He’d done his stint on the train, where he’d had to deal with the crate-full-of-snakes debacle, and the abuse dished out by Lucile Jacobs. That woman had a harsh tongue, and Fred had resigned himself to the fact he was going to be the butt of tedious running jokes for years. He was in a foul mood, but at least he got to switch to gate duty halfway through his shift.
The gate was an incredibly boring post, and a lot of people hated it. Seeing as Longhurst had the train, all the guard at the gate had to do was redirect visitors to the station entrance or explain to tourists that no, you couldn’t just drive up and have a look at a high security prison. Longhurst didn’t admit visitors on a Saturday, so this stint was particularly quiet. If a tumbleweed had blown by, it would have been big news. Fred had been looking forward to sitting down and reading his self-help book in peace.
For a vehicle to get through the front gate it had to be either driven by the warden himself or have the express consent of the warden. That almost never happened. Last year they’d had to bring in a crane for maintenance, but that was about it. So, Commander Blake driving up to the gate was a problem. The man was the highest-ranking CO and, in the opinion of most of the guards, the person who really ran the prison. He was, however, still not allowed to drive through the gate.
“Is this a test, chief?” asked Fred, forcing a smile.
“No,” snarled Blake, “it isn’t. There’s an emergency and I need to get in there now. There’s no time for the stupid train.”
“Right,” said Fred. “Only the rules – and the warden makes a big deal out of them—”
“I know what the rules are, now let me in.”
Fred gulped. “Only, under the rules, sir, it says that I can’t …”
Blake cracked his knuckles.
“Fred, open the damned gates. That is an order.”
Fred looked at Blake and then, reluctantly, went back into the booth and turned the key to open the gate.
He watched as Blake’s Corvette sped down the road towards the prison. Asshole. Fred was going to get in all kinds of trouble for this, he knew it. It was so unfair.
He pressed the button on his walkie-talkie.
“Control, this is Fred at the gate. I’m informing you that Commander Blake has been granted access via the gate as he says there is an emergency.”
“There is, but he’s not supposed to—”
“I know he’s not supposed to. He gave me an order, and I had to follow it.”
“But the manual says—”
“I know what the manual says, Tony. I was the one who did your training course on it.”
“OK, but—”
“I know,” said Fred. “Damn it, don’t you think I know?”
He turned to head back into the booth where he’d have to fill out a log entry. There would be meetings about this. Lots of meetings.
He reached the door to the booth and stopped.
Fred closed his eyes for a long moment and then opened them again.
The thing he couldn’t be seeing was still there, only slightly closer now.
Fred fumbled for the button on his walkie-talkie again.
“Control. We got a problem.”
“Now what, Fred?”
Fred opened his mouth and stood there. He knew there were words for this kind of thing. He knew what they were too, but he would be damned if right there and then his brain could form them into a sentence. Instead, he cleared his throat and said, “Control, you need to pull up the camera at the front gate.”
“Really, Fred? You can’t tell me what in the hell is …” The voice of Tony Rawlins paused for a very long moment, and when he spoke again it was in a near whisper. “What in the hell is that?”
Fred still didn’t speak. Instead, he stood there, his mouth hanging open, watching.
What he was watching was a UFO, flying about seventy feet off the ground and heading straight towards him. Behind it came a massive convoy of vehicles.
“Fred? FRED?”
Fred pressed the button on his walkie-talkie once more. “Tony, I’m going home now.”
“What?”
“Tell ’em I quit.”
Fred got into the little golf buggy they used to travel between the station and the guard post on the gate. He didn’t look back once.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Smithy worked away at the wall. It was tricky. Normally, cutting through plaster to get at some cabling buried behind it was easy, but this wasn’t normal.
For a start, he had to do it quietly enough so that nobody in the next room overheard it. The whole plan would fall apart if someone came in to check why unscheduled work was being carried out in the warden’s office. There was also a shared air vent, so Smithy had to be careful. Luckily, the Saturday shift had the radio on loud, listening to a basketball game, so he didn’t have to be that quiet.
Then there was the voice in his head – well, ear – constantly asking for updates. It appeared Sister Dionne was quite the backseat driver. He had to cut her some slack, seeing as she was under pressure. He’d bitten his tongue and refrained from suggesting that next time maybe she should spend a couple of hours in a dark crate with only a half-inch of glass between her and a whole mess of snakes, and then she could do this part and he would stay in Vegas and maybe catch a show.
More than either of those things, though, there were the snakes. Not the ones he had travelled with, but the ones that lived here. The cabling he had to get to was directly under a whole wall of glass cases containing rattlesnakes. Smithy wasn’t bothered by snakes, at least he was only bothered a normal amount. Some of them were poisonous, like, for example, the ones currently looking down at him from those glass cases. It didn’t matter they
