by Candice Fox
‘Make me.’
Celine grabbed the cord running from the toaster out through the bars and yanked it free of the extension cord. She stormed towards the control room.
She slowed as she neared Burke David Schmitz’s cell. The neo-Nazi terrorist, an unrepentant mass shooter, had the highest number of confirmed victims of all the men on Celine’s row. There was a kind of thickness in the air around him. A coldness. The feeling touched the cells on either side of his, which for now were empty. She peered sideways as she walked by and saw him sitting on his cot, straight-backed, looking at nothing, as he often did. The young blond man gave Celine the sense that he could see her even beyond the reach of his line of sight as she passed by.
Lieutenant James Jackson was there, as she expected him to be, slouched sideways in his swivel chair, his feet up on the control panel, clicking between the cameras on the screens before him. The coldness Schmitz had left her with was gone, and she was hot with anger again.
‘Did you give John Kradle a soldering iron?’ she asked. Jackson’s round face was lit by the glow of the camera screens, highlighting the bags beneath his eyes.
‘I didn’t give it to him. He built it himself.’
‘But you gave him the parts. You gave him the toaster,’ Celine said. ‘That’s the toaster out of the break room. The old one. The broken one.’
‘Well, he didn’t have a visitor smuggle it in up their asshole, that’s all I can tell you, Captain,’ Jackson said. His assistant, Liz Savva, choked on her coffee.
‘Help me understand.’ Celine leaned in the doorway, her arms folded. ‘I’m trying to get into your frame of mind. You let a man who shot his family to death in their home before setting the place on fire take possession of a toaster and misappropriate its mechanical parts so he could use it to burn things. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Look, Captain.’ Jackson leaned back in his chair and stared at her. ‘These guys on the row? I don’t sit around thinking about their crimes. If I did, I couldn’t work with them. I just think of them as miserable sons of bitches who spend twenty-three hours a day locked in a cage.’ He pointed upwards, in the direction of the warden’s office. ‘Warden Slanter’s been looking at me funny since I messed up the new carpet in her office. I was telling Kradle about it and he came up with the idea of the sign. And I think he’s doing a good job. So why don’t you just lay off the guy? He’s helping me out.’
Celine sighed.
‘It’ll look good for the next inspection,’ Jackson continued. ‘The inmates doing arts and crafts.’
‘Kradle should be bumped down to finger-painting level,’ Celine said. ‘That way, he’s less likely to hurt someone.’
‘What’s your problem with Kradle?’ Savva mused, peering into her coffee mug as if the answer might lie in there. ‘He’s one of the least confrontational inmates we have. It’s like you hate him even more than the guy in six who ate all those old ladies’ faces.’
‘I’ll tell you what I hate.’ Celine put her hands up, ready to paint a mental picture, but a dull ringing interrupted her. At first she thought it was the phone on her hip. Then she followed the sound to the speaker hanging from the ceiling in the corner of the room. She’d never heard a phone ringing through the PA system before. There was a click, and a noise like a desk chair creaking.
‘Hello, Grace Slanter.
‘Pay attention.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘What the hell is that?’ Celine asked.
‘It’s the warden,’ Savva said. The gentle ex-teacher and death row rookie was slowly rising from her chair. ‘Sounds like her phone’s being picked up by the PA.’
‘Oh, shit.’ Jackson laughed. ‘She’s left her mic on and taken a call.’
‘There’s a bus stopped in the desert half a mile from the prison walls. If you go to the window behind you and look out, you’ll see it sitting on the road.
‘Are you looking at it?’
‘Somebody better get up there and tell her the whole prison can hear her,’ Liz said. ‘Before she starts—’
‘Shut up,’ Celine said. ‘Listen.’
There was a strange silence on the line. A silence that had flooded through the speakers and infected the entire prison. Celine stepped back through the doorway and glanced down the row. It wasn’t this quiet in E Block even in the dead of night. She heard Grace Slanter huff into the phone.
‘Okay. I see it. What’s your name? I want to know who I’m talking to.’
‘On that bus are twelve women, eight men and fourteen children,’ the voice said. ‘They’re the families of guards inside the prison. Your employees. Your people. The driver is dead.’
‘Oh my god,’ Celine whispered.
‘Hey!’ an old man in the cell nearest the control room called out. Celine looked. He was holding a shaving mirror through the bars to see her. One grey eye was scrutinising her, its brow hanging low. Roger Hannoy, the face-eater. ‘What’s going on out there?’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Are you listening, Grace?’
‘I’m . . . I’m listening.’
Celine dashed down the corridor to the row of windows along the east side of the block. Beyond the furthest concrete wall of the prison, she could see the bus out there in the desert, stopped just off the lonely road that led to the facility. The voices on the speakers above them carried on. Jackson and Savva arrived beside her. Jackson gripped the bars.
‘My family’s on that bus,’ Jackson breathed. Celine saw all the blood rush from his face into his neck and then it was gone, leaving him grey as stone. ‘Tyler. Oh my god. Tyler. Tyler. Tyler.’
‘Who do you want me to release?’
‘All of them.’
‘This is . . .’ Liz began, but her words fell away and her mouth simply gaped.
‘Don’t panic. Let’s not panic,’ Celine said. ‘It’s, uh . . . It’s a drill.’ It seemed important to simply interrupt what was happening, to throw something, anything, under the wheels of the train as it came hurtling down the mountain, even though she knew it was impossible to stop it completely. The interruption didn’t last long. Jackson met her eyes, and they both knew that captains were briefed on all drills. The fear on Celine’s face crushed her lie the second it was out of her mouth.
‘I can’t. I mean, I can’t do that. That’s not doable.’ Slanter’s voice was bouncing off the thick walls. ‘You can’t just . . . What do you—’
‘You’ve got four minutes to empty the prison. We’re watching, and we’re looking for a particular inmate. When he appears outside the prison walls, I’ll call my shooter off.’
‘Who’s the inmate?’
‘We’re not going to tell you that. You’ll have to release everyone.’
Jackson’s radio crackled on his belt. Celine watched him try to grip it, work it awkwardly from its holster, but he failed, his hands numb. Celine pulled it free.
‘Are you guys up in E Block hearing this?’ a voice on the radio asked.
It sounded like Bensley from H Block.
‘Is this real?’ came another voice. All call signals were abandoned. All procedures thrown into the trash. Celine knew that was one of the first signs of mass panic. People forgot their training, became scared animals working only on instinct, fighting to return to reason.
A gaggle of voices and blips came out of the device in her fingers. Calls from all over the prison, fighting for airtime.
‘My husband is on that bus!’
‘Can anyone tell me what the hell is going on? Is this a drill? Is this a drill?’
‘This is Issei in Watchtower Eight. Somebody tell me this is a drill. Has anybody got a captain on deck?’
‘Is this for real, Celine?’ Jackson asked. He’d grabbed her bicep so hard his nails were biting through the fabric of her shirt. Celine tore her arm away.
‘I . . . I . . . I don’t know.’ She couldn’t force the words through her lips fast enough. ‘Just, uh . . . just get back into
the control room. Send up a code red, and—’
‘What you’re asking is not possible,’ Slanter was saying. ‘Okay? This is not how this works. Give me some time.’
‘You don’t have time. Meet our demands or we kill the passengers.’
‘You’re not killing anyone. If you want to negotiate, we can negotiate, but—’
Two pops. So dim Celine couldn’t tell if she imagined them, or if her brain took in the distant puffs of dust in the desert and the sight of the bus lurching sideways, and added the sounds, knowing with sickening clarity what she was seeing. The shooter had taken out both of the bus’s left tyres, causing the vehicle to collapse sideways and resettle, tilted, like a listing boat.
She thought she heard screams on the wind. But maybe not. Maybe they were in her mind, too.
‘Three minutes, fifty seconds. That’s how long you have left, Grace. Then I instruct my shooter to fire at will.’
‘Did you guys see that?’ came a voice on the radio. ‘He took out the tyres. He took out the fucking tyres!’
CHAPTER 3
Sarah Gravelle gripped her seat with her fingernails, staring at the stairwell of the bus, the mess there. It looked like cheap horror-film special effects: the blood, brain matter and flecks and splinters of who knows what mixed in with the broken glass. The people around her were screaming in thirty-three different ways, everybody with their own distress song, toddlers squealing and men bellowing and teenagers wailing, clawing at their shirt collars, reduced suddenly to the wide-open-mouthed kids they once were. Sarah stood again and held on to the rail that separated the front passenger seat from the stairwell. Her legs were jelly as the screaming began to be punctuated by individual voices, some young, some older.
‘Is it an active shooter?’ a child cried. ‘Mom! Is it an active shooter?’
‘Everything’s fine! Everything’s fine! Just stay down! Stay down low, honey!’
‘Daddy! I want to get off! I want to get off!’
‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for—’
Sarah gripped her way along the handrail. She told herself to keep her eyes on the prison, half a mile away, as she stepped numbly down the stairs.
‘What are you doing? Sarah! Sarah? Sarah, no! There’s a shooter out there!’
Sarah looked back. A woman was vomiting into the aisle. A man rambling into the phone to 9-1-1. Kids and adults were under the seats, jammed into tiny spaces, tight bundles of terrified humans.
‘I’ve. Got to. Get off,’ Sarah said. Her voice was flat, ridged only with weakly hitched breaths. ‘We. All have to. Get off.’
Two explosions. The bus lurched sideways, throwing bodies into the aisle. Sarah grabbed the door and pushed it open, let in the crisp desert air.
In Watchtower Seven, Marni Huckabee was staring down the scope of her rifle at the desert. She spent a good five or six hours a day on the tower, some of it staring through the lens at the gates, the fences, the yard, the walkways and cages. Once or twice week, maybe, she lifted her scope to the desert beyond the razor wire and tracked a rabbit or coyote or tortoise out there on the plains. But she was looking now at something she had never before seen, never imagined her crosshairs trembling over as she gripped the weapon with bone-aching tension. A bus door popping open. Someone’s wife or girlfriend, a woman she didn’t recognise, hesitating as she stepped down from the leaning doorway like a shaken-up child exiting an amusement park house of horrors.
‘Oh, god!’ Marni’s tower partner, Craig Fandel, gripped her arm. ‘They’re going to run for it.’
‘Don’t do it,’ Marni whispered. She could feel a droplet of sweat making the rim of the rifle scope wet beneath her eye. She swept her hat off, wiped her face with it, pushed her eye against the scope again. ‘Woman, please, don’t do it!’
Marni and Craig watched the woman push off and sprint into the desert, running for the prison gates. Craig let go of Marni’s arm.
‘Give her cover! Give her cover!’ he cried. Marni twisted the rifle sideways on its point, aiming into the hills, where the shooter must have been – the same side as the shot-out tyres. For the first time in her career, Marni flipped off the safety and opened fire.
Warden Grace Slanter saw the flash of white gunfire from tower seven, felt the delayed booming in the pit of her stomach. A lone figure was running from the bus across the desert, the unsteady, hunched, desperate running of human prey. Puffs of dust rose and gunfire cracked. Slanter watched the woman fall and slide and tumble in the sand.
‘Did you shoot her?’ The words felt sharp and hard in Slanter’s throat, almost unutterable. ‘Did . . . did you . . .’
The caller said nothing.
Slanter watched the woman struggle to her feet, turn and run back towards the bus, throwing herself through the doorway.
‘Take me,’ Slanter said. ‘I’ll walk out into the hills. No one will follow me. I’ll be unarmed.’
‘We don’t want you.’
‘Who do you want?’ she cried. ‘You can have anyone!’
‘Two minutes, forty seconds,’ the caller said. ‘We’re not playing.’
Celine Osbourne watched the activity in the desert play out through the barred windows of death row. She hardly noticed when Jackson snatched his radio back from her fingers.
‘This is Jackson, on the row,’ he said. ‘My son is out there. He’s thirteen. My wife is also on board. Can anybody in the towers see the shooter? Can we . . . Can we take him out?’
‘Nobody disarm their doors! That’s a direct order!’ a voice said. Celine recognised it as Mark Gravelle, from the gate. ‘That woman, the runner, that’s my wife. We have to get through this, people. We can’t empty the goddamn prison. Okay? We just can’t. I don’t care what’s happening out there, we gotta keep these guys in. Some of these men—’
‘Fuck you!’ Jackson’s hand was gripping the radio so tight the plastic case was creaking. ‘That’s my family! We can recover the fucking inmates! I’m not burying my son!’
‘Don’t disarm!’ came another shout across the airwaves.
‘We’ve got every fucking killer in the state locked—’
‘—leaving my babies out there—’
‘—go to hostage protocol! All officers—’
‘Look.’ Liz Savva’s sweaty finger bashed on the window, through the bars. ‘Look. Look. There are guys running. They’re unlocking the yard!’
Celine stared at the alarm lights mounted in the ceiling, the bell on the outer corner of the control room. Stillness. Silence. Just the stutter of gunfire from a distant watchtower. No one had announced code red. No one had thought to do it. Because this wasn’t a code red. This was something far, far worse.
‘Celine,’ Jackson said. ‘Open the row.’
‘No,’ Celine snapped. All the hairs on her body were standing on end. She was suddenly so cold she was shivering. ‘No, Jacky, we’re not doing this.’
‘I’m opening up,’ said a voice on the radio.
‘Who is that?’
‘This is Brian over in C Block. I’m doing it. You got women and children out there. My fiancée and my two girls. I’m opening the goddamn doors.’
‘This is Amy, in-in-in tower five. My husband just called me from the bus. This is real. Th-th-this is real. Open it up, please, everyone. Please. My baby boy is out there. Please!’
‘If C is opening, we’re opening, too.’
‘Me too.’
‘D Block here. We’re opening up.’
‘No!’ Celine gripped the bars on the window, stood on her toes so she could see the barred door of F Block below. She watched an inmate, someone she didn’t recognise, push open the security door.
With his hands.
His own hands.
The man walked out of the door on the side of the building. He took a few steps, looked around, took a few more steps. No officers with him. No other inmates lining up behind him. Just a prisoner, on his own, where he should never be on his own. It might as well
have been a zebra in a pink tutu walking out of F Block. Celine blinked but couldn’t comprehend it.
She reached out for Jackson, but he was gone. So was Savva. Celine swallowed bile at the back of her throat. She sprinted back to the control room.
‘No, no, no, no!’ She grabbed the handle of the door just as Jackson slammed it shut in her face. ‘No, we’re not doing this! No, no, no!’
Celine heard a sound that she had never heard before, and that was because it had never been made. It was a loud, thundering, rolling series of clanks.
It was the sound of all the death row cell doors being unlocked at once.
The monsters emerged slowly. She knew them all. It was clear in one horrifying instant how well she knew them, because as each man slid open their disarmed cell door, Celine’s mind was flooded with images of their crimes. The face-eater. The strangler. The mass shooter and the slayer of innocent children. Celine watched John Kradle step out into the hall, hesitant, like a wild animal venturing into a clearing. They locked eyes. She saw the terror and excitement in his face.
‘Get back inside!’ she called, but her voice sounded pathetically small in all the commotion. Some men were calling out to each other, asking what they should do. Others had ducked back inside to gather a precious item. One or two had sprinted away towards the iron-barred door to the stairwell.
She turned and bashed on the door to the control room with her fists.
‘Jackson, shut the doors! Shut the doors! Shut the doors!’
Men were running by her. They were going to the windows to check that the bus was really out there. That this wasn’t some sort of prank or test.
Celine then did something she had only ever imagined doing. She took two steps to her office, went inside, ripped out the bottom drawer and grabbed the revolver she kept strapped to the inner wall of the desk. She went back into the hall and raised the weapon.
‘Get back in your cells!’
They turned, looked her over, laughed. Big Willy Henderson, who had doused his wife in gasoline and set her alight. Ainsley Sippeff, who had opened fire on his colleagues at a bowling alley and killed two teenagers and a parking lot security guy.
