Dangerous Desires

by Tia Siren

  “The doors to the outside are open,” he said. “You need to go.”

  His eyes were locked on Crewe, who looked back at him with hesitation.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Yes, you can,” the man whose jacket said ‘Redding’ insisted. “This is your chance. The guards are going to be distracted by the riot. You can get out and go do what you need to do. You have to do this. You owe it to my brother.”

  There was another scream and Whisper heard gunshots reverberating through the building. She gasped and took a running step toward the door, but Crewe held up an arm to stop her.

  “It’s not safe for you out there,” he said. He looked at the men, his eyes lingering on Redding for a few long moments. “Are you sure that the way is clear?” he asked.

  Whisper felt her heart thudding in her chest. She knew what that meant. He was going to try to escape. Redding nodded.

  “You have to move fast.”

  Crewe glanced back at Whisper and then started for the door. She fell into step behind him, not giving the other men the opportunity to stop her. She remained close behind Crewe, letting his strong body make a path through the other inmates as they started for the steps. As soon as they made their way down to the main floor of the pod, she was greeted with a sight of unchained chaos and horror. The floor was slick with blood and scattered with broken bodies and remnants of beds, clothing, and papers. The walls echoed with the sound of screams and she could smell the acrid, stinging smell of a fire burning somewhere close by. The riot was rapidly spiraling to a point that it couldn’t sustain itself. The special forces would arrive soon and there would be more bloodshed. The thought of Crewe being a part of it immediately made her stomach turn, but she didn’t know why.

  They were making their way across the dayroom when another inmate threw a chair toward them. Whisper ducked to get out of the way and saw Crewe descend on the man, his fist cracking into the middle of the other inmate’s face. Redding suddenly appeared behind her, rushing toward the men grappling on the floor, and dragged Crewe back away from him.

  “You need to go!” he shouted.

  Whisper suddenly jumped into action. She ran toward Crewe and reached out to grab his arm. As she did, she heard an explosion of gunfire. The world seemed to slow down around her as she turned toward the sound. An inmate was holding a gun and a guard lay at his feet. Somehow, they had gotten into the locked cabinet in the cage at the far side of the dayroom. The inmates were armed. The prison was now under their control.

  “The catwalk,” Redding said.

  “What?” Crewe asked.

  “Head to the catwalk. Get out of here.”

  “Come with me.”

  Whisper latched onto Crewe’s arm and reached for the cuffs on her hip.

  “I can’t let you do that,” she said. She closed a cuff around his wrist and reached for her radio. “I need assistance,” she said into the crackling that came through the speaker. “The back doors are undefended.”

  “Stop!” Redding shouted, grabbing the radio out of her hand and tossing it across the room.

  He reached for her, but Crewe stepped forward.

  “Leave her alone,” he demanded, then turned to Whisper. “Please,” he said. “I’m innocent. I know you’ve heard that from every other man who has ever walked through those doors, but I need you to believe me. I am telling the truth. I’ve done a lot of things in my life. Some of them are pretty horrible. I won’t deny that. But I didn’t do what they say that I did. I’m serving someone else’s sentence, and if I don’t get out of here now, another person is going to die because of them. I need to do this.” His eyes burned into hers and she could see the sincerity in them. “Please.”

  Whisper released the cuff and tucked it back into her belt. She looked around and then back at him.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  As she darted across the room, praying every step that she would be able to get around the men with bloodlust in their eyes and violent hunger for a woman in their fingers, she knew that she had been standing at a fork in her life, and the decision that she had just made had put her on a completely different path. The riot was building around her and instead of doing her job and trying to bring the men back into submission, she was helping one of them escape. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat and she felt that at any moment she could pass out, but she kept going. She didn’t know why, but she believed Crewe.

  There was something different about him.

  Whisper’s hands were shaking as she approached the small, unobtrusive door and used her code to open it, ushering the men through it as quickly as she could. She slammed the door closed, not wanting to allow any of the other inmates through. They scrambled up the narrow set of stairs and through two more doors before ending up on the catwalk. The narrow hallway was eerily quiet in comparison to the dayroom that they had just left. She could hear their breathing, overlapping, blending, filling each second that passed with the sound of desperation. This corridor was near their ceiling and had tall tinted windows on either side, concealing whoever was inside from view while allowing them to look down into the pods. A glance through the windows revealed that the riot had spread quickly and was now boiling out of control throughout the prison. She knew that they needed to get through the catwalk as fast as they could so that she could direct the men through the staff areas and out of the prison. By now the cameras would have been destroyed, enabling her to emerge back into the riot without anyone ever knowing what she had done. They would get the prison back under control and she would be able to act as horrified and confounded by the disappearance of these men as the rest of the guards would be. She could slip back into her role and pretend that nothing had happened.

  Don’t come in…

  They were nearly to the door that would lead them out onto another stairwell when Whisper heard heavy footsteps coming toward them.

  “Fuck,” Crewe muttered. “It’s another guard.”

  “Back the other way!” Redding yelled.

  They started back in the other direction, though Whisper knew that there was no way that they were going to be able to get out of the corridor without being detected. They had gone only a few yards when the sound of the footsteps reverberating around them got louder and she knew that someone was coming at them from the other direction as well. Either she hadn’t closed the door well enough or someone had used another access point to get onto the catwalk.

  Ahead of them she saw another inmate rushing toward them. It was Greene, the man she had seen with the gun standing over the dead guard. Whisper felt like her heart had stopped. They skidded to a stop and turned to see two guards coming toward them from the other side, their black uniforms and full-face masks announcing that these were members of the special forces team that had been mobilized to bring the riot under control. These weren’t the guards who were tasked with the daily care and maintenance of the inmates, many of them new recruits brought in to fill the shortage that had been plaguing the prison for months. These men were lethal.

  The masked men shouted for all of them to stop and Whisper felt Redding grab onto her. She didn’t know if he intended to protect her or to use her as a shield, but there was nothing that she could do. Before she had any time to react, one of the men lifted the gun in his hand and aimed it at them. The sound of exchanged gunshots exploded in the small corridor, making Whisper feel like her head was going to explode. The force of the sound made her knees buckle and she hit the ground just as Redding scrambled for the blood-streaked gun that now lay beside Greene’s broken body. He scooped it into his hand and rolled onto his back. Whisper turned to look at the guards again, for the first time noticing that one of them was now lying on the ground, blood trickling from a wound in his neck. It was a fluke. The uniforms were designed to protect the men from bullets, but couldn’t defend every inch of their body. There was no way that Greene would have known how to aim a bullet so that it went between the laye
rs of the uniform to burrow down into the guard’s vulnerable neck. The miniscule chances, however, didn’t change that the guard now lay dead.

  Redding raised the gun and the other guard lifted his. Suddenly Crewe shot forward, his shoulder digging into the guard’s stomach so that he fell back. The gun in his hand went off when the guard hit the floor and Whisper heard the bullet ricochet off of the wall before she heard Redding wail in pain. Crewe grabbed the gun from the guard and the man scrambled back away from him. Whisper could see the fear in his eyes, but he had been trained for this. This is what he was supposed to be able to handle without hesitation. He looked down at the bodies lying on the floor and then at Whisper. She expected him to grab her and try to get her out of the corridor, but he didn’t. Instead, he forced past both of them and ran toward the nearest exit that would get him out of the catwalk.

  “Coward!” Crewe screamed after him.

  “Shut up and go,” Redding gasped from the floor.

  Whisper looked at him and saw his face contorted with pain. His hand was pressed to the upper portion of his chest and she could see blood seeping out from between his fingers. Crewe dropped down to crouch by his side and reached for his hand, but Redding pulled away, shaking his head.

  “Go,” he said through gritted teeth. “You need to get out of here.”

  “You’re hurt,” Crewe said.

  “It doesn’t matter. You have to go. If you don’t get out of here now, they’ll make sure that you never see the light of day again. You’ll lose your chance. Go.”

  “That guard will send others up here,” Whisper said. “They’ll bring him to the infirmary. But they’ll probably be here in a matter of seconds.”

  “Go,” Redding said. “Now.”

  Overcome with a compulsion that she couldn’t deny, Whisper suddenly jumped to her feet.

  “Take me with you,” she said.

  3

  Crewe looked at her questioningly, the expression in his eyes both shocked and confused.

  “What?” he said. “No. No, you stay here with Redding. Make sure that they get to him.”

  “You’ll never make it,” the guard he only knew as Blaire said. “Greene murdered two guards and Redding threatened another with a stolen gun. If you go by yourself, you’ll be dead before your feet hit the yard. If you bring me with you, they’ll hold fire so that they don’t put my life at risk.”

  “And then they’ll send out the National Guard,” Crewe said.

  “Maybe,” Blaire told him, “but at least you’ll have a chance to get away. If you don’t have, me, you don’t have a chance.”

  “Take her,” Redding said, his voice getting weaker. “She’ll get you out. Go to the safe house.”

  “I’ll come back for you,” he promised Redding. “I’ll get you out of here.”

  “Just get to the safe house,” Redding said. “And finish this shit.”

  Crewe looked across Redding at the guard.

  “Where do we go?” he asked.

  Without another word or giving herself a chance to think, she took off down the corridor in the same direction they were already going. Crewe fell into step behind her, forcing himself to keep his focus ahead as he stepped over the body of the masked guard. As he followed her down the catwalk it briefly occurred to Crewe that this beautiful woman might not be what she was presenting herself to be. Just as he had said to Redding, she had always treated them well, never looking at them like dirt or treating them like animals the way that the other guards had, and she had come with him this far, but she was still a guard. She was still an employee of a prison embroiled in a riot and he was trusting her to bring him safely to escape. Though he was starting to question his decision to follow her, Crewe knew that he didn’t really have a choice. It was either this or return to the pod where he would either be captured and locked down potentially for the rest of his life sentence, a sentence that he hadn’t earned, or killed by either the rioting prisoners or the infuriated responders. He could be handing himself over to the authorities by following her, but it was better than sacrificing himself to the slaughter.

  His mind was spinning as they scrambled down another stairwell and out of a narrow door to a brightly lit area of the prison that he had never seen. He could only assume that this was a section set aside only for use by the staff. Not designed for the manipulation and psychological torment of the prisoners, this area lacked the dull grey paint and tall, windowless walls of the pod. Instead, the walls were a bright, refreshing white with a blue stripe along the center, the streak broken only by large windows positioned every few feet along the wider hallway. In the time that he had spent within the prisons, the only time that Crewe had seen the outside was when he was transferred from the jail to court, back to the jail, to the first prison to start his sentence, and then here to this prison to serve it out. Even when the guards said that they were having yard, what was really happening was funneling the inmates from the dayroom into a series of cages just beyond. Cement floored and surrounded on three sides by towering stone walls, the fourth a bank of bars, these recreational spaces were where the inmates paced angrily, ran laps, and worked out. Some who hadn’t proved themselves violent were permitted to go into a cage together and might go through the motions of a basketball game, but there was no fun in anything that they were doing. They were all just waiting, trapped, their minds always churning with ways that they would be able to get out.

  Now he could see the light of a dying day beyond the windows. The sun was falling, melting into the horizon and sending a deep orange glow across the grounds. It showed just how long the riot had been going. It felt like it all had happened in a matter of minutes, burning past him in a frenzy so that the edges of the minutes were tattered and he could barely fit in each breath. Instead, it seemed that it had been hours. He listened for the sound of other guards, but there was an almost chilling quiet through the space. Blaire guided Crewe into what looked like a locker room and grabbed a bag out of one of the lockers. She clutched it to her chest and headed toward a door at the far side of the room.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Crewe said.

  “Take hold of me.”

  He hesitated, but reached out and grasped her arm as hard as he could without feeling like he was hurting her but so that it still looked as though he had absolute control over her. If anyone did see them crossing the yard and leaving the prison, it needed to look like he was holding her hostage, not like she was going along with him of her own volition. If anyone questioned her motivations, it could put both of them at serious risk.

  They burst out of the door and he pulled in front of her, yanking on her arm to make it look like he was forcing her along with him.

  “Go to the parking lot,” she said under her breath.

  It was that command that made him realize that they hadn’t left the building into the recreation yard that was used by inmates in less-secure pods, but rather into a section beyond the first fence. Though he knew that it wasn’t the case, it felt as though the air was different here. The feeling of the sun on his back and the fresh, outdoor air filling his lungs was indescribable. He wanted to stop, to just stand still for a few seconds and savor what he was feeling, but he knew that he couldn’t. He wasn’t free. Not yet. The sound of screaming and gunfire was all around him and he needed to get the rest of the way out and away from the prison before he became a part of the casualties.

  Blaire made a show of using her credentials to get them through the fence, the expression on her face showing enough fear that he wondered what she was really going through. Beyond the fence to the other side of the lot he could see official vehicles sliding toward the building and teams of special operatives swarming the prison, but the employee lot was deserted. Despite the emptiness, they kept up their charade.

  “Get my keys,” she muttered to him. “I don’t want anyone who might be watching to see me get them for you.”

  Crewe plunged his hand int
o her bag and rummaged around until he felt his hand wrap around her keychain. He withdrew it and turned them toward the rows of vehicles in the parking lot.

  “Which one is it?” he asked.

  “The green one.”

  When they got to the car, Crewe forced the keys into the passenger door, but he felt her shake her head.

  “It doesn’t work,” she said. “That door doesn’t open.”

  “What do you mean?” he hissed.

  “It doesn’t open,” she repeated. “It got jammed in an accident and I never got it fixed.”

  “Shit,” Crewe muttered, walking around the car toward the other side as he dragged her behind him.

  As he slammed the keys into the door he heard the squeal of tires approaching. He looked over his shoulder and saw several black vehicles coming across the grounds toward them. Panic shot through him and he wrenched the door open. Ducking into the car, he reached down and adjusted the seat so that he sat further back, then leaned out of the car and grabbed Blaire again, pulling her in on top of him. She gasped slightly as she landed in his lap, but he couldn’t let himself think about the beautiful woman nestled against him. In that moment, she was his hostage and they needed to get away from the prison.

  Tucking her in close to him, Crewe closed the door and forced the keys into the ignition. The car sputtered.

  “Why do you drive such a piece of shit?” he shouted before he thought through the words.

  “Because they don’t exactly pay a ton here,” the guard snapped back, showing the spark that he could always see in her eyes but had never been able to experience in the closed, regulated routine of their usual day. “It runs and drives, and that’s really ticks off everything on my car priority list.”