Fallen Earth | Book 1 | Remnants

by Morrow, Jason D.

  Alex closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  No one is getting through that door. No one.

  He opened his eyes and saw the prisoners talking to each other, their voices muffled by the thick glass. Tattoo Face turned back and looked at Alex.

  He yelled, “Open the door and I won’t kill you.”

  “They might just tie us up, you know,” Roger said.

  “You really want to take that chance?” Alex said, looking back at him.

  He turned back to the tattoo-faced prisoner, stoic. He gave the man no hint of his feelings. No fear. No anxiety. No acknowledgment.

  Alex was a stone.

  A few of the prisoners left the hallway at the leader’s command. Tattoo Face continued to make threats to Alex and Roger, but Alex remained calm. Roger was pacing behind him, but it didn’t matter. No one was getting in here, which meant none of the prisoners were getting out of the prison. They would be dealt with harshly when this was all over. Some who were only serving shorter sentences would end up here for the rest of their lives for their part in all of this.

  The thought gave Alex a twisted bit of pleasure—to know that the suffering these prisoners had caused would be hammered down on them tenfold. He knew the stories of what some of these men had done. He was convinced that if more people realized the heinous and vicious nature of these criminals—what they had done to their victims—there would be a death penalty in Wisconsin. There would be a death penalty everywhere.

  In Alex’s opinion, the decision to create a more humane society by forgoing the death penalty was built by men and women who hadn’t seen what these men were capable of. Most citizens didn’t realize that some of them were worse than animals. That some of them deserved worse than death.

  A smile formed on his lips as he stared at Tattoo Face.

  You’ll get yours, he thought.

  Just as he thought it, the group of prisoners returned, this time with a mob of more inmates. Alex’s smile dropped when he saw the man walking ahead of them. Tattoo Face wasn’t the leader here. There was a new man walking ahead of the pack.

  Alex didn’t doubt it. There wasn’t a person in the prison, hardly a person in the state of Wisconsin, who didn’t know the man’s name. It was unforgettable. The kind of name that makes you wonder if it’s real or if he changed it to match his persona.

  Jim Savage.

  He looked just like an average man you might find on the street. He was bald but for thin, blonde eyebrows, and not a hint of stubble on his face. He was clean. Neat. He could have been one of the prison guards, or he could have been a family accountant.

  He was the coldest killer Alex had ever heard of.

  Alex knew some of what Savage had done. He was the kind of high-profile prisoner the guards would pass around news stories about when they had heard he was on trial. They had all known it was likely Savage would be sent to Lone Oak. When he had arrived, the tension was high. Still, over time the glamor of it all died down and Savage was allowed the same kind of rights as most of the other prisoners. He kept good behavior despite the fact that he had no possibility of parole. But he had gained a following. Such a high profile prisoner was incapable of escaping notice. Some of the worst flocked to him, and he always seemed happy to accept other inmates into his fold. The guards did what they could to break up potential gangs and large gatherings, but Savage was a leader of his own prison cult, it seemed. Cost of entry: loyalty. With Savage, the prisoners belonged to something. Rather, they belonged to someone.

  It was a large prison, of course, so not everyone kissed the inmate’s sneakers, but his leadership rarely went unnoticed by anyone. Even if many of the prisoners weren’t dedicated to him, each of them respected him and understood you didn’t cross Savage, nor did you cross one of his many lackeys throughout the prison.

  The people who did follow him, however, followed him religiously.

  Apparently this wasn’t an uncommon thing to see throughout harsh prisons. There were people within who had more influence than others, but Savage took it to another level. He wasn’t physically dominant, but he had a reputation that lent credibility, and he spoke to people in a way that drew them in, welcoming them if they played by his rules. For many of the prisoners, he was the kind of person you wanted to please, even if you didn’t know why.

  Now, he was leading the prison riot.

  “Let us in the room,” Savage said, calm and clear, almost like he was talking to a misbehaving toddler. His voice was muffled through the thick glass, but he spoke loud enough to be heard.

  Alex swallowed. There was something about Savage’s calm demeanor that shattered Alex’s. He noted that Savage made no false promise of letting them live.

  Savage waited only a moment for an answer before he turned to one of his lackeys and nodded. A moment later, two prisoners pulled a man down the hallway, one of his legs dragging against the ground.

  None of them would have been able to see it in the darkness, but Alex’s face drained of blood.

  Roger swore.

  “Warden Beckett,” Alex whispered to himself.

  The warden’s face was covered in blood from a gouge on his head, but he was still alive. He stood between two prisoners who held him up, their shoulders resting under his armpits.

  Savage looked back at them through the window and breathed deeply through his nose.

  “So, here’s the situation. We have the warden who will be killed in a few moments. You, however, can determine how his life is going to end. It’s either going to be very quick or”—he got so close to the glass his nose was touching—“it’s going to take a very long time. I think you understand what I’m saying.”

  “I’m about to throw up,” Roger said. Alex looked back at him, and Roger was doubled over, his hands resting on his knees as he breathed in and out. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”

  “Roger,” Alex said, his expression firm, “there is nothing you have to do. They are going to kill the warden no matter what. We will remain right here and do nothing.”

  He turned back to Savage, who shrugged and then nodded at the prisoners behind him.

  The thick window and walls weren’t enough to drown out the sound of crunching bones and screaming pain. With every crack, every cry, every gleeful laugh, Alex refused to flinch.

  Savage didn’t watch the execution. Instead, he stared at Alex with an almost quizzical look on his face. He studied Alex, but Alex didn’t look away. Over the screams, over the snapping bones, Alex clenched his jaw and didn’t blink. He wasn’t sure, but there seemed to be a hint of a smile on Savage’s face as though he was pleased with their connection.

  Alex wanted to shoot him between the eyes.

  “I can’t do this,” Roger said over and over. “I can’t do this! I can’t do this!”

  “Roger, shut up!” It was the only break in Alex’s statuesque demeanor.

  “Please!” Warden Becket shouted. “Please!”

  If he had tried, Alex wouldn’t have been able to see what they were doing to him, but the two of them only had to endure the torment of listening to this sadistic punishment for a few more minutes. There was only so much a body could take.

  Something snapped in Roger’s brain. “No!” he screamed.

  Before Alex could stop him, Roger hit Alex in the side of the head with the stock of his shotgun and ran for the door. “You have to let him go! You have to let him go!”

  “Roger, don’t!” Alex didn’t get the words out before Roger threw open the door and was flung backward by a shotgun blast to the chest.

  Alex went numb. There was another blast and the warden was dead.

  Alex was next.

  He could only clench his jaw. He and Roger could have waited this out. All they had to do was hold on for backup, but Roger couldn’t take it. Alex could have done a little better, but he would have made sure they survived.

  Alex pulled himself to his knees, and when he looked up, Savage was standing over him.
>
  Chapter Nine

  Savage was impressed that the guard didn’t shake or beg for mercy. The man knew what they had just done to the warden. They had just shot the other guard in the room, but this man…this man wasn’t afraid.

  “I imagine this isn’t how you expected the night to turn out, was it?” Savage said, bending down to meet his eyes.

  The guard didn’t say anything as the prisoners surrounded him. Blood trickled down the back of his neck from the gash in his head where the other guard had hit him.

  Savage looked down at the name stitched on the guard’s uniform. “Alex, I’m going to need you to help us get the keys we need.”

  “Why? You’re just going to kill me.”

  “Or torture you,” Savage said. “That’s an option as you have already seen.”

  “To keep people like you in here?” Alex shook his head. “I can take it.”

  This drew a laugh from a few of the inmates.

  “Besides,” Alex continued, “you won’t make it past the guard towers.”

  “Why don’t you make that bet?”

  Savage had met men like this before. He had killed a few of them and they never brought the same satisfaction. When he killed them, he always felt like they got the better of him somehow—like they had something he didn’t, and he would never know what that was.

  Savage had the other inmates pull Alex to his feet. They searched him for keys, then got what they needed to open the key vault. Everything was labeled as it should have been. Keys for the guard towers, keys for the front gates, keys for every door in this facility. It was all there.

  The night flashed back through Savage’s head, and he couldn’t believe he was here. He couldn’t believe how it had all turned out.

  The escape. The lockdown. And now, the key vault.

  Savage had only heard hints of an escape a couple of weeks ago, but that wasn’t anything new. Someone was always planning an escape. They were always thwarted, or it simply turned out to be the musings of someone who had been in Lone Oak too long. Savage had spent plenty of his own time devising ways he would escape, and his thoughts usually went to what he would do once he got out.

  There was just one man he wanted to see. One man he needed to meet. Savage didn’t care about surviving. He didn’t care about escaping to the border to live a life in the shadows, no, his one goal was to travel five miles away to the town of Hope and have a little chat with a man who needed to die.

  Then, justice would be served.

  Savage often wondered why his reputation among other prisoners was so enthralling and among law enforcement officers was so repugnant. He only got blood on his hands when someone truly deserved it—when their sin was so great that it needed to be paid for.

  The other prisoners had killed the warden, though Savage would have been fine killing him, considering the kind of man Savage thought him to be. He didn’t pull the trigger on the guard who had opened the door, either. The others could do what they wanted, but Savage wouldn’t kill unless someone broke the law. His law.

  Savage’s law was simple: don’t lie to him, don’t steal from him.

  When Savage had heard about a prisoner escaping earlier in the night he had been surprised and even a little jealous. He had never heard of the man Henry Tash, but Savage, along with some of his closest allies, had been brought to the warden’s office to be questioned. That was how it always was. When something big happened, the warden always came to Savage as though he had been the one to plan it. He would have thought the warden would have learned by this point. When he’d been asked if he knew anything about the escape, Savage had been quick to tell the warden that he had nothing to do with it, but the warden had gotten so mad that he ordered the guards to throw Savage in the hole. Then, the power went out.

  That was all it took.

  Savage instructed a few of the prisoners to get whatever keys they needed to break the prison wide open. Five of them went into the vault and began rummaging, sorting, dispersing.

  This was his chance. It hadn’t been his plan. This had never been part of his fantasy. He didn’t know anything about the power outage, but he knew an opportunity when he saw it.

  With keys dispersed, he stood in front of the inmates and told them to go in large groups to the guard towers and any part of the prison where other guards may be hiding.

  “We need weapons. Ammunition. If we can do this quickly, we can all be out of here in the next hour.”

  The men nodded and started out the door. Savage looked down at Alex. “I want you to be afraid.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Alex said.

  “People like you are strange to me,” he said. He stopped the man who had snatched the other guard’s shotgun and took it for himself. He lowered the gun and pointed it at Alex’s chest. “There is a reason you aren’t afraid and your friend was.” He looked down at the body. “Sorry, I didn’t catch his name. The name tag has a hole in it.”

  “His name was Roger,” Alex said.

  “Do you not have anything to live for?”

  “I do,” Alex said.

  “Then why aren’t you afraid?”

  “Because you don’t deserve my fear.”

  Savage had asked the question to people before, just before their lives were about to end. A person like this would typically clamp their jaws shut and say nothing, or they would tell him to burn in hell.

  Never had he gotten an answer like this.

  He lowered the shotgun. “We need a hostage. You’ll do.”

  Alex’s expression didn’t change, but Savage prided himself in reading people. Maybe it was a twitch in Alex’s eye. Maybe a muscle near his mouth flinched so fast most would have never noticed. The guard felt relief. Hope.

  Savage wanted to see if the guard would break—if his stoic heroism in the face of death was an act or if the man was truthful. Did he really believe Savage didn’t deserve his fear, or was that just something he was saying to keep himself calm? It gnawed at Savage, and he knew the only way to find the answer would be to keep the guard alive.

  He figured the prison guard would break. He would beg to be let go. Try to say anything to get out of his situation. Then Savage would have the lie—that the guard was just putting up a front.

  Then Savage would kill him.

  Chapter Ten

  Leland could hear Henry’s feet crashing through leaves in the woods for a solid three minutes before the sound stopped suddenly. He slowed his pace as he dodged a couple of small evergreens and brought his shotgun in front of him.

  Leland had grown soft. It was hard for him to catch his breath as he scanned the woods. Sweat slipped down the side of his face despite the cold night air. His chest burned, and his heart pounded.

  This was no good. Part of him wanted to let Henry go and just be rid of him. With the chaos of the night, who would blame him? There wasn’t a soul that would have expected him to take a fugitive like Henry on a five-mile hike just to incarcerate him. In fact, there were plenty of people who would probably say it was a dumb decision and that he should have just stayed where he was until the power turned back on and he could get backup. Well, he had waited at least an hour, and they had sat in darkness with no help.

  More than anything, he wished he had a flashlight. Much of this could have been avoided if he had a way of seeing.

  Henry had taken his pistol, but how effective could he be in the dark? It wasn’t like the shotgun with a wide spread of pellets.

  Leland tried to get his bearings. They were headed in the direction of Hope but they were still a long way off. He silently cursed himself for taking on this responsibility, for going to Fristo’s to look for Henry because of a hunch. He didn’t move here to take on these kinds of jobs. He was here to write some speeding tickets, break up a couple of bar fights, and drink coffee with the locals every morning. He wanted Hope to feel safe with his presence, like a big brother who wouldn’t let them be troubled by anyone else.

  Chasing murde
rers through the woods in the middle of the night was not part of the deal.

  He shook his head at the thought. Of course, it was part of the deal. When he took his oath, it had been part of the deal. It had been part of the deal ever since his first badge was pinned to his chest.

  The deal was to take on anything that arose. Henry Tash was a threat to society, and that threat was in his county. As it was, however inexplicable, Leland was the only one who could stop Henry and bring him to justice.

  If I can find him, he thought.

  Finding him could be a bigger risk than Leland was willing to take. He was no longer looking for an escaped inmate in a jumpsuit. He was chasing an armed man in the woods at night. It was suicide.

  Leland had stared down the barrel of a gun before, when he was five years into his career in El Paso. He and his partner had come upon a drug deal gone bad. There were a few bodies on the floor—a bloody mess. His partner was looking in one room, and Leland had gone into another, thinking the place was abandoned. That was when he turned and saw a man clutching his side, blood dripping between his fingers. The man already had a gun trained on Leland, and Leland hadn’t had the chance to turn fully, so he froze.

  His whole life didn’t flash before his eyes like he expected it to. Highlights, maybe. Some regrets. Decisions he wished he would have made differently. He’d thought about how he’d drank too much the night before. How he had staggered into the house before the kids had been put to bed. Cora, Travis, and Gwen had all looked up at him, a fear in their eyes he didn’t think was warranted. He’d never hurt them. Not physically. Then there had been the look in Melanie’s eyes.

  Disappointment.

  Leland’s regret had been that they had all gone to bed without saying a word to each other—that Leland had left the next morning before everyone else had woken up. The sight of him walking into the house—a stench on his breath so strong you could smell it from the other side of the room—that was going to be his family’s last memory of him.