“Three hours,” Eric answered. “If you give me some prisoners, one. I could use twenty. We’ll have them clear off the weight while my men check the foundations.”
“Explain.”
“Each post has an eight foot foundation. The poles go deep, and they dig out to compensate for the possible weight of all the prisoners pushing at once. Think yard time, they all gang up, not worried about who gets shot, knowing we can’t shoot them all…”
“That’s why we have the wall.”
“Yes, but the fence was built to withstand it anyway. It should hold ten thousand pounds of pressure – should. We’ll stress test the foundations. Basically, we’ll clear the ground around them, and see if any movement has taken place. If it has, we’ll place a jack against it and see what amount of poundage forces movement. We need to know that every post is solid. If one goes down and breaks the link, the chain will be pulled down and simply separate from the other, stronger posts.”
“All of them, in an hour?”
“I’m assuming the majority will be intact,” Eric told the Warden.
“What minority are we looking at?”
“Possibly ten percent.” He shrugged. “We’ll go by load. The ones with more pounds of pressure are much more likely to be compromised.”
“So not dig them all up?”
“Exactly.”
Warden Bowers nodded. “Good,” he said, “get on it.”
“And what do I do?” Sam asked. “Chris’ll be gone for an hour, and it’ll only take a quarter that to assemble a team.”
“Pick prisoners for work detail, establish defensive positions to watch outside, and our backs inside, and stop being a pain in my ass.” Bowers smiled at him. “Can you handle that?” he asked.
[RL: Before you ask: Yes, I love this scene too. There’s an immediacy to the information. It all feels perfectly logical. Here you have a room full of men discussing how they’re going to move hundreds of corpses from their prison’s fence, and they approach it with total professionalism. No thought whatsoever as to what they’re actually moving. “Sir, we have ten thousand pounds of zombies on the fence!”
“Really? Well, we’d better move them! Those fences are only rated for ten thousand pounds. If we had five thousand pounds it wouldn’t be a problem, but ten thousand? Get right on that!”
And they also describe the redundancies in place to keep the prisoners in. This is another constant theme we worked in: lock after lock after lock after security code after gate after fence after wall after fence after razor wire after field… It stands to reason that this place is better protected than Fort Knox, which was Tom’s brilliant initial idea.
{Insert Gagging Noise Here}]
Seven
“Gibbs,” the guard called as the cell door opened, “you pulled work detail.”
Erin Gibbs sat up in his bunk, squinting against the fluorescents. “We haven’t had roll call yet,” he said.
“Not gonna have no roll call today,” the guard said. Erin didn’t recognize him but his patch read: HARPER. “Probably not going to have it anymore, period.”
“That’s a relief,” Erin said, and slipped his feet off the bunk. They stayed there a moment, dangling, until he pushed himself off, dropped, and they landed with a thump, his knees bending as they hit. “I’d love to sleep in Sundays.”
“Not what I meant,” Harper said.
“I don’t remember volunteering for work detail.”
“You don’t?” The guard scratched his head. “Well,” he said, “do you remember volunteering for prison? Because here at Brennick Maximum Security, you do what the fuck we tell you.”
[RL: This was a line Tom came up with while we were tossing things around and it played so perfect we rewrote the entire scene to have Tim Harper come and pick him up so we could use it.]
Erin shrugged, said, “Whatever,” and started getting dressed.
“Outside, so put on the cold ones.”
“Outside?” Erin and Bill asked together. Bill was still wiping the sleep from his eyes, but sat up at the word.
“What do you mean ‘outside’?” Erin asked.
“Like outside. The opposite of inside.”
“I’m down,” Bill said, and got up, making for his clothes.
“You Gibbs?” Harper asked. He was on the heavy side of four hundred pounds, but more football player pounds – all upper body. He hooked his two thumbs up under his belt and slouched against the cell door.
Bill looked around, said, “No, he is.”
“Then I don’t give a damn if you’re ‘down’, you’re not on the list.”
“Aw, come on,” Bill moaned. “I’m fucking offering to help.”
“You never struck me as the type,” Erin whispered.
“If it’ll get me out of this cell an hour, I’ll kick some ass on this project. Whatever the hell it is.”
Harper eyed him for a moment, then said, “Fine. I like your enthusiasm. If half your generation was so eager, we wouldn’t be fucked like we are. Course, eager about things like not killing people…”
“One step at a time,” Erin told him.
Harper shrugged him off. “Let’s get a move on,” he said and led the way, clipboard in hand.
[RL: I’ll let this transition without interrupting to comment…]
Eight
"I got thirty-two," Tim Harper told Sam Watkins.
Sam stared at him a moment, and then shook his head. "I asked for twenty,” he said. “Twenty. Not thirty-two."
Tim's massive bulk had guarded Brennick's gates for nearly a decade, but had rarely ever been inside. His experience with prisoners amounted to waving buses of them through the gate, not guarding them. But with the outbreak, Warden Bowers had pulled all the men in and sealed the gate for the time being. Tim's guard shack had initial control of the gate, but it was outside, and so the Warden had reassigned Harper inside, and taken over control of the gate from his office.
Tim shrugged. "I'm an over-achiever," he said.
"No, you're an idiot,” Sam told him. “I can't take thirty-two prisoners out there. It's bad enough with twenty. How many guards do you think I'm bringing?"
[RL: Again, Tim does what he’s told, but I liked that exchange enough to force it in despite the break in core character on Harper’s behalf. This is part residuals from him not originally being meant for the scene, and part me being a stubborn ass. Probably light on the former and heavy on the latter.]
Tim shrugged again. "Dozen," he guessed.
"About that," Sam agreed. "No problem with twenty of these fuck-heads tagging along, but thirty-two is pushing it."
"If twenty would do it fast, thirty-two'll do it faster."
Sam sighed at him, said, "Give me the damn list," and snatched it out of Tim's hand before he could offer it. He ran down it, read the names, then went back through and crossed out the twelve highest security threats. Handed it back.
"The twelve I crossed off don't go,” he said. “Take them back to their cells. The other twenty, have Rovelo and Pope chain their ankles, but leave their hands free. Split them into two groups of ten and then chain them together. That way, if they try to run, the ones that make it'll be dragging their friend's dead weight."
Tim nodded.
[TK: Tim is pretty fun, lives in his own little world.]
They looked at each other for a moment. "Harper," Sam said. "Now."
Nine
Erin Gibbs just stared straight ahead as the guard, Harold Pope, chained his ankles together. "What are we working on, Pope?" he asked.
Pope stood, his long, lean frame popping a bit as it unfurled, and said, "Don't tell me nothing. I've heard some rumors – crazy shit – but I haven't been out to see what's up."
"What was all the commotion last night?" Tall Bill asked from behind Erin. “Pointing assault rifles at us and such?”
Pope leaned a fraction to the right to look at Bill. "I was in Admin,” he said. “I don’t know."
"You're being awfu
l quiet today, Pope," Erin told him. "Something bothering you?"
Pope shrugged. "I should be at home in bed right now,” he explained, “instead I'm cuffing you fucks. Should something be bothering me?"
"Point," Erin said. "But I can't think of a single time Bowers has had prisoners pull work detail outside. In fact, I can't think of a single time Bowers has let us look past the gate."
"And don't think this is going to be a fun field trip, either," Pope snarled. "We've got six men to each ten prisoners, and we're locked and loaded and itchy as hell."
Erin squinted at him. Pope was a good enough guy. Erin couldn't figure out what had crawled up his ass. After a minute of staring each other down, Erin sighed and said, "Well, I guess Disneyland's out then."
Pope nodded. "And Sea World too," he said.
[RL: Okay, an interesting thing happened while we were working on Episode Two. We had finished the Pilot almost completely, and were moving on. We would eventually go back and update a few spots in the Pilot, but at this juncture we were done with it. We were hashing things out, and trying to get the series moving. The Pilot had had to be a bit slow to establish the various characters, but we wanted to up the action.
As sometimes happens, it fell to me to punch out a first draft. Often times you don’t know every detail until you’ve gotten that first draft finished. In fact, often times you have no fucking clue what’s going to happen until the entire project is finished, and so you need to move forward in order to establish the key points, so that you can seed the story with them as they move along. Otherwise you end up with a character saying one thing in one episode, and then acting the complete opposite in the next. If you know he’s going to act that way in the next, you simply go back and alter the dialogue in the previous to keep him in character.
Now, in this case I was tasked with writing the first draft. And as we moved through, I wrote the scene here, with Pope being pissed he’s still here when he was supposed to be at home. I don’t know why I wrote it that way, it was just a filler scene to keep Erin involved and to transition them from inside to outside. But something hit me: these fucking guards never should have been here this long. They were supposed to go home. And while we planned on having the prisoners start manning the prison, we had never figured out how. I called Tom immediately and said, “I just figured out how we’ll get the prisoners out of their cells…”]
[TK: Yeah, I was stoked because when you get stuck, it’s a pain the ass (3 or 4 conversations) before you’re moving again.]
[RL: That’s probably because the level of awesomeness I expect from our writing is pretty obscene. I am just naturally gifted with enough awesomeness for half, but it takes you a bit of time to build it up sufficiently.]
Ten
There was a quiet knock at Warden Bowers' door and he said "Yup" without rising. The door opened and a young lady with deep auburn hair, long and slightly curled, brought herself and her legs into the office, shutting the door behind her.
"I'm sorry to bother you, Warden..."
"You're never a bother, Mystique," Bowers said. [RL: See? No “not her real name” in this one. I don’t know that was so prevalent in the Pilot.] Got up and came around the desk, then settled on the corner, closer to her. He liked that. "What can I do for you?"
"Well," she began, squirming a bit. Bowers intimidated Mystique. The fact that men didn't intimidate Mystique made Bower's intimidation seem all the more threatening. He liked that, too. "I understand you retained third shift..."
Bowers raised a hand. "I had no choice," he said.
"I understand, it's just that... well, we've been on going sixteen hours. Everyone's tired as hell. We haven't gotten any orders on breaks. Are we supposed to just go twenty-four seven? When's the relief shift coming? And if we're stuck here - I can't imagine why, but the rumors are crazy - where are we all going to sleep?"
In all the chaos, Warden Bowers had never even considered it. Brennick boasted a guard and administration employment of three hundred - at any given time. But they were split between three shifts: midnight to eight AM, eight AM to four PM, and four PM to midnight. The Warden usually ran the prison from his office eight to four and then Sam Watkins took over from four to midnight. From midnight to eight it was quiet and the highest ranked guard became the Warden. It had never been a problem.
It had been obvious the midnight shift wasn't coming in when the sun went down and a fucking wall of zombies came out of the forest. Bowers hadn't even thought about it when the eight AM shift didn't come in - he had stayed all night because Watkins had been late, and then when he did get in, all hell broke loose. But the others had gone home.
And, obviously, they weren't coming back.
[RL: …and that scene followed. It was just what had to happen. It only made sense. And I think it added an extra amount of tension to the season. This is more about me jerking myself off on my awesome ideas than anything else, but I thought it might also be interesting in a How A Book’s Made kinda way.]
Eleven
Chris poured alcohol over his arm and said “God damn it” as it burned. The wound was festering, puss starting seep out. The dressings and alcohol weren’t slowing the swelling or the infection.
“You alright in there?” someone asked from outside the stall.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” Chris spat. “I don’t check on you when you’re taking a shit.”
He heard a muffled “asshole” and then the men’s room door opened and shut, and he was alone again.
The bite shouldn’t be reacting this way, he thought. It wasn’t deep – no veins or arteries had been hit. A simple sterilizing and bandage should have done the trick, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t even bleeding – it was oozing – the edges of the teeth marks red and inflamed.
He put a fresh bandage on and pulled his sleeve down to hide it. Then went out of the stall and headed for the sink. He popped two more antibiotics – he had access to the medical ward’s stockpiles [RL: Remember that now] – and washed them down with tap water, then took stock of himself in the mirror.
His eyes were bloodshot, black baggage hanging beneath them, but what could he expect after being up a day and a half? He just needed sleep, he told himself, but wouldn’t be getting any anytime soon.
“You’re fucked,” someone said, and he looked around.
Checked under the stall doors.
He was alone. He shook it off, took one last look in the mirror, and left.
[TK: Major twist number 1.]
Twelve
“You alright?” Sam Watkins asked when Chris arrived at the loading dock. Sam had the twenty prisoners loaded into the beds of two trucks. The prisoners would ride in front of another truck filled with guards. If a group jumped, the guards would mow them down. Four trucks of prisoners and guards, plus two from maintenance: he hoped it would all be done in an hour tops – what Eric had promised – but doubted it. It was a big task.
“I’m fine,” Chris said, and covered his mouth a moment. “How would you be, you looked like me?”
“I have nightmares often,” Sam said. “You got this?”
“No problem. We take them out, clean up the fence, and then you and me go check out town.”
“Keep your fucking eyes on these bastards. One makes a run, you know the drill.”
“I got it,” Chris assured him. “Don’t worry on my account.”
Chris climbed in the lead truck, put a hand out the window and made a circular motion: Move Out.
But Sam was worried. Not about what might happen while Chris was cleaning up the bodies, but what might happen when he got back.
Thirteen
Erin Gibbs sat in the back of the truck and tried not to breathe. If he took in too much air he would get sick, most likely. They were moving from the garage – room temperature – into the Hallway, the chain link and concrete alleyway that split the prison’s two yards. To the right was the female yard, desolate beyond the razor wire topped fence, to the left the
male, also deserted. Six guard towers loomed over them: one at each point of the Hallway and two rising up from Brennick itself behind them, over the warden’s garden.
It didn’t make a convict feel secure.
But the idea of passing the opposite way he came in made him feel… something. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time.
They stopped at another gate, the guard opened it and the convoy passed through. Out of the Hallway, and into the parking area. Brennick would harass you once at the Main Gate, let you park if you got past, and then harass you a bit more each time you tried to get deeper. It was like the ten circles of hell like that: the further down you went, the worse it was.
They passed through the front gate, the trucks all staying tight, and Erin couldn’t believe the bright white as the sun reflected off the snow. It hadn’t been a major fall – maybe ten inches – but it had done quick work with the environment, covering everything in its thick blanket.
The truck banked right and began to take them around the parameter of the prison. Erin finally allowed himself some slow, soothing breaths. The air was cold but crisp. He hadn’t tasted the scent of fresh snow in a bit under a year – the last time they had it, he had been in solitary. Again.
The sky was bright blue, with dark clouds smudging the southern horizon.
“We’ll get hit again,” Tall Bill told him, chained six inches away, the metal clinking on the bed with the close proximity. “One moves out, the next moves in.”
Erin only nodded. Turned around on his haunches and saw what they were aiming at. It took him a moment. He thought it was a brush pile. He squinted at it, and as the truck pulled closer he realized what it was.
“Holy fucking Jesus,” he said.
No one was listening. They were all looking at the carnage.
Outpost Season One Page 38
