Primus Unleashed

by Amber Wyatt

  Lamar did not give a damn. All he cared about was that the thickest layer of concrete was 2.5 inches thick. He grinned as he hefted his forty-five-pound steel bar. Ever since he had thought of the plan eight months ago, he had spent every day discreetly weakening the chains on the weights bars out in the rec yard. It would take him no time at all to smash a hole in the wall big enough to wiggle through and bypass the high security doors. Nobody ever expected that a prisoner would have unescorted access to the administration block, let alone with a heavy enough tool to break through a wall. Lamar figured that in all the chaos he could get through to the infirmary. It was the room with the least number of walls between the main access corridor and the outside world. He would only have to smash his way in from the hallway, maybe pick up some drugs from the pharmacy on the way, then out through the back wall directly into the staff carpark.

  Lamar cocked his head to one side in curiosity. C block was a hell of a lot quieter than D, where he could still hear the chaos and shouting behind him. Maybe CRT was already here and had knocked some sense into the prisoners. The tactical team were bad motherfuckers, and although he was big and had a weapon, they could just stand off and taze him. Hell, with the whole zombie thing going on, they probably had shotguns. He might not have that much time left to effect his escape after all. Lamar grunted in annoyance and started trotting faster, deeper into C block.

  In less than a minute he was at the infirmary door. Just in case it was his lucky day he tried the handle but, as expected, the heavy steel door was locked. Lamar shrugged his shoulders. It did not matter. It was time to get to work. With one last look up and down the hallway, he picked a spot a few feet away from the door and began to pound on the wall with his steel pole. His enormous muscles bulged every time he hammered the hardened steel forward, and within seconds the first cracks appeared. Soon the wall visibly dented inwards as he punched the outer layer of concrete into the insulation behind it. Lamar grinned. This was where all his daydreaming and planning was going to pay off. He had realized that smashing a hole in the wall big enough for his vast body to fit through would be a time-consuming task. Instead he started hammering at the wall as if he were drawing the outline of a door. It meant that he would have to break through far less concrete, and after finishing his outline, he would only have to pull out the large, remaining piece in the middle and let it drop to the floor.

  In the main atrium of C block, the huge crowd of zombies stirred from their silent daze and turned their heads around, trying to locate the source of the dull thudding that was echoing around the building. None of the inmates had survived the terrible carnage that had swept through the block and claimed their lives only minutes before the lockdown closed the cell doors. Now they were simply an army of undead monsters gripped by a terrible and unending hunger.

  Minutes passed as the echoes seemed to come from all directions, but eventually the zombies at the back of the hall focused on the open doorway next to the deserted guard station. They started to walk towards it, slowly at first, but as they got closer and it was clear the sound was emanating from the doorway, their strides became purposeful and urgent. The rest of the zombies followed them out of herd instinct, slow to start with, but quickening as they too approached the door and heard that the sound was getting louder and louder.

  “What’s that thumping noise?” a querulous voice asked from the shower stalls and an older, white man poked his head out from behind one of the walls.

  “Motherfucker!” Albert exclaimed, and Dwayne nearly dropped his pole in relief. “Barton what the fuck you doing in here?”

  “I couldn’t be bothered to go out to the rec yard today. It’s too hot today, so I started taking a shower. Why are you two back in the block?” the elderly, prison librarian asked. He walked out of the stall with a towel wrapped around his waist, holding a bottle of shampoo. Then he saw the steel bars they were carrying and the boxes of ramen. And the bars of the security gate. “Are we in lockdown? Albert what are you doing with those poles? And full cartons of noodles! Did you guys rob the commissary?”

  Keith Barton had been the co-founder and chief financial officer of a Fortune 500 company, who had been caught by his chairman embezzling over eighty million dollars of company funds into various offshore companies and bank accounts hidden around the world. But that was not why he was in jail. The chairman had confronted Barton with the evidence one late night at the man’s office. He had hoped to convince his old school friend to return the money, and in return he would not press charges, but would instead expect Barton to take early retirement and leave the company.

  Barton had surprised the chairman twice; first of all, by refusing the offer of enforced retirement, and secondly by immediately leaping over the desk on to him and wrapping a telephone cable around his neck. Despite his slim frame, Barton had more than enough wiry strength to quickly throttle his lifelong friend to death. As he had dragged the chairman’s body into an old, out of the way conference room, Barton had stumbled across the director of human resources screwing his pretty new intern across the table. The athletic young lady had used her impressively muscular legs and six months of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training to quickly immobilize Barton while the HR director called the cops.

  Barton had been sentenced to twelve years for manslaughter, but had been a model prisoner and was due out on parole for good behavior after six. For the last five years Barton had served as the prison librarian and he was patiently counting down the months and weeks to his last day. His constant air of good cheer and general amicability towards all inmates and guards was due to the fact that, with the death of the chairman, nobody else in the world knew about the missing eighty million dollars. When Keith Barton walked out of the gates of prison in nine and a half months, all that money would still be waiting for him, and he spent his nights lying in his bed in his cell, daydreaming exactly how he was going to spend every penny of it.

  “Jesus Christ, you mean you have no idea what’s going on? Didn’t you hear the announcements?” asked Dwayne.

  “Not in the shower,” Barton waved a languid hand behind him, “you know how it is with the echoes off the tiles in here.”

  “Well, we’re in lockdown because some zombies got loose in the joint, man.” Dwayne said. “Anyone else in here with you?” Albert asked, still clutching his pole and looking past Barton into the showers.

  “No, nobody.” Barton looked at them wide-eyed. “Did you say zombies? For real?”

  “Yeah, for real. Get dressed quick. We ain’t got nowhere to go but if we have to move, we might have to move fast.” Albert’s low voice rumbled. He pressed his face up against the bars and tried to see as far down the corridor as he could. He wondered if the thumping sound was part of Lamar’s escape plan or something more sinister. There was no way that idiot was going to be able to smash through the gates or security doors. Then whatever the muffled hammering noise was, it stopped.

  The leading zombies from C block walked into the administration corridors, slowed down and then halted completely. The noise that had attracted them there had stopped and there was nothing in the hallway in front of them except a distant pile of rubble and some larger, broken, slabs of concrete next to a hole in the wall. The closest zombie to the rubble kept walking forward on his own, albeit much slower now, attracted by a faint noise that none of the other zombies further back could hear. Meanwhile the hallway behind them slowly filled up with the zombies still coming out of C block.

  Confined as a shuffling crowd within the narrow corridor behind the empty guard station, they could neither hear nor see prey, they were simply following the noise of the footsteps of the zombies in front. As they all started coming up against the stationary zombies in front, they too gradually came to a stop, blocking the way forward, until the entire crowd had slowed and stopped. Then they stood there silently with the unnatural stillness of the undead.

  Except for one zombie. He had been pushed off to the left, close to the jammed open gat
e to D block, and echoes of distant voices seemed to whisper down the hallway to him. He slowly moved up to the gate, then walked through it towards the other block. The voices were definitely clearer now. The other zombies closest to the gate turned their heads to watch him go, but did not follow.

  Inside the infirmary, Lamar was oblivious to the danger outside, in the hallway from which he had just crawled. He was opening cabinet doors and rifling through their contents in frustration, looking for drugs that he could take with him and sell, to score some quick cash on the outside. The problem was that he did not recognize any of the names of the drugs on these bottles and boxes. They were probably all worthless junk for diarrhea and headaches or something. He had grabbed a few tubes of steroid cream which, unknown to him, were specifically for the relief of dry, itchy skin, but all he knew was that it said steroid on it and he was always on the lookout for some extra juice to help bulk out his muscles. Finally he threw away a box he recognized as something he had been prescribed to get rid of fungus between his toes, and decided he was wasting precious time. He needed to smack a hole into the wall leading into the car park, jack a car and get the fuck out of there. Then, for just a moment, he thought heard a noise back out in the hallway.

  Lamar spun with surprising agility for such big man, and as silent as a cat he tiptoed back to the hole he had made in the wall. Someone was definitely out there, getting closer. Then the noise stopped and all he could hear was the faint hum of the fluorescent light tubes above him. In a sudden flash of insight, he realized that whoever was on the other side of the hole, possibly a zombie, had been following the sound of him digging through the cupboards and throwing boxes on the floor. Lamar mentally cursed his stupidity. Of course it was a zombie. There was a huge motherfucking hole in the infirmary wall. If it had been a guard or another inmate, they would have stuck their head in to see what was going on.

  The hole Lamar had made was quite low, like a ragged edged door made to a child’s scale, only as large as it had needed to be for him to squeeze his bulk through. Whoever or whatever came through would have to bend down to get through it. Zombie or guard, Lamar was going to fuck them up. Nothing was going to stop his escape now; he had already gone too far.

  He silently stood to one side of the hole, raised the steel pole above his head with both hands, then kicked the chair next to him to make some noise. Sure enough he immediately heard movement outside in the hallway, and a heartbeat later a zombie stuck its head through the hole. Lamar slammed down the metal pole with a quick lethal crack and crushed the zombie’s skull. It dropped to the ground immediately, unmoving. He leaned close to the hole and listened. There was definitely something moving out there. More of them were coming, and it was impossible to tell how many of them there were. He needed to think fast. Lamar looked around calmly. They seemed to be attracted to noise, so he knew that if he continued with his escape plan and started hammering on the opposite wall, that zombies would immediately start pouring in behind him. He needed something to block the hole, long enough for him to knock himself a second hole in the wall on the other side of the infirmary. He looked back down at the unmoving body at his feet. Maybe if they came in one by one, he could just block the hole with dead zombies?

  “Are you kidding? Lamar really planned on breaking out?” A white guy with a mullet, belly and bad tattoos was talking to Albert at the gate. As time had passed without any zombies appearing, the panic and the fighting had subsided in D block and now the only noise was that of heated arguments from the overcrowded cells on the second level, where inmates had packed themselves in, ten or twelve inmates into each two-man cell.

  Now they were bored, way too cramped, and shouting for the guards to open up the cell doors again so that they could get out. Jayant’s voice was the loudest, shouting about his constitutional rights. Tempers were fraying inside the cells, and new fights were starting over the lack of space to sit down or rest. The rest of the prisoners still out in the atrium lounged around on the benches and taunted the prisoners stuffed into the overcrowded cells. The guards, locked securely inside their duty station, ignored all of them.

  Half a dozen prisoners had wandered down the hallway to the showers and were chatting with the three men on the other side of the bars. Dwayne noticed that all of the men were clutching items looted from the commissary. The place was undoubtedly empty by now. Shit, he should have grabbed some more stuff when he was in there. Maybe another carton of ramen, or some cigarettes. He had had plenty of time hanging around in the showers before the gate finally closed.

  “That’s right,” Albert was saying, “Dumbass said he had some plan to get out through the infirmary. I heard some hammering earlier on but it stopped pretty quickly so maybe the guards or the zombies got him.”

  “Ha. Zombies? You trippin’ fool! You really buy that shit about zombies? Warden was just saying shit to chill the fucking riot in the rec yard and he lied his ass off, yo.” Sammy said mockingly, but he looked nervously up and down the corridor towards C block. Sammy Pereira was a loud-mouthed Latino whose mouth would have got his ass a severe kicking except that he was the prison’s foremost drug dealer. Nobody knew how he got his stash in or the money out.

  Dwayne liked him, despite the almost constant flow of trash that came out of his mouth. Sammy was young, and he kind of felt sorry for the kid. He had been picked up on a minor felony for possession of marijuana, but Sammy had two previous felonies on his record and thanks to the three strikes law, he went straight into the slammer for fifteen years. Dwayne knew people who had gotten less for murder. Dwayne had also realized that the kid’s lazy attitude and trash talk were actually a carefully created façade concealing a highly intelligent mind. For a skinny dude, he was surviving well in the macho environment of the federal penitentiary, and that little trick had earned Dwayne’s amused respect. Still, his small frame and lack of physical presence were undoubtedly the reasons he had not been able to get through the packed crowd and into a cell before the lockdown had started.

  “Holy fuck!” it was the fat, white guy with the mullet. Dwayne vaguely remembered his name, Strathides, or something Greek like that. Strathides stopped scratching at an angry red rash on the side of his neck to point down the corridor. “Look at that! It really is a zombie.”

  Everyone’s head whipped around to look down the corridor towards C block. The lone zombie that had been following the voices had turned the corner and was walking steadily towards them, its dull eyes fixated on them without any expression. It had been a small Asian man, and although the face was undamaged the prisoners could see that the top of his head had been completely scalped down to the bloody skull beneath.

  With a gasp of fear, Sammy immediately dropped his loot from the commissary and ran like a scalded cat. The other men jeered at him.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” laughed Strathides, wiping one hand back over his greasy mullet. “We could take him easy. This was what they put us in lockdown for?” he held out a hand to Albert. “Hey, Big Al, give me that bar.”

  “Fuck you, nigga. Go get your own goddamn bar!”

  “Move it, ese,” a bald Latino pushed Strathides out of the way, “we got this.” Another Hispanic, equally bald and his face covered in Salvadoran gang tattoos joined him. The first man had an aluminum cleaning pole with the mop-head removed. His partner had another of the weights bars from the rec yard just like Dwayne and Albert. Dwayne was glad nobody had thought to prise the bars off their chains before. It seemed they were a lot easier to get loose than he had assumed, and they would have made lethal weapons in some of the yard fights he had seen go down.

  The two Hispanics stepped forward, side by side, just as the zombie let out a loud moan and started trotting forward towards them, arms reaching out, hands twisted into claws. The first man lunged forward with the aluminum pole, spearing it in the eye and it dropped to the floor like a stone. Surprised at how quickly it had fallen, both men gaped for a second, and then his partner pounded it in th
e head with the metal weights bar just to make sure. The body flopped loosely to one side with the impact but clearly the zombie was already dead.

  “FUCK YEAH!” whooped Strathides. “Score one to the inmates. Tell the warden we sorted out his zombie problem for him. Yeah!”

  The two Hispanics laughed in relief and all the inmates high-fived and shouted as they celebrated their victory. The noise was deafening in the shower block as the whooping and hollering echoed off the tiles.

  Back in the administration block the explosion of noise from down the hallway to D block hit the crowd of zombies like a lightning bolt of energy. The horde of zombies lurched from being frozen statues straight into a full sprint, and they surged in a hungry mass towards the open gate. The zombies that had been wandering curiously down towards the noises from the infirmary spun around and joined them. Within seconds the flood of zombies was pouring through the gate into D block and the first ones came around the corner barely twenty feet away from their human prey.

  The small, laughing group of prisoners broke off from their victory shouts, took one horrified look at the solid wave of zombies running towards them, and ran screaming back down the hallway to D block. Some zombies tripped and fell over the freshly killed zombie in front of the showers, but they were up on their feet again in an instant, running with the rest. Albert, Dwayne and Keith cowered in terror, hidden behind the corner of the showers, not daring to breathe, as the torrent of zombies ran past the closed gate, following the other prisoners. They could clearly hear the shrieks of pain and shouts of fear erupting from the helpless inmates in D block as the zombies tore into them. The zombies themselves were utterly silent and the only sound they made as they passed, was the drumming of their feet as they ran towards the screams of terror.