THE THOUSAND DOLLAR BREAKOUT: Colt Ryder Uncovers A Deadly Fight Club At San Quentin State Prison . . . Will He Escape With His Life?

by J. T. Brannan

  The whole thing just got worse and worse. Gordon wanted a riot in his own prison, just to cover up the tracks left by his own damn fight-club.

  The guy was even more sociopathic than most of his inmates.

  “Consider it done,” Michaels assured him.

  “But leave this one alone, you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear,” the gang boss agreed, looking at me with lifeless eyes. “Loud and clear.”

  “And as for you,” Gordon said, turning to me, “you get some rest. You’ve certainly earned it . . . and you’re definitely going to need it.”

  Chapter Eight

  I was asleep in the infirmary bed when the sirens started sounding, the loud wail filling the room, bouncing off the walls.

  The riot.

  Damn, Michaels hadn’t wasted any time.

  I could hear noises outside the room – shouting and running, boots pounding down the corridor outside.

  I felt for the cuffs, where they met the rail of my bed, and started to try and break them off. Gordon had made Michaels promise not to hurt me, and Michaels had agreed, but I wasn’t sure I believed him; after all, riots were chaotic affairs, and shit happened.

  Michaels could get away with murder; indeed, that was the whole point.

  There was no breaking the cuffs, no matter how hard I tried, and so – in the dark of my room, sirens still wailing outside – I began trying to work the rails themselves, shaking them back and forth like a madman.

  More noise outside the room, more shouting, the sounds of fighting, glass breaking, metal clanging.

  My door opening, light and sound spilling in from outside.

  I looked up from my bed, still trying desperately to break the rails I was secured to, and saw Frank and Karl enter the room, five more skin-headed Aryan goons right behind them. They all had weapons of one sort or another, a mixture of shanks, pipes and homemade hatchets, and I was still attached to the damn stretcher.

  Come on, damn it!

  They reached me and – panic causing my muscles to contract harder than they ever had before – I finally wrenched the rails clean off the stretcher; and then I leaped up and smashed the right rail into Frank’s face, the left down over Karl’s head.

  They staggered and fell, and I slammed a knee into Karl’s chest as I raced past him, on a collision course with the other five men.

  The first man I reached tried to slam his hatchet into my head and I moved in, blocked the underside of his arms, hit him hard in the solar plexus with a single knuckle, and then stripped the weapon from his hands as he gasped for breath and went down.

  I turned to avoid a gleaming shank, swinging the hatchet as I went, embedding it in the man’s side. He squealed and fell, and I pulled the hatchet out and buried in the face of the next guy, splitting the skull wide open from the front; the blade went so deep I couldn’t pull it back out.

  I felt a sharp pain in my side and turned to see a long needle sticking out of it, blood dripping, a man’s hand on the other end. He pulled it out and tried to stab me again, but I used the edge of my hand to strike him hard in the windpipe, startling him; and as he tried to remember how to breathe, I grabbed his wrists, bent his arm at the elbow, and made him stab himself in the chest with his own weapon. I stripped the shank out of his hand and stabbed him again, before I was knocked to the ground by someone else.

  I almost blacked out, and realized I must have been banged around the head with one of the metal pipes. But I wasn’t out of it, and I rolled over and stabbed the shank through the guy’s foot, pulled it out as he screamed and stabbed him through the knee, then the thigh; pulled it out again and stabbed him in the groin, the intestine, the stomach. Six hits in not more than a second or two, my arm pumping the blade in and out of him.

  He fell, and I was already moving, seeing the guy I’d hit in the solar plexus getting to his feet, and I rushed across and stabbed him too, right in the throat. But then I took a shot from a pipe, right in the ribs, and I doubled over, watched as the attacker loaded up again, ready to cave my head in with the solid bar. But I was quicker, and sliced across the arm that held the pipe with my own weapon, then cut back across his chest before gripping him hard and shoving it straight up under his chin, the blade passing through the underside of his jaw and pinning his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

  Frank had recovered by then, and rushed toward me, strong weightlifter’s hands ready to rip me apart. The shank had been left in the last guy’s head, and as Frank approached I bent low and scooped up the metal pipe, slamming it into his knee as he reached me. He yelled in pain, and I hit him on the arm, heard the bone crack, and then in the ribs and then – as he crouched over from the blow – I let him have it over the back of his skull, splitting the bald head wide open.

  I felt a heavy impact moments later, as I was tackled to the ground by Karl. Caught off guard, I fell to my back and Karl mounted me and started raining down punches on me with his big, meaty fists.

  I weathered the blows as my hand reached out blindly in the semi-dark of the room, reaching for a weapon . . . any weapon.

  And then my hand reached something and I swung it, my other hand reaching up to secure the big man in place as the hatchet struck home, burying itself through the side of Karl’s head. I saw the pain, the surprise, and the life drain out of his eyes, and I rolled his big heavy body off me and got back to my feet. I saw a shank on the floor and picked it up, a weapon in each hand now, ready for more.

  Seven men were down, probably all dead, and the room was covered in blood and gore.

  Looked like Michaels had decided not to do as the warden asked, after all.

  I was just wondering if perhaps now was the time I should make my escape – my cell door was unlocked, the whole prison was probably in chaos – when armed prison officers came racing in, rifles aimed right at me.

  I dropped the weapons I was holding and sighed.

  Escape would just have to wait . . . for now, at least.

  It was probably just as well, I considered as a sudden wave of pain-fueled nausea hit me and I collapsed back onto my bed, holding the wound in my side as it bled over the sheets.

  In my condition, I probably wouldn’t have made it anyway.

  Chapter Nine

  The spike had luckily avoided my organs, I’d just taken it in the muscle tissue and surrounding crap. It hurt like a bastard, but it wasn’t going to kill me. Missed the ribs too – although it turned out that the guy with the pipe had broken two of them anyway. Had a concussion from the blow to the head too, and – all in all – I was in a bad way.

  I didn’t cheer up when Gordon came back to the infirmary to visit, either.

  “You don’t look too good, son,” he said.

  “Well, there’s no fucking surprise there,” I said. “I guess your little Nazi friend didn’t keep his side of the bargain.”

  “No,” Gordon said, “he didn’t.” He threw a black and white photograph onto my bed, and I stared down at it.

  It showed Trent Michaels in his prison jumpsuit, lying on the concrete floor of a prison corridor, head half blown off by what could only have been a shotgun.

  “Looks like he tried to escape during the riot,” Gordon said, pretending sadness. “One of my men had to respond.”

  “By blowing his fucking head off?” I asked. I wasn’t sorry to see the bastard gone – it was one less thing to worry about, after all – but I felt a scalding sensation in my gut as I was reminded that Gordon was even more ruthless than Michaels had been.

  Gordon shrugged. “It was a riot. Shit happens, okay? My man was forced to respond to a fleeing prisoner, and the only weapon he had was a shotgun. What are you gonna do?”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said.

  “I am right. Looks like you took out all the others yourself. Good work, and I’m sorry it happened like that.”

  “The riot was your fucking idea in the first place,” I reminded him.

  Gordon held his hands up. �
�Mea culpa, mea culpa,” he said, “you’re right. It was possibly a hasty move. But it’s all worked out okay. I’ll add Michaels – and your seven bodies – to the count, maybe blame the Black Gorilla Family for the whole thing, get some of those boys some extra time. Maybe some of those Mexican bastards in La EME too, they need shaking up a bit.”

  I could see from his smile that he was enjoying this; he evidently saw the prison as his own personal kingdom, and felt himself to be unassailable.

  “How many, in the end?” I asked.

  “How many what?”

  “How many people died last night?”

  Gordon looked quizzically up to the side, as if he was trying to recall the statistics. “Last I heard – not including the ones you took care of – the figure was hovering somewhere around half a dozen or so.”

  “Half a dozen innocent people, just to cover up the ones that were already dead?”

  “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs,” he replied, face serious. “And they were hardly innocent; they’d all been convicted in US courts – beyond reasonable doubt, I might remind you – of some of the worst crimes you can imagine. These aren’t boy scouts, you know.”

  I knew that Gordon was right, that some of these guys were real slime – hadn’t I already killed several of them myself? But that was in self-defense, and was therefore – in my mind, at least – completely legitimate. What Gordon was doing was something else altogether. He was right, the courts had convicted them; but those same courts had also decided on their punishment, which was incarceration, not death. It was Gordon’s abuse of his position, his authority, that appalled me. He felt he could do whatever he wanted, to whoever he wanted.

  I didn’t know how I was going to do it yet, but I knew then and there that I was going to stop this man, one way or another.

  “So, when’s this other tournament?” I asked.

  “Wondering if you have enough time to recover?” Gordon asked with a smile.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it son, we’ve got a few days yet. I’m sure you’ll be fighting fit. Okay?”

  “I guess I don’t have much choice, anyway. Do I?”

  Gordon shook his head. “No,” he said, “I guess you don’t, at that. But,” he continued after a thoughtful pause, “don’t give me that tortured soul shit, it doesn’t wash. You enjoy it.”

  “What?”

  “The fighting. You enjoy it. I can see it in the way you move, the way you breathe, the way you look. It’s like you were born to fight, born for war, like maybe you’re only truly alive when you’re putting another man down, and everything else in your life is just the interlude between battles. Go on,” he urged, “try and deny it.”

  I tried to open my mouth to speak, to protest, but the trouble was . . . maybe Gordon was right?

  Hell, “maybe” nothing – he was right.

  I was an animal, a creature meant only for violence; I’d tried civilization once, and it hadn’t worked out. What I did now, I did to help people who might otherwise never get the justice they deserved, but I knew I was only justifying my existence by offering my services to others.

  The bitter truth was that I did what I did, because I couldn’t live without doing it.

  “You see?” Gordon asked with a smile. “You can’t, can you?” He shook his head. “No, of course you can’t. We are what we are, and there’s no changing us. No, I don’t know what you think of me, and – quite frankly – I don’t care. Because I’m true to myself, and I reckon that makes me more honest than most. And you,” he said with a laugh, “you should be thanking me. I’m giving you a chance to legitimize your bloodlust, I’m letting you have free rein, okay? You can fight these guys, you can even kill them, and there’s no blowback, no punishment. It’s gotta be Heaven for a man like you, right?”

  The suggestion was uncomfortable, maybe too close to the bone, so I decided to ignore it. There were probably better ways of handling these issues, but not thinking about them had always worked for me, and I saw no reason to change now.

  I gave Gordon a noncommittal grunt in response to his comments, and he just nodded his head as he stared at me, as if I’d just confirmed exactly what he was thinking.

  “Anyway,” he said as he stood, “I can’t be here chatting all day, fun though it is. I’ve got a prison to run, you know.” He winked at me from behind those rimless spectacles, turned on his heel, and left the room.

  A part of me considered thinking further about what he’d said.

  The other part said fuck it, and that was the part I liked best – and so I forgot all about our little chat, closed my eyes, and fell fast asleep.

  Chapter Ten

  It was the middle of the night and the wind was building, pushing up clouds of dust between the buildings as we approached the chopper, its spinning rotor blades whipping up a storm of their own.

  It reminded me of Afghanistan and Iraq, and a whole host of countries in between – heads down as we raced to board the transport choppers, finding a space, crammed in with our weapons and equipment; some people silent, others chatting without stop as we took off and flew low over enemy territory, pilots hugging the landscape, the ride so jerky and brutal at least one of us was always sick; getting to our target, our adrenaline white-hot, coursing through every part of us as the chopper slowed to a hover and we fast-roped out, hitting the ground at a run, assault rifles up and ready as our transport lifted off in a hurry; and then that was it, the mission was a go, we were on, and fighting for our lives.

  All those memories, and more, came flooding back to me as I was marched across the prison grounds by four armed guards, headed for the baseball field where the helicopter had landed.

  A week had passed, and my wounds were doing a lot better. The cuts had scabbed over nicely, there were no blood infections, the muscles of my side which had been stabbed were knitting together nicely again, my head was a lot less fuzzy, and my ribs . . . well, they still hurt like hell.

  I’d been left alone during that time, the word of the warden obviously carrying more weight than that of Officer Bush; I’d even been given more time out in the private yards to train. I hadn’t done too much of that though, preferring to use my energy to recover instead.

  We got to the chopper and my head bent low, an ingrained habit, my eyes closed tight to protect against the swirling dust of the baseball field; the guards pushed me forward, the door opened, and two more guards grabbed me from inside the cabin and hauled me aboard.

  I rubbed my eyes to clear out the last of the dirt and opened them, saw Gordon and Bush already there, alongside several guards.

  “Evening, Mitch,” Gordon said with a smile. “Good to see you.”

  “Wish I could say the same,” I said as the guards pushed me into one of the canvas seats.

  “I told you about that mouth,” Bush reminded the warden, but Gordon just smiled, amused.

  “Oh, I don’t worry about that none,” Gordon said. “Fighters have got to have personality, right?”

  “If you say so,” I said, as Gordon gave the signal to the pilot, and we started to lift off the baseball field, sound of the rotors picking up now. “So, you gonna tell me where we’re going?”

  “All in good time, my friend,” Gordon said as we pulled away from the prison, into the dark, windy skies above. “All in good time.”

  That good time, it turned out, wasn’t long at all; almost as soon as we took off, we were starting to descend, and I wondered if it was something to do with the weather; there was a ferocious storm now, which was pushing the chopper this way and that.

  “There a problem?” I asked, but Gordon smiled enigmatically and shook his head.

  “No problem,” he said. “We’re landing.”

  “Landing?” I asked, looking out of the windows into the thick mist below. “Where?”

  And then I saw it, the huge rock rising out of the mist toward us.

  Alcatraz.
>
  We were going to be fighting at Alcatraz.

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  I didn’t get a tour of the island, which was a shame – I’d always wanted to visit the place.

  Instead, I had to make do with a long and uncomfortable walk along the path that led northwest from the helipad – set up on the old parade ground – to the main prison complex, right in the middle of the island, built on its highest point. But it was so dark, wet and windy that I couldn’t see a thing; we all wore rainslickers, and it was all we could do to stay on the path. The rain and mist were so hard and dense, it seemed we were swimming in black ink for most of the time.

  We’d made it inside in the end though, and – after taking the rainslickers off and getting ourselves sorted – I had my first real look at the place.

  Old was the first word that sprang to mind, old and worn out; but then again, this place hadn’t actually been used as a prison since 1963. Strange that the most famous prison in America – maybe the world – had actually only been used as a federal penitentiary for 29 years. But in that time it had gained notoriety for housing prisoners who had simply caused too much trouble at other federal prisons, including Al Capone himself.

  Gordon had immediately left us, going to attend to business elsewhere in the building, but Bush stayed with me as the armed guards led me through the sally port toward the main gate that led to the cell blocks. “Amazing place, right?” Bush said. “Can’t believe Gordon managed to organize it. Guys from the other prisons will be arriving soon, I hope they manage to land okay. Weather’s a real bitch, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed as we passed through into B Block, electric bulbs casting an eerie light over the bare concrete walls. The prison seemed completely empty, and the hollow ring of our shoes and voices only added to the eeriness. “So, how did he manage it?”