by Candice Fox
The men brushed past her. Celine had never been on this side of the barred doors with any of the inmates she worked with unless they were wearing cuffs. They put the cuffs on in the cells, walked the inmates out to the yard, then uncuffed them in the cages that were there under the sunshine to let them roam in a slightly bigger space for an hour a day. Big Willy’s arm touched Celine’s as he went by. She felt ice tumble into the pit of her bowels.
The last men ran out into the stairwell, heading for the yard. Celine went back to the windows. Men were flooding out of the prison buildings, rushing towards the gates at the front of the complex, a mass evacuation, a sea of denim flooding out into the desert. A wave of nausea hit her and she doubled over, resting her hands on her knees. The sound of the release had been deafening. Now the halls were quiet but for the words falling out of her own mouth, panicked moans.
‘No, no, please,’ she huffed. She straightened, trying to breathe, but the nausea hit again like a punch to the gut. ‘Please, god, don’t do this.’
The monsters were gone. All of them. Out into the world. She turned away from the windows, knowing that, with each second that ticked by, the state’s most dangerous men were edging closer and closer to their next victims.
She had failed. For a decade and a half, all Celine had wanted to do was keep the bad men in their cages where they belonged; away from the world, from each other, from the people who they had hurt. And all of it had been for nothing.
A man turned into the hall. Celine raised her gun. It was Jackson, pausing briefly before he ran.
‘It’s my family.’ He gestured weakly, then disappeared. Liz followed him. Celine heard their footsteps on the gravel outside.
She went to the control room, stepped numbly into the space, which was lit dimly to accentuate the contrast on the surveillance cameras. She touched the cell discharge button and some other dials vainly, as if she would be able to reverse the last few minutes somehow if she just found the right switch. The screens in front of her showed no movement. She turned and looked at the screens by the door that gave glimpses of the yard. Remaining inmates were being hustled reluctantly towards the gates by prison staff. These were likely the elderly, infirm or mentally ill prisoners, or some perhaps merely scared men who were close to their release dates and didn’t want to step outside the prison walls and have their sentence extended for an escape attempt. Celine marvelled at how seamlessly the mutiny had unfolded. Once the first call had come through announcing someone was opening up, it seemed that most of the other staff had fallen into line. When a colleague’s family was in danger, you stepped up, it seemed. Even if that meant endangering everyone else out there by releasing the worst of the worst into their midst.
She decided she would go out into the yard, to see the big gates of the prison standing open. It was something she had never witnessed before. The twenty-foot-high iron gates, as thick as truck tyres, usually only ever opened as far as was necessary to let vehicles into the outer enclosure. But she supposed there was no need for that now. The gates would be thrust wide, useless.
The figure that appeared at the edge of her vision was tall and slender. Her mind, still failing to comprehend the new reality of the animals running wild outside their enclosures, told her it was Jackson. But it was not.
Willy Henderson grabbed Celine by the arm and shoved her back into the control room.
CHAPTER 4
John Kradle stood in the staff parking lot of Pronghorn Correctional Facility and felt the sunshine on his face. It occurred to him that he had never in his life stood on this spot, though he was positioned a mere hundred yards or so from his cell back on the row. On the night he had been driven to the facility, the truck had come in the back way, through the rear gate, a less impressive fifteen-foot-tall iron affair on the south side of the complex. He’d hardly noticed the facility taking in the bus on which he sat, like a giant whale swallowing a fish. He’d just been sentenced to death for murdering his family. Minute by minute, he had simply been trying to resist the urge to scream.
As well as standing somewhere he had never stood before, he was also standing somewhere that he had never considered he would be able to stand. His feet on the asphalt. His hands by his sides. The sun on his cheeks. One hundred yards, give or take, into the free world.
Men were running past him, yipping and cheering as they went. Kradle was initially surprised at just how many of the inmates were able to smash the windows of the cars in the lot, get in and get the engine running in mere seconds, but then he supposed being able to hotwire a car was among the most common skills within the populace at any prison in the world. He watched alliances forming almost wordlessly, inmates flagging down and packing in to the back of cars, horns honking as the vehicles took off towards the road. In the distance he could see civilians cowering against the side of the tilted bus as cars full of criminals zipped past them, trailing dust.
Every vehicle was headed the same way: out onto the service road that led to the highway. When they reached the highway, Kradle knew, the cars could turn left towards Vegas or right towards Utah. Kradle could guess which way most would be turning.
He looked at the huge, open gates of the prison before him, standing wide like welcoming arms. A cluster of staff was gathered there, gaping at the spectacle of the mass breakout with their arms folded and mildly defeated looks on their faces. Some were on their phones, pacing back and forth nervously, trying to warn loved ones of the coming tidal wave of criminality.
‘Take the kids and go to my mother’s place,’ an officer was saying into his cell phone. Kradle didn’t recognise him. There were only ten staff who worked on the row, where he had lived for the past five years. ‘Get in the car and drive there now, Cherie. Right now. Don’t stop anywhere.’
‘Go down to the basement and don’t come out until you hear my voice.’ A female officer passed Kradle, on her phone, her gun out in front of her, finger on the trigger. The pistol’s aim wavered over him as she moved, but her eyes didn’t meet his. His was just another criminal face in the horde that was running rampant. Kradle watched her get into her car, parked at the furthest end of the lot, and shake the gun at some inmates to get them away from the driver’s side door. She started the engine and sped away.
Celine hit the floor of the control room so hard that all the wind was smacked out of her lungs. The gun clattered out of her fingers and slid under the control room desk. She crawled a few paces, trying to suck in air, but Henderson snatched her ankle, dragged her back to him, started pulling weapons off her body and throwing them away. He took her baton from its sheath and smashed her a few times, the pain so sudden and all-consuming she didn’t even know where she was being struck. Everything blazed with pain. Wham-wham-wham. There was blood in her eyes. Her vision blurred red just as her thoughts came back into focus: her brain told her she needed to be very strategic now, true with her aim, calm and cool and moving like a machine that ran on instinct and training.
She squeezed her eyes shut, and in the darkness felt him kneel on top of her. He was within swinging distance now. Celine struck out and felt her knuckles smash against the bridge of his nose.
Right on target.
She’d spent a second in offensive mode, and now reeled back into defensive mode. Get to safety; recover; plan; strike. She covered her face with her arms, locked her fingers protectively around her skull and waited for the barrage of rageful punches to ebb. When it did, she slammed her knee upwards into Henderson’s crotch. He bent double instinctively, his body folding, anticipating the pain, his sweating forehead pressed between Celine’s breasts. He let out a groan, high and eardrum rattling. She clawed at his neck and head until he rolled away. She rolled as well, gripping her way towards the door, but he was back on her before she could move more than a foot or two, and he seemed somehow stronger, as if the rage generated by the knee in the crotch had only given him power.
His arm came around her neck, thick and wet and hairy, and squeezed s
o hard she felt the pressure of it behind her eyes.
And then, with a crack, the pressure was gone.
He’s snapped my neck, she thought.
The words in her mind were hellishly clear. She curled her toes, expecting to feel the terrifying numbness of paralysis down her body, but she found that she could move. Henderson’s arm had slithered away. More cracking sounds came. Celine rolled onto her back and watched John Kradle standing over the big man who had attacked her, his arm reaching up and then swinging down, the toaster in his hand smashing into Henderson’s face like Thor’s hammer, shiny and dented and covered with blood.
Celine watched Kradle beat Henderson half to death, her limbs refusing to move, seized by shock. Weird thoughts drifted through her; about the blood splattering up at Kradle’s face, about how he gripped the toaster with his two fingers in the slots and his thumb around the base of the machine, as if he were holding a bowling ball.
All at once her body and mind recovered, and Celine scrambled under the control desk, picked up her gun and swung around. Henderson wasn’t moving. Kradle was standing there with the toaster in one hand and her baton in the other.
‘Are you—’ he managed before a yelp of surprise and a look of horror. Celine fired three times. The bullets smashed into the wall behind Kradle’s head, the last missing his ear by an inch or less. He cowered, the toaster and baton at his feet, forgotten.
‘Sweet Jesus!’ he howled when the firing had stopped. ‘I’m trying to save your ass here!’
‘Get down!’ Celine growled. ‘On your knees, inmate! Put your hands on the back of your head!’
‘You’re crazy.’ Kradle stood, backing up. ‘You want to shoot me, go ahead and shoot me, Celine. I only came back here for my stuff.’
She didn’t shoot. He turned and walked out of the control room. Celine gripped her way up to the observation window. She watched him jog back to his cell. He emerged what seemed like seconds later holding a pillowcase stuffed with items. She watched him disappear through the door at the end of the row that led out to the yard.
Celine crawled back to Henderson. She couldn’t bring herself to look at his mangled face and head. The hands that cuffed him were slick with blood, her own and his. She snapped the restraints on the big man, gathered up her weapons and limped slowly in the direction Kradle had gone.
Raymond Ackerman had been sitting listening to all the hubbub outside his cell. The phone call patched over the PA system, then the hoots and hollers of excitement from the inmates, the crash and clatter of chaos erupting beyond the bars. Two female guards stopped right in front of his cell, yammering in terror and gripping each other, and he watched them lock themselves in a storage cupboard only seconds before all the cell doors slid open. He was stirring a pot of noodles on his little camp stove throughout the entire affair – Picante beef ramen – the thin, lifeless packages lying discarded on the iron desk by the toilet. He thought long and hard, but couldn’t remember anything like this going down during his time at Pronghorn, or in any prison he’d been at, as a matter of fact. Seventy-seven years on the planet, forty-two of them behind bars, or steel mesh, or bulletproof glass, or whatever the hell they decided to keep him in, and he’d never witnessed a mass breakout. Pretty special. He stirred his noodles and waited for it all to die down, until only the clink of his spoon against the side of the pot could be heard.
Nobody came to see if ‘The Axe’ Ackerman had joined the breakout. People tended to forget about Old Axe. He was quiet, slow-moving, didn’t want for much. When fights broke out in the chow hall he tended to back away. When his cell was shaken down he stood with his arms by his sides, face against the wall, just as he was told. He sat now, enjoying the quiet of the empty cell block, eating his noodles, thinking about how good he’d got at eating noodles with a spoon over the years. They didn’t have forks in H Block – as though, without forks, guys wouldn’t have anything to hurt each other with. As if without forks, everybody was safe.
Stupid.
Axe got up after a while and went to his cell door, looked out across the cluttered common area. The men had trashed the place as they fled, like they thought they’d never be back. There was toilet paper festooned around the place, hanging off the ceiling fans. Books and cups and other stuff lay about everywhere. A cell down the hall was on fire. Axe figured most of the block would be right back where they started within twenty-four hours, and the screws would make them clean up all that mess with their own toothbrushes.
Axe had no real plans about going anywhere. He saw the outside world on TV and didn’t much care for it. It seemed pretty noisy and weird. People on sitcoms were rude and mean and dressed stupid, and there would be a whole bunch of things he didn’t understand about how to be in society. Seemed to him that just to get a decent meal you had to order it on a phone and pay for it with a cloud, and he didn’t have either of those. He figured he’d only get a hundred yards outside the gates before a flying drone would turn up and scan his face, and then he’d be turned right around and marched home to his cell. It was all too much effort for him. He was a tired sort of guy. Liked to conserve his energy. But, he thought, he’d wander out into the yard anyway, just to see the gates hanging open, and then maybe raid everybody’s cells for noodles.
When he got out into the yard, there was nobody there. He went to the gates, put a hand on them, felt their warmth from the desert sun. He took a couple of steps out, just for the hell of it, and rolled a rock under his shoe. Most of the activity seemed to be clustered around a bus parked in the desert, maybe a half-mile from the facility. People hugging. Kids moving about. Axe hadn’t seen a kid in almost four decades. He watched the scene for a while with his hands in his pockets.
Axe hung about, not doing much, waiting for someone to notice him standing there, but nobody did. There were the unattended noodles to think of. Dozens and dozens of packets, probably. But he decided in the end that there was no sense in making the screws’ jobs easy by sitting in his cell for the entirety of the breakout. He turned and started heading for a Joshua tree he could see standing all alone at the foot of a rocky hill. He figured he’d go there and check it out. Axe hadn’t seen a tree up close for half his lifetime. It was something to do with himself.
CHAPTER 5
The desert sun beat on the back of John Kradle’s neck. It worked its way around his ears, up into his scalp, hot fingers trying to climb around his skull. In the Nevada desert there was no winter, not until the sun set. He kept his head down and pressed on over the cracked and dry land, one step at a time, spiky plants scraping at his jeans. It wasn’t long before his white rubber prison shoes were brown and rubbing at the back of his heels. They were shoes made for walking on polished concrete floors, no more than a couple of miles a day; shoes that had no hard internal structure, not so much as a shoelace eyelet that could be taken off, bent, sharpened into a tiny blade. The shoes began to squeak as sweat rolled down his calves into them. Kradle kept on, glancing back now and then to see the prison shrinking and shrinking.
A helicopter flew overhead, low enough for Kradle to feel the beat of its rotors in his chest. There were cars in the distance soaring up the service road to the facility, cars of every colour and shape. It would be an all-hands call to law enforcement. Kradle figured Las Vegas Metro police and Nevada Highway Patrol would be there, and in short order SWAT, FBI and the US Marshals would be too. Every Pronghorn staff member would be called to help out. Kradle planned to be in the mountains by the time things really ramped up. He figured he had about five miles to go before he hit shade.
It was while he was looking back, checking on the growing activity, that he spotted the man on his tail. Kradle knew he wasn’t from the row. He’d seen everyone on the row, even if he didn’t know their names. At home in his cell, Kradle had been able to physically call out and communicate with guys three or four cells either side of his, and one Christmas had passed a kite six cells down to negotiate the barter of two bottles of hand cream fo
r a Snickers bar. The other guys he only saw when they were being escorted past his cell to visits with their lawyers or family in the cages.
For a while he simply hoped the guy would peel off, head into the hills another way. Maybe Kradle had picked the only sensible path from the prison to the walls of the shallow valley in which the facility lay. The shortest path. But when the man on his tail hadn’t disappeared, hadn’t lengthened or shortened his proximity in about twenty minutes, Kradle stopped.
The man stopped.
‘Get your ass here!’ Kradle called.
The man approached. The last thirty yards or so, Kradle expected him to stop growing in size, but he didn’t. Somehow the outside world had added a foot and a half of height to Kradle’s approximation of him, a worrying thickness to his already huge, muscular frame.
‘You can’t be following me,’ Kradle said, in a voice that was far less confident than the one he’d used already. He pointed to a fork off into the mountains. ‘I’m heading this way. Give me some space, okay?’
‘I want to come with you.’ The guy smiled, showing a big gap between his front teeth that made Kradle think of a toddler. ‘You look like you know where you’re going.’
‘Are you . . .’ Kradle shook his head and tried to think. ‘Are you kidding me? I don’t even know you, man.’
‘I’m Homer Carrington.’
‘Look, the smartest thing for everybody to do here is strike out on their own. And I’m heading—’
‘Pretty clever.’ Homer ran a hand over his buzz-cut black hair. ‘Head for the hills. Everybody else will be going off to Vegas. Why go into the hills? It’s rocky up there. Dangerous. There’ll be snakes. Probably big cats. It’ll take you so long to get through, everybody else will be rounded up by the time anybody even thinks to look up here.’