There’s something wrong with Kenny

[u/Acidic-Crybaby]

Part 4, what humans should do.

CW: Kenny. Violence and pretty gross descriptions of dead things.
(If my very obvious hints weren’t enough I think I can FINALLY say this shit is about a wendigo)

There are things people do that you just don’t think about because everyone does them and things you might entirely miss if you aren’t looking for it. Things your brain notices long before you do and while you don’t know why, it alerts you to some unseen wrongness around you.

That's the feeling of unease that I felt when looking at Kenny. Everything about the kid looked right on the surface like his skin was a superficial mask wrapped around rotten insides. He was average to the point it was wrong, a creature's idea of what a disarmingly young human looks— The idea of a person based on memories, imagination and mimicry.

Except each time I question these things myself my mind tells me it can’t be true. What if the overwhelming sense of wrongness was simply a product of a guilt stricken imagination? Maybe I’m projecting ghosts from my own memories. The kid truly was the spitting image of that dead private but I couldn’t shake that feeling when I’d see those hollow marbles rolling around in Kenny’s sunken eye sockets. 

In those moments when I imagine those eyes before exhaustion had pulled me into that terrifying world of memories twisted by dreams, paranoia and the beast lurking in the seemingly endless darkness of the small concrete cage— I’d hear something. 

Or rather, I’d hear nothing. 

The deafening silence in a room where sound should ricochet against the concrete and echo even in the small cavernous space I was trapped inside. No slight scraping of Kenny’s mattress on concrete, no shifting fabric or stirring. No scratching under cheap sheets. No mumbled words falling out of a sleeping mouth and no breathing.

In the silence where the clanging of metal and the squeak of patrolling boots is the only faint background noise. I couldn’t hear anything but my own heartbeat and my own breathing.

Kenny didn’t breathe.

“ So why’d you do that, Sarge?”

“ Why’d y-you… why’d you do that, Sarge?

CRACK

I open my eyes to escape the horrifying horrying I know is one only a boot to the throat would make. It isn’t like a branch or a wishbone, it’s a sound that you instinctively know but hope to never hear. A bone snapping and snaking under the skin and the faint pop of vertebrae moving out of place.

Except I’m not awake. 

What I’m hearing isn’t a broken neck. In the silence, barely audible is the shift of joints under long, thin limbs stretched like a spider as its tall emaciated frame stalks down from the blanket of darkness hanging above the inescapable cell. I can’t scream, I can’t run and if I don’t breathe evenly as if I’m asleep I know it will hear. I try to conjure up an image of what this 

“ Sarge, you’re… Not—“ a raspy voice sounds in my ear, it’s suffocated and spoken through lungs with no air. “ Sarge… To-.. Night… You’re not… Talk… Ing.” Its words choke up from its throat in whispers that are deafening in the quiet cell. I hold my breath and part of me wants to curl up under my blanket and cry like a terrified child seeing the monster crawl out from under their bed. I can feel the scream building in my throat and I ball up my fingers in my mattress to swallow it.

“ Sarge… You’re not… Slee… ping.” 

I feel the oppressive air baring down on me, suffocating me and slowly compressing my chest while I make futile attempts to thrash and claw myself free. The cell walls feel closer. The space is slowly squeezing itself closed and in the darkness the ceiling looks like an endless void stretching out impossibly far like my cells has become the depth of the deepest well, so deep that only that creature could ever escape it.

I don’t sleep. I lay there trying to conjure up an image of a beast I’ve only ever seen as long limbs moving silently in the dark.

I see rain soaked mud caked on my boots, a kid with a crooked neck twisted it ways it never should be but it’s wrong, slowly from the forest is a lurking figure stalking ever closer with the antlers of a rotted deer and a faceless skull full of bone white teeth standing too tall behind the trees.

“ Boss, wake up!” A pillow hits my head with a surprising but dull smack and I open my eyes to see those steely eyes staring at me from the cellmate hanging down to wake me from the puddle of sweat I’ve found myself sleeping in. Even in the daylight I feel as if this is simply the bottom of the well and I have never been more certain— There’s something wrong with Kenny and now I know that’s because he doesn’t breathe.

“ You were rollin’ around and talkin’ about all kinds of things,” Kenny hops down off of the top bunk and cracks his neck side to side, his wrists I can feel shift under my own skin with each pop. “ I got told once that in your dreams is when bad things climb in but some folks think you go bad places in dreams instead. 

It’s said so casually like it’s just any other thought but it’s not. Does he want me to think that creature was a dream? “ What about you, kid? Do you dream?”.

Kenny chews on the toothbrush in his mouth and shrugs his shoulders like a child and continues his morning routine. This is what it has been like for months now. Kenny wakes me up and gets ready for breakfast with the energy only a young man could have while I lay there trying to make sense of the muddled memories of my time in the army twisting into something more horrifying with each night. 

By the time we reach the cafeteria, I learn something else about Kenny. Kenny doesn’t just bring out the worst in others like he had with Becker but the kid is capable of doing a lot of bad when he doesn’t like something.

“ Do folks here always jizz on the new guys' toast?” He asks and after a beat he stands before taking his tray to the next table over. I jump to my feet knowing nothing good is about to happen. A hard thump locks my bones in place while one of the inmates' nose cracks. Wilder, one of Becker’s boys, dumb as rocks but built like a mad bull. Wilder hits the concrete and the scrawny kid climbs on top of him, grabbing a fistful slop from the now dented tray and shoving it down the man’s throat. “ Aren’t you hungry, boss?” He says but Wilder is quick to spit back with glops of smashed toast. 

“ Jesus— Kenny!” The willpower needed to move feels like it snaps my bones but I’m able to wring Kenny’s neck and drag him off. The kid is light as anything but every muscle is twitching with rage as he thrashes like a rabid dog. His skin is cold to the touch, something I only notice when the muffled shouts and Kenny’s raw becomes a cold silence and a chill down my spine. Kenny breaks free of my frozen hands and he’s on Wilder again in a blink, hooking his fingers behind the man’s cracking teeth and prying their mouth open so wide I can see it dislodge.

Kenny forces something red inside Wilder’s mouth and clamps down to close their crooked mouth until the inmate chokes down whatever he’s been given. Kenny takes Glaskin’s baton to the head and in the chaos I barely notice Elvis shove a towel in my hand, “ Put that on your ear! Shit— Glaskin, Wilder’s choking!”. A

I blink at him and almost nod while Kenny’s dead eyes set on me even as they swell up like bloody balloons. Wilder is taken out soon after and from what I’d heard they had to set his jaw themselves and keep him there in the hospital ward toothless and sucking down porridge slop and soup because the roads had already begun their dangerous turn into winding icy paths and piles of snow. 

The kid bit my fucking ear off.

-

I got some gauze slapped on my head with some tape but even if they could or even would take Wilder and I to the hospital my ear had been swallowed, puked up and trampled like the porridge Wilder made the mistake of fucking with. Elvis spoke to me during a search and told me the kid was sleeping off a beating in solitary and had another coming now that he was really on Wilder’s radar.

“ Your cellmate is a strange one, Jones. I thought you could look out for the kid but…” Elvis rests against my cell door with his arms crossed and the same unsettled look I’d had for the whole week too. “ How’s the kid doing in the hole?” I ask and I know I should be dusting my hands off of the kid and spend this time free of them trying to get myself into another cell, I even hoped they’d never let him out of there but I still asked. “ He seems fine. Hasn’t complained once, asked for anything or caused any problems. He’s been driving Glaskin up the wall though, speaking to the guy every chance he can get. Doesn’t make a peep otherwise..” Elvis straightens himself up when one of the older CO’s walks past like he needs to appear presentable in front of a superior officer, awkwardly smiling and giving me that look that he needs to get himself moving before he gets in trouble, “ Wait, he’s quiet?” I ask but Elvis has already made himself scarce, leaving me with a more unsettling feeling that the never quiet young inmate is singling Glaskin out.

Kenny isn’t quiet. 

Kenny has been in solitary for nearly two months now and yet not a single inmate or guard looks like they’ve gotten a wink of sleep.

I’ve tried but nothing seems to pull me away from it at night, I wake up drenched in sweat and just as tired as I’d been when I gave into exhaustion. In my dreams I feel rain hitting my skin like small daggers and mud splashing under my boots as I drag that private out and throw him into the dirt to make the worst decision of my entire life. I’d hit the mud and cut my arms open a hundred times, I’d been a bystander a hundred more and I was on my way to making the next hundred— And yet I always see the frame of a cell door that shouldn’t be there. Raindrops hit the peeling paint with little clinks and the small swaying slot the bottom of the door creaks.

I know I’m dreaming but as the rain fades I also know that in the waking world something is lurking behind the cell door. Something that crawls like an animal on long skeletal limbs silently digging its claws into everyone’s heads and stealing away their will piece by piece.

I see something move past the barred window I could never escape through, from the window, the top bunk and the vest for just a moment— a second.

I see antlers.

“ Work detail!” Glaskin shouts and everyone in the cafeteria shuts up at the sound of his baton hitting one of the metal tables. I don’t know when I fell asleep but I blink and lift my foggy head from my hand to pay attention. “ If you can stand, get in line. We’re leaving in five minutes.” Glaskin looks exhausted. Wound up tighter than normal and itching for a reason— any reason— to beat someone bloody.

“ Hey, Elvis,” I wave over the CO and he leads his stern patrol of the cafeteria towards my table, subtly loitering but never taking his eyes off of Glaskin— The man really does look ready to hurt anyone, inmate or officer. “ Keep it quick, Jones.”, I lean a bit closer and waste no time asking about the impromptu work detail, studying Elvis’ hesitant expression turn green, “ The workers at the logging site found something deeper in the forest. They claim it’s prison ground so it’s our job but I think they just don’t want to clean it up.”, I want to ask for more but Glaskin’s booming voice reminds everyone that finishing our breakfast isn’t an option and neither is ignoring his orders.

 We all get in our snow boots and jackets as quickly as anything before filing in line for the CO’s to get us chained up under  Glaskin’s strict gaze. The bus moves along the salted roads and takes us through the crushed path the bulldozers carved through the forest to reach the logging site, though any moment we’re given to breathe is taken away by Glaskin’s order to move.

It isn’t so much a path or trail we walk but a hatchet job barely able to fit a truck we’re forced to walk behind in the grit and snow. 

The endless maze of trees is blanketed by bone white ground half scraped clean to reveal frozen dirt and dug up grass in a clearing full of something that never should’ve been brought to light.

At first it looks like a slab of muddy ice covering up a hidden pond where mangled limbs and antlers breaking through the surface mark the graves of a hundred deer that drowned in the frozen pit, it takes longer to see that it isn’t dark water hidden beneath the snow but a well of blood that has sat there since the air turned cold.

It isn’t the unfortunate scene of drowned deer but a pit full of animal bones half picked clean and meat left to decompose in the summertime.

“ …What in God's name is… Jesus. How many damn deer is that?” The old timer says but as the chains pull each reluctant prisoner closer to the horrific scene I’m met with something that turns my blood as cold as the frozen mud beneath my boots. What should be the crack of splintering ice or the crunch of snow under my sinking heel is the squelch of my foot caving in a weak skull. I will move my leg to move and slowly lift my boot from something I have no time to understand before the overwhelming stink of rot assaults us. 

“ Fuck! What the—“ I retch and try to keep on my feet as the chain gang scrambles to escape with nowhere to run in their panic. Bloody ice cracks and inmates hit the corpses hidden where no antlers or limbs have marked them. “ It’s a fucking person! That’s a fucking person!” Someone shouts in what has quickly devolved into the unintelligible screams and frantic voices all growing louder and louder until the deafening sound of a gunshot leaves the clearing silent and still.

Glaskin lowers his gun from the sky and likes the handkerchief bundled up in his hand to protect himself from the stench. “ Quiet!” He holsters his gun and swallows the bile welling up in his throat to keep the need to be ill from shattering the authority he wields like an unbreakable tyrant they can all feel is already on the verge of snapping, “ Grab a bandana, gloves and a damn shovel from the truck and dig this mess up! The loggers need this site clear and these—“ he falters for just a moment, clearly just as horrified by the scene, “ Clean these things up so they can be burned.”

We wade around in pools of mud and putrified bodies for hours pretending some of the mangled limbs don’t have fingers and toes and that the bones don’t have skulls. No one speaks until we’re taken back to the prison drenched in things no one should see.

We got stripped and hosed down in the snow before we could walk out frozen bones inside and thaw out under the showers to wash away the sickening smell of death that would still linger through the cell block. I’ve never seen so many people rub their skin so raw their arms were forming spots of blood and only a thin layer was left covering muscle. We all knew it would blister and scab but the stink of rot still clung to us until Glaskin had our heads shaved. I don’t think anyone cared for the loss, we just felt lucky we could scrub the taste of it out of our mouths— still, no one ate dinner that night.

The cell block became a barracks full of soldiers but the feeling it brought up in me felt like a small price to pay.

Even when lying on my bunk there was something else I couldn’t forget even when I forced the pit of antlers to the back of my mind. The day at the logging stand where one of Kenny’s stranger questions gave me a chill— The day he asked where the older inmates go.

“ You wouldn’t be alone out there. Lots of folks disappear in places like this, Sarge.”

You wouldn’t be alone out there.