was built doesn’t have the violent history of the last one. It helps. But once a potential riot gets out of hand, it’s difficult to gain control again.
But me? I’m Sweden. I’m nonpartisan. I’m neutral territory. I read in my bunk while my new cellmate goes out to party. He never takes me anywhere.
I do my best to stay out of it. I really do. But when a guard—one of the good ones, not the douche bags who think they walk on water—is taken hostage, I have no choice but to step in. Either that or live with myself, and God knows that’s hard enough as it is.
I step out to see three men dragging O’Connell, the guard, toward the control room. He’s bleeding at the temple and mouth and struggling for air. Partly because of his injuries and partly because of the pepper balls that have been shot into the dayroom. Tears are streaming down all their faces, and I’m starting to feel the effects of the pepper spray as well.
One inmate holds a shiv at O’Connell’s throat. The second is wielding a wrench he stole when the rioters invaded the shop. And the third is telling him how he is going to decapitate him and use his dismembered body as a toilet. Only his words are, “I’m going to saw your head off and shit down your throat.” I was paraphrasing.
O’Connell is terrified, and for good reason. These things rarely end well. I cross the catwalk through a ticker tape parade of toilet paper, trash, shredded bedding, and the occasional mattress.
The inmates at the end of the walk grow wary. The closer I get, the more nervous they become, but adrenaline has flooded every cell in their bodies. They’ll be hard to stop. Well, harder than normal.
I lower my head as I walk forward. Glare from underneath my lashes.
They get more fidgety. The one with the shiv turns, positioning O’Connell between him and me. I curse under my breath when I realize O’Connell’s been stabbed. At least twice. Nothing that can’t be fixed, but he needs medical attention fast. I’ve learned that human bodies are much more fragile than my own. While his wounds would hardly faze me, they could be fatal to a mere mortal.
“Back off, Farrow,” the shiv wielder says, holding it out proudly like a peacock displaying his feathers.
I smile and the guy resigns himself to fighting me. But what he wants is the guard. That particular guard, and I wonder why.
He rushes me, dropping the guard in the process. O’Connell crumbles to the ground while the other two join their comrade. It takes me longer to incapacitate them than I thought it would. The adrenaline keeps them moving despite broken bones and possible skull fractures. I slam one’s head into the rail of the catwalk. He’ll live. The other I toss over it. His future is more iffy.
Now that I’ve gotten them out of the way, I dodge the leader’s shiv, grab him around the throat, look into his eyes, and search for why he hates the guard so much. It’s not a pleasant process when I scour the minds of the living. I don’t do it often.
Since he has O’Connell on the brain anyway, I find the memory easily. He’s being strip-searched, and the guard eyes him with blatant disgust. Not that I can blame him, but he tells the testy inmate that he smells like fish.
O’Connell was standing back, observing. He laughed when the guard spoke. But what Shiv failed to see was that O’Connell was not laughing at him. He was laughing at the other guard. The idiot that none of the guards liked. He was fired months ago, but Shiv never forgot the insults that were thrown at him. Some guys can hold a grudge.
Shiv’s going to hell for his malicious treatment of the elderly in his neighborhood. Clearly he never got the whole do-unto-others thing. I figure I’ll be doing the world a favor by sending him on his way a few years early.
As he pushes forward, I use his own momentum to snap his neck and send him over the catwalk as well.
I grab O’Connell and head for the control room. No one else comes after me. They know better. Even as I’m shouldering a guard, an enemy player in the game, they leave me alone.
When we get to the control room, there is a group trying to get through the glass barrier. They see me coming and