I saw some doubtful looks but Reeves looked ok with the decision and it made me feel a lot better. I had not been ok with just walking away.
Entry 5: Prison Break
I had shoved a blanket in my pack which I now took out and laid out on the ground. I pointed the blanket out to Ann and waggled my eyebrows. She gave me a sexy smile, slunk over, laid down on half the blanket, waggled her eyebrows at me, then pulled the other half of the blanket over her and rolled away from me. Not exactly what I had in mind. Oh, well. I put my pack up against a tree and laid down in the dirt to try and fall asleep.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been very useful. I’m not usually the one who lets everybody else work while I sit around. I think I’ll get better if you guys have patience with me.”
That was the most any of us had heard Chrissie say at one time since we had rescued her from the house in the cemetery. We all lay there for a second letting the words sink in. Based on the conditions we had found her in, I don’t think any of us had expected her to jump in and help out right away. Ann said as much.
“Chrissie, you’ve been through a lot. All of us have, but you have been through some stuff that added another element of horror to this whole mess. If you need to talk about it, all of us are here for you.”
Chrissie responded, “Thank you. If you guys want to hear I think it may help to talk about it. The images just seem stuck in my head and won’t come out. Maybe sharing will help.”
The prisoners were loaded on the bus in the parking lot of Brevard County Jail to be moved to the Seminole County facility. Inmate Hernandez shuffled out to the front of the line moving onto the bus to get himself a prime seat. The prisoners didn’t know it, but they were being moved as a very large percentage of the prison guards had called in sick with this flu that was showing up all over the news. The wardens had been conferring and decided the best thing to do was try and consolidate the prisoners at the Seminole facility so they could watch them properly and consolidate their manpower.
Due to the limited man power, they had opted to move some of the more civil prisoners first. This prison was one that had a program whereby prior military were able to volunteer to live in the ‘military’ wing of the prison. This consisted of an open bunking area that was run similar to the boot camp all of the inmates living there had been through. In order to participate, you had to have been in the military and you had to have good behavior and agree to live by the rules of the military wing. Inmates with military backgrounds tended to do well surrounded by like-minded individuals and were released earlier for good behavior than the general population of the prison.
Hernandez had been a Machinist Mate in the Navy who had ended up stationed at Roosevelt Rhodes, (Rosie Rhodes) in Puerto Rico. He had been assigned a post as a shore patrolman, he had used the post to blackmail the sailors he found engaged in prostitution, drugs, and other illegal activities. In his two-year tour of duty there he went from shaking down married sailors he pulled out of the local brothels to actively being involved in dealing drugs. His superiors started hearing rumors and getting reports from men he had shaken down and they started an investigation. They never pinned anything major on him but found enough to give him a general discharge instead of letting him transfer to another post.
Once in the civilian world, Hernandez very quickly found out that an OTH (Other Than Honorable) discharge pretty much made him unemployable. He decided to get back into the drug dealing that had been so profitable while he was in the military. He had gone out and bought several sheets of acid which he planned to break up and sell to young sailors on leave and looking for a good time over on the coast. The very first person he had approached to sell to was an undercover cop. He was charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute and thrown in jail.
After bouncing around to different jails for a while, he ended up in the military wing in Brevard County. He quickly became the go to guy in the wing for drugs. Boarding the bus today he noted they only had one guard with a shotgun and the driver. Normally there were at least two guards and the inmates were all chained up and locked into the seats. Today they just had them march onto the bus and take their seats. The guard and driver looked pretty rough. The guard coughed several times and took his seat yelling at everybody to sit down and shut up.
They pulled out and drove down the access road towards I-95 north. Hernandez had sat down next to his friend Jay. Jay had been a marine before getting kicked out for smoking pot on leave and popping positive on a drug test. When he’d gotten out he had ended up working as a bouncer at different clubs before finally ending up in prison. Jay had seriously injured a guy at the bar he was working the front door for. The guy he hurt had been hitting on a waitress that Jay was sort of dating and Jay had broken the guys arm then shoved his face into a mirror hard enough to break the mirror and lacerate the guys face bad enough to require reconstructive surgery.
The driver slowed the bus down and stopped in the middle of the street and slumped in his seat. The guard went up to look at him.
“Everybody stay in your seats!” The guard yelled over his shoulder then got on the radio connected to the dash on the bus and radioed dispatch. “Dispatch, this is prison transport three-two-four alpha, our driver has passed out, please advise.”
The guard set there for a few more minutes but no one responded to him. He fiddled with the dials and tried again and still got nothing. Around the tenth time he tried he finally got a response, “This is dispatch to prison transport three-two-four-alpha, please be advised this sickness appears to be widespread and there are currently riots going on in the prisons. We are attempting to send medical and backup to your location but it will likely be a few hours. Advise you pull over and wait, will contact you again when assistance is in route.”
The guard set his shotgun down and picked up the slumped over driver by wrapping his arms around the guys’ waist. He awkwardly dragged him into the seat he had been riding in at the front of the bus and latched him in with the seat belt. Then he engaged the drive on the bus and moved them to the side of the road.
“Ok, everybody, we’re going to be sitting here for a bit. Keep the noise down while we wait.” The guard set down in the driver’s seat with his shotgun across his lap and we all commenced to wait. Hernandez leaned back in his seat for a nap.
Hernandez woke up from his cat nap to the sound of screaming. The driver was sprawled across the two guys in the first row of the prisoner seats and had his teeth locked into one of the inmate’s cheeks, from the look of the bloody lump on the guy’s head the driver had already ripped his ear off. The inmate sitting next to the one being attacked was trying to get up and over the seat to escape. His hand grazed the driver who let go of the first inmate and jumped on the other guy.
Everyone on the bus was yelling now. The driver was ignoring the punches in the face he was taking from the inmate and attempting to get at any exposed skin with his teeth and fingers. The two guys in the seat across from where the driver was tearing into the two inmates stood up and slipped past the gory scene, running out the front door of the bus. The guard did not attempt to stop them or even look up.
Jay was looking around wildly for a weapon. Hernandez did not waste his time looking for a weapon. Realizing that a prison bus would have secured pretty much anything that may be useful. He was thinking along the same lines at the two guys who had just run off the bus and were now standing about twenty yards away looking around shiftlessly. Hernandez nudged Jay.
“Hey man, let’s make a break for it. Get a stampede going out the front door.”
With a plan laid out now, Jay and Hernandez started shoving people towards the front door. Most of the people on the bus were trying to go the other way which was causing them some issues with maintaining the momentum to get enough of a human wave to carry them out the front door. It got worse about a minute later when another scream came from the front of the bus. The guard had dropped his shot gun on the floor and
was now ripping into people as well.
Hernandez and Jay grabbed another one of their buddies, Mitchell, USMC Dishonorable Discharge, and knocked people out of their way to get into the fight. The driver was rolling around in one of the bus seats with a fat ex-air force guy who had enjoyed looking at extremely inappropriate things on his work computer and wasn’t smart enough to hide it. Turns out what he liked looking at was also illegal so he was now mixed in with the rest of them. Even among criminals he was looked down on, so no one even had a second thought about trying to pull the driver off of him.
Jay approached the guard who was coming straight at him and threw a haymaker that knocked the guard over a couple of seats. The guard bounce back up immediately and jumped at Jay again. Jay repeated the process with the guard bouncing back up and coming at him again. Before Jay had the chance to take another swing there was a loud boom and the guard went flying to the side. Jay had gone deaf in his right ear from the proximity of the shot going off and he turned to give Hernandez a cuss filled lecture on aiming a little better next time. As he turned Hernandez pulled the trigger again and shot the driver who had stood up and had been about to jump on Jay from behind.
The air held the coppery smell of blood and the acrid odor of gun powder. Everyone on the bus was breathing hard and looking around wildly. Except for the inmate who had been asleep in the back. He popped up and jumped on one of the guys in the back and started ripping and biting at him. The other guys around them freaked out and jumped out of the way. Hernandez pumped in another shell, walked to the back of the bus, put the shotgun to the freaks temple and pulled the trigger.
“I’m out of here.” Hernandez said, loud enough for everyone to hear over the ringing in their ears from the repeated shotgun blasts in the confined space of the bus. “All of you saw that was self-defense. I doubt it would matter though since I killed a guard, I’m getting off this bus and starting a new life somewhere before I get locked up forever. Jay, Mitchell, any of the rest of you guys who want to come with me feel free, I’ve got a weird feeling about what’s going on.”
All in all, five more of the guys decided to go with them, the rest either were short-timers and did not want to jeopardize getting let out early or were too hurt or scared to go. The ones he took with him mostly had years left on their sentences and were the kind of guys who weren’t easily scared. They were also the kind of guys who did not look too far into the future or consider the consequences of their actions much beyond the next five minutes or so.
“When the cops show up tell them that we left to go look for help. Telling them we went the other way would be appreciated. Especially if any of us end back up in jail because you told them the right direction.” With those words Hernandez led his new gang down the road and up towards the I-95 interchange. He was leader because he seemed to have a plan, he was respected by all of them, and he was carrying a large shotgun.
Hernandez continued walking until they saw flashing lights up ahead. It looked like a roadblock was being formed. He led his group into the woods and carefully circled around to get a better look, having told the rest of them to stay behind and out of sight. He saw the roadblock included National Guard vehicles and a lot of weapons and camouflage. Considering there little ‘incident’ on the bus had only happened maybe an hour before it did not seem very likely that this whole roadblock had been setup for them.
Hernandez made his way back to his men. He had been thinking the whole time.
“Guys, something serious seems to be going on. There’s weekend warriors waving their guns all over the place out on the road. There’s a bunch of them but less than there should be to man the vehicles and guns they have setup. I think this sickness thing is all over the place. I think we need to stick to the woods and try to get somewhere we can hole up and figure out what’s up. Then we can head out to find us some fake ID and start new lives. Get me near a military base and I’ll find some kid willing to give up his ID and driver’s license for a couple hits of whatever we can pull for him.”
“I do not want to get sick though. If any of you feel sick you need to get the fuck out of here. This is your last chance on that one. I hear a sneeze or a cough I might put you in the ground so if you got allergies or anything I suggest you leave.”
Nobody moved. Everybody knew Hernandez was serious. They’d just seen him waste three dudes on the bus without even hesitating. Seemed like a good guy to follow. Plus, he had the big gun.
They all stood around and stared at each other for a few minutes then Hernandez took the lead and they melted into the woods. He got them about two hundred yards off the road and they started moving roughly North West until they started hitting civilization, at which point they turned North. They heard sirens in the distance from all directions. Occasionally, they heard the sound of single shots or automatic weapons being fired. At least twice, F-15s flew by going subsonic above them.
They got hungry. They were all used to hard work but they were also used to three square meals a day courtesy of Uncle Sam. Either in or out of prison. They moved towards the road until they came across the back of a sub-division. Moving carefully, under cover of darkness they moved from yard to yard cautiously trying the sliding glass doors. The third one they tried opened. When they went in a small dog started yapping at them hysterically. A large foot with work boots came down hard on the small dog and it went instantly quiet.
A woman called out from somewhere in the house. “Trixie? Come back to mama Trixie. Time for bed, do you need to go out? Where are you – “
The older woman had walked into the kitchen and flicked on the light. Revealing the rough men in the orange jumpsuits standing around her dead dog. One of them with ‘Hernandez’ stenciled on his jumpsuit leveled a shotgun at her and simply said, “Scream or yell and you die. We want food, whatever money you have, and if you were a little bit younger we may be able to use you for something else but oh well. I guess we’re probably in a hurry anyway. Now, unless you want us to not be in a hurry, get us some food and tell us what the hell is going on in the world?”
The old woman was shaking. She was so scared she felt a dribble of piss running down her leg. She stepped over her dead pet and went to the pantry.
“I was watching the news and they said it was the flu and for everybody to just try and stay at home. Then they came on and said people were going crazy and trying to kill each other and if you were able to go, to go to one of the shelters.”
The woman looked around the room. “I stayed here. I was going to go to the shelter tomorrow if I did not hear anything new.”
She screwed up her courage and reached into the pantry behind the large bag of stove top she was saving for when her grandkids visited. They were in love with “Grammys Stove Top”. Like here’s was different than anybody else’s. All she did was dump about a cup of brown sugar into it when no one was looking and instant grandchild love!
She had not even kissed a man since her husband had died three years ago. She didn’t like the look in these convict’s eyes. She slid the stove top stuffing bag out of the way took a deep breath, pulled out the Smith and Wesson revolver, clicked the safety off, turned, and started shooting. The prisoners were diving everywhere for cover. Hernandez had already started ducking when he heard the sound of the safety being clicked off. He bounced up now and shot the old lady in the chest. She fell on the floor and died.
He looked around the room. One of his guys was bleeding pretty bad on his shoulder and another was sporting a big gouge on his side where he had jumped right onto some kind of statue of an angel made of metal. The wing had cut him right up the side, he was bleeding pretty bad but should live. Pretty much a miracle no one had been hit, or just horrible shooting at close quarters. None of that changed the fact that he was hungry.
Stepping over the old lady’s body he grabbed a variety pack of snack size chips out of the pantry. He opened up a bag of Cheetos and threw the box over to Jay who moved several flavors out of the way to sh
ow that he was a sour cream and onion kind of guy. They started passing around food when they heard banging on the front door and yells and screams coming from all around the house.
Not wanting to get stuck in the home, especially on hearing the front window breaking, Hernandez waved for everyone to follow him and then ran out the back door. Jay stooped to pick up the dead woman’s pistol and then followed. The whole group was back out in the woods within about thirty seconds of the screams starting. Panting hard, Hernandez signaled them to settle down in the brush and then he crawled over to the edge of the yard to watch the house.
He saw several people enter the house through the back door. Seemed like they were all drunk or high or something. They randomly smashed stuff and screamed but eventually calmed down and just stood there staring vacantly at whatever they were facing when they decided to stop. Some of them settled to the ground and appeared to go to sleep. A couple stooped down over the old woman.
Hernandez assumed they were checking on her to see if she was Ok so he started backing up. Which put him at a different angle to the slider and he saw that they were biting her? He lay there for a while watching and putting things together in his head. Then he very slowly crawled back to the rest of his team who were sitting around waiting. The one skill common to all the branches of the military is learning how to sit around and wait patiently. Hernandez assumed if he had taken another fifteen minutes there would have probably been a game of spades going.
Zournal (Book 2): Cruising The 'Poc Page 3