“Like the Star of David?” one of the men asked.
Pope sighed. “Like ‘don’t fucking shoot me, I’m a civilian,’” he said. “I know you’re all scared. Don’t worry about the women and children. They’ve been taken to the female wing’s auditorium, where they’ll be living with our female guards. “
The man stepped forward, naked. Maurice didn’t know his name. But he was sturdy, muscles toned and flexed in anger. “I want to see my wife,” he told Pope.
“Not an option.”
“You say they’re with the female guards. We’ll get dressed, and then we can go see them.”
Pope shook his head.
The man crossed his arms and said, “Then we have a problem. I’m not going anywhere with you until I see my wife.”
Pope nodded. Then, in a flash he had a baton in his hand and brought it down on the man’s shoulder. A crack echoed off the walls, and the man went down to one knee.
“The only person here that seems to have a problem,” Pope told him, “is you. Right now, I am within my legal rights to shoot you for interfering with a prison guard and jeopardizing the security of this institution. How’s that sound?” Pope looked around. “Anyone else have a problem?” he asked.
No one spoke up.
“Everything will get worked out tomorrow,” Pope assured them. “We just have to play nice and make it through the night, and then the Warden will meet with everyone and explain how we’re all going to survive this. Until then, I need you to understand that we’re sharing these nice strong walls with the worst society has to offer. Because of that, and the risk of infection, we have to take every available precaution. Is that clear?”
The men nodded.
“Good,” Pope said. “Now get dressed. We’ll be back in fifteen to bring you to your quarters.” He looked at the man, still kneeling. “Cuff this piece of shit,” he told the other guard, then left.
[RL: This is an interesting scene in that the guards have absolutely no idea how to deal with anyone who isn’t either a prisoner, a visitor – both equally suspect and presumed guilty – or a guard. Their behavior is actually understandable when you consider the way the prison is usually run. The parts about wearing guard uniforms but with strips to identify them as civilians, while seeming to grant them second class citizenship, is a way for the guards to know that even if they don’t know them, they shouldn’t shoot them. Otherwise, a random person (because no single guard could know every single inmate) walking up to a lock in a guard uniform would be immediately believed to an escaping convict and shot.
Pope probably doesn’t handle it the best way, but he does what he was trained, taught and conditioned to do: treat every living thing he doesn’t know to be a guard as a threat. In a maximum security prison setting, it isn’t a slam on him that he would react that way.]
[TK: The first draft of this scene was very different. Initially, we disagreed on how this would work out. We needed to separate the families to increase the tension and set up the next season. However, knowing I would never allow my family to be separated from me, ever, we had to have someone take a stand and pay the price for it. It was either that or go with a line like: “Although more enjoyable to watch, gang rapes are much less frequent on the women’s side of the prison. So we feel it’s advisable to have the wives and daughters stay in the female wing.”]
Thirteen
“What do you mean the showers are taken?” Phil asked.
“I mean we’ve got the civilians in there,” Harper told him. Big, heavy, but with a football player’s build, Harper had a way of filling a space and not letting things pass. That had been his job for years at Brennick: guarding the main gate. Phil wasn’t impressed with his attitude.
“So what the hell am I supposed to do?” he asked Harper. “I’m covered in blood, sweat and gizzards, you want me to use a wet napkin?”
Harper shrugged. “They’ll be done in a few minutes,” he said.
“Have you smelled me? I don’t have a few minutes. I want to take a God damned shower. Why is everyone being a prick to me?”
“Don’t be a baby.”
“I come in and Pope’s talking shit. You won’t let me take a shower. Chris is desperate to talk to me for some stupid reason. I mean, man, somebody toss me something here.”
Harper reached in his front pocket and took out a tissue. Tossed it at Phil.
“There,” he said. “To wipe your tears.”
Phil let it drop and shook his head. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll use the lady’s.”
He turned and started walking away.
“And if there’s women in there?” Harper called.
“Then the second half of my problem will be solved, too.”
Fourteen
Chris passed through the lock leading to D-Block.
“What’s in the bag?” the guard at the lock asked through the speakers.
“Your mother’s panties,” Chris told him. “Mind your business.”
“Asshole.”
Chris ignored him and kept on. D-Block was the furthest from Admin. That would work nicely. The male’s wing was split into four blocks, alphabetically from closest to admin to furthest away. The prisoners considered more likely to escape were housed progressively deeper inside the prison. Though everyone at Brennick was a lifer, these guys were the real psychos.
“Perfect,” Chris said as he walked along the floor. Above him, on the catwalk, guards nodded down at him. To his left and right prisoners looked through their cell bars. Chris being the first guard to walk the floor in over a day.
Chris stopped at a cell and peered in. Two sets of eyes looked back. One set belonged to Jared “Hardline” Patterson. A behemoth of meth addicted fury, he had raped and murdered six women before they caught his ass. Jared had only gotten bigger and more brutal inside. The second pair belonged to a skinny little shit in drag.
Chris waved to the guard in the control room. “Open fifty-two B,” he called.
The guard nodded. The cell door began to open.
Jared nodded to Chris. “What’s this about?” he asked.
“Just a check-up,” Chris told him, and stepped into the cell.
[TK: I think by this time you’ve realized we’ve taken the genre in a slightly different direction. However, we’re not done yet. Ask yourself: what would you do if you know you’re going to turn? How far would you take it?]
[RL: Are you asking me?]
[TK: Um, it was more of a rhetorical question for the reader, rather than you.]
[RL: Oh, my bad…]
Fifteen
Erin flipped off his bunk and landed with practiced grace. Went over to his cubby and picked up his snow globe, shook it and set it back down. The snow dancing around the boy and father skating.
“You never did tell me the story behind that,” Bill told him.
“I didn’t?”
“Nope.”
“Huh.” Erin climbed back up onto his bunk and lay down, lacing his fingers behind his head. “So the first thing we need to figure out is transport,” he said.
“Like trucks?”
“Exactly.” Erin nodded. “There’s no way we’re running out of here. But that means I’ll have to get to the loading bay, I would assume.”
“Or the parking lot.”
Erin shrugged. “That’s a tough place for me to bullshit my way into.”
“True.” Bill was silent a while. “How are we going to get the girls?”
Erin said, “Mercedes will have to figure that part out.”
“Does she know that?”
“Not yet.” Erin laughed. “She doesn’t even know I’m planning on leaving.”
“Would she rat us out?”
“What for?”
“To get back at you.”
Erin thought about that. He couldn’t know for sure. But before he brought it up, he planned on finding out.
Sixteen
Phil paused at the lock that led from admin to the f
emale wing of Brennick. Male guards were rare in this wing, and he knew it. But he didn’t think it should make much of a difference. He wanted a shower and didn’t understand why everyone had turned into fucking robots since they left two days before.
[RL: Now, here is an example of the separation that has taken place between the guards that went out, and those that stayed. The ones who went into the town only know what has happened in the town, and they think it was pretty fucked up. Meanwhile, the guards that stayed behind only know what has been happening in the prison, and they think it’s been pretty fucked up. So the two sides – though those returning from town are a tiny number – have lived in two completely different worlds for the past day to two. They can’t begin to relate with each other at a certain point.]
“Whatcha doin’ over here?” a voice asked from behind him. Phil turned and found Mystique standing there, smirking at him.
“I’m trying to take a shower.”
“Is that so?” she asked, and arched a perfectly groomed eyebrow. “I heard you had quite the day in town.”
Mystique was that girl that everyone wanted, and the ones confident enough to ask got to have. Phil had never gotten a shot at her, not because he couldn’t bring himself to try, but because he had never had the opportunity.
“Yeah,” Phil said, nodding. “Really got me worked up, if you know what I mean.”
“I do.” She smiled at him.
He glanced over his shoulder. Then back at Mystique, her long hair slightly curled. “You know, they kind of frown on male guards being over here.”
She nodded.
“It might make everyone feel better if I had an escort. You know, just so they know I’m not gonna try and take advantage of some poor girl.”
She smiled again. “Of course,” she said. “My shift was over an hour ago. I’ll walk you to the showers.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Phil told her. Put his arm out and she hooked hers through it. The lock opened when Mystique nodded to the guard. They passed through, arm in arm, Phil whispering in Mystique’s ear.
[TK: Can’t say it enough, I love that guy.]
Seventeen
Maurice and the column of survivors paused as the guards counted them.
“I got twenty-eight,” one of them called.
“Same,” another returned.
The column got moving again. They had been doing that every few minutes: counting heads, making sure no one had disappeared into the prison. Where they weren’t allowed. Keeping tabs like they were prisoners.
They passed through a steel gate and entered a long, wide hall. The floors painted with arrows and stop and go signs. The walls covered with stenciled reminders to keep their hands in front, eyes ahead, and that any offense was a punishable offense.
[RL: I like that because it would have immense emotional effects for someone who had never been in prison. In the real world, every offense was punishable only if you got caught, and tried, and convicted, and lost your appeal, and the next, and so on. In Brennick, if you pissed and the stream went in the wrong direction, you got a beating. I’m not judging, that’s the way it probably has to be, but I think it would be terrifying the first time.]
Went down the hall for a few minutes. The guards stopping them at two wide double doors. Beyond them, Maurice could hear the chatter of low voices. People inside. A lot of them.
The front guard pushed open the doors and kicked down the stop, leaving them open so the survivors could stream in.
“Everyone pick a bunk and make yourself at home,” the guard instructed. “We don’t have set beds. The sheets’ll be cleaned at each shift change. That’s every twelve hours. Starting tomorrow we’ll be putting you to work, too. So just pick a spot and like it.”
The auditorium was massive, probably ten thousand square feet. A perfect rectangle with folded bleachers running along either side. The center was a grid of cots laid out four feet apart, running from about ten feet from the doors all the way to the other end. About half full. Probably a hundred male guards milling or sleeping.
Maurice chose one at the end. Sat down and sighed. He was dead tired, he realized. Maybe he could sleep now. With the walls between him and danger. Maybe he could rest.
He wasn’t sure.
Eighteen
Chris could feel seconds tick away from his life at every lock he passed. It was maddening. How many hours had he lost over the years, waiting for fucking doors to open in this place?
“Come the fuck on,” he hissed at the guard. “I don’t have all night.”
The lock started to open and he cut around it as soon as the opening was wide enough. The voice was angry with him, and it wasn’t being shy about it.
“It’s fine,” Chris told himself. “I’ve got to wait a bit anyway. Everything is still perfect.”
He made a right and went down the hall. Stopped at a trash can and dumped a few spent needles into it. Kept on. He had about an hour to kill, by his calculations. Just enough time to get one last thing done before he and the voice had their vengeance.
He would need to call ahead, he decided, he couldn't just wander around in the female wing.
Nineteen
Mercedes could feel something in the air. It was like a shift in weight. The feeling you get when a loved one dies: even before the phone call, you know something’s missing. Like a sadness that can’t be explained. Like a black hole, sucking all the light out of your life. Only this one was moving.
It was somewhere close, but she didn’t know why she could feel it. Like a rabbit sensing a wolf, she knew it was there. But what was it?
Maybe, she thought, it was all in her mind.
Everything that had been happening, her world was changing too fast. It was making her nervous, and now her nerves were paying her back for the strain. Now she was on edge. That was all.
She felt it move around her.
Abstract. So far away, yet breathing on the back of her neck. Evil. So evil it made her want to cry. Why was this happening?
“You feel that?” Jessie asked her from the bottom bunk.
Mercedes nodded, even if Jessie couldn’t see her. “What is it?” she asked.
“Feels like a ghost.”
Mercedes waited. Jessie went on, “I remember when I was little. We got a ghost in our house. My grandma said it came in through the mirror. If you put a mirror in a room and don’t put space between it and the wall, she said it makes a portal because you can’t see behind the mirror.”
“Sounds stupid.”
“That’s what my mom thought. And then one day – I was little, like seven – I was taking a shower. You know, too big to take baths. And I felt something. Something just like that. I opened the shower curtain and there was a man standing there.”
[TK: Life makes the best stories, don’t you think Jennie?]
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He disappeared right away.”
Mercedes waited. Jessie didn’t continue.
“And?” Mercedes asked.
“And nothing. It feels like a ghost.”
Mercedes watched the ceiling, tracking the feeling as it moved. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she said.
[TK: Except for the fact that different members of our family have lived in different haunted houses.]
The cell was quiet. Nothing but the two women breathing. Then a latch clanked and Mercedes snapped up, sitting in her bunk, her eyes staring at the cell door, which was opening.
Ramirez, one of the female guards, short and petite and olive skinned, stood on the other side. The door slowly rolling right. “Warden wants to see you,” she told Mercedes.
[RL: I can not think of four more terrifying words for Mercedes at that moment.]
Twenty
“I think about the devil, sometimes,” Tall Bill told Erin.
[RL: This entire sequence we’re reading here was totally my invention, and was intended to build the sense of foreboding to a level the season hadn’t
even skimmed before. I think/hope it succeeded, but either way it was all me and Tom only wishes he had come up with it.]
Erin sighed. “Not this again,” he said.
“Totally different take on it.”
“How’s that?”
“I think about what he would be like, to meet him,” Bill explained. “Would he be suave? Would he be smart? Would he be handsome?”
“That’s how he’s always described. He’s, you know, whatever he wants to be. Like God. God can be a bum or movie star handsome. Whatever he wants.”
[RL: “I like to imagine Jesus as a dirty old bum. And you’re like ‘Get out of here, you ol’ bum’ and then you go: ‘Wait, that was Jesus.’” Thank you Will Ferrell, and God speed.]
Bill was silent a moment. “I guess,” he said.
“Why? What were you thinking?”
Another pause. “I was wondering,” Bill told him. “How would you know it was the devil? I mean, everyone says this person is evil or that person, but how do you really know?”
Erin shrugged.
“I mean, the easy one is Hitler. Everyone accepts he was pure, unadulterated evil. But the people around him, they thought he was great.”
“Sure,” Erin agreed.
“So, I’m just wondering, what does true evil look like? And if you saw it, would you know?”
Twenty-One
Chris watched her walk into the shower room. God, he thought, she was beautiful. He had never really thought about it, but she was. Even in her prison uniform, she was stunning. He couldn’t imagine how he had missed it. He just hadn’t seen her with his new eyes, he told himself. Everything was clearer now. Almost perfect.
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