The thing that got to me was the noise.

The voices shouting and cursing and pleading. The doors banging closed. The snap of locks being turned.

Up till then I had been the big man, all bluster and face set in a sneer, like I didn’t care.

But, lying there, hearing that noise, I started to cry.

I was eighteen years-old and it was my first night in a prison cell.

I thought about a lot of things that night.

How my mother’s heart was broken when the police came to arrest me.

The few memories I had of the father who’d slipped out of my life when I was eight years old.

The things I had stolen and sold for quick, easy cash. Money I had then burnt on stupid things.

I didn’t sleep at all and when the lights went on in the morning, I told myself, that when I’d served my sentence, I was going to make changes to my life. I’d get clean. I’d go to college. I’d beg forgiveness from my mother and be back in my family home.

There was no way I was going back to prison.

I could not have been more wrong.

Forty years later I was lying on a bunk in a prison cell waiting for the lights to come on. The sounds of men crying out in their sleep echoed around me.

This was my twentieth conviction. There was no three strikes and you’re out law in England. I don’t know whether that was lucky for me or not.

And it was the eighth prison I had been in.

I’d moved about a lot, to all different parts of the country since my first spell in prison, telling myself again and again that this time it was going to be different.

That this was going to be the fresh start I needed.

But I always ended up in the same place: Inside.

I was a loser, and I was staring down the barrel of old age.

I had wasted my life.

The lights flickered into action. The whitewashed walls of the cell stared back at me.

I lay there blinking and grimacing.

My body was a wreck. No exercise, too many fights, junk food, and alcohol when I could get it, had taken a toll.

The hour after hour spent in cramped cells had not helped. I was not the type of prisoner who spent their time doing sit ups and push ups.

I doubted I could even touch my toes.

If I had been a car, I would have been scrapped. Or, just abandoned by the side of the road.

My back ached, my arms ached, my neck, my guts, and my ankles ached. After a moment, my head joined in.

Sitting up would only make this worse. But I did it anyway.

Then my door unlocked with a sharp groan of its own.

Another day in prison had begun.

I stepped out onto a walkway. Its iron was hard and cold beneath my feet and everywhere I looked I saw dark metal and dirty grey stone.

And washed-out men. Men like me.

The prison I was serving my latest stretch of five years in, was more than one hundred and forty years old. In places it looked more like a castle than a prison. There were turrets and slits in the outside walls rather than windows.

It was overcrowded and filthy and damp.

It was lousy that it was still being used to incarcerate men in 2022 but building new prisons cost money so this place was kept patched up and running.

I remember reading an article somewhere, that in America running prisons was big business, with private companies raking in the cash via specially built super-max facilities. Here in England, the authorities were dragging their heels and making do with dumps like this.

I scowled, as my senses were assaulted by the smell of stale sweat from hundreds of men blended with the mould growing on the inside of the walls, then I joined a line of inmates being shepherded down a metal staircase by prison guards.

The guards in this prison were the same as all the others I’d encountered over the years. Some believed they were helping make the world a better place, some were bullies, and some were bland. These last types of guards worked in a prison, but it might as well have been a factory or a call centre. They turned up, they went through the motions, then they went home and, at the end of the month, collected their meagre wage.

That was my theory anyway.

The guard with a clipboard standing at the bottom of the stairs was one of the bland types. He looked at me like I was a box on a conveyor belt and said in a monotone voice, “Garden duties for you today, 5674.”

That was my serial number. I doubted he even knew my name.

I did not take it personally. I was actually quite pleased.

I was not considered high risk, so was allowed privileges. This meant I did shifts in the prison’s workshop, where the inmates made tote-bags and greeting cards, which were sold commercially. I also got to work in the prison garden.

Another guard unlocked a barred gate and walked me down a corridor and then, with a different key, opened up the door that led out to the prison garden.

There were no electronic locking systems in this past-its-sell-by-date prison.

I emerged into the fresh air with a smile on my face.

Then shivered violently. The prison stood in the middle of moorland – a rugged, bleak landscape most famous as the setting for the fictional pursuit of a mysterious dog by a certain pipe smoking detective. It was cold and wet at the best of times. In late November, the wind felt like it was biting into my skin.

Prisoners can’t be choosers, though, and it was better than being stuck inside.

I wandered over to join the small group of inmates already hard at work digging and weeding, supervised by a couple of prison guards. I recognised one of the inmates. Brenden was twenty-three and doing eight months for stealing a police van and crashing it into a police station. He was in the thick of the gardening action, attacking the root of a plant with a blunt plastic trowel.

Another one of my theories is that there are two categories of prisoner.

The first type, say as little as possible. And grunting is preferable to actually forming words.

The second type are talkers.

Brenden was a talker. He kept nothing bottled up inside.

The minute he saw me he came over and said, “This place is the pits. My girlfriend smuggled in a mobile for me last week, but the reception is lousy because we’re in the middle of nowhere. One bar if I’m lucky but most of the time, I get nothing.”

I glanced around at the guards. Luckily none of them had overheard.

I turned back to Brenden. “You need to careful,” I whispered. “You could have your sentence extended if the guards find out you have a phone.”

He nodded and tapped the side of his nose.

Subtle as a brick, I thought, and picked up a blunt plastic shovel that was resting against a wall. The garden implements were made by the same people that made the cutlery. There was nothing that could be used as a weapon.

The prison garden was in an open square in the centre of the prison. It was a ramshackle affair. Root vegetables seemed to grow ok and were cooked in the prison kitchen and served to inmates.

I leant on the shovel. I had no intention of digging, not with my back, neck, and the rest.

Brenden had stopped broadcasting that he’d done something dubious and was talking to me again:

“You know what one of the other prisoners told me. He said, you’re growing vegetables in a grave. You see, they used to hang men here a hundred years and more ago. And hanged men couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground, so they dug a hole below the gallows, and when the poor prisoner stopped kicking and twitching, they cut the noose and he fell right in. Then they shovelled the soil back over him. Makes my skin crawl it does, thinking about it. All those bones under my feet.”

There are lots of stories in prisons. I dismissed most of them as urban legends. Gruesome gossip to pass the time.

I’d heard this one before and patted Brenden on the shoulder and said, “Don’t believe everything you’re told. Especially not in here.”

Then I shivered some more.

The temperature was not just dipping, it was hurling itself off a cliff. And dark clouds were gathering. They seemed heavy with the promise of rain, and worse.

Sure enough, ten minutes later the storm broke. Rain began to pelt us, and a bolt of lightning split the sky. The thunder followed seconds later.

We ran for the door, scrambled through it then stood there gasping. We were soaked to the skin.

Brenden looked at me and said, “This storm is epic.”

He wasn’t wrong.

As the guards escorted us back to our cells, I could hear the wind and the rain battering against the walls of the prison.

Even the thick, old stones couldn’t keep the sound out. And every few minutes, thunder filled the air.

It sounded like the world was breaking apart.

I assumed that the lightning was continuing outside. There were no windows where I was, just the glow of the strip lamps that ran high above us and were embedded into the ceiling of each cell.

As the door to my cell was locked, they started to flicker on and off.

Around me, men I could not see started to cheer and whistle and stamp their feet. Any disruption was like nectar to the prisoners, and they roared their approval as the thunder and the rain and the wind grew louder and louder.

And then the lights went off and stayed off.

I sat on my bunk in the darkness and simply listened. A small man at the eye of a storm.

The storm lasted for the rest of the morning. Just after noon, it ended as quickly as it had begun, and the power came back on.

An uneasy silence had settled over the prison, and I could hear the footsteps of a guard near my cell. The lock turned and the door opened.

The guard who stood there was one of the ‘making the world a better place' type. He’d even once told me his first name – James. As if he thought we were going to bond, and I’d share the details of my troubled life with him and that would set me on the path to rehabilitation.

Dream on, was my view on that.

At that moment in time, he looked like he was in pain.

“Stupid static,” he muttered to himself.

I had no idea what he was talking about, until my hand brushed a metal rail, and a spark flew from it and struck my fingers.

I swore at the sudden stinging pain. Then I put my hands in my pockets and was very careful not to touch anything else.

As the guard led me back down the stairs, I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing up and my skin was tingling in places.

It was the weirdest feeling. It was like there was a charge in the air.

The guard led me out into the prison garden and told me to gather up the equipment. The trowels and spades and the rest lay on the ground where they’d been abandoned, ground that was now a muddy wasteland.

Just great, I thought, then I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“That storm was beyond epic, it was veering on the apocalyptic,” Brenden said as he appeared at my side, grinning. “I mean, that was so good. It was wall-to-wall storm action.”

“It was one big s.o.b. of a storm,” I said. “And it’s left an almighty mess.”

Brenden looked at the sodden earth and said in a quiet voice, “Wow!”

Then he started retrieving the equipment. He didn’t seem to care that he was getting mud all over himself.

I reluctantly decided that I should help him and was wondering where to start, when Brenden yelped out in pain.

There was no metal in sight, so it can’t have been static again, I figured.

His left hand was curled up and he was holding it against his chest.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Something bit me,” he gasped.

I looked down at the ground and could see a big bug crawling away. It was one ugly mother and seemed strangely unsteady on its many legs.

I stomped on it with my boot.

Its carapace was hard under my sole and did not give. I put all my weight into it and eventually felt it crack.

Then I spent some time wiping my boot clean on the ground. I didn’t want to look at the messy remains and turned my attention back to Brenden. He was still hugging his hand against himself and pulling a face.

“You’ll be OK,” I told him, and together we quickly collected up the equipment then were led back to the door.

Just in time, because the rain started to fall once more, and the first crack of thunder sounded like an echo to the door being slammed shut.

I was taken back to my cell. I didn’t think anything more about Brenden being bitten until a guard came to collect me from my cell a short while later.

As he led me along a walkway, I could hear the storm still raging outside. The wind sounded like it was trying to rip the prison building from the face of the earth, as the thunder growled, and the rain struck.

Ten minutes later, we reached the prison infirmary.

The prison’s doctor was waiting for me. He was a tough looking ex-soldier who I’d heard had served all over the world. I thought of him as one of the good guys. I’d seen him for a few ailments over the time I had been in this prison and always found him thoughtful and kind.

Concern clouded his expression when he spoke: “Brenden is running a temperature and I am concerned he has picked up a viral infection, but the symptoms are not ones I have seen before, in all my travels. I am going to make a call to put in a request to have him moved to a hospital. In the meantime, I think it would be helpful for Brenden to have a friend by his bedside. If that’s something you’re OK with?”

I nodded. “Sure,” I said.

I carried a plastic chair over to Brenden’s bedside. The guard who'd brought me was slouched against a wall, close to where the doctor was now sitting at a desk with a PC and a landline phone on.

Brenden was in a very bad way.

His eyes were screwed shut. He was very pale and coated in sweat and muttering to himself and turning this way and that. One of his wrists was held by a restraint that was anchored to the frame of the bed.

This was standard procedure but struck me as cruel in the extreme at that moment.

I said, “Hey, Brenden, hang on in there.” And the lights went out again.

They’d lasted longer in the storm this time but with the ancient systems in this prison they were bound to give sooner or later.

In the sudden darkness, I could hear the doctor saying, “Hello, can you hear me. Damnit!”

It sounded like the phone line had gone as well.

Then the lights came back on. To an extent. They were much weaker than before and cast a dull yellow glow over everything.

“That’s the backup generator we have for the infirmary,” the doctor said, but I wasn’t really listening.

During the brief blackout, Brenden had stopped moving.

He looked to me like he had died.

I felt choked up and was about to say something to the doctor, when Brenden’s eyes opened. His head turned to one side, and he looked at me.

Fear trickled through me, ice cold and razor sharp.

His eyes were filled with hate and madness.

I felt like I was looking into the eyes of some primal creature. Of some monster.

“D… Doctor,” I said weakly.

He got to his feet and started walking over to Brenden and me.

“Hurry,” I said.

Brenden was twisting and shaking his body and clawing at the air with his free hand and struggling violently to free his restrained hand.

He pulled it and pushed and rattled his wrist trying to escape.

But the restraint held.

Then Brenden leant over and began to bite into his own arm just below the restraint. Sickening sounds of tearing and cracking filled the infirmary and then he was pulling his arm free – leaving behind his hand. He had chewed through his own arm.

He sat up, span round.

The doctor stood staring in horror at him.

Brendan got to his feet, the ragged bony stump of one of his arms hanging loose at his side dripping blood onto the floor. The other arm reaching out.

He looked at me for a moment then turned away and began to stagger slowly towards the doctor. The guard who was still somewhere on the other side of the room began to scream.

The doctor opened his mouth but was silent and still. He looked paralysed by fear.

Brenden draped his good arm over the doctor’s shoulder and leant in. I did not see him bite, but I saw the agony on the doctor’s face.

Watched as the doctor’s legs crumpled and he fell to his knees.

His face was hideously disfigured. Blood-soaked muscle and bone shimmered in the emergency generator’s yellow light.

He looked at me, appealing for help with his eyes.

I looked away from his grotesque gaze.

What could I do, except cower in terror as the nightmare continued.

Brenden had cornered the prison guard and held the struggling man pinned against the wall.

Brenden was tearing him apart. Blood splattered over every surface.

The doctor, abandoned, was convulsing as he went into shock and moments later stopped moving.

The guard was no longer struggling either.

The only movement was Brenden feeding.

I got to my feet. My legs felt drained of all strength, and I was shaking badly but I knew I had to get out of there while Brenden’s attention was on sating his abhorrent hunger on the guard.

I did not know why Brenden had not attacked me.

Was it, I wondered as I inched towards the door, because we used to be friends?

Did a vestige of the young man I had known remain inside this murderous freak?

I made it out onto a walkway. The rest of the prisoners seemed to be locked in their cells and I could only make out one guard through the gloom which shrouded everything.

The guard was heading my way.

It was James.

He was clearly oblivious to the gore-fest in the infirmary.

I stumbled towards him.

His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why are you not being supervised?” he asked.

“Brenden,” I gasped. “He’s killed them.”

“What the…” James began.

I talked over him: “Brenden has changed, he’s a monster. You have to get help.”

James’ expression spoke volumes: he thought I had lost it.

“You have to believe me,” I begged, “before it’s too late.”

Only, it already was.

Brenden was staggering towards us. He wore a mask of his victims’ blood and, once again he passed me by, and closed on James.

James would be dead in moments – unless I acted.

There was an unoccupied cell a few feet away. Its door was open, and the smell of bleach was strong. It was washed out and ready for its next occupant.

“Move towards the open cell,” I yelled at James. “Do it now.”

He stumbled backwards and towards the cell.

Brenden followed.

James was almost through the door when I shouted, “Jump to one side.”

He leapt to his right, and I barrelled into Brenden using all my weight. He fell into the cell. I did not. I slammed the door shut.

“Lock it!” I screamed at James.

He looked utterly lost and confused and terrified but he did it then stood there shaking. Then leant over and looked like he was going to vomit.

“We don’t have time for that,” I told him. “There are two people he attacked in the infirmary. And I’ve seen enough horror movies to know they’ll be back on their feet in no time and coming for us.”

“I can’t deal with this,” James said.

“Infirmary door locked now, hysteria later,” I replied.

Looking very green he hurried over to the infirmary door and secured it.

By this time, more guards had appeared.

They demanded to know what was going on.

Which was fair enough.

Brenden was groaning and hammering on the door of the cell we’d trapped him in.

The blood he had trailed all over the floor was a line of darkness in the gloom.

And now there was more groaning coming from behind the locked infirmary door.

I looked at the guards, looked at James and said, “I really need some fresh air.”

“No way!” one of the guards snapped back. “You should be in a cell.”

James held up a hand. “This man saved my life,” he said. “I’ll take him out into the prison garden. In the meantime, I suggest you rustle up an armed response unit and some people in bio-hazard suits. There’s an unholy mess needs clearing up.”

As the guards looked at us open-mouthed, James led me away.

He unlocked the door and followed me out into the prison garden.

The storm had ended.

The air was clear.

I stood there breathing it in.

Relief flooded through me.

It was over. I was safe

Then I noticed there was a strange smell coming from the ground. The smell of decay.

The smell of death.

It rose from the mud and was growing in strength.

Two more guards emerged. As the stench hit them, they covered their mouths and noses with their hands and swore.

James looked disgusted. He was standing in the middle of the garden and started to walk back towards the door, clearly wanting to get away from the smell.

But, he had only taken a couple of smells when the insects began to emerge.

They scurried up out of the ground, dozens of them at first. Many of them were like the bug that had bitten Brenden, but there were spiders as well, and they were all rushing out into the open – and over James’s shoes.

More and more insects were joining them – there were hundreds by then – and they were rapidly crawling up him.

I could no longer even see his shoes for the layers of bugs, and they had started to make their way up his trousers.

He tried to kick them off. Tried to sweep them off with his hands, but, instead of falling away, the insects scurried onto his hands.

They ran up his chest, his back, had reached his neck.

And it was then I saw the blood – the red beneath the growing layer of insects. And I realised with horror, that the insects were biting him.

He began to cry out in pain and tried to move towards the door. Towards what I guessed he thought was safety.

But there were too many insects on him.

They covered his face and his hair and soon the only thing of him I could see was his blood dripping between the moving swarm of insects as they overwhelmed him.

Only minutes after the attack began, he fell to the ground.

I’d been transfixed by the revolting spectacle, but felt someone pulling at me and turned. It was one of the guards.

“We need to get back indoors, now,” he said, his voice shaking with terror.

I did not need telling twice.

As soon as we were back indoors, the door was slammed shut and locked, leaving James to his gruesome fate.

I took a deep breath, looked and the guards and said, “I’d like to go back to my cell now.”

That was six months ago. I’m in an internet café now, writing this.

The coffee I bought has gone cold, and in a while, I’ll be heading back to the hostel where I’m staying.

I’m a free man again and this time I mean it when I say I’m not going back inside.

I’ve wasted my life in prisons, and I almost died in a prison.

In the aftermath of the incident, I was taken into a room and told by a man in a uniform that a statement was being issued. The statement said that there had been a riot at the prison, and that, tragically, there had been fatalities.

It was a cover up. Pure and simple.

I was also told, that if I ever said anything about what had really happened, to anyone in the prison or once I was released, I would be in the worst trouble of my life.

Well, that’s a risk I’m prepared to take.

The truth needs to be known.

A warning needs to be given.

I saw an innocent man twisted into a fiend by forces that I have struggled to comprehend.

In the sleepless nights that followed the incident, I have thought long and hard about what happened, and I have the scrap of a theory.

Call me crazy if you want, but this is what I believe happened.

The hanged men who were buried long ago beneath the ground that became the prison garden rotted, as dead men do, but something of them lingered:

Their desire for retribution against a world that had condemned them to be killed and their bodies treated like waste. Their hatred, which burnt inside them as the noose embraced their necks.

These were so strong they did not die with them. They lay dormant until the storms awoke them.

Their rage then, was back from the dead, and it infected the land, and the bugs.

The one that bit Brenden turned him into a Zombie.

The most hideous creature that has ever walked this earth.

I don’t know where he’s been taken, some top secret lab maybe, where the nightmare continues.

And not just for him.

There are so many obscenely cruel injustices that have been committed over the years in the name of justice, that I see no reason why this should not happen again, in some other place.

Only next time it will be worse.

Because, I truly believe, there are unknown horrors waiting out there that no prison can contain.