BLOODLOCK

0256 HRS

The sun was high and bright, yet it yielded no heat. The beach, postcard perfect, was tropical and alive. The khaki sand provided an excellent contrast to the emerald waters with their foaming and defrothing at every ebb and flow. A dense growth of vegetation threatened to overtake the sand, if such a thing was possible. Out of the denseness ran a small Asian boy whose primal scream was born of terror and despair. His small golden face would be have been handsome if it wasn't so distorted by fear. The boy wasn't running for his life. He knew innately that life was fragile and often cheap. The boy was in flight for something far more valuable than life. He was running for his soul.

"RUNNN!" Jonathan Poke awoke with a start. The loudness of his own voice embarrassed him. Prison can be a lonely place, but rarely is it a solitary one. Generating too much noise in the dead of night could result in you being found dead in the morning. Poke was instantly thankful that his was a single or one-man cell, until a dull thud on the wall confirmed that at least one other person heard his outburst. Poke made a mental note to give the guy a few tokens in the morning.

Tokens, brass slugs minted by the Department of Corrections (DOC), are the coin of the realm in the state penitentiary. It's not uncommon for an inmate to use a few tokens to buy themselves out of a beat-down. With 89 days and a wake-up left on his sentence, Poke was too "short" to make enemies now.

He scanned the darkness for the LED of his clock. 3:00 beamed back at him. Poke settled back on his bunk and was asleep with in moments.

On the opposite side of the facility, inmate Eric Cabias was using salt to draw a protection spell on the cold concrete floor of his cell. He knew his cellmate would complain whenever he woke up and saw the symbols, but Cabias didn't care. The dreams were back. And he knew what that meant, the Manananggral was close. She was in hot pursuit of his soul, just as she had been 15 years ago on a quiet beach on the Philippine Island of Batan.

Linda Ramos looked at her clock with squinted eyes and recognized a blurry three and a couple of zeros. The memory of her dream was beginning to fade; something about a screaming boy on a beach. Linda thought about digging out her dream journal, but cancelled the idea. The process of writing would make it impossible to get back to sleep. She briefly considered calling in sick, but she knew her caseload for the coming day was too heavy. Linda accepted her only real option; she forced herself to settle down and return to sleep. Sleep is a precious commodity for a prison case manager.

Gwen read somewhere that 3:00 a.m. was the Devil's hour. As she swabbed her arm with alcohol, she wondered what need the Devil would have for time. With practiced precision, Gwen dragged the x-acto blade across and through her flesh. As always, she noted that the pain begins the moment the work is done. Finished, Gwen stared at her handiwork - admiring the beauty of the red beading on the white of her flesh. She dabbed her pinky into the sticky liquid and with it, drew a red clock-wise circle on a blank page of her blood diary. Flipping through previous pages, it's clear that many red circles have preceded today's entry.

Gwen closed her journal and offered her arm to the silent figure sitting on the floor beside her bed. The man-boy greedily licked the beaded blood and sucked the open cut for a few moments. Tenderly he applied the bandage that he extracted from his pocket. The teenage boy was glad — no, proud to be apart of something.

"Go home Brian. I need to sleep", Gwen whispered.

"Right! Okay!", Brian said too quickly. And left the same way he came in — through the window.

Gwen marveled at the thought that she was just a 16 year old girl, yet she had her very own blood slave. Okay, he was really her best friend —- her only friend. Gwen was thankful that she had a friend at all. Such were her musings until she fell into a light snore.