed, shoving himself away from the door and flapping his arms in a dramatic show of defeat as he proceeded to collapse onto the bottom bunk adjacent to the one occupied on either side by D-8611 and D-9002. The bunk’s bent-up frame squealed the same way it always did when D-7495 fell directly onto it, but by some anomalous feat of engineering, it continued to hold despite the man’s sheer size. D-8611’s forehead wrinkled in conjunction with the perk of an eyebrow as his eyes locked with D-7495’s, “You couldn’t hear anything?”
“The people are speaking in damned Foundationese. Something about a crack in their masquerade?” D-7495’s reply was punctuated with a low groan, and he massaged the temples beneath his dreadlocks in a circular motion with both of his hands before mumbling out a new set of words, “At least now I can think.”
Though the alarms had ceased to blare, the scarlet glow of rotating emergency lights continued to pirouette around the cell, cycling its ambient colors through perfect intervals of blood red and pitch black. The rest of the D-Block was uncharacteristically quiet, the familiar humming of ventilation only sometimes interrupted by the rapping of a fist on a door and the consequential barking of a guard ordering the block to keep it down. D-8611 was the first of the three D-Class to speak up after a number of minutes that none of them had bothered to keep track of, removing his prescription glasses to clean them with a fold of his jumpsuit while simultaneously rubbing his eyes, “How long are we gonna be on lockdown?”
D-9002 was the first to respond, his head still buried in the crinkled pages of his sports magazine and there not being so much of a feigning of intrigue in his borderline-robotic voice, “You’ve never been on death row.”
“No, I- wait, how did you…?” D-8611 flinched with his mouth agape in mid-sentence as he sharply pivoted his torso in D-9002’s direction, plastering his glasses haphazardly back over his face and blinking several times in quick succession as if he’d just been told that the Earth was flat.
D-9002’s shoulders twitched in the closest approximation he was willing to make to a shrug as he turned a page in his magazine and answered matter-of-factly, “It ain’t even been an hour and you’re already asking how long it’s gonna be.”
D-7495 snapped into an upright position like a rake that had just been stamped on, very nearly colliding his head with the top bunk as he scooted with another accompanying squeak of the frame to be nearer to the opposite bed, shooting D-8611 a quizzical look as he did so, “You’ve never been on death row? How in the hell did you wind up here?”
D-8611 held both of his palms out in front of him in a defensive gesture just as soon as the question had registered in his mind, his head rapidly swiveling back and forth between the other two D-Class as he stammered out a response, “It’s complicated, okay!? It’s a long story!”
With a final jerk of his head, D-8611’s glasses flew off of his face, bounced off of his knee, and clattered onto the floor. D-8611 sighed as he bent down to pick them up while D-7495 gestured broadly with one massive forearm to the still-flashing emergency lights and scoffed, “I think we have the time.”
“And we’ve got nothing else to do.” D-9002’s dry remark was accompanied by the rustling of him crumpling his sports magazine into a ball and chucking it away, to which it bounced off the rim of the toilet and vanished into an unlit corner of the cell. D-9002’s face sported a stubbled chin, a crooked nose, and a pair of bloodshot eyes that lazily scanned the room until they found D-7495, who was looking D-9002 over with a bewildered expression. D-9002 shrugged again before responding, his tone still so devoid of emotion that it was impossible to tell if he was even joking, “The tag on my underwear was a better read.”
“Alright… you know what? Screw it. My month’s almost over and I guess it’s better if I tell this to somebody who might actually believe me.” His voice tinged with resignation, D-8611 ran his fingers through his grey-streaked sandy hair and secured his glasses back over his face after wiping them off with another fold of his jumpsuit. He then cupped the base of his head in his hands and leaned back until he was touching the concrete wall parallel to the bunk he and D-9002 were seated on, his eyes rolling up as if he’d begun to watch all the events of his recent past play out on a projection in front of him, “So, I was a… hacker, for lack of a better word. I didn’t go around bypassing firewalls with fragmented packets or anything — I just wrote a tool that could scan local admin accounts for basic weaknesses that almost everybody looked over. That was all I needed to extort a lot of wealthy people and make off with millions.”
D-9002 scratched unconsciously at his stubble and stifled a phlegmy cough before speaking up, “But extortion ain’t what got you here.”
D-8611 closed his eyes and shook his head in listless slow motion as he continued, “It was, actually. I extorted a big name — somebody in the top point-one percent. I shouldn’t tell you who, but, well, let’s just say he had a ‘dark’ sense of humor. It would’ve been the biggest haul I ever made, but I learned the hard way that he wasn’t just a nepo baby. Remember how I said I couldn’t bypass firewalls? This guy could, and he flipped the table on me. He said he would’ve been impressed if I’d done that to anybody else but him, and that maybe I could do him a favor that I wasn’t in any position to refuse. He told me how to find the network for an airbase that was just decommissioned, and that I needed to crack any machines that were still inside. That’s when I panicked and made two big mistakes. The first was streaming it all remotely to my personal desktop, and the second was thinking I knew everything there was to know about the world.”
D-8611 paused and inhaled a soft breath, letting both of his hands fall into his lap as he stiffened into a straighter posture. D-7495 and D-9002 exchanged glances, the former of the two mouthing ‘damn’ and the latter bobbing his head in a vague gesture of acknowledgement, after which D-8611 thumbed the bridge of his glasses to keep them in place and proceeded from where he left off, “I only ever got to look at one file — a document. The first thing I saw when I opened it was a logo in the corner that I still don’t recognize; it looked like somebody took the globe from the United Nations and drew a big pentagram over it. Right next to that was ‘non-terrestrial parathreats’ in big, bold letters, and below it was a long list of hyperlinked gibberish — code words or scientific names, maybe. So, I did what I think anybody in my position would’ve done. I clicked. I clicked on the link at the top and watched this… image of a pink ball on a black background pop up on my screen. It was low-res like it was snapped by some passing probe, but you could tell it was a planet. A planet with pores. Pores, hair, veins — it looked like a close-up from a medical textbook. I was told to take pictures of everything I found, but I couldn’t even take one. I just sat there and stared until my cursor moved on its own to the bottom of my screen, right-clicked the network icon, and chose disconnect.”
“Damn.” D-7495 didn’t mouth the word this time, punctuating it with a sharp whistle as his now-weary gaze met with D-8611’s, “Wait, let me guess. This is your punishment for sticking your nose where it shouldn’t have gone? I mean, not that you really had a choice.”
D-8611 clasped his hands together and nodded, his reply coming off less offended than it was sad, “The rich guy covered his tracks and made sure I took the fall. I fled the country, but that only ever works for so long. I was in Barcelona waiting to be extradited back when my lawyer walked in with a lady who wanted to make me a deal. If I just answered her questions and spent a month in one of her organization’s testing facilities, I’d be acquitted of all my crimes. And, well, I think you two can figure out the rest.”
With that, D-8611 stood shakily from his spot on the bottom bunk and began to pace, his pale skin practically absorbing the red disco of emergency lights that continued to span the whole of the cell. D-9002 promptly stretched his legs over the depression in the bed where D-8611 had once been sitting, lying flat on his back with his head to the pillow and beginning to speak — more to himself than anyone else, “Y’know, that planet you say you saw… it’s got me thinking about some of what I dealt with in that little site up in Siberia. I’d seen and heard all kinds of things. There was talk of cults who used some woo-woo to change their bodies and live out in the cold — that they could run around in their birthday suits and still not get a lick of frostbite. I even heard a chopper pilot swear on his own mother that he saw whole towns of them from up in the air. Never saw the cults myself, but I did see a lot of proof that they were out there.”
D-8611 halted mid-step and craned his neck back to shoot D-9002 an incredulous look and probe him with a voice that was equal parts skeptical and intrigued, “Seriously? When was this?”
After freezing for several seconds upon hearing D-9002 spit out more words in five minutes than he had in the past five days, D-7495 bounced to the edge of his bed with another cry for mercy from the frame as he held his tree-trunk arms out in front of him in a ‘stop’ gesture, “Wait, was that where you were when the guards nabbed you for a week and a half and we thought they’d fed you to some monster?”
D-8611’s jaw slacked into an ‘oh’ of realization as D-9002’s head twitched into something of an affirmative nod, “Their medical examiner needed an assistant, so they pulled me.”
D-7495’s eyebrow arched near to his hairline at that claim, his eyes scanning D-9002 from top to bottom for any indication that he was making the whole story up, “A D-Class? What are you, a doctor?”
“Veterinarian.” D-9002’s clarification came out as little more than a grunt, but D-7495 was still able to make it out, to which he proceeded to curl his lips into a smirk and remark under his breath about how stretched thin the Foundation really must be.
D-9002 didn’t pay the remark any mind, instead opting to elaborate while D-8611 sat down with his back to an adjacent wall and angled his head in D-9002’s direction, “I’d had to have helped cut open fifty something bodies in just the eleven days I was out there, and almost all of them were John and Jane Does. No clothes, no luggage, no IDs; just bodies that’d been found out in the snow and carted in for us to look at. Their causes of death were never the same, but they’d always have all kinds of severe deformities. I saw a lot of vestigial limbs, malformed organs, and whole cadavers that hardly looked human. The last day before I was shipped back, the examiner knocked on my door and told me to get the snowcat ready — that we had to go conduct an autopsy. I asked her why the body hadn’t been brought to us, and she said ‘because it’s too big to be moved.’”
For what looked to D-8611 and D-7495 to be the first ever time, a flash of fear washed over D-9002’s ordinarily-stoic face, but it was gone so quickly that they both brushed it off as a trick of the lighting while D-9002 continued without so much as a half-second of hesitation, “It was a rump of segmented exoskeleton like something you’d see on a pillbug, but it was easily three or four times the size of the snowcat we rode in on. The whole rest of it was buried in permafrost; there was no telling how long it’d been there. The only tools we had that might’ve been able to crack the shell were our icepicks, but when we started with those, we hit something soft right away. The examiner helped me scrape off some of the ice, and the thing was wearing a goddamned saddle. The task force people we came with took one look at that and said we needed to leave. We didn’t argue, and I was out of Siberia by noon the next day.”
As the last word passed through his lips, D-9002 rolled over on his side to where he was facing away from D-8611 and D-7495, staying quiet for long enough that the other two D-Class began to wonder if he had fallen asleep. But D-9002 mumbled out two more sentences, “Make of that what you will. Whether you believe it or don’t ain’t any of my business.”
D-7495 responded before D-8611 could think of anything to say, slowly shaking his head and allowing his face to droop from one of incredulity into one of sympathy, “No. I get it, dude. Hell, I’ve seen things like that, too. Well, maybe not exactly like that, but close enough. Cults, I mean — we had one of those back when I was in gen pop. They were in a different block from mine and the other gangs would always run them off if they ever tried to recruit anybody from outside of there, but you wouldn’t believe the stories. Every time one of them got thrown in the hole or wheeled to Medward, some wild rumor would crop up about how they were trying to file their teeth with rocks from the yard, collecting blood in their toilets and doing swirlies with it, or seasoning their food in the mess hall with ground-up animal bones. Real gnarly stuff.”
D-9002’s face was no longer visible, but D-8611’s face twisted into one of abject repulsion at the mention of bloody toilets and filed teeth. D-7495 kept talking, wrapping a dreadlock around one of his swole fingers and twirling it about as he did so, “One day, I met with a brand new greaser who was set to be moved in with all the freaks in the cult block. We hit it off for a while, but when I tried to warn him about the place he was headed, he just laughed in my face and asked if I wanted to be let in on a little secret. I told him to lay it on me. He said that the ‘Church of the Red Harvest’ was the whole reason he was there — that they were spreading the ‘Nälkä’ too far and too fast, and that the ‘Order of the Red Dream’ needed to reign in their leash before any secrets slipped out. I looked at him like he was nuts and asked how in hell he was even planning on doing that. He laughed again and said he had connections before walking out on me. Sure enough, a couple weeks later the whole cult block was rounded up and bussed off to somewhere upstate. I heard some more gossip about the buses never reaching their destination, but save for that, it was like the cult never even existed. Nobody believed me about what that greaser said, and I think he knew that.”
“Damn.” This time, it was D-8611 who uttered the word with his nose still turned up. D-7495 reiterated, hissing out ‘damn’ with enough venom to kill a rhinoceros, but with a slight smile now tugging at the corners of his lips. D-9002 then grumbled ‘damn’ from where his face was now buried in the sheets of his bed, which elicited a round of chuckles from both D-8611 and D-7495. As their chuckles died, the emergency lights did, too, draping a blanket of impenetrable darkness over all three of the D-Class, who, with nothing more to say, settled themselves back into their respective bunks and proceeded to close their eyes. D-7495 was the first to scream ‘damn’ into his pillow when, exactly twelve seconds later, the harsh glare of fluorescent lighting coupled with the screech of the opening cell door made the prospect of sleep a distinct impossibility.