Deathstalker 01 - Deathstalker

tried that hard to conceal it. Defiance, perhaps, or maybe some last trace of her own conditioning. Or something else that she'd forgotten. Either way, they caught her.
    And now here she was, alone in the dark with a worm in her head, down in Wormboy Hell.
    Light began seeping into her cell from somewhere. A sickly yellow light that made her think of disease and decay. In it, she could see the sores and scabs on her blotched skin. The smell was suddenly thick and choking, and her stomach heaved painfully though there was nothing in it. And there in the cell with her, crawling out of the shadows in splashes of bloody amniotic fluid, came the babies. Bald and pudgy, with barely formed arms and legs, they crawled over and around her, a living carpet of unforgiving flesh. Unfinished fetuses squirmed spasmodically on the concrete floor, trying to squeeze in between her and the floor, as though trying to crawl back into the wombs from which they'd been prematurely torn.
    She wanted to love them all, poor blameless innocents, but she knew what was coming next. They came from Wormboy. Teeth appeared in all the babies' mouths, sharp, jagged teeth thrusting up through torn bloody gums, and slowly, deliberately, they began to eat her alive. Jenny always swore that this time she wouldn't scream, but she always did in the end. Teeth ripped at her flesh as she screamed and screamed, and blood ran down to pool thickly on the floor. As the pain and the horror mounted, pudgy fingers began to pry at her squeezed-shut eyelids to get at the eyes beneath, and even though she knew none of it was
    real. Jenny Psycho screamed and screamed until her throat was raw.
    Wormboy did so like his little games. And mindgames were the best fun of all.
    *
    Fat and wide and greasy like a slug, genetically-engineered to never sleep or waver in his duty, Wormboy filled an entire auditorium from wall to wall; vast acres of pale, faintly luminescent flesh that rippled and folded in upon itself.

    His bulk covered all the floor, and his huge distorted head pressed against the ceiling. Long tubes entered his body here and there, providing nourishment and removing wastes. He could never have eaten enough to satisfy his enormous appetite. His body's needs were taken care of by the authorities so that his mind could roam free across the prison. Wormboy's parents had been normal enough humans, but he had been designed and tampered with from the embryo onward to shape the mind and talents of the perfect jailer. He ran everything, from the computers that ran Silo Nine's security, to the guards who enforced his edicts, to the little pets that gave him access to every prisoner's mind.
    Every time someone was damned to Wormboy Hell, for whatever reason, a small genetically designed and Imperially patented parasite was surgically implanted in their brain. Wormboy's worms. They blocked off the esper's powers so they couldn't use them offensively, and secreted various useful chemicals that helped to keep the espers and clones quiet and malleable. And if by some chance an esper or a clone did find the strength of will to fight off the chemicals and try to escape, the worm would fry their brain.
    If his prisoners misbehaved, or held back information, Wormboy used his little pets to gain entrance to their recalcitrant minds and sent them nightmares that had all the hallmarks of reality except that you couldn't die in them, no matter how much you wanted to. Wormboy sent his horrid dreams to instruct or persuade
    or punish, or just for the fun of it. There was no one to tell him he couldn't, and after all, no one cared. They were going to die anyway. The worms gave him all the control he needed and were much cheaper and easier to run than hundreds of individual esp-blockers. Their designer won a major award, before he disappeared into Silo Nine to insure he never told anyone else his secrets.
    Wormboy liked to go among the monsters, the malformed, horrid results of esper and clone experimentation. Too dangerous ever to be released, too useful to kill, they roared and spat in their cells, clawing at the stone walls. Human no longer, but more than beasts; wild and awful and beyond pain or fear, they defied even Wormboy's best efforts, but he never gave up on them. He swept back and forth among the specially reinforced cells, walking up and down in their minds, and they screamed and howled with a rage that shook the walls. To them, he was just one more monster among many.