Wendigoon

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's like there's this evil approaching getting closer.

This time, we were less scared during the event itself.

Will offered to guard racing past 500 bucks from his commissary account if the man would come back and tell them what was going on.

Dante listened intently, trying to hear individual screams from the third floor over everyone else's shouting and confusion, without any words he thought he had heard.

But I wrote down, Jesus Christ.

We weren't as scared when it was happening because we'd lived through it twice before, but this time, the long-term fear was much deeper.

Now we knew for sure that it was going to happen again, and any prisoners that had the means began lawyering up and doing everything they could to transfer to other prisons, even if it meant worse conditions.

The problem was the North Dakota prison system was already overflowing, which was the whole reason GCG got started in the first place.

So every guy that got out meant it was that much harder for the rest of us.

Both of our cellmates transferred, giving us more space, so that was nice, but it was small consolation.

Apparently, word had started to spread on the outside, and GCG's solution, instead of paying the guards even more, was to stop having a night shift at all except for just one poor guy.

Kellen was a bit miffed he hadn't gotten a raise out of the whole thing, but we started to believe us that something was going on.

By then, he'd been around a while, and he knew we weren't bullshitters.

Too many of the other prisoners had told him they'd heard something walking around the first, second, and third floors at random during the night.

It was just a few steps, sometimes as many as 20, but it only happened every so often, and only once it had been long enough that you thought it had stopped for good.

One guy on the fourth floor said he'd heard a full run from one end of the third floor hallway to the other, clear enough that he expected a guard to come charging up the stairwell, but nobody had appeared.

He slid his wrist and got transferred out on medical leave the next day, so we took him serious.

All that was enough to get Kellen to start doing some research on the outside.

He came to us in the seventh month of my sentence with a pale face.