Sam and Colby: The Penitentiary

29

*hi, i hated the old cover so i changed it, that's a picture of the actual prison*

"Ey, fresh meat. Uppity, let's go!" a man barked. A loud metal clanging made me jolt upright, almost smacking my head on the metal platform above me.

"What the...,"

"Now! Let's go! Morning count is in ten minutes," the man huffed. I leaned over to look at the direction the voice was coming from. All I managed to catch a glimpse of was a hand, swinging forward as it would when someone was walking. On the other side of bars. Jail cell bars. And I was on the side I didn't want to be on.

"Where the fuck?" I heard someone groan above me. I looked up and realized that I was in a bunk bed. On the bottom. I swallowed hard.

I shrunk back against the wall the bed was shoved up against, cowering in fear. Where was I? Who was above me? What the fuck was happening?

I watched as a pair of feet swung themselves over the side of the bed, then landed on the ground as their owner jumped down. I just about passed out with relief when I saw that it was Sam.

"Oh, thank god," I whispered. He turned around to look at me.

"Vanessa? Thank the lord. What the fuck is this?" he asked.

"Wh—I don't know! You don't know either?" I asked.

"No!" Sam exclaimed. He then turned his head to see the bars and jumped back. "Are we... no. No, there's no fucking... what the fuck."

I looked down and noticed what I was wearing for the first time. It was a men's light grey button up shirt and matching colored pants, made out of the same material of nurse's scrubs, a white tanktop undershirt on underneath the button up top. They were too big for me, still rigid creases in them from being folded up.

"Sam... I don't like this," I said shakily. He was wearing the same thing. We both had hospital-grade grip socks on our feet, mine bright red and Sam's a deep blue.

"What do the colors mean?" Sam asked.

"Something bad," I whispered. We both stood there, frozen with fear for a moment.

"This is the same place. This is the jail. These are the over 100 year old empty, abandoned cells we were just shown on a tour of this goddamn place," Sam said, his eyes growing wide.

Damn it. That was exactly what I was thinking. I was just praying to god that I was wrong.

"Morning count!" a man yelled, his voice echoing. A loud buzzing sound echoed through the air and our cell door popped open a few inches. "Out here! Now!"

Sam and I looked at each other, my heart beating so fast I thought it was literally going to burst in my chest. He visibly swallowed, then led the way over to the door with wobbly legs. He slowly rolled it open a few feet, enough for us to walk out.

We were on the second floor of cells out of the three floors in this unit. There were rows of prisoners lining the railings of the upper floor platform, two people in front of each cell, wearing uniforms identical to me and Sam's, everyone's socks one of four colors.

Sam and I imitated what everyone else was doing, standing with our hands clasped behind our backs and legs pushed together with a rigid back posture a few feet in front of our cell door. I peered through the railing in front of us and looked down to see several prison guards, all dressed in black uniforms sporting shiny badges on their chests. My eyes quickly found their way down to the guard's belts, covered with different things. A wooden baton, handcuffs, a walkie talkie, some keys. One of them had a gun.