to do his job, that same smell remained. And though he occasionally left the Compound at night when he was allowed, that scent followed him. He often kept clothes tucked away in a plastic storage box, just to keep the smell from remaining on the items, but he still smelled it.
He figured he always would.
After living and working in this Compound for fourteen years, the smell was as much a part of him as this place was. It was strange, in a way. He could walk these dank, dark halls with his eyes closed. He knew the scars on each prisoner’s body and he could still hear their raspy, pained voices long after he’d closed his eyes to go to sleep. He could pinpoint each and every creak or moan from this old building.
But he couldn’t remember his own birthday, although, from his occasional trips out of the Compound where he could find out the date and year, he knew he was twenty-six, now. A lot of the time, he didn’t know what day of the week it was because that wasn’t an important detail for him. Or that’s what he’d always been told.
Pav had learned to find comfort in discomfort. In a way … Here, in the deepest part of the Compound where the light rarely touched, fresh air was rare, and the mold was beginning to grow in the corners, comfort was nonexistent. Even his living quarters felt a little too much like the cells where the Boykovs kept their prisoners.
Not that it mattered.
Here, he felt at home. Here, he did his best work. In the musty darkness. Alone, usually. With death all around …
Pav walked into one cell with a bucket of cold water ready, and a cloth hanging from his other hand. Most of the cells didn’t even have doors to close—although there were a couple that did—not that they would need them, anyway. His gaze found the man who stayed in this cell huddled into a corner, and the reason Pav had brought the bucket and rag smeared on the wall beside him.
Shit and vomit.
The man, shackled to the wall by a thick rope of chain connected to his ankles, and one around his neck, too, looked Pav’s way when he came into the cell. His eyes connected with Pav’s, but he found no life staring back. Just a wild gleam and a rotted smile.
Pav blinked.
The man’s teeth hadn’t been rotted before.
Blyad.
Fucking hell.
Shit—that’s what was covering the man’s mouth. Shit. His feces. Pav had seen far worse things in the chambers, that was for sure. He’d seen bodies after they’d been beaten to a pulp. He’d seen a man skin and debone a human body. He knew what someone’s insides looked like when they were on the fucking outside.
Bodily fluids came with the territory.
They made his stomach roll, sure, but he usually just put it out of his mind, and went about doing his job. He’d then spend a couple hours in the shower making sure he’d washed every bit of it off that he could.
But this?
Feces smeared on the wall?
In the guy’s mouth?
The gleam in his eye?
The crazy smile?
The man didn’t even say anything and he still seemed like, despite the fact he was staring right at Pav, he was actually looking past him. As though Pav were nothing more than a ghost standing there in the doorway, and he wasn’t seeing him at all.
Add in the wild look in his eye and the madness in his smile … well, sometimes, a mind just couldn’t take what happened in these chambers, day in and day out. Sometimes, a mind broke from it all.
Not that it changed anything. Pav still had a job to do. He headed farther into the cell and made quick work of washing what he could. The wall, and the parts of the floor that had also taken a few smears of the waste. The man wouldn’t let him touch him, and even hissed Zhatka at him when he tried to wash out his mouth.
Pav wished he could be surprised that even in his madness, the man remembered who he was, except he couldn’t be shocked at all. The people he shared these chambers with—while he lived his life unshackled and with less punishment than them—they were still the same in a lot of ways. Owned by people they rarely saw. Their futures determined by men whose names they rarely whispered.
These prisoners …
They respected Pav as much as they feared him.