And will you still be able to tell when it’s safe for me to leave the medical unit?” “Yes, I can call you,” Steve replied.“Good, get started,” Cara said and ended the call. “And don’t forget to cut the power to the trams as soon as you see the staff drop.”Cara waited an hour, then another thirty minutes before her phone rang. It was Steve telling her the connections were made and the gas was now being piped into the prison through the central air unit. She stepped away from her desk and entered the E R finding an unused oxygen concentrator setting against the wall. She found the correct tubing and locked the door. She then turned on the concentrator and breathed the oxygen rich air coming from the unit. As long as there was power to the medical unit, she’d be safe from the gas that was now starting to kill every non vampire in the building.Bohdan sat on the edge of his hard cold stainless steel bed and watched the next tram stop. Another twelve paying customers sat in their chairs
Steve took off to the warden’s office while Cara left to free Bohdan. The tourists on the trams were now roaming the tunnels unable to escape, scared for their lives and the vampires were now regaining consciousness. The prison was on lockdown as Steve controlled all systems from various control panels throughout the pods, and the authorities were now on their way to evaluate the situation. The shit had hit the fan.Steve found his way to the warden’s office and reached for the doorknob, it was locked. He fished out his master key from his massive key ring and popped open the door. He found Kathy sitting behind her desk holding a pen like a knife. Steve smiled and entered the room. “What are you going to do with that?” Steve asked.“What’s going on?” Kathy asked. She was a bit dizzy from the gas that had found its way into her office. She got a small amount and was becoming more lucid every second.“I gassed the place,” Steve replied. “Except for your office. Some of the gas must have
“I don’t know, I thought I was supposed to,” Steve replied.“Now you see why I demoted you,” Kathy said. “You’re going to have forty six vampires running around in this building with thirty six tourists. What do you think will happen?“I can lock the tourists up in the guard pods,” Steve replied. “Or we can get the fuck out of here,” Kathy said.“There’s only one way out and that’s the tunnel system in the basement.”“Wait a second,” Cara said. “I didn’t plan this so we could all run. I planned this so we could live independently. The vampires will feed on the tourists, but not kill them. We will run this prison as our new home.”“Are you fucking nuts?” Kathy asked. “Do you think criminals will play by your rules? These inmates may be vampires, but they are also convinced murderers. They won’t do what you want them to, they will kill all the tourists and then try to escape.”Steve heard sounds coming from the door to the tram tunnel. Voices that got louder and louder. He stepped over
Three hours into the prison takeover, the nine humans left alive pondered their fate locked up in guard pod three with no way to escape. Steve, Cara and Kathy all sat at the control panel filling the only seats with the rest resting on the floor with their backs to the walls. From their vantage point they couldn’t see the bodies and blood on the commons floor, it was a blessing considering the mess.“How long till it starts to smell?” Paula Borodin asked. She was a fifty something woman who dragged her husband to the zoo as a getaway trip for the both of them.“Depends on the temperature,” Ted, her husband replied. “But I’d say two days.” “Oh my God, that’s going to wreak!” Paula snapped back.“This was your idea, not mine,” Ted replied. He was pissed. He didn’t want to go on the trip in the first place.“Yeah, well at least I tried to do something, that’s more than you would have.”“No, I wanted to go to Kansas City, but no, you wanted to see the vampires. Fuck these vampires, I didn
“I hate skinheads,” Bohdan replied. “He tried to recruit me as their new leader. I refused.”It wasn’t long before vampires entered the commons area and started removing the bodies. One by one they would drag them out of the room and down the hall. The distance from the commons to the yard was about fifty yards with the yard in the center of the rectangle shaped prison building. It was the only open air space they could get to.Two hours later smoke could be seen rising into the air from the window, the only window they could see from the pod. Steve clicked on the monitors and brought up the image of a stack of bodies burning in the center of the yard. Surrounding the bodies were six vampires who were tending to the fire, tossing on paper and wood to keep the flames burning. They found it wasn’t easy to burn something made up mostly of water.Cindy Lewis stood up and walked to the monitor and looked over Steve’s shoulder. She hadn’t said anything the whole time she’d been in the pod,
Rancid paced around pod one trying to think of what he could do to save himself, if he could save anyone else, that was extra, and he didn’t care. “What kind of tools do we have access to?” he asked aloud.“You know as well as we do, nothing,” Charles replied. He was not a skinhead, but was as frustrated a vampire as any of the rest. “The guns are locked up in the armory, the kitchen is locked, and so is maintenance.”“We need to break into one, get some tools we can use, which would be the easiest?”“Kitchen I suppose, maintenance is locked down as much as the armory I’d think, they keep a lot of shit down there. But I don’t see how you plan to open a sealed door, the kitchen has a deadbolt I’m sure, if not more.”Rancid was pissed, he knew that all the cells were the same, with the beds, tables and toilets molded as part of the cell with no moving parts. They were designed that way so they couldn’t be used as weapons. But where there is a will, there is a way. “There must be a key s
“There’re humans left, they won’t do that.”“They will try to rescue them, once they do, we’re done,” Rancid said.“They have no idea how many humans are left, they won’t do anything unless they can account for everyone who was working at the time.”Rancid scratched his chin and thought for a second. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Until they can force us out, they can’t do much.”“We need to get the humans out of pod three and into a cell, so we can keep an eye on them. Maybe put them if a few different cells so they can’t get to them at the same time.”“You forget something, I’m not in charge,” Rancid said. “You want to be,” Anita replied.“Want and be are two very different things. I might have some pull with the skinheads, but that’s about it. I’m surprised you’re talking to me. Why don’t you take the lead?”“If I thought I could, I would. The women here get no respect at all. If we didn’t keep together, we’d be raped and killed,” Anita said. “It’s still a man’s world.”“Well, I don
“What are our options?” Kathy asked. She looked to Steve for the answers. “There must be a way to get out of this pod.”“Yes there is,” Steve replied. “There is an escape hatch built into every pod in case of a prison riot or takeover, just like this.”“Great, why didn’t you mention this before?”“Because it won’t work unless you have someone in maintenance to open the door at the end of the tunnel. Every pod has a hex key in the emergency box that will let you open the pod escape door, but once you traverse the tunnel, which is only two by three feet, you have to exit by another hatch door that is opened by someone in maintenance. Last I checked, Alex was dead and I’m here. And unless the National Guard goes in and opens the hatch door, we’re fucked.”“There’s no way to open it from inside the tunnel?” Kent asked.“You won’t fit in the tunnel anyway fat boy,” Steve replied. “What are you? Three fifty?”Steve expected to get beat for his comments, but Kent was more of a gentle giant w