When the undead guard’s facial skin started peeling and tearing open and the other eye popped out of the socket and hung by a piece of thin pink tissue George couldn’t stand another second. He screamed and took off running back toward the dining hall.
I’ve run more in the last few minutes than in my entire life. God, I’m serious, get me out of this and I’m going on a diet. I swear it! George prayed as he lumbered back toward the front of the kitchen.
He almost tripped over a pallet jack used to haul around heavy loads. Swerving around it, he got an idea when he saw the pallet was stacked with several hundred pounds of flour in big sacks. He grabbed the handle and began pulling.
Down the corridor he’d just come from, he heard a horrible guttural howling noise and he glanced back. Without much surprise he saw the lab coat wearing zombie guard following.
George was tempted to yell “Piss off!” at the monstrosity, but realized it had to be tracking him by sound or smell at this point. The mental image of the guard’s eyes was something he hoped to someday forget, but doubted he would.
Pulling the loaded pallet jack to an open space of floor, he caught a glimpse of Jose and Vito. They had tied up the revered to a support beam with a long extension cord.
George felt tempted to yell for their help, but something he didn't recognize inside himself said, “No, you've come this far. You can do this.”
Looking over the stacks of several hundred pounds of flour sacks, he waited until the undead guard came out of the corridor. Screaming angrily, George put his massive weight to use and pushed the heavy load toward him. He got the load moving fairly fast and slammed it against the undead guard.
Gunderson was knocked off his feet and slammed into the corner of the kitchen where a giant industrial style dough mixer was located
George pushed the pallet so that it was partly over one of the guard's legs and hit the release lever that dropped the load, quite effectively pinning him to the floor. After confirming the undead guard couldn’t get loose, George walked shakily back toward Vito and Jose.
Nearby, Vito knelt down and was looking at the securely tied up reverend while shaking his head.
George was breathing hard as he came over and asked, “What's wrong with him?”
Vito poked a few easily visible bloody bullet holes in the reverend's chest with the ladle before saying, “I'm no doctor, but I think his problem is that he's suffering from a bad case of being dead: Dead and running around.”
Jose nodded and whispered, “Zombies.”
Vito and George looked at the bite marks on Jose's arm and backed away from him.
“I'm okay, you idiots! Don't look at me like that,” Jose said, while pawing through the first aid kit that had been hanging on one of the walls. “How do you know he’s a zombie? I mean, really how can we really tell?” Jose asked.
George almost mentioned the guard in the doctor's coat that had his face boiled off, but was too busy trying to keep his stomach from reversing gears as he wheezed and struggled to catch his breath.
Vito crossed over to a counter beside the walk-in freezer where a collection of knives were arrayed in an easy to see if any were missing arrangement, that guards would check before letting the kitchen staff leave for the night. He picked up a long butcher’s knife and came back over to the reverend.
George backed up asking, “What if you're wrong? If you stab him with that thing it would be murder.”
Vito nodded and went ahead to cut through the reverend's neck.
George and Jose looked away for a few seconds until there was a thud sound and Vito said, “Nope, it wasn't murder. This guy's already dead.”
Jose whispered a prayer in Spanish and George finally worked up the courage to look over.
The reverend's head was lying in his lap. The mouth was still opening and closing as the eyes looked up at George until Vito slammed the long blade through one of the eye sockets. The mouth stopped opening and closing and Vito pulled the knife back out and wiped the blood off the blade against the reverend's pants.
George watched as Vito searched through the man's pockets. He pulled out a set of keys and his wallet.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” Jose said as he finished bandaging his arm.
George shook his head slowly and walked back over toward the pinned guard trapped under the pallet of flour.
Jose went over to Vito as he tossed the empty wallet on the dead reverend’s body and slid the cash he'd found inside a pocket. “Come on, man, let's ditch el gordo. You and me can find the car that goes with those keys and be gone in no time.”
“Don't call him gordo,” Vito said quietly and looked over at George before continuing. “Where do you think we could go? I mean, even if we found the car and someone hasn't already hot wired it, where would we go?”
“For a start we could get away from here, very far away from here.”
Vito watched George lift a big sack of flour and toss it on the guard's chest then another and another until the undead guard was fairly well pinned to the floor.
George stepped over and slid the guard's handgun from the holster then checked his pockets for extra bullets. He found two speed loaders and went back over to the others. Looking at Vito, he handed him the gun and asked, “Has it been fired?”
Vito quickly flipped open the revolver's barrel and saw it was fully loaded. “Nope, whatever happened to him must have been quick,” Vito said then tried to hand the gun back, but George just shook his head.
“I don't know anything about guns. I've never even fired a real one. The closest I've ever come is playing video games. I'd probably end up shooting myself by accident.”
Jose grunted in disgust, but Vito only smiled saying, “Don't sweat it. I'll teach you sometime.”
“We need to go,” Jose said again.
“No, that would be stupid,” Vito said crossing over to unbuckle and remove the guard's gun-belt. “You tell me where we could go that has forty foot high walls of granite, like Bayonne, and then I'll consider leaving.”
“This is a prison, you loco gringo. What do you think will happen to us once the guards get control again?” Jose asked.
“They won't,” George said quietly, looking at the weakly struggling undead guard buried under several hundred pounds of flour sacks.
“What do you mean, they won't?”
Vito nodded saying, “George is right, Jose. If they couldn't get the guards to show up for work when they had Bayonne under control, why would they come now that it's in complete chaos?”
“You're saying we should take the prison for ourselves? That's loco.”
Vito buckled the gun-belt around his waist and said, “I doubt we could take the whole prison, and I don't think we need more than A-Block to hole up in, anyway. I think, for now at least, we should just barricade ourselves inside it and stay put until things calm down.”
“Then what? Besides, all the food is here. If we're going to stay at Bayonne we'll need food. Why not stay in here?”
Vito shrugged and looked at George. “What do you think?”
“Speaking as a 'gordo',” George said sullenly then paused to give Jose a dirty look before continuing, “...it's tempting to stay here. But it’s probably a bad idea. The Sabres, the skinheads, and all the other gangs might leave the prison, but if they don't it's only a matter of time until they get hungry and come here. I don't know about you guys, but I don't want to be in their way.”
“Alright, that's smart,” Vito said and turned to Jose holding out the keys he took from the reverend. “So, what's it going to be, Jose? You still want to leave and take your chances or help us gather some food and get our asses back to A Block?”
Jose bit his lower lip and stared at the keys for a few seconds before sighing and saying, “Okay. Let's find some food and get somewhere safe.”
LaShod backed away as Scar came charging out of the workshop and swung a four foot long piece of metal at his head. He felt the wind of it
as it passed over when he ducked and ran toward the roughly same sized man and punched him. His fist connected solidly to the big man's solar plexus. Scar stumbled back and almost dropped the piece of metal, but then the captain felt something hit him hard in the back.
As LaShod had dealt with Scar, the younger skinhead had run up behind him and swung the hammer that he was holding. It was a heavy mallet style hammer used for pounding on metal, but also worked quite effectively as a weapon.
The captain thought something was busted as his back screamed in agony. Staggering unsteadily and expecting another blow, he heard the young man behind him suddenly squeal out in pain.
Janice Carson's father had been very protective of his daughter and made her take various self defense classes as a teenager. She'd only had a couple of chances to use her skills since then, but the would-be mugger who's arm she broke and the guy she went on a date with who tried to get grabby and received a broken nose and a pair of badly bruised testicles could both attest she was a very capable and dangerous woman who could easily defend herself.
The idea of running off if things went badly, as the captain had suggested, seemed stupid to the young reporter. She knew the prison was having a riot and as if that weren't bad enough, there also apparently were a number of undead people thrown into the mix. She ran over and kicked the hammer wielding skinhead once in the back of his leg. Then quickly two more times after he fell to the ground- one kick in the chest, and another in the young man's crotch.
He let go of the hammer and curled up in a ball of moaning and swearing misery as she scooped up the heavy mallet.
LaShod was circling and dodging the long piece of metal Scar was swinging, but quickly tiring as his back pain seemed to grow worse instead of better with each passing second. The gang member took a big swing at his head and as the captain dodged he dropped it and tackled him as it clanged to the ground.
Scar didn’t know what was going on throughout the prison, but felt time was growing short and the idea of dragging out this fight any longer would be a bad mistake. He wrapped both hands around the captain’s neck and squeezed while ignoring LaShod’s punches, even as he felt his nose being shattered. (You didn’t earn a nickname like Scar without also having suffered a fairly large number of broken noses)
“Die, you nasty piece of nigger shit!” Scar screamed as blood gushed from his nose.
LaShod was seeing bright flashes of light and barely conscious when Janice brought the heavy mallet down on the back of Scar’s head as hard as she could. The five pound hammer caved in the back of Scar’s skull with such force that a considerable amount of blood squirted out through both his eyes and one ear.
The dead gang member collapsed atop LaShod and it took several seconds of pushing for Janice to roll him off.
She checked the captain for a heartbeat and watched as the other gang member ran back into the workshop building. LaShod’s heart was still beating, but he was unconscious. Slapping his face gently, she whispered, “Wake up.”
His eyelids fluttered but LaShod didn't seem able to open them.
Janice scooped up the hammer at the same moment she heard running footsteps approaching from behind. She spun around and spotted at least half a dozen young inmates, all with shaved heads, running through the workshop toward her. She sprinted toward the athletics field and dropped the heavy hammer after only a few seconds. Risking a glance over her shoulder when she reached a tall chain link fence that separated the baseball and football field, Janice tripped over something and fell hard in the grass.
Before she could even get to her knees the convicts were there. They were laughing and yelling as they tore off her clothes.
Captain LaShod opened his eyes as the reporter's screams echoed back from the prison’s tall granite walls. It was the most he felt capable of doing for several moments. The rear of his uniform shirt had only a bit of blood on it from the back wound he'd gotten, but the pain was so intense every time he tried to move he decided it would be easier to just give up and closed his eyes.
The reporter's shrill screams were very grating and almost as difficult to deal with as his back wound.
From one of the camera views Carl saw a great many inmates still milling around near the open gate and wondered why they were staring at the administration building. He switched cameras and saw some men pouring gasoline through some of the broken ground floor windows. In less than a minute smoke was pouring from the windows and the inmates were cheering so loud that Carl could hear them even inside the librarian's office.
A braying alarm started sounding as Carl switched camera views inside the Administration Building. Some support personnel had barricaded themselves inside the warden's office and as they started panicking after smelling smoke the old man tried to reactivate the fire suppression sprinklers.
On the computer screen a flashing prompt requested a code to reinitialize the fire protocols.
Carl stared in disbelief and tried using some of the codes Bobby had written down, but after each wrong answer he had to restart the entire fire suppression program again. And each time he restarted it he would glance at the warden's office on the monitor. The people were choking on the fumes drifting up from downstairs. Tears ran down Carl's face as he kept trying different codes.
After five minutes the sprinklers came back on, but it was far too late; either to save the people or the Administration Building. The same automated public address message from before began to play, and those doors that had swung shut earlier once more opened.
Carl switched camera views of what was going on inside the burning building. Room after room was filled with so much smoke he couldn't see what was happening, until he clicked on the camera covering the infirmary hallway. The prison ward for psychiatric cases was located at the rear of the Administration Building. Every door was standing open and a parade of convicts was mirthfully marching outside.
Carl realized nearly all of them were still dressed in the dark blue uniforms reserved for those convicts that had been relegated to the Maximum Security Block for the mentally insane or just those deemed too psychotic to be with the general inmate population. They were banging bedpans together and then he saw that the most notorious and feared prisoner in all of Bayonne was leading them; Twisto The Clown.
He was born Ezekiel Thorne but would only respond to the name Twisto since his arrival at Bayonne. When he first came few guards and almost none of the other inmates had any idea just how dangerous he was. Part of the problem stemmed from how charming and genuinely funny he could be at times, the rest of it was his normal appearance. He was bald, thirty-six years old, stood just shy of six foot tall, and was of medium build. After the trial, his court appointed psychiatrist wrote a tell-all behind the scenes biography with a title that summed him up quite aptly; Twisto: Behind the Smiling Mask of Madness.
The first half of the book detailed Ezekiel's relatively sane childhood, although interviews with his neighbors did bring into question his suspected involvement with several pet mutilations that began as he entered his teens and ended only after he moved away. Cats were the most commonly killed pets followed closely by dogs, and there was one case of a python that had somehow escaped its cage and been found dead and twisted like a pretzel. The snake was tied from the front doors of Ezekiel’s synagogue.
The number of disturbing pet deaths varied over the years and most likely at least some of them were not committed by Twisto. Although, at the trial he gleefully recounted several horrible acts that sent some jurors in search of psychiatric help after he was convicted. At one of his psychiatric interviews he was asked why he'd pulled the fur off so many different cats in a multitude of ways.
Ezekiel Thorne tilted his head as far as it would bend to the left before answering. He smiled broadly and said, “I wanted to see for myself if there really is more than one way to skin a cat. It turns out the old saying is right, there is.”
The rest of the book on Twisto detailed his long line of victims he'd
tortured and usually killed as an adult. He was repeatedly hired by unsuspecting parents to perform at birthday parties. While performing, he would scout out potential victims and look for homes that lacked security alarms in particular. Then later come back and either kidnap his targets or at least in one case put on a very different kind of performance in the same house he'd been at as a lovable capering happy clown.
At his trial when family members had asked why he'd done it, Twisto answered as sincerely and truthfully as he could. “I did it because it was fun.” Then he proceeded to tell dirty jokes until he was gagged at the judge's order.
When he was sent to Bayonne Prison, Ezekiel was initially placed in Cell Block A. That was almost a year earlier, and at first he seemed to be behaving himself and made a great many friends. He told everyone to call him Twisto. Many prisoners were impressed by his ability to juggle, sing, dance, and his seemingly endless supply of filthy jokes. Whenever he could buy candy from the prison shop, after earning money doing work or getting some sent to him from relatives, he'd always purchase hard candy mints and saved them up until his birthday. He saved them because he had a plan.
During all that time of gathering candy he had been making a mental list of fellow inmates he most wanted to see dead. At the very top was a double murderer.
An ex-navy man named Roger Wilson who had killed his wife's mother and father at a not quite successful Thanksgiving gathering, hated Twisto and would often beat him until the guards, or more often the clown's followers, rushed in to save him.
Once, Wilson confided to Jose that Twisto's high pitched voice was infuriatingly scary when he acted like a clown, which was incessantly.
Jose, Vito, and a majority of other inmates steered well clear of Twisto and his growing group of followers. There was a hard to define something about the guy that made most of the smarter convicts avoid him. The less intelligent ones seemed drawn to him “like flies to dog shit,” Vito would often say but only when he was out of earshot of the clown or his fans, friends, and minions.