by Glen Frost
"You get her?" a man's voice asked from somewhere over that way.
"Pretty sure I did." Another male voice, this one deeper and more gravelly with a distinct Texan twang.
"Not sure we shoulda shot her, Larry. The boss lady said the guards are all fair game, but she didn't say nothing about other prisoners."
"She didn't say nothing about not fucking up other prisoners neither," Larry Whoever corrected. "If she's still warm, you can cover me while I give her ass a little parting kiss goodnight."
"If'n you say so, Larry."
The voices were coming closer. Now she could hear their footsteps too, approaching cautiously. She knew that there had to be at least one gun still pointed her way.
More than a few tables had gotten overturned and scattered during the short but brutal melee. The two men were kicking them aside and checking behind them, one by one, drawing ever nearer. Moving slowly so as to avoid attracting their attention, Anya brought her right leg in close to her chest, resting the foot lightly against the underside of the table, twisting her body in order to put it in a straight line with the sound of the mens' voices.
"Where are you, honey buns?" Larry could only have been four or five feet away from her, based on the proximity of his heavy breathing.
She lashed out with her foot, catapulting the table through the air as hard as she could. Both of her would-be hunters were knocked over like bowling pins, the air leaving their lungs in a massive whoooosh. Anya was on her feet in a split-second, leaping toward the sound of their groans and coming down on top of the table with a thud.
Two more gunshots came from underneath the table, almost deafeningly loud at such close quarters. The bullets punched through the plastic tabletop and embedded themselves in the tile ceiling high above them. Anya stomped down hard on the tabletop, once; twice; a third time. Each crushing impact brought a scream from somewhere underneath it. She hopped down and kicked the cracked and battered table to one side.
The two men lay side by side. Both wore orange jumpsuits. Even in the low light, it was obvious that the first man's face had been crushed. It was much too flat, the facial features sunk and depressed into the back of the skull in a weird basin effect. The distorted face bore a look of immense surprise, punctuated by two thin streams of blood which ran from the flattened nostrils.
Prisoner number two was still alive, though he probably wished he wasn't. Although his buddy had taken the brunt of her stomping, Anya was willing to bet that this guy — based on the fact that a handgun was laying next to him, she was guessing that this was Larry — was hurting pretty badly. He was clutching at the right side of his chest, bracing the ribs underneath his armpit.
"Get up."
The only response was a groan, so Anya delivered a motivational prod to the man's crotch...not hard enough to wound, but sufficient to induce a little pain.
"Jesus fucking Christ!" Larry whined, curling up into the fetal position. That in turn seemed to make his broken ribs hurt even more, and he rocked pathetically back and forth trying to find a position of comfort.
"I said 'get up,' or the next one will be in your ribs."
Full of resentment, Larry climbed to his feet. She saw his eyes glinting in the near-darkness, perhaps trying to figure out who she was and how the tables had been turned on him so dramatically.
"I shot you."
"Yes. I'm a tough girl, Larry. You really don't want to put that to the test."
"I was just trying to protect myself," he whined, the lie as pathetic as his voice was.
"Sure you don't want to give my ass a parting kiss goodnight?" She let his own words hang there between them for a moment before adding, "We both know exactly what you wanted, Larry, and if I don't get what I want, then I'm going to rip your balls off. And I promise you, I am not exaggerating one bit."
Something about the strange woman's tone of voice compelled Larry to believe her with absolute, instant conviction. "What do you want?" he asked quietly.
"I want to meet the new boss. Take me to the warden's office."
"If you're sure," he laughed nervously. "You haven't spoken to her yet?"
"Obviously not."
"She didn't get round to meeting all the prisoners yet," he explained, as much to himself as to Anya. "When she made the guards let us all out, I was one of the first to meet her. She said she'd be talking to all of us as soon as she could."
"I want to say thank you," Anya lied, "for giving me my freedom back."
"You sure about that? She's a pretty scary lady."
"You're scared of a woman?" She injected a little mockery into her tone, challenging his masculinity in an attempt to tease a little more information out of him.
"Wait 'til you meet her. She makes people do things...whatever she wants them to do. Just by asking. It's really fuckin' weird."
"What kind of things?"
"Didn't you hear her on the PA system?"
"I was sleeping pretty heavily," she lied again. "Just tell me."
They were walking in the direction of the doorway from which Larry and his buddy had emerged and starting shooting at her. Stepping out into the brightly-lit corridor, Anya noticed that the cell doors in this wing were all standing open. She looked in each one as they passed by, noticing that the beds were generally unmade and that all of the cells appeared to be empty.
"She said that her name was Debbie somethin'-or-other. Said that she was runnin' this place now, and that it was open season on the guards."
"Open season?" Anya had never heard the phrase before.
"That they was all fair game," Larry explained. "She said that some of 'em was disarmed, some of 'em wasn't, and that she sent them off to go try and hide from us. You'd expect 'em to run for the hills, I know that; but she told those poor fuckers that they wasn't to leave the prison, and you know what? They didn't! Not a one of 'em."
They had reached a staircase. Larry had to inch his way up step by step, still clutching at his ribs and groaning at every jolt and jostle. He gripped the handrail for support and leverage. Finally they reached the top, a broad landing which joined two hallways together. The Texan inmate led her to the right. They passed more cells. A dead body lay spread-eagled on the bed inside the fourth one they passed. It wore the uniform of a guard, and its face had been somehow removed, exposing the muscles and tendons that had once held it in place. As they walked by, Anya saw an inmate standing over the corpse; he was wearing the dead man's face across his own in a grisly mask, held on with what looked like a boot lace threaded through each of the temples. She was sickened to see that the masked prisoner was naked and masturbating over the body of his victim, one final act of humiliation directed towards those who had kept him imprisoned for who knew how long.
Anya turned away, not wanting to see the depraved inmate ejaculate. She gritted her teeth without even thinking about it. The corrections officers were, by and large, decent men and women. They had chosen a hazardous profession, it was true, and there was always a risk of violence when one was protecting society from the very worst of the worst, but nobody deserved to be treated like this. She resolved to stop this nightmare as soon as she possibly could, and if at all possible, she was going to avenge the suffering of the prison officers.
As they approached what a wall-mounted sign told her was the warden's office, Anya dropped back a couple of steps and quietly slipped in the ear plugs she had been keeping in her pockets.
It was time to end this before things got any worse.
Deborah Jovacs was a dead woman.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
It is an old truism that the hopelessly insane have no idea whatsoever that they are mad. Like many old sayings, it contains more than a grain of truth.
Debbie Jovacs was having the time of her life. Since she had first awoken to find herself being violated and had made the pig responsible pay for it with his life, the former army corporal had known that she was a dead woman. A coldly rational core still remained underneath th
e swirling madness of her deranged psyche, and that core was speaking to her all the time, whispering incessantly that this time there was NO WAY they were going to let her get away with prison; not after she'd butchered so many of her jailers.
The only thing more liberating than being a card-carrying psychopath, she reflected, was knowing with absolutely certainty that she was going to die. The only question now was how. Jovacs was under no illusion that she was ever getting out of here. Even though she could order the guards to let her out of any of the exits if she so chose, the soldier in her knew that the cops (most likely backed up by the military) would have enclosed the Supermax in a ring of steel already. There was no getting in, short of a full-scale military assault, and absolutely no getting out. She suspected that the only reason an attack hadn't been made already was because whoever was running this show wanted to give their hostage negotiators time to do their thing. So far, Anya had declined to take any of their calls, yet still they persisted, phoning the warden's office every couple of hours without fail in a desperate and vain attempt to get her attention.
They didn't realize that they would only be negotiating from a position of weakness: There was nothing they had that she actually wanted, and she'd be damned if she let them waste any more of her time than they already had by keeping her in a motherfucking coma for the past few months.
The closest thing to hostile action they had taken so far had been that Black Hawk fly-by an hour ago. Debbie had watched it from the window of her office, seeing the utility helicopter come barreling across the prison courtyard. Part of her had expected the attack to come then, and she had almost welcomed the idea in a way; yet it had apparently been nothing more than a recon flight, because the pilot hadn't stopped to off-load any troops. He'd taken some small arms fire from one of the released convicts, but she seriously doubted whether they'd done any damage, and the helo had soon sped off again.
The sense of disappointment had almost been tangible. She rather liked the idea of going out in a blaze of glory, one last futile fuck you gesture to Uncle Sam and his army, the same army that had warped and twisted her brain while it was trying to give her extrasensory powers. This prison was going to be her Alamo, Debbie had decided, one of those valiant yet futile last stands that Hollywood loved to make big budget movies about.
Taking over the Supermax had been easy. As soon as the first guards had fallen under her influence, they in turn had taken out the few remaining guards in the prison's operations center. Once that had been done, Anya had gone to the first twenty cells she could find, freeing their occupants and ordering them to serve and protect her no matter what occurred. That particular tactic had proved to be very foresighted indeed when one of the night guards had unexpectedly tried to be a hero, choosing to try and fight it out with her own personal guard force in one of the third floor hallways. A heavily-tattooed Mexican inmate named Jose had immediately jumped in front of her, soaking up a grouping of three rounds that would otherwise have shredded her chest to mush.
The wannabe hero had paid with his life. The phalanx of guards that she had made into turncoats against their will had poured more than thirty rounds into him. In retrospect, Debbie suspected that when it came to the manner of his death, he would turn out to be one of the luckier ones.
Unwilling to walk around stark naked or wearing the backless hospital gown they'd put on her, she had instead chosen an orange prisoner's jumpsuit and sneakers. It hadn't been too hard to find one in her size; the storage facility was full of them, all almost freshly-laundered and folded neatly. She wore it as a badge of honor as much as anything else, taking perverse pride in having the word INMATE stenciled across her shoulder blades.
She had met each of the eighty-six surviving night guards in turn. Rather than killing them outright, she had given them orders to run and evade, but under no circumstances were they to leave the prison. The next part of her grisly, brutal little game was to inform all of the inmates via the PA system that Christmas had come early. The guards were now working for her, Debbie had explained with a twisted smirk, and one of them (her personal assistant, one John Anderson) would be going from cell to cell, unlocking the door and releasing the prisoners. This process would take some time, but once they were finally freed, Debbie had promised her fellow inmates that they were at liberty to hunt down, torture and kill as many of the corrections officers as they felt inclined to...Mr. Anderson excepted, of course.
The handful of guards who were still under her influence had given one another uneasy looks. Debbie had ordered them to strip naked and fight one another to the death for the amusement of the prisoners. They had done exactly as she'd asked, descending into a melee of brutal hand-to-hand combat while the crowd of cheering inmates surrounding them add more men to its number with every passing minute.
She knew that some of those guards who were scattered throughout the prison still had their handguns, but Debbie figured that was a small price to pay. She'd forced Anderson to escort her and her entourage of prisoners to the armory and then open it up. Soon every prisoner who wanted one was packing a shotgun or assault rifle, more than enough firepower to make mincemeat out of anyone who was only armed with a pistol. Some of the inmates took a fancy to the ballistic body armor and donned it with all the excitement of children on Christmas morning, strapping on Kevlar chest plates and buckling on visored helmets.
Yes, she'd reflected, the cops were well and truly outnumbered and outgunned now.
Things had threatened to get a little ugly when the inmates captured two female corrections officers. Although she understood on an intellectual level that most of these men had been locked up without the sight of a woman for years, even Debbie had lines that she wasn't willing to cross. After all that she had gone through, even the merest thought of sexual assault against a fellow female brought her to a boiling rage. Rather than indulge the male inmates in their sick fantasies, she had ordered that the female officers be slowly put to death by being crucified outside the prison entry point. It would send a very clear message to the authorities, one which she hoped would provoke a fast and aggressive response.
She had no such compunctions when it came to the mistreatment of men, however. Debbie had grown to hate men, not least because the vast majority of scientists who had tortured her during the experimental phase of her military life were male; they had inflicted pain on her the likes of which she could never have imagined existed. When one of her roaming lynch mobs had dragged in the night warden, a man named Zahn, and his lackey Burton, a cruel smile had twisted her otherwise attractive face into something entirely less pleasant.
"Please," Zahn had said, pleading for his life. "We were only doing our jobs...please..."
"Strip 'em and flip 'em," Debbie had cut him off mid-sentence. Addressing the twenty-man mob she had added, "I don't know if it's possible to be fucked to death, gentlemen, but I expect you all to answer that question for me. These two gentlemen are your test subjects."
Many eager sets of hands had begun to tear at the two mens' clothing, ripping off their shirts and yanking the pants down around their ankles. The very last thing that she had seen of Zahn and his pet was the sight of their pale white buttocks, exposed and vulnerable, disappearing beneath a mass of sweating, heavily-tattooed male bodies.
From the shrillness of their screams, she was willing to bet that the two men weren't enjoying their final moments all that much.
That only caused her smile to grow wider still. Absently fondling the Smith & Wesson .45 that she had found on the body of one of the dead guards, she wandered over to stand behind the warden's ornate wooden desk and set the weapon down lightly on top of the dark lacquered teak. Debbie took another look through the window, parting the blinds with one hand. It was fully dark outside now, but the floodlights had switched themselves on automatically, flooding the exercise yard with bright light.
"I'd ask you to come quietly, as the police like to say, but to be honest, I would be concerned that you mig
ht say yes."
The voice from behind her was heavily-accented (Slavic? Russian? Debbie wasn't entirely sure) and took her by surprise. Turning slowly, she saw a dark-haired female inmate standing in the office doorway. Her office doorway, as she was already coming to think of it. Standing alongside her was a male prisoner, one whose face was vaguely familiar, although she couldn't recall his name.
"And just who the fuck are you?" Debbie asked, directing her question at the woman.
"Who I am is not important. This insanity ends right here, right now, Corporal Jovacs."
The unexpected use of her rank stung Debbie like a slap. She blinked, stalling for time. How did this prisoner even know her name, let alone her military rank?
"You're pretty well-informed for a prisoner."
"I think we both know that I am no such thing." The woman stared at her, her pretty face devoid of expression. "My name is Anya. My superiors have asked me to bring you in alive, if that is at all possible. Is it at all possible?"
Jovacs eyed her coldly. "I'd rather die."
Now it was Anya's turn to smile. "Good. That's what I was hoping you'd say."
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa! What the fuck is this?!?" Larry was looking from one woman to the other, trying to figure out exactly why this nice friendly meeting had suddenly turned into death threats. Anya shot him a sideways look of annoyance. That was all the distraction that Debbie needed. In the split-second that Anya had taken her eye off the ball, she picked up the Smith & Wesson and brought it into the aim.
The male prisoner gave a shout of alarm. Anya began to turn, but she was too late. Jovacs had spent a lot of time on the range during her military service, qualifying repeatedly with the pistol to the level of expert. She pulled the trigger smoothly, placing the first two rounds in Anya's chest, just above the level of the heart in the center of mass. Anya staggered drunkenly, pitching into Larry, who was caught off-balance and began to fall. The third shot, intended for Anya's head, instead turned Larry's face into a spray of red mist that splattered Anya with his blood and brains.