"Pardon me?"
"I don't know why I hate her. Believe it or not. It hurts- knowing something but not knowing how or why. I don't know why I went 3000 miles across America to know why Javier had her photo. I don't know why I killed Javier. I don't know why I killed any of them. I don't know why I hate Alexandra Gibson. All of that- I felt someone or something driving me to do it all."
The expression on his face just changed. He was perplexed at first- when I told him I didn't know why I hated her. That feeling increased manifold- at least it seemed as though it had, as his face had perplexity and confusion written all over it.
"This changes quite a lot. I'm not quite sure it this can get you freedom, but this... if what I think is indeed true, you and I both will know that you were simply helpless."
Saying this, he turned away and walked. This was the interrogation room of the prison. He walked out of the room, he went out of sight and then, the officer led me to my prison. I couldn't make out the complete blueprint of the prison, but I had an idea. The first thing a prisoner does, is know the whole layout of the prison where he is kept. It helps in future needs- breakout being one of them. I was sure that sometime or the other, I would breakout. There were three rows of cells, two rows having two cells and the three having one. There were five guards here, each having machine guns. In my cell there was already someone- another inmate, of course. He looked at me, with a slight smirk. The officer locked the cell, and went away. He spoke.
"Breakout from here is tough, if not anything worse. I can see it in your eyes- you want to get out of here."
He was definitely going to be my best mate here. Looking at him, I knew he had tried breaking out before.
"How long ago was it?" I asked.
"Two months. Any other jail authority would have sent me to solitary; but not here. Reason being- they don't have one. They have pride- pride on their security. Newly built, guards at every nook and corner of this place- inescapable they call it. Nonsense. I got to the compound wall. They shot me on the leg before I made the jump. That's why they caught me. They had no chance otherwise."
"Uh huh. And whose the one helping me get out of here?"
"The name's Gale. Checked into here last year. Killed a cop."
He failed once, he was hungry for freedom. He was definitely going to be the perfect companion to escape with.
"So when do you wanna escape?" He asked. I just wanted to. I knew now that the beast living inside of me had control of me and it wanted Gibson dead. I surrendered to that beast again- as usual.
"Let's get started." I said. He smiled.
"Listen carefully. From now on, whatever I say is quite important. Breakout from here is going to be tough- alone, yes; together, not really." I was all ears.
"In these cells, there are no cameras or mics- we can talk whatever the hell we want to, without fearing nothing. Outside, as you may have noticed, there are five guards. All of them have the M1A SOCOT guns. Heard of it?"
"Sure have. This criminal named Swinn mentioned having that in his favorites tray back home when I interviewed him."
"I know Swinn pretty well. You're a journo. Good guy turned bad eh?" He laughed after saying this. "Anyways, the gun, as I just mentioned, are M1A's. All guards out here have 'em. We gotta get one each from them. There ain't no way we gettin' guns any other way. They are too big to be concealed. So outside this room, there's five guards. We are in Block 1. There are four blocks totally, so 20 guards in this building. This building is a circle as you might know. Visualize a pizza, divided into its 4 slices. That's how the building is made. You ever drew? When you were young?"
"Yeah of course I did." This question was unexpected. We were planning a breakout, and all of a sudden he was asking me if I ever drew as a child.
"Good. Remember the sort of upside down 'U' we would draw between two mountains to show the sun? Well that's the layers of this buiding. Two on the wider part of this 'pizza crust' and one where we are sitting- towards the centre of this pizza. Those two cells have a small division in between. That's how we and the guards can walk in these blocks. At the very end of each block, the hard crust of this pizza, is a door. That leads to the lawn where we are let into every morning at 10. Well that's only Block 1 and 4. Block 2 opens into the warden's office or the interrogation room you came from, and Block 3 opens into the Workshop. There are 6 guards outside Block 1 and Block 4. Basically, 4 guards guard the Workshop, 4 guard the Room and 4 are there for additional headache. There's a 10 foot high compound wall, easy to climb, and only 2 guards on the other side. After the wall, at about 15 feet away, there is barbed wire. Slightest touch of the wire and an alarm goes off, which alerts everyone here, and the Control Centre a mile away. So we have to get past the wire in less than 30 seconds or we will have 20 odd guards shooting at our asses and 40 odd police cars coming our way. Any plans on doing that?"
"Yeah one. We need some equipment. Some of it we can get it from the Workshop. We need silencers, for our guns, most importantly. How are your gonna get them?"
He got up, and took a book lying on the bed. He showed me the spine of the book. It had an opening, through which he slipped three of his fingers without difficulty.
"What I'm gonna do is imma put a rag into here, and tell these guards to parcel it to my man in NYC. He is gonna take out the rag and put silencers in here. It's a code. Small rags mean silencers. I got one the last time I tried to escape. No suspicion."
"Brilliant. So here's the plan. Tomorrow, we go to the Workshop and build ourselves protection. You have wooden planks in there?"
"Hell yeah."
"Cool. So we take three planks each, cut them as long as our body from head to toe and as wide as ourselves, attach 'em together, and use some metal pieces as handles. Metal pieces?"
"We got 'em all."
"Also, we might not be and to do this in one day. How long can we stay in the Shop?"
"One hour."
"Probably two days. We have to conceal the day's work somewhere."
"No hiding needed bruh. There's a locker in there. We prisoners can keep the day's work in there. They don't check it, cuz they believe in their security. They think we ain't got no chance of escapin'."
"Amazing. So then, after we're done with making the protection, we wait till we get the silencers from that friend of yours. The day after getting it, we escape. 10 in the morning, guards open the door, we snatch and push- Snatch the gun, and push the guards. We take cover and attach the silencers. Then we shoot the guards outside this cell. How many will there be?"
"Seven. Seven in each block and 4 outside the pizza- 2 near our end and 2 on the Block 4 end."
"Ah. More security at 10 eh? Okay so after we shoot them, if we can, we get out of Block 1. Then, we shoot the guards we face there. We run into the Workshop take our creation."
We did exactly as we planned.
Now, five days after planning it all, here we were standing outside the Shop. Bullets were fired our way before we even reached the door. I saw the Gale- who wanted to escape at any cost, at this instant. He smashed through the window and fired. His bullets killed two out of the three guards. I fired one more, and the third one also died.
"There's probably more coming. We need to collect them quickly."
I hadn't even completed my sentence, and Gale had his equipment and he threw mine to me. That was going to save us from the bullets fried at us. They had close range rifles. The further we were, greater would be the protection offered by our shield. I covered my whole front self using this shield and ran. We ran back towards where we came from and we were welcomed by about ten guards- maybe more. We tried and maintained our distance from them. Bullets were being fired from one side to another. After five intense minutes, we finally had the upper hand. We had killed 15 till now- only half. The other half was containing the prisoners, we thought. There was a lot of noise on the Block 4 end and the sound of bullets reiterated itself every few seconds. The guards outside were definitely alerted. The Control Centre was definitely informed so the time we had was very less.
"Change of plan," he said." We jump from this side." Instead of jumping from the wall right in front of Block 1, we climbed the adjacent one. I jumped first, he followed. At a distance, I saw lights- police cars surely.
"We have to hurry!"
He jumped. He used the pliers we acquired from the Shop, like a knife- he jumped from the wall, and dragged the pliers across the fence. The alarms went off, but the fence was cut. We forced ourselves through. Cuts on our arms and legs didn't stop us. He ran- ran really fast. I had to keep up. Nothing else was going on in my mind. I just ran. We ran two miles- jumping over logs and puddles here and there and running under low branches.
Two miles and we were there. It was a shack, quite similar to Rodrigo's. We had left the police trailing long back. I knew it was going to be tough finding us.
"We'll rest," he said. "In turns. You rest first. We need someone awake to watch on us." So I did.
We took turns, taking rest and watching out for unwanted guests.
Until next morning...
