Alpha Kill - 03

ALPHA KILL

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Tim Stevens

Copyright 2014, Tim Stevens

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License Notes

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Cover by Jane Dixon-Smith at
JD Smith Design

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H
orn Creek Maximum Security Correctional Facility, Illinois

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T
he power supply went down at six forty-five in the evening.

Ten seconds later, all hell broke loose.

Nearly one thousand souls were incarcerated within Horn Creek’s walls, though it was debatable whether some of the men and women detained there possessed anything as spiritual as a
soul
. One thousand people, yoked to the grinding machine of the US penal system, their bellies filled by their recent drab and functional suppers, their minds hungry for something else.

For a chance to get the hell out of there.

In the sudden blackness of the almost windowless complex, nine hundred fifty-six desperadoes found themselves in the dining halls, waiting on their call to return to their cells, or in the corridors on the way back to their cells, or already in the cells themselves. Same as it had been every evening at this time, day after day, for months. Or years. Or, in some cases, decades.

Except this time they found themselves in a darkness so total, it was as if they’d been stricken by a plague that had rendered each and every one of them instantly blind.

A darkness that afflicted inmates and guards alike.

A darkness that equalized them.

It took ten seconds for the realization to sink into the collective consciousness. First of all, each brain had to process the sudden absence of light, to grasp what it meant.

Then, the awareness of the change in the power dynamic began to take hold.

In the inmates’ minds.

And in those of the guards.

The guards had it harder. Despite the terror that transfixed them, they had to remember the procedures. The protocols. The duties they were obligated to perform in the event of a power outage, an eventuality that had seemed laughably hypothetical when put forward in the lectures they’d undergone during their training, but was now a horrifying, urgent reality.

The inmates, on the other hand, just followed their instincts.

*

L
ester K. Fairbanks listened to the first shouts rising through the darkness, and seriously thought he was going to throw up.

Or void his bowels.

Or both.

But he did neither. Instead, he hitched up his belt over his moderate paunch, and drew himself up to his full five-feet-eight-inch height – both mannerisms he’d adopted to assert his confidence – and thought to himself:
Relax. Stay calm. Focus. You know what to do. You’ve rehearsed this in your head twenty times. Fifty.

Lester had been a guard at Horn Creek for the past eleven years. During that time, he’d proved himself a workhorse. A reliable, steadfast kind of guy. The sort who’d always volunteer for overtime, who’d agree to swap shifts at short notice even when it meant inconvenience for him.

He wasn’t a high flier. He’d never reach the higher ranks of his profession, the status of warden or even a deputy. Lester wasn’t a natural leader. He got along with his colleagues fine, and the inmates seemed to like him, as far as a bunch of high-security felons could come to like any of their captors. But he didn’t have that spark, that essential wiliness necessary to outmaneuver the competition and position himself at the top of the pecking order.

And he knew it. And wasn’t particularly bothered by it.

Lester had never wanted to be a prison guard. As a boy, he’d always harbored an ambition to become a police officer. A detective, in the big city, like the characters from the Ed McBain 87
^th
Precinct paperbacks he’d devoured by the truckload. Steve Carella, or Bert Kling, or Cotton Hayes. One of those cool guys, unpretentious yet quirky, and effortlessly competent.

But his grades had never been quite good enough, and his fitness levels had always fallen just short of the standard required for the Chicago police force. School friends of his
had
made the cut, and he’d watched them pass him by. Watched them with awe, and a stinging sense of failure.

So he’d become a staff member at Horn Creek. It was an honor, he supposed, that he was trusted to look after some of the most high-risk prisoners in Illinois. And he didn’t let his resentment about the diversion his career path had taken turn him into one of those embittered, asshole guards he saw around him from time to time. He didn’t beat up on inmates every chance he got. He didn’t screw them over, withholding privileges or denying them simple comforts, just to score some petty victory over them.

Lester did his job well. But all the while, he never liked it.

In the sudden darkness, he pressed himself against the wall. He was in his monitoring room, a narrow cell-like cube within which he manned four of the scores of closed-circuit cameras that were located throughout the prison. The cameras were, of course, inactive now that the power was down.

Lester listened to the animal howls echoing through the belly of the prison, the clashing of metal crockery on tables and the stomping of feet on corridor floors, and he felt a solitary bead of sweat crawl snail-like down his right temple.

Dear God. What had he done?

His wife, Rhonda, was disappointed in him. To say the least. Lester had married her fourteen years ago, when they were both twenty-two. Her once-slender figure had collapsed into squatness, like it had been pressed down by the giant thumb of disappointment. Bitterness had etched itself on her face in savage strokes. The worm had turned a few years back when there’d been a deputy position up for grabs. Rhonda had gotten excited, and had urged Lester to apply. He’d been astonished, had told her he wasn’t interested, and hadn’t gone for it.

Yep, things sure had soured after that.

Lester felt the thrumming through his feet, the transmitted footfalls of a thousand penned animals on the move, readying themselves to burst free.

All he wanted to do was to retire. To break free himself, at the age of thirty-six, and take Rhonda down to Florida. Spend the next forty or fifty years in the sun, sipping fresh OJ in the mornings and a pina colada or three at night. Maybe exercise a little, jog along the beach, get himself in shape. Pay for some nice things for Rhonda. Like clothes. And a beachfront condo. Maybe even, he thought wistfully, a boob job.

He closed his eyes for a moment, fixing the montage in his mind. The brilliant, sunkissed golden sands. The skies the hue of pure cornflower. The beach babes strolling languidly by in their skimpy white bikinis.

It was his for the taking.
All
of it.

The money Lester was going to be paid, the money that would be delivered to him in cash at the location across the border in Wisconsin, would set him and Rhonda up for life. He’d already worked out how he was going to manage it, salting a little away here and there, in different bank accounts and trust funds so as not to arouse suspicions. Properly invested, it would net them close to one hundred thousand dollars a year, every year, until they were eighty. By which time it wouldn’t matter any longer. They had no kids, nobody who’d miss them after they were gone, financially or otherwise.

All Lester had to do was hold up his end tonight.

He pressed the light on his digital wristwatch and peered at the face.

Six forty-eight.

Three minutes had passed since he’d gritted his teeth and pushed his thumb down on the detonator button in his pocket.

At first, he’d felt icy terror strike through his heart. Nothing had happened. He wondered, panicking, if he’d gotten something wrong. Damaged the detonator somehow, caused it to short-circuit because of the sweat from his thigh through his pocket.

But after a second, he’d sensed, rather than heard, the soft
whoomph
of the explosion, some distance away through the thick concrete walls. And the lights had winked out all at once, as if the prison had suddenly died.

The explosive charge had taken out the substation which fed off the main grid and thereby supplied the prison with its power. Several capacitators had been added to the substation over the years as the prison had expanded and the demand for electrical power had increased, but the bomb had factored those in.

The generator was supposed to kick in after a minute, to provide back-up power. But Lester had sabotaged it earlier that afternoon, just like he’d been instructed, and had taken an ax to the reserve diesel tanks so that their contents had ebbed out, unnoticed.

He knew there was a storage depot with further fuel tanks less than two miles away. The depot would be notified within a couple of minutes, and trucks would be scrambled to bring additional fuel as soon as it was established that the back-up generator wasn’t working. The trucks would reach the prison in under ten minutes. Allowing a further ten to fifteen minutes before the alarm was raised - and that was probably tighter than necessary, because it would probably take the warden and his staff considerably longer to realize the generator diesel tanks had been damaged - it meant that the power wouldn’t be restored for at least a half hour.

Which left plenty of time for Lester to pick his way through the confusion toward the west exit doors, and wait for the man who was going to beat him to a pulp.

*

L
ester arrived at the west doors at seven thirteen.

It took him longer than he’d anticipated, mainly because although he’d memorized the route in intimate detail - had walked it, and rehearsed it in his mind, countless times - he hadn’t been prepared for the darkness.

Along the way, he’d been barged and jostled by fellow guards who’d pounded past him, racing toward their stations. He’d had to dodge down an unexpected corridor when he’d seen the vague shapes of a bunch of inmates thundering down the main passage, whooping and laughing with a feral lust for freedom surging in their veins, whatever makeshift weapons they’d seized flickering in their hands and clashing off the walls.

The low, confused sound rumbling throughout the prison complex had exploded into a bestial roaring that echoed off the rafters and ricocheted down the walls.

At one point Lester had to press his back against the corridor and catch his breath, while his heart hammered against his ribcage. He was unfit, yes, and that played a big part in his current physiological state.

But more than that, he was
scared
of these people.

Scared shitless.

It was ironic, Lester thought, that the most frightening human being in the entire prison, the one single man he’d least like to meet in other circumstances, was the one he had to trust the most now.

That man was Gene Drake.

He knew the alert would have been triggered at every police station for miles around, as well as at every federal law enforcement facility in the State of Illinois. Horn Creek was a major penitentiary, incarcerating some of the most dangerous prisoners in the United States. A riot of this magnitude would trigger an overwhelming response. SWAT teams, the National Guard. Once they  had the complex surrounded, there’d be no escape.

Lester’s part in all of this was just about done. He’d already briefed Drake on his escape route, given him an exquisitely detailed breakdown of the standard protocol that would be followed in the event of a full-scale riot. He’d told him where the efforts would be concentrated, how many guards would be likely to station themselves at each key location within and at the perimeter of the complex.

The west exit was the weak point. It was the one with the greatest reliance on an electricity source, with its multiple arc lights illuminating a dead-end corner of the yard outside the building and a single observation tower overlooking it in the north-west corner of the perimeter wall. It was considered the least likely route through which an inmate would try to escape, because there were no gates there. Anybody trying to exit the complex through its north-west extremity would have to go over the wall. And the wall was under the observation of a 24-hour tower guard detail.

Except that, tonight, there were no spotlights, because the power was down, comprehensively. And the moon, already the narrowest sliver of a crescent, was completely obscured behind a roof of dense cloud. It was no accident that tonight had been chosen for the break. The moon was scheduled to have waxed fully. And the overcast weather was a happy coincidence.

The guards in the control tower would be panicking. Visibility would be seriously compromised, and although they’d hear anybody who was scrambling over the wall, they wouldn’t dare to open fire indiscriminately, in case they hit possible hostages.

So Gene Drake was going to go over the wall.

Lester had his back against the doors. In his pocket was the emergency override keycard he’d obtained ten days earlier. A guard of his status didn’t normally have access to such a card, but he’d purloined it from a senior colleague during a drinking session and had cloned it and replaced it before the man knew it was missing.