by Hunt, Jack
Erika narrowed her eyes. “Actually, I was looking at that dusty old bag of yours but thanks for the additional information, it confirms my belief about you.”
His eyebrow went up. He looked at the bag but said nothing.
She shook her head and looked towards the front, hoping the driver would reach the destination soon. The sooner she could get out of the vehicle and away from him the better. She really didn’t want to have a conversation but something had been bothering her ever since the night went south. “So why pay for the other meals back at the restaurant? Was that meant to impress me?”
“No, it was to show you that money doesn’t mean shit to me either. I figured if I was going to be the next post on your blog I might as well make it worth reading.”
“That’s not my blog. It’s Trish’s.”
“Really? And so the text that mentioned a post getting a lot of hits — that wasn’t you gloating about what you were hoping to achieve tonight?”
“Such an asshole. It was meant for Trish. It wasn’t directed towards you.”
“Oh well that makes everything better.”
She fixated on his eyes. Close up and under the lighting, that was when she noticed they were a deep blue. Back in the dim lighting of the steakhouse she thought they were a different color. She looked away realizing that she had stared a little too long.
“I didn’t tell you about the hotels because I wanted you to get to know me. Me,” she said again emphasizing the word. “And as for my father. I don’t give a damn what he thinks. He’s barely been around most of my life, and that includes my mother.” She paused. “I was raised by a nanny.”
Tyler rolled his eyes. “First world problems, what a tragedy,” he replied before glancing out the window. “At least you had someone around.”
She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips, folded her arms and looked ahead. She would have asked what he meant by that but she was already trying to crawl out of the conversation. “Can’t this heap of crap go any faster?” she asked the driver. Instead of answering he simply gestured to the road ahead which was chock full of vehicles. She was contemplating getting out and walking the remainder of the way. Sure, it would kill her feet but she was more than willing to suffer a blister than deal with him.
Out the corner of her eye she could see him tapping in a number on his phone before lifting it and waiting for Facetime to kick in. An older man appeared. He had to have been in his late sixties. Bald, a thick gray beard and large shoulder muscles. Behind him were numerous clothes hangers.
“Hey Uncle Lou,” Tyler said. “Sorry I had my ringer off. I got your texts. What’s the matter?”
“Are you near a radio?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Tune into 92.3.”
“Look, I’m on a date.”
“You were,” Erika chimed in to correct him.
Tyler shot her a sideways glance before looking back at the screen.
“Tyler, just do it. Now.”
“Okay, okay.” He leaned forward “Hey, mister, you think you can tune into 92.3 and turn up the volume?”
“No. I’m listening to my jams.”
Tyler shook his head and got back on with his uncle. “He won’t tune into it. Just tell me what’s going on.”
“There is something big happening, Tyler. I was chatting with a buddy of mine out in L.A. and he was telling me there have been power outages across the west side of the United States and reports of telecommunication outages. It doesn’t look good.”
“Uncle Lou, what have I told you about this?”
“Tyler, I’m not messing around here.”
“Did he put you up to this?”
“No. Listen.”
“I’m done listening. I will be home later.”
With that said Tyler hung up and shook his head as he looked out the window. He tapped his phone against the bottom of his chin and looked lost in thought. Erika noticed something she hadn’t seen before. Tattooed between his thumb and finger was a small dove, and beside that a number three.
“Um. Do you live with your uncle?”
“Unfortunately, yes. I’m planning to get my own place soon but…” He shook his head and she kind of figured that money must have been tight. What other reason would someone who was in their late twenties have for staying with a family member unless times were hard. She might have probed him more had they been on better terms but after the way the evening had gone, she opted to let it go. Instead she asked him about what he’d said.
“You seemed pretty dismissive of what he had to say.”
“If you knew him like I did, you would too.”
“But he sounded concerned.”
“They always do.”
“They?”
He groaned and shook his head again. Obviously, a touchy subject, and one that didn’t seem as if it could be cleared up in a few words.
“Would you mind if I used your phone? I should call my brother. Uh. He was flying into Vegas this evening and I was going to meet him at the hotel.”
“Knock your socks off,” Tyler said handing her the phone without looking at her. He certainly had been disturbed by the call. Gone was the smile. Erika tapped in Chad’s number and waited. It rang a few times but went straight to voicemail. She didn’t bother to leave a message as she didn’t want him calling Tyler’s phone. Instead she tried to reach the hotel and speak to Luanne, the hotel concierge.
“Oh hey, it’s me. Has Chad arrived yet?”
“I haven’t seen him, Erika.”
“No phone messages?”
“Let me check.”
She placed her on hold for a minute and returned to say there had been one, something about his flight had been cancelled. All flights were grounded until further notice.
“And power outages?” Erika asked.
“Yes.”
The moment she said that Tyler’s head turned. Without saying a word to her he leaned forward and grabbed hold of the cabbie causing him to swerve in the road. “Tune into 92.3. Please.”
“Okay. Geesh. You know I don’t have to put up with this. This is my…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, just tune in.”
Static fuzzed as he turned the dial and the station kicked in. He turned it up. Two people were in the middle of a serious conversation about what was happening on the West Coast. “They are still trying to determine what has happened. Bob, can you…”
Before they could hear any more the signal went fuzzy and in the next second the car stalled and all of them jerked forward in their seats.
“What’s going on?” Erika asked.
The driver tried turning over the engine but it wouldn’t start.
He wasn’t the only one. A large number of vehicles on the road had stopped working. The newer ones at least. The working ones, which were older, couldn’t drive on as the others were now blocking the way.
“Tyler.”
Tyler ignored Erika as he stepped out, his eyes widening as he watched light after light blink out. Vegas was the city of lights. A concrete jungle that was lit up twenty-four seven but here he was leaning against the car witnessing something he’d only ever heard about as a youngster. “No. It can’t be true. No.”
“Tyler. What is happening?” Erika asked as she got out.
She along with many passengers began to fill up the road, all perplexed by what was happening and all they were seeing. The entire city was shrouded in darkness.
3
It was to be a simple transfer of seventy-nine prison inmates from North Dakota’s State Penitentiary to a Washington state facility to ease space and staffing issues. Overpopulation of county jails, treatment facilities, pre-release centers and state prisons had become a chronic problem across America. North Dakota was no different. Earlier that evening, Gabriel Johnson had been in his cell getting some extra needed shut-eye when a correctional officer banged on his single cell and told him to pack his belongings. He was being transferred. There was no warning. N
o explanation. Any attempt at asking questions was met with shouts to keep quiet. Keeping them in the dark. Keeping them guessing. That’s just the way they liked it. It was all about control and they had been trying to control him for the past six years since he’d been incarcerated for armed robberies and killing a cop. In those six years things hadn’t got any better for him. Three failed attempts to escape had ended with him bludgeoning to death a correctional officer, being given more time and thrown in solitary confinement. It had taken the better part of a year before they changed their minds and put him back into general population where his twin brother Marcus was serving time for the kidnapping and murder of three women. Since then he’d been doing his best to keep his nose to the grindstone and avoid trouble if only to figure out how he could escape again.
Heavily shackled and dressed in the usual orange prison garb they shuffled onto the plane and were directed to their seats. For the first hour of the journey, on the bus from the pen to the airport, Gabriel had no idea if Marcus was being transferred. He recognized some of the men — Jericho Wells, Bill Pope, and Torres Hernandez just to name a few. These were guys he’d shot the breeze with in the courtyard. The others? He looked around and spotted those he’d got into a fight with in the cafeteria. They sneered at him as if making it clear that if shit went south, they’d be there to settle the score. It was only when he boarded the plane did he see Marcus seated near the back.
“Hey Marcus.”
He grinned, looking relieved. “Gabriel.”
Marcus was identical in appearance. When they were kids, they would play tricks on their teachers and people in the town, pretending to be one another. They’d even used it to their advantage in the prison, styling and cutting their hair to create confusion just for the heck of it. The only way anyone could tell the difference was Marcus had a birthmark on the back of his shoulder. Beyond that, they were similar in practically every way.
“Inmates. Silence!” Ted Stevens, a correctional officer, said. Stevens was a brooding individual, six-foot, buzzed white hair, previously in the military. Although he once may have looked intimidating, whatever muscle had been there had turned to fat now that he was a few years out from retirement. His tolerance for insubordination bordered upon psychotic. Rumors had swirled about him arranging for beatdowns of anyone that looked at him wrong. Of course, they were nothing more than rumors to most but not to Gabriel. He’d felt first-hand the harsh consequences of crossing him. After Gabriel killed that correctional officer in a failed escape, Stevens soon got his payback. It occurred sometime after two in the morning on a weekend. The door to his cell abruptly opened, and he was torn from his bed, dragged to the floor and beaten within an inch of his life. The brutality was so severe that he couldn’t speak because of the swelling. No charges had been brought, and it was unknown what excuse he came up with but it must have stuck. The prison administration had no idea what took place on shifts. Stevens made sure of that.
Gabriel took a seat two rows back from Torres. He had a teardrop just under one eye, and more tattoos covering his shaved head and throat. Once part of a gang, his reputation preceded him. A ruthless killer who wouldn’t think twice about snapping someone’s shit up. He was inside for drug trafficking, running a prostitution ring and multiple murders.
Gabriel turned and tried to make eye contact with Marcus.
It burned him to know that his brother was inside but it was to be expected. Their upbringing hadn’t been exactly ideal. Their mother was a whore, their father absent and so it wasn’t long before they were thrown into the system and shopped around like pieces of meat to different foster homes. Abuse both sexual and physical came with the territory and it wasn’t long before they ran away and got caught up in the wrong crowd. Petty theft soon morphed into armed robberies, and although Gabriel tried to keep Marcus away from it, it was a losing game. What drove him to kill those three women vacationing would forever be a mystery as Marcus wouldn’t discuss it and no amount of threatening him seemed to help. After a while Gabriel just let it slide.
“Hey Johnson,” Jericho Wells said leaning in his seat across the aisle from him. A pale albino, he’d got the attention of the prison when he first arrived. “You heard anything?” Jericho was a complete lunatic. Though short in stature, he made up for it with his unpredictable and unstable nature. Gabriel had seen him rip a guy’s penis off with his bare teeth. The victim was twice his size, a meathead who when he wasn’t pumping iron in the yard, he was in the habit of doing the rounds and picking someone new as a fuck buddy. He made a bad choice when he selected Jericho. Keith Anderson. How could he forget that guy’s name? How could anyone? After cornering Jericho in the showers with two of his pals, he thought he had the upper hand, that was until Jericho decapitated his nether regions. His pals got the hell out of there and by the time prison guards showed up, Anderson had bled out. No one touched Jericho after that. Hell, no one barely talked to him. Gabriel had. That kind of aggression just needed to be channeled and he intended to use it when the time was right.
“Nothing. No idea where we’re going,” Marcus replied.
“Washington state,” Bill Pope said without looking at them. He was seated three rows down from them.
Jericho frowned. “Yeah. What facility?”
“Does it matter?” Pope replied. Bill Pope was the grandfather of the group, though unlike Stevens, he didn’t look his age. He was serving life inside for stealing vehicles, and the murder of a family and four police officers. No one would have guessed how violent he could be. On the surface he was a mild-mannered individual. He had a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, round spectacles and an athletic appearance. He often caused people to wonder if he was on the same diet as the others. He radiated health and that was an unusual thing for anyone locked up. The food was shit. The conditions even worse. And yet he thrived. Pope continued, “It’s the same shit just packaged differently.”
“You’ve got that right,” Marcus said from behind him. “Though it would be good to know what we’re heading into.”
“It’s larger than what we just left,” Pope said turning his head. He squinted at Gabriel and a thin smile flickered across his face. “Overpopulation in the pen. Look around you. The only ones that are being moved are high offenders, or those serving life sentences which means it will be years before any of you return to Dakota for parole. I imagine they are sending another group to another state.”
“They can do that?”
“Sure they can. They do it all the time. In the forty-three years I’ve been inside, I’ve been transferred three times. They keep the low-risk prisoners in county jails and then move us to another state before they transfer in more.”
“Essentially refilling it. How the hell does that help them? It’s no different,” Marcus said.
“It makes room for more in county, numbnuts,” Jesse Walker, a guy that had been at odds with him, said.
“Hey asshole. Watch it,” Gabriel said.
Walker laughed. “What are you going to do, beat me to death, Johnson?”
Gabriel knew any attempt on Walker would be an attempt on Stevens. While he wasn’t buddy-buddy with him, they had some kind of arrangement going. Gabriel was pretty certain that Walker was feeding him information, keeping him in the loop of prison conversations, specifically ones involving escape plans.
“It’s not just that,” Pope said. “It’s a matter of cost. It costs them more to house us in Dakota than in Washington state.”
The doors closed, sealed by another correctional officer named Martin Lee. He was a young guy, early twenties, Chinese American and overall friendly, maybe a little too friendly. Friendliness was seen as weakness. Inmates were always looking for ways to exploit the system and new correctional officers were prime targets.
It wasn’t long before they felt the rumble of the plane and it took off down the runway. Gabriel was pressed back into the seat. He clutched the armrests and closed his eyes as they soared up into the night sky. It wasn�
��t meant to be a long flight, roughly two hours and thirty minutes. He glanced out the window of the plane as it gained altitude. It had been a long time since he’d seen the state from above. In the forty-two years he’d been alive he’d only been on a plane once and that was to visit his mother a year before she passed from an overdose. The landscape soon disappeared as the plane tilted and changed course. As the plane climbed higher, time seemed to slow. He watched as others looked out the windows, most probably yearning to be free again.
He never knew how much he could miss his freedom until it was taken away.
“Soak it in, Johnson. It’s the last time you will see the outside.” Stevens chuckled looking over at Lee who wasn’t smiling. Lee wasn’t tainted or jaded by the system yet. He was an idealist like many that came through the doors. They worked there thinking they could make a difference. That somehow a word said, a kind action might change them but there was no changing lifers. The only escape from the claustrophobic environment was an hour in the yard, a family visit or the kiss of death.
For the first hour of the journey the inmates were silent. A few chatted quietly to the man beside them but most kept to themselves and slept. Gabriel turned to face his brother who was two rows back in the seats across the aisle from him.
“You remember when mom took us camping in Theodore Roosevelt National Park?” Gabriel asked.
Marcus nodded. “Cottonwood Campground. Yeah. I remember not wanting to go.”
“Then you loved it.”
Gabriel gave a longing look out the window. “What I would give to go back to that weekend.”
“One day, brother.”
Gabriel inhaled deeply than sighed. “Just a few days under the open sky, a tent, good food, and…”
“And… shut the hell up!” Jesse said turning in his seat. “I’m trying to get some shut-eye here. I don’t want to hear about your shitty weekend.”