He hears the cell door open. The guards are screaming something at him he doesn’t understand. But then again he never understands what those power hungry bastards are trying to tell him. “I'm up you big buffoons,” he tries to explain, but before he can get another word out he feels the cold metal of a nightstick against his skull. Then all goes black. When he comes to, he finds himself strapped in a chair wearing an iron mask. “What is this new madness?!” he yells. No one seems to hear him, and if they do they provide no response. He feels nausea in his stomach as he tastes the copper from the blood in his mouth. It’s then he realizes he is in more danger than ever imagined. He can hear them now. Their cries for blood and human flesh can be heard echoing in the distance. He had heard about this place. Only whispers were uttered of it, for those who spoke openly of it were often never heard of again. The Hall of Blood they all called it. He knows his screams will fall upon deaf ears. As his heart begins to race with panic he wonders how he, a loyal soldier, would end up in hell on earth. Fort Murtagh was a place for criminals of the highest degree. Only those who committed this heinous act were condemned to this living hell. A prison it was called by name, not by nature. Those who came to this place returned only in death, only when the chains and binds of the mortal world no longer held them down.

Now, sitting in the iron chair of his impending doom, he no longer feels panic, but relief. Relief that he will soon be free. Free from the walls that confide him to madness day after day. Free from this hell. The yips and screams get louder now, as he can now smell their half-dead, rotting flesh.

They were stories of myth and legend as a child, these half dead monsters that feed on nothing but human blood and flesh. They were the stories children told when they snuck down to the combine after curfew, the stories parents threatened them with when they misbehaved, saying, “You better behave, or the Mullucks will have you hide!” He never thought those old stories were in fact going to be his undoing.

He hears the alarms now as the stone doors begin to open all around him. They rush in like a pack of hyenas rushing to grab the first bite of fresh meat. They begin circling him, smelling and licking at his cold, sweat covered flesh. Their cries begin to get louder and louder, then all of a sudden they stop. All is eerily quiet as nothing can be heard but the rasping breathe of the Mullucks as well as his own sharp, heavy panting. “Why aren’t they attacking me, mauling me flesh?” he asks himself. As soon as the thought crosses his mind the utter realization becomes clear. “They are toying with me.”
No sooner does this thought enter and leave his mind does it become the last thought to have ever entered his mind. They attack.
He awakes with a start in a cold panicky sweat as he hears the cell door open. “It was all a dream,” he breathes with relief. His relief is short lived as he takes in his new surroundings. The Hall of Blood has claimed its newest victim. Damned forever to this new hell, he screams. A high, shrill, bone chilling scream that it not his own, but that of a Mulluck…