A moment of silence passed as each man considered the card again.

"So, there's allegedly something about to happen," Jack mused. "And something else on Christmas Day. Can you put the translation into writing for me? I still need to log it into the database, and I'll send the card to the Postal Inspection office. I assume if no shit hits any proverbial fans in the next couple of weeks, then we're probably fine."

Forty hours passed, and death row was redefined. Convicted murderer Nathan Horn struggled for air as he lay dying on his bed. Every feeble breath felt like lightning in his chest.

Much of Horn's present state was ironically akin to the once familiar sickness of heroin withdrawal-a sensation he had not experienced in twenty-two years. His lungs had become increasingly thin over the last hour, and he now continuously felt light-headed and nauseous. There was nothing left to vomit, but he was vaguely suspicious that maybe he had soiled himself again.

Horn had stopped getting up eight hours ago, after he had fainted in the throes of a violent retching spell and hit his head on the concrete floor hard enough for blood to trickle down his agonized face. Too weak to care that his body was shutting down, he could only be grateful that the violent illness he had been engulfed in throughout most of the morning had finally subsided.

The rotten meat smell of the sores was everywhere, even though only some of the inmates had them. Horn was covered with them, and the pain was excruciating. Someone was screaming. Someone else-or maybe it was the same man-was vomiting. Horn had no option but to lay in misery and absorb the sounds and smells of the mortally ill.

Mercifully, his vision was totally gone. He could not see the disgusting mess that had become of the six-by-eight cell where he had spent the last eighteen years of his sentence. He was also unaware that Buzz, the child molester on the other side of the wall, had been dead for three hours, or that Sam-who two years earlier had raped and murdered his sister at the age of nineteen-was now on his hands and knees as he sobbed, mumbling an inarticulate prayer to a God that had never existed to him until that morning.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, Horn's ravaged mind was a collage of people and events from his past. His mother. His parole officer. The sixteen-year-old girl he had shot in the chest in her apartment because it turned out that she didn't have any dope after all. A parade of lawyers. The judge who had asked God for mercy on his soul. Horn had laughed out loud.

The sores were like fire, and their flames were spreading. He could no longer feel the distinct patches of corroded flesh; they were all melting into one surreal torture. Internally, he was being slowly devoured. Externally, he was burning alive. His last semi-lucid thought was a forlorn one. They had all been right. Nathan Horn finally believed in Hell.

end.