"Nothing. Their truck, possibly some blood, but from up there it's hard to say for sure in the grass."
"No bodies?"
"No bodies."
Warden Bowers grunted and looked from one man to the next. "Well, this is one great big cluster fuck," he said.
"We could call the locals, see if they've heard anything..."
"This is my prison, Watkins, and I plan on keeping it that way. I’ve been on the phone all morning with the Feds. The last thing I need is the Sheriff butting in." Bowers thought a moment. "Watkins,” he said, “I want everyone ready for anything. I want all shifts on high alert, every cell checked every ten minutes. Break out the assault rifles and scatter guns. Arm the fucking secretaries if you have to. I am not losing a single prisoner. Understood?"
"Check."
"Pick your best man and have him organize a team of four. I want them loaded for bear. If there's some fucking Arian Army out there trying to liberate their 'freedom fighters' I want them ready for it."
Sam only nodded this time.
"Sanders, get them the best coms we got. I want every word recorded so if there is someone out there, we have all the evidence we need. And get me any surveillance video you have." Bowers looked at them a moment, then sighed. "And gentlemen," he said, "do it now."
Twenty-Five
“Things that make you wanna say: Damn,” Chris said as he walked through the armory.
Warden Bowers liked to joke that his guards were better prepared than the marines on Okinawa – and he could probably make a case for it. Brennick boasted around fifteen hundred prisoners and had about two hundred actual guards on at any given time. Add in a total administrative staff of about two hundred – cooks, janitors, paper pushers, processors, nurses, doctors, and a redundant amount of each to cover each other’s asses in case of a screw up – and it made about two thousand all told. Maybe only three hundred that could be trusted with a weapon.
Yet, somehow, Bowers had amassed over five thousand small arms over the years.
Chris’s dad had explained how it worked:
Every year Bowers got a budget. It was itemized and prioritized. And every year it was ten percent higher than the last. Arming the guards of a Maximum Security Prison is, of course, the number three item on the list. One is psychological treatment. Two is food. Three is weapons maintenance, small arms and supply. Number four is recreational supplies. Twenty-eighth is prisoner education. If the budget on any line item wasn’t spent, it didn’t get paid the next year.
But Warden Brooks ran the prison the way a drunk runs a household: if anyone sneezed in a way that offended him, he locked everyone in their rooms and wouldn’t let them out until he felt damn good and ready. And it had shown the first year.
No one had fired a shot.
Prisoners had died – less than before – and been released – more than before – and come in – more than before – and eaten food and enjoyed recreation and one or two might have gotten educated.
But no one fired a shot.
So when the new budget arrived, he didn’t need any new ammunition or weapons. But why waste the money? He decided to stockpile them. What could it hurt? Every guard expected a truck to show up any day with no tags and the guns to be loaded up and driven away – part of Bowers’ personal retirement package – but the truck never came.
The guns did.
And they went to the armory.
“Fucking sexy,” Sam said, nodded to him. “But you only need to arm a four man team. I’ll handle passing them out to the guards on look-out. Warden wants to know what the fuck is happening, and I’m trusting you to find out. Obviously I have to be here, on point, but I need my best out there, finding out what the hell is going on. You got it?”
Chris picked an AK-47 up and studied it. This was his first time in the armory. He had expected AR-15s, not AK-47s.
“Why AKs?” he asked.
Sam shrugged. “Warden says: ‘All rifles are like wives.’” He explained. “‘AKs are good wives: they let you handle them rough. ARs are like stuck up bitches: they want you to do everything soft as a kitten and with the lights out.’”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“In other words.” Sam paced up to the rifle, snatched it out of its perch, pushed a magazine in and jacked a shell into place. “These put out no matter what you do to them,” he said. “Drop them in water, sink them in mud, tell them to fuck off, but when you tell them to go ‘boom’, they do. That’s Warden’s kinda lady.”
Twenty-Six
"What the hell is going on?" Mercedes asked as she watched guards running past her cell with assault rifles. She and Jessie huddled together at the bars and peered out. The guards were assembling in a position to shoot into the cells. Mercedes shuddered.
"Hey," Jessie called out. "Hey, Remirez. What's going on?"
The guard stopped for a second and answered, the words coming out almost as one: "Warden thinks there's gonna be a break. Shots fired outside the walls. Stay away from the bars and keep quiet."
And then she was gone.
"A fucking break?" Jessie marveled. Then to Mercedes: "Has anyone ever broke out before?"
Mercedes shrugged. "Not lately," she said. "Come on, let's do what she said and stay back. I don't want to die today. Not here, not now."
Twenty-Seven
"Now they gone and gave a bunch of teenagers machine guns," Tim Harper said as Chris passed through the main gate.
Chris stopped the truck, turned in his seat and spat: “Fuck you” at him, then continued on.
He cut left off the road and the truck and men inside started bobbing up and down as the terrain changed from paved to grassy.
“What are we looking for?” Smith asked from beside him, his AK-47’s butt on the floor next to his feet, barrel pointing at the ceiling. “A sign?”
“Kind of.” Chris said, nodded. “Watkins thinks someone’s trying to take a vaca and has some pals out here being bastards. Warden sent a maintenance team out, didn’t come back. Sanders heard shots fired.”
“Sanders?”
“Over the coms.”
“Got it.”
“So, we’re gonna retrace their steps and see if we can’t find our boys or some bad guys.” Chris kept the truck about a hundred feet from the fence, paralleling the chain-link border. “Sanders said they were within a thousand feet of the fence when it happened, but that they’d gone over all the lines, so they must’ve started at the cell tower and worked their way back. Once we make it around to the back, we should see their truck.”
Chris cut the wheel by forty-five degrees and waved to the guard tower as they passed the first point on the diamond. The guard waved back, his rifle held steady in his right hand.
“What happens then?” Smith asked.
“God knows,” Chris told him.
Twenty-Eight
Erin Gibbs lay back in his bunk and weaved his fingers behind his head.
“Holy fuck,” Tall Bill breathed from below him, “they’re ready for war. What do you think’s happening?”
“None of my business.”
“What? Yes it is. You live here too.”
“That must have come out wrong. Since you didn’t get the hint, I meant: shut the fuck up. I’m relaxing.”
“How can you relax when they’re pointing assault rifles at you?”
“I’m not worried about them. Assault rifles or otherwise.”
“Well, I am worried about them. How often to guards kill prisoners here?”
“Not as often as prisoners do.”
“I got no problem with the prisoners. I’ve been here a few weeks, and I’ve been in enough of these places to know after the first few days, so long as you don’t do anything stupid, you’re straight. And I’m not going to do anything stupid. But the guards, they look at us like animals. They’ll shoot first and ask questions later. No matter what happens, they go home happy and have a fucking barbeque. While we’re stuck here. Or dead
.”
“Jesus Christ,” Erin huffed, and sat up. “You really don’t get the meaning of shut up, do you?” He swiveled and hung his legs off the bed. “Listen,” he said, “if it’ll help take your mind off it, let’s talk.”
Tall Bill turned, sat, and put his back to the bars. “Okay,” he said. “Politics?”
“No, I’m not talking politics with you. Who the fuck even follows politics?”
“I’ve always followed politics. And when I could, I voted. In fact, when I could, I voted as many times as I could.” He laughed. “My old man always used to say ‘Stop bitching if you’re not going to do anything about it.’ Eventually he changed it to ‘Just stop bitching,’ but that’s my old man for you.”
Erin smiled. “Go on,” he said.
Twenty-Nine
Sanders ejected the new DVD, took it out of the tray, pressed it into a case, and handed it to Sam Watkins. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he said.
Sam nodded and left.
He was starting to get nervous. He hadn’t thought about what it would be like being in this place after what he had seen that morning. The walls seemed higher, the corridors tighter, everything colder and more ominous. And it took for fucking ever to get from point A to point B.
From the com room, he had to pass through two minimum security and one medium security lock to reach Warden Bowers’ office on the top floor, overlooking the garden. At each he got more keyed up than he had been at the last. He felt more and more eyes on him. Every time he looked through bulletproof Plexiglas he felt like the guard on the other side was scrutinizing him more.
It was insane. No one other than the Warden thought of him as anything other than the boss, and Bowers loved his ass. Hell, he probably wouldn’t even care. That was the kind of guy he was. He was loyal. He had Sam’s back.
“It won’t matter anyway,” he said aloud as he paced down the empty hall. “No one’s ever going to find out.”
Thirty
They saw the truck parked just where he thought it would be. Chris pulled up next to it and the men poured out. They checked a full three hundred and sixty degrees and saw nothing. On one side the fence and prison, on the other an open field for fifteen hundred feet from the fence, and then unbroken woods for miles. The cell tower stood tall just at the wood line.
“So you think they started at the cell tower?” Smith asked.
“That was the theory,” Chris told him. “But I don’t see why they couldn’t have started at the truck and gone to the tower. I forgot how the close the woods are on this side. They could have literally been at the tower and seen somebody, said ‘you’re not allowed within a thousand feet.’”
Smith looked at the tower. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see anyone over there.”
Chris sighed. “That’s the fucking point, Smith,” he said, “where the hell are they?”
Chris thought a moment, then said: “They were following the lines, that’s what we’ll do. See what we find. Odds are we’ll catch them playing grab ass in the woods over there. But stay tight, just in case they want us to join in.”
“And if they do?” Smith asked, smiled.
“You can have fun. But if anyone tries pulling my pants down, I’ll shoot the bastard.”
Thirty-One
Warden Bowers took the DVD from Sam and dropped it on the desk. “You seem stressed,” he said.
“A lot of shit going on,” Sam told him. “That’s all.”
“True.” Bowers sighed and got up from his desk, crossed around it to a cabinet, opened it, and took out a snifter of scotch. “Always something, though.”
“It’s the job. I knew what it was when I applied.”
Bowers pointed to the DVD and poured two glasses. “Pop that in the picture machine,” he said. “Let’s see what happened to those boys.”
Sam picked it up from where the Warden had dropped it, brought it over to the massive plasma television that overlooked the coffee table and leather couch. Warden Bowers didn’t believe in watching anything on a computer screen. He believed anything worth watching was worth watching right: from a couch, on a big screen, with scotch.
Sam put the disk in, took the remote, flipped the screen on, and settled onto the couch. Bowers sat next to him with a groan and exchanged a scotch for the remote.
“Who’d you pick?” he asked Sam.
“Chris.”
“He’ll do the job,” Bowers agreed. He pointed the remote at the television. “And... Action,” he said as he pressed play.
Thirty-Two
“It’s like a fucking slaughter house,” Chris breathed.
There was blood. Everywhere.
“I don’t think they were playing grab ass.”
They were twenty feet away from the tree line. The grass, burnt from the cold, was matted and scuffed and covered with blood. The frozen ground beneath unable to saturate. The red spanned a twenty foot area, spread out in a smear in the direction of the trees.
“Looks like they got dragged into the woods,” Chris said.
“By who?” Smith asked, looking around. The other men did the same, gripping their rifles in white knuckles.
“What the hell could make this mess?” one of them asked. His name was Will Jones, a dark skinned man Chris knew well enough not to trust at cards. “Practically butchered them right here to make all this blood.”
Chris bent down and picked up a nine millimeter shell. “Defensive firing,” he said. “No gunshots from the trees.”
He looked at Rick Statham, a new guard – one month in. “You okay, Statham? You look like you’re about to piss yourself.”
“I’ve hunted my whole life,” Rick said. “And I’ve never seen this much blood in one spot.”
“Never,” Smith echoed.
Chris keyed up his com unit. “Got blood and drag marks by the tree line,” he said into it. “Some defensive small arms shells.”
“Roger,” Sanders returned. “No bodies?”
“No bodies. But blood like an expressionist painter went crazy with about five gallons of red.”
“Jesus.”
Chris looked into the trees. “Shit,” he said, and jumped. “Did you guys see that?”
Smith squinted, and then nodded. “I’ve got movement,” he said.
“We’ve got movement in the trees,” Chris reported into his com unit. “We’re going to go check it out. Tell the tower to keep sharp.”
“Roger.”
“Alright boys,” Chris told his men, “who’s going in first?”
Thirty-Three
“I swear, I would have bit his little prick off,” Jessie told Mercedes. “The first time.”
“Please, Jess, I’ve had enough. It’s bad enough we’ve got the screws pointing rifles at us, I have to listen to you bitch? Just stop.”
“I’m serious,” Jessie scolded her. “First you let him fuck you, then you let him knock you up, then you let him beat you. Where’s your self respect?”
“I’m a convicted murderer,” Mercedes told her, “not a senator.”
“That doesn’t mean shit. What would you do if one of these bitches made a run at you?”
“Slit her throat.”
“But you let Chris shit all over you.”
“I already told you, it wasn’t Chris.”
“Exactly!” Jessie spat, holding her hands up. “That’s my point: you lie for him.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Like a fucking rug.”
“It wasn’t Chris. Neither of them.”
“What do you mean ‘neither of them’?”
Mercedes took a deep breath and held it. She needed to get it out anyway, and if Jessie wouldn’t stop, she might as well say it. She’d feel better, she told herself. And Jessie was the only person she could tell.
“The baby,” Mercedes said. “It’s not Chris’ baby.”
Thirty-Four
“This movie is boring as shit,” Sam told Warden Bowers. “It’s just fi
ve guys walking around looking at the dirt. Fast forward to the good part.”
Bowers glared at him. “It’s my house,” he said. “I control the remote. I’ll fast forward if I want, or slow the fucking thing down if I want.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Damn right you are.”
Bowers hit the fast forward and the men on the screen started walking faster. They walked around in a circle by the cell tower, and then stopped and one of them took out a walkie-talkie and started speaking into it. Bowers hit play and everything slowed down to normal speed.
“Okay,” he said, leaning forward and sipping his scotch. “Here’s the ‘good part.’”
Sam leaned forward as well, and they both squinted at the screen.
The man with the walkie-talkie was saying something. He was very expressionistic about it, waving his left arm at the trail the buried lines took to the cell tower. At the distance from the camera the men were small, but the picture was crisp and they could see the exchange pretty well.
“What’s that?” Sam asked and pointed at the tree line. Four small forms began staggering out of the woods.
One of the repairmen saw it, too, and said something, pointing. The walkie-talkie man turned and they couldn’t see his face. He pointed the walkie-talkie at the forms, who kept approaching. As they did, a dozen more appeared. Then more. The man dropped his walkie-talkie and pulled his pistol. The other guards backed in close to him and did the same.
A gun arm recoiled as a shot was fired.
Then all hell broke loose.
The people from the trees swarmed on the team. In an instant, they were gone. Just one big writhing mess of flesh. Then the mass began to pull apart, and with them the men – torn limb from limb by their attackers. Each piece being dragged back into the trees.
Outpost Season One Page 4
