“Preacher!” one of them shouts.
Castillo frowns. “What?”
The inmates rush forward and dump the ammo into the gun bag. Silas closes the door, a worried look on his face, while they start loading up magazines as fast as they can, ramming shells into shotguns.
“Preacher. He’s here. He’s coming—”
There’s a concussive blast and a massive hole appears in the door. Silas, who had been standing right in front of it, screams and goes down, his back shredded to pieces by wood, metal, and what I’m assuming are shotgun pellets.
The door slowly moves inward to reveal Preacher standing there, holding a shotgun.
I shove Sawyer to the right. Felix follows and we duck down behind a shoulder press machine.
“God has judged you all for trespassing!” shouts Preacher as he moves farther into the room. “You have come into the promised land as invaders. For did not the enemy say, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, and my hand shall destroy them!’”
His followers step inside the gym behind him. They’re all armed with handguns, rifles, and shotguns. I count seven of them.
“‘And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.’”
There’s a moment of silence. The figure next to Preacher leans into him and whispers something. Preacher frowns as he listens, then pulls back to give the guy a look.
“Man, do you not read the Bible? It’s a prerequisite for being in my blessed army. What I’m saying is kill these motherfuckers. They’re trespassing in my Canaan.”
The guy hesitates again. Preacher sighs and pumps his shotgun. “Just shoot.”
Preacher’s men open fire, muzzle flare lighting up their faces. Some of the Kings scramble for cover behind the weight equipment. Others rush toward the changing rooms and are cut down in midstride, blood spraying into the air.
Preacher has his arms outspread, face raised to the roof. “For you know I am the Lord,” he shouts, “when motherfuckers spray bullets in my name— Oh shit!”
His last words come in response to Castillo and some of his men grabbing the half-loaded guns and returning fire.
The noise of shotguns and semiautomatic weapons blasts through the confined space. Felix lunges out from behind the cover of the weight machine, grabs a Beretta from the guy standing on the end of the line, and shoots him in the head.
He then ducks down and darts through the gap that opens up, running straight through the door. Sawyer and I follow him. We sprint along the corridor as fast as we can, the sounds of gunfire echoing behind us as we go. I pause once to duck into the storeroom and grab the key ring, then we put as much distance between us and the gym as we can.
Fifteen3:20 a.m.
Sawyer feels like she’s losing control of everything.
Wait—who the hell is she kidding? She never had control. From the moment she arrived this morning, events have just snowballed, and she’s been caught up in them, thrown about like a leaf in a… well, like a leaf in a goddam hurricane.
Right now she’s utterly exhausted, freaked out, pissed off, fed up, terrified, and a lot of other things she’s too stressed to even attempt to label.
“Man, I’ve never experienced shit like that,” says Felix excitedly.
The three of them have ducked into what turns out to be a mail room. There are piles of letters everywhere, some bound by elastic bands, others piled up in wall nooks. Opened letters are spread across multiple desks. Magnifiers with lights attached and portable drug-testing kits stand ready to examine them for contraband. Some relatives spike the paper with LSD. Others spray Spice—synthetic cannabis—onto the pages; the drug soaks in and the inmates then smoke them.
They came in here to hide in case Preacher came after them. And to discuss their next move. Which to Sawyer is totally pointless, because if their next move isn’t making their way through the prison units as fast as fucking possible, then they’re all going to die anyway.
Constantine is sitting next to her on a desk chair while Felix has his face pressed against a crack in the door, watching the corridor.
“How long are we going to be here?”
“We’ll give it five minutes,” says Constantine.
Sawyer sighs and leans against the desk. She stares at Constantine for a long moment, a thoughtful look on her face. “Tell me about Amy,” she says after a while.
He looks at her in surprise. “Why?”
She shrugs. “We’ve got five minutes to kill.”
He hesitates for a moment, his eyes distant. “She was… amazing. And a pain in the ass. Stubborn. But not arrogant. She could change her mind, you know? She didn’t think she was always right. If you could lay out your argument, and she saw sense in it, she would shift her viewpoint. I liked that about her. Most people just double down when they realize they’re wrong. They get defensive, argumentative. But Amy never saw the point in that.”
“How did you meet?”
“She stalked me.”
Sawyer looks at him in shock. “She didn’t.”
He smiles. “No. Well… kinda. I was coming back from my veterans’ support group meeting. I was on the train, just sort of… zoned out. You know how it gets when you have to deal with emotional shit. You’re just mentally exhausted. So there I was, sitting there, minding my own business, staring at my hands, and I get this feeling someone is watching me. I look around, but I don’t see anything suspicious. No one really paying me attention. Just normal people doing normal things. I look down again, but
