The horror of the past and present was the only thing on his mind – the enemies ranged against him and how they were laughing real hard as he rolled around on that bed, breathing heavily, his heart palpitating like a rabbit in the experimentation room.

BANG BANG BANG BANG

The thump on the door was loud and cruel. Marko knew the thump as well as he knew the person’s voice, or the contours of his face. It was a unique signature.
“You coming for hot chocolate?
You got any cigs man? Come on.”
Marko lay still under the sheets. He had been dreading this moment since he awoke.
The door slammed shut with violent force.
Byron was possibly the ugliest, scariest-looking human being who ever crawled out of a womb. His granite-head was skinned with a loose covering of flesh. His smile was so wicked that it made the female nurses recoil with panic. His teeth were fucked up beyond dental repair; his lips tattered and scarred from some miscellaneous drug addiction. His eyes were dark slots of anger, bloody-red and black, and his complexion was so war-torn, it looked as though a thousand toy soldiers had waged a protracted civil war from strategic trenches, dug under each of his ears.

He was the sort of guy who needed to be kept away from the public, even when there was nothing wrong with him, because it looked like there was always something wrong with him.
And now he was Marko’s self-appointed ‘new best friend’.
“Can I have this shirt in here? Just til mum comes with some new clothes?”
Marko peeked over the sheets at the monstrous man rummaging through his wardrobe. He tried to imagine him with a pleasant face, the sort that greets you in the foyer of a plush hotel.
He knew it was a pointless mental exercise, because he would soon have to look him right in the eye.
“I been wearing the same t-shirt for two weeks, did you notice? I fucking stink. Come on, get out of bed and let’s go for a shufty. Come on, you can’t stay in here all day.”
“You sound like that Nazi pig,” Marko complained. “He’s been on his rounds. What is it with that bastard? Has he got a soul or what? Pen pushing hillbilly. All he does is sit down the corridor scribbling on his clipboard, in his shirt and tie.”
“Who you on about?” Byron snarled. “That pussy with the Greenwoods ties? He runs the
place… Touch him, you’ll be in a secure cell for a month…til they decide where to move
you…like that Carl, old cunt, left just before you arrived….walled a doctor up outside the
laundry…. your mate were sat there watching, next thing, he’s been injected and banged up. Don’t touch that little fucker, whatever you do.”
Marko studied the rank ugliness of Byron’s mouth as the words spilt out like toxic vapours. Despite his deep mental trauma, Marko found the situation amusing, in a sick and twisted way. It was hard to take anything seriously when it emanated from that poor specimen of a head.

Marko imagined Byron in the Newsnight Studio, vainly trying to hold his own against Jeremy Paxman – his butchered gob spitting out solutions to the world’s problems, but unable to do anything about its own war-torn state.