Lockdown (A YouTuber Crossover)

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I can tell you the exact moment my life went to hell.

It was 2 years ago at this point, I was only 13 and fights and trouble were going on at school. I didn't live in a nice part of town, but it wasn't the worst either. Either way it was still up there with pretty bad places to live. During lunch and recess the cafeteria and playground became a battlefield for the school gangs, most of the fights were with words, you know the name calling and stuff like that. (My group had control of the jungle gym and we weren't giving that up.) I later realized just how much like prison school can really be.

Every once and awhile a big fight would kick off, punches would be thrown, blood would be drawn the usual fight scene stuff. I never threw a punch, I never gathered the guts to do so, also being as scrawny as I am there really wasn't a point, I'd get killed. Even though I never started a fight, that doesn't make me any better than the kids that did, at least fighting with your own two fists was kinda noble.

That Thursday started off like any normal day. I would never have guessed that it was the beginning to my downfall. I sat with my friends Ghost and Jordan on the monkey bars, we were talking about football and who we thought was gonna win the super bowl that year. Jordan didn't really care or understand so he just hummed and listened. It was one of those days where everything seems to be going perfect. Not a cloud in the sky, and the sun was the nice kinda warm like it wrapped you in a super comfy blanket. Sometimes I think back before my life went downhill and I wonder how things could've been different if I had just walked away.

But I didn't. I didn't walk away when Zexy and Simon dragged this poor little kid across the playground. I didn't walk away when they started pushing him and shoving him, asking him why his dad drove him to school in a Challenger. I didn't walk away when Zexy threw the first punch and the poor kid crumpled. I didn't walk away when Simon took the kid's wallet out of the side pocket on his Star Wars backpack and threw it to me.

Instead... I opened his wallet and took a twenty dollar bill and shoved it my own pocket. I then dropped the wallet and started walking away, thinking about what I could buy with said twenty dollars.

That was the exact moment my life went to hell.

"Always trust your instincts, Ty," was something my dad used to say. He'd been in trouble before: nothing major, but a couple dodgy business deals that hadn't gone the way he'd expected. A good guy, if a little lost, and not really type of person you'd expect advice like that from.

He was right though, you have instincts for a reason, and on the day I walked out of school with Dean Hatcher's twenty dollars they were screaming for me to go find him and give it back. As you can probably guess I didn't. Nope, I learned this great new ability to ignore my instincts, to turn off that little voice inside your head that tells you to and not to do things, so I could deny that I hated what I was doing.

And well, that's how I became a criminal.

Here's the thing too, it was so easy. We started off small, Zexy, Simon and I would go around the playground demanding money from other kids. You know how like in the movies the big and ugly bullies always do before the hero comes in and the bullies get what's coming to them. Only I'm not the most average looking bully; I'm scrawny, not bad looking either. I'm fairly pale, and have dark brown hair that hangs in my face, slightly covering my left eye, which are both also a dark brown. And I didn't get 'what was coming for me' until two years later.

Loose change, couple dollars every now and then and sometimes even some candy. For Zexy it wasn't enough, he suggested that we break into a couple houses Simon backed out. I didn't though. My addiction wouldn't let me. So we did; we hit a small house about three blocks away from my own. We knew this house was empty for the night. We stole around three hundred dollars out of a can the owner kept on her dresser, some jewelry too but we chickened out on selling it and ended up throwing it out.

I knew the old lady who lived there, old faded photos of her and her long-dead husband on the fireplace-- and knowing that those rings and jewelry meant more to her than any amount of money. But I buried those thoughts, like I buried all thoughts that would cause me to second guess what I was doing. Crime is way easier when you don't think about it.

I never thought about the future, it never occurred to me, not once. Even though nowadays the law was a lot stricter over here in the U.S. With more and more teens and kids turning towards the way of crime. Especially after what happened a year or two ago now. During the late fall and winter months around the holidays. (Thanksgiving and Christmas etc.) All around America gangs of teenagers went ballistic. Robbing stores, committing murder; it was horrible. My family didn't really have a Christmas that year as we were too scared to really go to any store during that time period. No one really knows the reasoning why all the gangs and whatever around America decided why what they did happened, it just happened, they called it Hellish Holidays, and that was when the federal government decided to really crack down on youth crime. They took the idea of a prison from the UK called Furnace Penitentiary and one guy who's name no one really knew made it all possible. The sister location Dark Furnace. I remember first seeing the comparison pictures on TV of the two prisons, both looked equally as terrifying as it sent a chill up my spine. The prisons that kids and teens went in and no one came out. Even though I was a petty criminal, I never once thought I'd end up there. Not me.

I mean, I did know that I couldn't keep this up forever, but as long as the money kept coming, I kept telling myself that I was invincible, that nothing would ever happen to me. On my fourteenth birthday I bought myself a brand new computer. On my fifteenth an Xbox one. I was on top of the world and no one could stop me!

But all the terrible feelings and thoughts I kept burying were still there, and I could feel them starting to churn and grow somewhere inside of me. There was still that part of me that knew this wasn't right and that I would be getting what was coming for me soon. And this would be something I would never be able to fully recover from.

And, well, as in all crime shows or movies that thing that was coming came with one last job.