Inmates exiting the penitentiary were picked up and chauffeured away. The rest of the guards were marched out of the prison, hands on their heads. A pickup truck pulled near the front entrance and a man standing in the bed raised a long, dark tube to his shoulder.
The missile obliterated the road sign heralding the entrance to ADX Gilchrist and federal property.
A cheer went up. Oddly, the prison structure itself, the gates and the watchtowers, were left intact.
Chloe Gimms saw it all then. The inmates were going to turn the tables on their captors and lock them up like prisoners of war. Chloe Gimms’s mind flashed on every story of human degradation she had overheard in her six years working federal pens. She was one of the few women there and she was going to be passed around like their last cigarette.
But that was not what happened. A truck used for transporting livestock was brought around and all the captives were loaded onto it like day laborers, including the wounded and the dead. Armed prisoners in con scrubs surrounded the truck and Chloe Gimms pushed toward the center, trying to disappear with the rest. The back of the truck was shut up and they began rolling away from the prison, past the fallen campers and abandoned TV trucks, turning the corner and following a bulldozer out along the access road. Chloe’s mind reeled. She looked around for familiar faces, but they were packed so tightly she could not move. Where were they being taken? The phrase “mass grave” popped into her head, and Chloe Gimms’s bladder emptied, warming the insides of her thighs. Hers was one of the last to go.
Special agent Lon Coté rode with the rest of the Gilchrist police force aboard a second truck, pulling in between the guard truck and the lead bulldozer. Ex-cons had led a surprise attack on the prison from the outside, and the liberated prisoners rode in pickups on either side of the two trucks now, howling and hoisting rifles in their hands.
The country road was dark but for the white snow. In the distance Coté could see machines working, large vehicles: backhoes, tractors, a fork-bladed snowplow. The organization mystified him. This was a coordinated effort, not a riot of opportunity.
The trucks slowed near the machines, rolling past cruisers and armed prisoners, AR-15s leaning casually on shoulders. No one on Coté’s truck uttered a sound. A huge combine lit up, slowly threshing its way off the road to allow them past. Suddenly Coté understood, and he was amazed.
The voices of the cons below grew angry. An argument, back and forth, in Spanish and English. The Spanish accent was Cuban. Gilchrist housed seven Mariel Cubans, the worst of the six thousand or so degenerates, criminals, and lunatics dispatched to the United States in Castro’s “Freedom Flotilla” of 1980.
Coté chanced a look over the side of the truck. The arguing Marielito was wearing Chief Darrow’s hat and brandishing his AR-15 in the direction of the cops on the trucks. One of the ex-cons was telling the Marielito to do as he was told, that he was not following the plan.
Then a yell from behind. Coté turned in time to see a young man in uniform slipping over the side of the truck, dropping wildly to the ground and taking off. It was the police chief’s son, his arms pumping, boot treads kicking up bits of snow like sparks as he ran full-out for the trees.
Two shrill whistles from one of the ex-cons on the ground and a shot rang out.
The chief’s son stumbled to his knees. A second shot stopped him from crawling.
People on both trucks screamed.
Armed cons and ex-cons jumped from their cars and rushed the trucks. A pickup with an M60 machine gun mounted on its bed pulled around from the shadows, high-beam headlights on, patrolling the road with a small man crouched behind the butt stock, hands at the ready. Coté began saying “The Lord’s Prayer” in his head.
The Marielito was still going on, his debate with the white ex-con ratcheted up a few notches now. The hostages’ fate was being decided. Cons and ex-cons waited on all sides with wild looks of freedom and desire in their eyes, their rifles trained on the trucks, waiting to be told what to do.
Blue police lights came on. There was a cruiser set just off the road. Four men in con scrubs stood outside it, mostly in shadow.
One man stood in front of the rest. That man slowly shook his head.
The Marielito in the police hat gave in. He shrugged grandly and lowered his rifle, swearing in Spanish.
Rifles went down all around the trucks. The man with the mounted machine gun took his hand off the trigger and tipped the barrel toward the sky.
The trucks lurched and started forward again, past the rumbling combine and a sign marking Gilchrist’s town limits. Coté’s eyes remained fixed on the man who, with a simple command gesture to the renegade Marielito, had pardoned their lives. He was certain that blue-tinged silhouette was Luther Trait.
The combine rolled back into place behind them and the other machines crowded in, the snowplows starting to work, pushing snow from the fields onto the road. The prisoners were barricading the routes into Gilchrist. They were expelling every law-enforcement representative and closing off the town. It was a revolution.
Chapter 8
The center of town was taken without resistance and Luther Trait entered the Gilchrist police station with little fanfare, like a conquering general inspecting the abandoned enemy headquarters. The sensation was so like one of his mental journeys that he had to remind himself that he was in fact physically in the room. Coffee cups had been left behind and coats were slung over chair backs and the telephones still rang. Trait touched one of the desks, feeling it under his fingers, still uncertain. He put his hand on a ringing phone and the receiver was still warm. He answered it.
The voice said, “This is Salvatore Richardsen of the FBI. Get me Agent Coté.”
Trait said, “He is not here right now to take your call.”
“Who is this?” demanded the caller. “What the hell is going on there?”
Trait hung up and turned to his crew. They were stamping snow off their shoes and exploring the station, except Spotty who stood by his side. Spotty had been Trait’s white shadow at Marion, the Brotherhood of Rebellion pledge a full head taller than anyone else in the room, and loyal in the extreme. He would march at any order. ADX Gilchrist had failed to break him mentally because there was so little there to break. The rest were ex-cons dressed as locals, Brotherhood of Rebellion click-ups from the outside.
Dove Menckley entered the station shivering. Slender and shifty, a compulsive arsonist with burned hands and skin grafts obscuring the Hispanic features of his face, Menckley took in the room with furtive glances out of weepy, bloodshot eyes. Stacks of paperwork, partition drywall, roster notices: Menckley’s world was full of kindling.
“Crazy out there,” he said, rubbing his scarred fingers together thirstily. “No fires, anyway.”
Trait said, “There better not be.”
Menckley nodded, chastened. “They’re rounding up the residents and bringing them to the prison.”
“Good. How do the people look?”
“Bad,” Menckley said, smiling until he realized he probably shouldn’t. “Pretty bad.”
“Cons staying inside town?”
“I think so. They’re enjoying it too much to run off yet. A few will try their luck on the outside, but I think most are excited about assembling back at the pen tomorrow morning. They want to know what your plan is.”
“We have the snow on our side, but not time. Get back to the pen. Some of them might be thinking about tearing it down. Discourage them. We need it for the next phase.”