Wheezers are failed mutations with convulsing limbs, coats, and World War Two style gasmasks stitched onto their face. They come during the Bloodwatch and mark certain inmates cells with a black substance derived from inside their coats. The Blacksuits then come with their dogs and capture the ‘marked’ cellmate, allowing the wheezer to inject the victim with the substance. This renders the victim completely inert while they are taken away to be experimented on; most never to be seen again.
In Execution, Alfred Furnace reveals that the wheezers are actually those who are seemingly immune to the nectar, rather than the fact that they turn into blacksuits, the nectar acting as blood made oxygen in the air fatal to the body and thus requiring gas masks to modify the air to filter out nearly all the oxygen available. The wheezers are Alfred Furnace's personal scientists and surgeons who then carry out the body modifications of the transformation process. Most of the wheezers in the prison are implied to have been around since the second world war and have grown old with Furnace, forgetting everything about their lives but the desire to experiment. Furnace also confirms that Zee's seeming immunity to the nectar would have made him a wheezer.
