High Stakes

Prison Break (Darien)

"Head in the game, Valentine!" he growled.

"Law 208, subsection 5 A," I said as I fired another warning shot around the corner. Towards the guards. Not at. "Any escaping prisoner is granted," I shot again, "a fair trial if no guards are seriously injured."

Deacon fired as well, just missing the target before he leered at me again. "Darien, you blinded two guards back at the cell block."

"He can heal from that," I said.

"Heal from having his eyes gouged out?"

"I don't know," I shot around the corner. Towards. Not at. These were day workers. Innocent men. Granted, no vampire was legitimately innocent, but still, maybe they had a family. Maybe they had someone they had to get home to as well. "They might be okay," I added.

"Darien...." Deacon fired another shot, only this one landed in between the guard's eyes. The other guard wailed as his colleague fell onto the floor in a frothy, seizing mess. I'd watched many men die in my afterlife, but this man seemed to die in slow motion. I stared as the werewolf venom the bullet was laced with acted as a poison in his veins. The guard grabbed his dying friend, screaming his name, but all I could see was my face on the dying man's corpse. That could have been me–that could be me, I thought.

My hands shook as I reloaded my gun.

Beside me, I could hear Con's thoughts echo inside my mind. 'There is only one ticket out of here,' he thought, 'and it's escaping or in a casket.'

– † –

Prisoner number: 8-29 D.

That's what I had been reduced to on the inside. Three numbers and a letter. At least it was a fitting letter, I supposed. The guards called me '29-D,' like that was my name—regardless of the guards knowing my 'real' name.

Everyone knew my name.

Darien Bloody Valentine was a hard name to forget, especially around these parts, but they liked to make us nameless on the inside. They liked to strip us of any remaining sense of identity of who we used to be. Here we were cattle. Sheep. My rags were also proof of that; the same colourless grey they gave all the prisoners. My cell was so tiny that if I lay down and stretched out, I could almost touch the other side. It consisted of the following items – a cot, which smelled like goat cheese (I wasn't sure how), a broken metal sink with a reflective, plastic mirror above it, so I could see how depressed I looked, and a bucket to both sit on and piss in. The cement around me was damp, and despite my measuring method, you really didn't want to lay down in this hellhole.

Once a day, a guard came in and hosed out the darkened cells with a high-pressure water cleaner, and if we'd pissed them off enough, or they just didn't like us, they often hose us down too. But despite the in-house cleaning service, the cage I was left in still somehow had this grime everywhere and made the rest of my cell smell of stale blood and urine. This only made me question the goat cheese part even more. Was there ever a goat in here? Did it lay on the bed? Or was that just the scent of death and decay after many, many years?

Either way, believe it or not, this was one of the better places. The Slab, they called it. It was a holding facility where the real offenders were put before their trial, which was typically some kind of death sentence.

"29-D," said a guard.

With my back still leaning against the cold cement behind me, I glanced up.

"Your lawyer's here."

About bloody time, I thought bitterly. How long has it been? Three days? A week? It was hard to keep time in this Godforsaken hellhole, considering there weren't any windows in here. The prisoners relied solely on the fluorescent lighting which was on the roof in between the cells, in the middle of the aisle. Somehow, it was still dark in here, but I supposed that I should count my blessings since other holding cells down south were built with skylights on the top so that the sun would beam down into the cells all day. For a vampire, that was another kind of torture. This, being withheld in the royal part of the prison, wasn't so bad by comparison.