“We’ll call the cable company, try to get it worked out.”
Chris pulled out his cell phone. Held it up to prove his point, and then squinted at it.
“What?” Smith asked.
“No service.”
“It’s the walls,” Smith explained.
“No.” Chris shook his head. “I always have service,” he said. “Look.” He pointed to the wi-fi detector on the screen. “No internet, either.”
“Cable’s down.” Smith shrugged.
“Let’s check with the Man.”
Eight
“Just tell me what happened,” Marcia Vasquez told Mercedes.
“I got jumped.”
“By who?”
“You know the rules,” Mercedes told the nurse. “I rat her out, she kills me next time.”
Marcia sighed and held a cotton swab to an alcohol bottle, tipped it upside down twice and removed it. Touched it to Mercedes’ bruised cheek. “It’s just not right,” she said.
“She’ll get hers’.”
“Excuse me?” Marcia asked, a penciled eyebrow rising up into her tan forehead.
“I said: ‘It’s no big deal.’”
“Of course.” Marcia finished cleaning Mercedes’ face, and then sighed again. “You’ll mend up just fine. I suggest you stay in your cell, get some rest, and think about telling me who did this.”
Mercedes looked at her. Marcia huffed a bit and then rambled off in a frustrated, motherly tone: “You all can’t just keep beating, raping, and killing each other. She beats you, you kill her, her friends kill you, your friends kill them, and then I have to have a parade of dead women in here, and I know all their names, and they’re good girls who got caught in a bad world and made bad mistakes, and they’re in here hurting each other for no reason. Just tell me, stop the cycle, and we can go to the Warden and…”
Mercedes touched her hand gingerly, stopping her.
“We’re still in a bad world,” she said. “And even you can’t change that.”
[RL: One of the sadder, more heartfelt scenes. I always like this scene, even if it was never necessary for the plot. I mean, again, it pushes Mercedes forward as an extremely emotional character. I just get the bond reinforced every time I read it. She’s there, beat up, and she can’t tell the nurse anything close to the truth. But she’s strong. Over the course of the first season we can see some of that fire. In the following seasons, we’ll see a lot more. Mercedes is possibly the most important character in the franchise, next to Erin.]
[TK: Stop it, I’m getting all misty and besides Phil is the best character.]
Nine
Sam got to the edge of the brush and stopped, squinting to see inside. Breath seeped from his lips in ragged clots of steam. His shotgun cradled in his arms. The scavengers above still circling and diving – but individually not coming back up for minutes at a time.
There had to be hundreds of them.
He looked down the road in both directions. Still not a single car had passed.
Took a deep breath, gripped the shotgun tight, and barged into the scrub. It tore at him as he went in, and tried to hold him as he made his way out into the forest beyond. He stopped. Looked around. Trying to get his bearings. He had only gone ten feet, but the forest floor was a different world. Trees stood as dense, monolithic guards in all directions, making his internal compass rotate like an over-wound watch.
“The highway’s behind me,” he said aloud. It was suddenly nerve-racking not to hear the sound of cars passing on pavement. “The birds were a hundred feet in, and fifty to the left.”
[RL: I think today we take certain things for granted. The sound of cars passing is something that strikes me as a near constant. Maybe not as much when you get to more rural areas. But, on a highway, to be standing in the woods just ten feet away, and not to hear the constant drum of tires, it would be unsettling. It’s those kinds of things I think we forget we’ve forgotten – things like total, void-like silences. Just an observation.]
He started forward, shotgun held loose, safety off. The forest was awash in sounds. Trees cracking. Needles rustling. And birds – so many birds – screeching and tearing at something. He thought he heard fabric separating, the sound ricocheting off the trees and playing along the forest floor.
He kept on. The sounds getting louder. Now he could see the shadows flickering here and there as the birds flew overhead or swooped down. They were to his left now. He adjusted course and homed in. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.
He broke into a clearing and blanched. Shook his head to clear it, and fired a shot into the sky. The birds leapt off the body and took to flight, leaving the hollow carcass in the grass.
Sam fumbled with his left hand, his right holding the scatter gun tightly, and took out his phone.
[TK: We left this open to the readers imagination. I can’t stand when writers feel the need to describe every little item. Is it a deer? A person? Kid or old man? I really like the freedom that writing like this gives the reader. I can picture a slow rain of blood droplets as the birds leap into the sky and the blood runs off their beaks. Besides you get more details later, see if you got it right.]
Ten
Chris, Smith, and Dave Sanders stood huddled in the communications office. Chris and Smith had no idea what any of the equipment did, but they were confident Dave knew all.
“I don’t know what you guys want me to tell you,” Sanders said.
Chris stared at him. “Do you know what will happen if these fuckers don’t get to watch Dancing with the Stars?” he asked. “The word ‘riot’ isn’t violent enough. Jesus, what do you expect them to do for entertainment? Read?”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
[RL: One of my favorite jokes to read. Or write. It never gets old to make fun of people not reading books. The Dancing with the Stars is fun, and kind of foreshadows the extreme shock of not having all these things we – again – take for granted. Something as trivial as Dancing with the Stars becomes life or death when it’s gone. Human nature, I think.]
“Well, uncross it. They’ve been locked down for three weeks, all it’ll take is a nudge and we’ll have a war zone in here.”
[TK: I think it’s important to highlight the tension that runs through the prison, and that any break in the routine is cause enough to drive the prisoners over the edge. It’s a current that runs through our society, most large cities only need a small push to riot. Win an NBA championship, fuck lets burn the city down in celebration.]
Dave shrugged, his glasses slipping down to the point of his nose at the movement. He pressed them back in place.
“It’s not me,” he said. “Everything’s down. I tried to call it in and get someone to take a look at the lines, and the phones aren’t working. None of them. Land line or cell. Internet’s down. TV. The whole nine. And our phones don’t go down. We have a direct line to the governor’s office for emergencies.”
[RL: “And executions.” We didn’t include that, because we didn’t want to place it in a specific location. If we added it, several states would be off limits. We’ve begun working on an offshoot series that will need Brennick to be placed in a specific state, but until that project has progressed we can’t nail Brennick to a particular spot. Eventually we’ll know which state it’s in and then we can talk about executions, though we hint around a bit later on. It’s as much fun for us to figure out new threads as it is for the reader.]
“Did you try it?”
“Over Dancing with the Stars? No. You’ll have to take it up with the Warden. But I already know what he’s going to say.”
They waited. Dave looked at them, enjoying it.
“Yeah?”
“’I was looking for volunteers anyway.’”
Eleven
Erin Gibbs paused at the gate.
"One coming through," Jenson called.
There was a clack as the bolt came free and then an electric hum as the motor slid the gate along its tra
ck.
Brody, the gatekeeper, called out from the other side of Plexiglas, his voice projected through a speaker in the wall: "How ya doin' Gibbs?”
[TK: If this is the first of our books you’ve read then you won’t have noticed, but we use the names of our families and friends throughout all our books.]
[RL: If this is the first of our books you’ve read, and you’ve been stalking us, that’s why you noticed Tom’s son’s name being used here.]
"How would you be doing if they threw you in with those animals, Brod?"
"Maybe I should close the lock back up, send you back to solitary. Would you like that?"
The "lock" was the gate, there were hundreds of them in Brennick, separating each section of the prison in the very likely case of a riot.
Gibbs shrugged.
"Tell you what," the voice scratched out, "I'll let you in if you promise to play nice."
"Deal. The next time I take a shank off someone in the middle of the night, I'll give it right back."
Brody glared at him.
"And not in his belly this time," Gibbs assured him.
[RL: Love that line because of the inferred scene.]
They passed through the lock. Behind them, the motor started back up and the gate closed.
Clack.
[TK: Once again I enjoy the simplistic writing style we use. It lets us keep the focus on the action and the characters without having to spend a thousand words describing the bars and locks, hallways, and cells. We’ve all seen a prison before, some on TV or a movie, some a little closer up.]
Twelve
"This is a prison, not a retirement home. I don't give half a shit if they have TV."
Chris started to say something, but Warden Bowers held up a palm.
"The phones are a different story. We need those phones operational."
Chris nodded.
Bowers keyed up his intercom and said, "Sharon. Get a team out of maintenance down to check the fiber optics line. Every inch. I want those phones back up and running."
"Yes sir, on it."
"Do you feel better?" he asked Chris.
"What about the cell phones? Why aren't our cell phones working?"
Bowers sighed and punched the intercom. "And have them check the power lines to the cell tower. Chris was right in the middle of a hot sexting session and we ruined it."
Sharon giggled back: "Can do, Warden."
[RL: That’s not dismissive.]
"Now," he said, "I don't want this to become a union issue, but how about you two get back to – I don't know – guarding prisoners. Sound good?"
They nodded.
"Dismissed."
Thirteen
Sam Watkins cursed his phone again and held it up. The little signal bars were gone, and in their place it said "SOS."
"I’m calling the fucking SOS," he grumbled. If a cell phone can't find its own network, they're designed to operate on any network if only to make emergency calls. This close to Brennick, he should have been picking up the prison's cell tower. Sam pocketed his phone and looked down at the body.
[RL: Very useful information. And true. One of the few things our great Congress has done for us that makes any fucking sense. But it’s a double edged sword. Especially when your five year old loves collecting your discarded – but still operational – cell phones.]
It had been a woman. At some point. Now it was a hollowed out shell. Blood was haloed around it in a circumference of about fifteen feet. The head had been neatly - and quickly - picked clean of eyes, ears, and lips. She hadn't been dead long by the look of it. The animals had been very efficient with this corpse. Far more efficient than Sam thought possible. It would take a pack of wolves to do this. With the birds finishing it off.
"More like a hundred," he said to no one.
It wasn't just the intestines that had been gnawed at - they were all gone - but the legs, arms, neck - everything was torn and shredded.
[TK: Did you get it right?]
He tried his phone again: Nothing.
"Shit."
He looked around him, did three hundred sixty degrees and then made a decision. The birds couldn't do any more damage than they already had. The body would keep until he got to the prison, got on the phone and got the right people to the scene.
Something struck him. He hadn't even thought about it. Amazing how quickly instinct and training took over. He couldn’t be here. He couldn’t find this. Not now. Not ever.
He looked around again, then backed his way out of the clearing.
[RL: As stated: a fresh corpse. Had Sam hung around another few seconds, he would have been in a world of hurt. A. he would have had every creeper in hearing range on his ass from firing that shot. B. that hollowed out woman was only seconds away from reanimating. But fate’s funny like that. He just makes it out of this one. *Sigh* He may not always be so lucky.]
[TK: However, at this point those weren’t the most likely fears that jumped in his mind. In a few chapters his reaction would likely have been extremely different.]
Fourteen
Jessie looked up from her novel as Mercedes came into their cell.
“How’d it… oh,” Jessie said. She came up close and looked at the bruises. “Not well, I guess.”
“As well as I could have expected.”
Mercedes saw Jessie’s jaw working.
“He did this to you?” she asked.
Mercedes shook her head. “No,” she said. “Random coincidence.”
“Don’t be a bitch.”
“I’m serious. It wasn’t Chris.”
“Who then?” Jessie flicked her head and the bit of red hair that always hung in her eyes flipped back and then dropped into its normal place.
Mercedes squirmed. “Just two fucking hos, okay?” she told Jessie. “Don’t worry about it.”
“So it was that limp dick piece of shit.”
“What are you gonna do? Take out a guard? A male guard?”
“Cocksucker isn’t even supposed to be in our wing. He comes over for…” Jessie trailed off.
[RL: Ouch.]
Mercedes looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine. He’ll get his. They all will. Sooner or later, they’re all going to get what’s coming to them.”
[RL: Yes. They all will. A lot of the Pilot is foreshadowing. Letting the reader know that the zombie hoard is on its way. As such, there’s a lot of talk like that. Off hand references to the end of the world and such. In fact, now that I think about it, there’s a lot of that in the whole first season.]
Fifteen
“You poor, stupid, unlucky bastard,” Mike Sanchez told Tall Bill Mahone.
[RL: My favorite scene of the Pilot.]
“What?” Bill asked.
“He’s out,” Ray Torez explained.
“Who?”
“Your new cell mate.” Torez pointed so Bill could see. “Erin Gibbs,” he said.
“He doesn’t look like much.”
“That’s what they always say,” Mike whispered, “just before he snaps their neck like a pigeon’s.”
Tall Bill squinted at him. “He white or black?” he asked.
“Neither,” Sanchez explained. “Or both. Right down the middle, really. But in here: he’s neither.”
[RL: Again: Not racist. Accurate.]
“What’s with the box?” Bill pointed at the box Gibbs carried in his now unchained hands.
“Oh,” Mike said, and laughed. “That’s his personal effects.”
Bill Mahone looked at Mike and then at Ray.
Ray explained: “See, usually when you get sent to solitary, they just leave your shit in your cell. The idea is it’ll be sitting there when you get back.” He laughed this time. “Unless you’ve got a hell of a cellie, it’s all gone when you get back.”
“But,” Mike cut in, “in this case, he made such a mess they just went through all his stuff, anything without blood on it they stuck
in that box and put it in the basement.”
Bill looked sick. He opened his mouth a few times to talk, but couldn’t find words.
“Said his cellmate came at him with a shank,” Ray said, shrugged.
“You poor, stupid, unlucky bastard,” Mike repeated.
[RL: What I love so much about this scene is the way they make it seem like it’s Bill’s fault. Like he picked Erin as his cell mate. I also love the idea that he goes in sure this is the devil. No question. He won’t make it the night. And when we get to know Bill we learn he’s not really that bad a guy. So when he randomly gets stuck with Psycho-Solitary Man, it builds this idea in the reader’s mind that Gibbs is the worst person there. Once we move along, that changes. Adding to the emotional flow that is meeting new people. Which makes the characters people, and not characters, and the story seem real.]
Sixteen
Sam pulled up to Brennick’s front gate and stopped. Twelve feet tall chain link with razor wire spun neatly atop it, it was the last line of offense against escape.
“You’re late,” all four hundred pounds of Tim Harper said.
“You’re an asshole,” Sam told him.
“Both good points.”
“Open the gate.”
“You know,” Tim drawled, leaning comfortably against the guard post he had manned for nearly a decade, “Warden’s gonna have your ass if you keep this up. He can’t have his number two late three days a week. He takes that personally.”
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