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  "What?" Kathleen's face paled to a chalk white. "That was a joke, Kathleen. Just a joke. Now, get busy. I want everyone in full gear: helmets, goggles and vests. Then get this prison locked down so tight even the cockroaches can't crawl around without getting an okay from one of us. Radio Glasser, let her know I'm on my way. And Collins, get this Edelman guy off the tower and into the administration building's main room. I'm going to want to talk to him." Andy Blacklock, Rod Hulbert, Melissa Glasser, and the other members of the first responders team worked their way across the exercise yard toward the machine shop. Andy kept to the shadows as much as possible, but didn't try to kid himself. The prisoners hiding inside the building would know that he was there. They would know all of them were there. His best hope was that they would be unarmed. Once he was within shouting distance he called to the escapees. "Listen up! You need to come out, and you need to do it now. A showdown does nothing but get people hurt or killed. That's not something you want." Andy gave Rod a nod and the man took off at a slow jog across the yard, up the side of the building and across the roof. He watched Hulbert long enough to know he had made it across the open areas then held his hand up to stop the others from advancing any farther. He was waiting on a call from Kathleen. Things would go better if he knew who was inside the shop.

  He also needed to know how many, and that they really were just prisoners. He didn't-deep down-really believe they had been invaded by aliens. But… He couldn't think of any other explanation for what was happening. Once Rod was in position there was no more movement and no more talk from anyone. They waited in the growing light. The sun was rising, and it was rising in the northwest just as Collins said it would. His men-three of the twelve were women, but somehow he couldn't think of them as anything but men, not if he was going to put them in a position of getting shot at-were in position. He had learned that most team leaders thought like he did. They were women in the lunchroom, the meeting rooms and on the practice field, but when it came time to go one-on-one with a prisoner, they were men. It was only the younger guys who didn't have to fool themselves on that point. The guards at the prison were pretty well evenly divided between black and white, and men and women. But the first responders and E-team members were mostly men. Big men, as a rule. Rod Hulbert was the only man on the team under six-foot. And he was the only man on it who weighed less than two hundred pounds. The dozen or so women who were part of it were like Hulbert. Specialists. They weren't going to be sent into a cell to bring a prisoner out. It wouldn't happen. Prisoners could get huge. That was the thing that surprised new hire-ins. The sheer size of the prisoners. Natural size, too, not simply the bulk that so many of them added by weight-lifting. It seemed like almost half the men convicted of murder were walking giants. One popular theory among the guards was based on studies they'd heard about, where scientists found that a lot of oversized men had an extra Y-chromosome. That extra Y made them big; whether it made them violent or not was up for debate. Andy was a bit skeptical, himself. True, he'd read an article once that stated a large number of verysuccessful executives also had that extra Y. According to the author, these men didn't wind up in prison because their parents found constructive ways for their child to burn off the extra energy and aggression. Andy didn't know if that was true or not, but figured it was at least a possibility since some of those high-powered positions took more than healthy dose of the killer instinct to do well. Still, he had his doubts that there was any such neat answer to the problem. The still simpler explanation was that most juries and judges were more likely to convict a huge man for murder-just to be on the safe side, so to speak-and throw the book at him. Whatever the reason, though, the fact remained. A very high percentage of prisoners convicted of murder were just plain big. He shook his head and forced himself to concentrate on what was happening. He didn't have his usual team. He had only three of his regulars; the rest were from the afternoon crew. He also didn't have a backup of state and county boys waiting to be called in. They were on their own. Hulbert signaled: he could see three prisoners inside the shop; he could get a bead on two of them. "You, inside the machine shop! Come out with both hands on your head and hit the dirt as soon as you're through the door."Kathleen, hurry up. I need to know who's inside that building. Andy gave Hulbert the wait-at-ready signal. He checked his radio. It was on. The sun was coming up fast. The shadows of a half hour ago were gone. The combination sweet and sulfur smell he'd noticed earlier was still in the air. And the sky was the bluest sky he had ever seen, streaked with great swatches of orange, reds, and greens. The clouds were huge, cumulous, and almost fluorescent white. A postcard morning. He wished for a camera and the time to capture what he was seeing, then took a deep breath. It was too pretty a day for someone to die. Unfortunately, that was probably going to happen. The only question was who, and how many. Andy looked at the building and checked his radio one more time to be sure. Hulbert was on his belly, looking through the scope of his semiautomatic rifle. He was following his target, his finger on the trigger, waiting for thego. "It's Charlie-house,"Kathleen called on the radio."Mark Suplinskas is dead. They used dental floss." He'd been afraid of that.

  New guards simply didn't realize how many ways convicts could figure out how to kill or injure somebody. In their own way, they could be incredibly ingenious. "There are six of them,"Kathleen continued."But it wouldn't have been planned. The back wall opened in the… quake… and they took advantage of it. Three cells opened, six prisoners out." She rattled off their names: Cole, Biggs, Porter, Robertson, Walker, Taylor. "Bless you, girl." Andy gave a small sigh of relief. It was prisoners inside the machine shop-no aliens, so stop being a jerk-and they hadn't planned the escape. That meant they wouldn't be heavily armed or supplied for a long siege. He called out loud enough to be heard by those inside the building,

  "We've waited long enough! It's time for you to come out." "Fuck you, badge!" someone yelled from inside the building. "It's time for shit.

  You want us, get yo' lilly ass in here." "If that's the way you really want it," Andy called back, "that's the way you'll get it. But think things over. That way someone always gets hurt. And that someone is usually the prisoner." He motioned to his team to be on the ready.

  Pop! It was a zip gun. He could tell by the sound. The small, prisoner-made weapons were usually constructed out of old plumbing pipes, springs and metal scraps. They weren't accurate beyond a short distance, but they carried a hell of a punch, and could easily kill a man. The load sounded like a. 45. He gave Hulbert waiting on the roof of Baker-house the go signal. Crack! Crack! Andy knew two of the six prisoners were now dead or down. Rod never missed. Frank Nickerson was part of the three-man first responder's setup team. He moved into position and then fired the military issue grenade launcher, sending a canister of C.N. between the bars, through the plate glass window and into the machine shop's one large room. It wouldn't be enough to drive the men out, but it would make them uncomfortable as hell. Heather Kolb, the second member of the team, moved into position and tossed a canister through a window next to the one Frank's had entered. Jason Lloyd finished the trio, with a canister of his own. His went in the same window Heather's entered. Smoke billowed out the broken windows.

  The three of them reloaded and fired again. Now the men inside the building began screaming. "Fuckin' pigs! Don't shoot, you cocksucking monkeys! We're comin' out! Fuck! Don't shoot!" Four black men stumbled through the door, their hands clasped behind their heads. Once through the door they spread out, coughing and hacking and cussing. "Fuckin' hacks, you had no right. No right. We were comin' out." The prisoner doing the talking slid to his knees, his hands clasped behind his head, coughing louder and longer than the others. Frank moved toward him. Andy watched, fear rising inside him. The man dressed in prison gray wasacting. His coughing was too extreme, his breaths too regular for the distress his actions implied. The chemical released by the C.N. canisters, designed to irritate skin, eyes, mucous membranes and lung tissue, did not affect all peo
ple the same. Andy took a deep breath to shout a warning. "No!" It was too late. The prisoner jerked up, burying a shank made from an old toothbrush into the soft tissue beneath Frank's vest. "Fuckin' wood sucker!" he hissed, glaring at the guard-whose skin was several shades darker than his own. Race didn't really matter much compared to the gap between guards and prisoners.

  "Fuckin wood lover!" Frank gasped, blood running from the wound. The prisoner twisted the toothbrush that had been sharpened to a fine point. He was looking for the artery leading to the leg. Andy didn't think. He aimed his shotgun, fired, and the prisoner collapsed, knocking Frank over, falling on top of him. The other three prisoners ran. Someone yelled, "Halt!" The men continued running. Rod fired from the rooftop. Crack! Crack! Crack! Two of the three prisoners were dead. The third was on the ground and would be gone within minutes.

  His gurgling, rasping breaths could be heard in the now silent exercise yard. Rod's bullet had ripped through both lungs. With each breath, he sprayed a pink froth across the road. "Shit, oh shit, ohshit!" Heather was close to hysterical. She was a good guard, had worked for the state for over ten years and seen a little of almost everything, but this was too much. First the quake, and now this. She had never watched that many die that way. And Frank was a kid, just twenty-three years old, who looked a lot like her own son. He was bleeding on her lap now. She had sat down and was holding him, trying to help, to comfort him. "Shit, oh shit, ohshit!" she repeated, finally getting hold of herself. Andy was on the radio. He needed medical and he needed them now. The nurses were coming, but the three to four minutes it would take for them to arrive would be too long if Frank's artery had been nicked. Or his bladder. He remembered Brown.

  Still in the infirmary, unable to be moved because there was nowhere to move her. He checked the man lying on Heather's lap. Heather was applying pressure, trying to slow the bleeding. He then took off at a jog to check the two dead prisoners. He recognized their faces, but couldn't recall either of their names or why they were incarcerated.

  He then knelt next to the third one, the one who was still alive. The man was fighting for each breath. There was nothing Andy could do for him. The man's eyes went wide and wet. His breaths came quicker. He'd be dead within a minute, with that wound. Andy heard the nurses coming with their carts. It was still shift change, which meant there were three of them inside the prison. Two afternoon nurses and the one and only night shift nurse. Caldwell, Ray and the new one, Jennifer Radford. He knew one of the three would stay behind to care for Brown.

  So that left only two nurses available for cleanup in the yard. He turned around, planning to ask what he could do to help, but stopped and stared. Nothing came out of his mouth. Jennifer Radford was all business, taking care of her only patient with a chance at survival.

  She didn't see him, but he saw her. And was momentary frozen. He recognized the sensation, although he'd only had it a few times in his life. Rare as it might be, it was quite unmistakable. And, as before, he was struck by how little the sensation had to do with anything popular culture or certainly the girlie magazines ever talked about.

  It was never a woman's figure, or really even her face. Just…

  Something. In this case, perhaps, the calm seriousness in a pair of intent dark eyes. Who the hell knew? Justsomething that told him he really, really, really wanted to get to know this woman better. Really better. Of all the times!

  Chapter 7 The summons for medical caught the nurses off guard.

  They were locked inside the nurse's station, with their guard outside the door, and were completely absorbed in their own problems. The three of them were in the middle of report, trying to take care of Brown, the injured guard, and do the paperwork for Greg Lowry. Two of the nurses were in a hurry, wanting to go home and get some sleep.

  "Looks like baptism by fire for you, Jenny," Lylah Caldwell said. The sixty-one year old R.N. smiled half-apologetically. "You're going to have to go. My legs are killing me. They're too old and I've been on them for eighteen hours." Jennifer Radford nodded and shot Barbara Ray a worried look. Ray was an LPN who looked to be in her early forties.

  "Don't panic, I'm coming along." Ray pulled a large red leather bag from the bottom shelf of a metal cabinet. "Grab the portable O2 tank."

  She nodded toward the back room, then snatched up a radio and grabbed another bag from the cabinet, loading it onto a gurney. "Brown is stable, she should be able to get by with just one of us for awhile."

  The woman on the examining table moaned and reached for the I.V. tubing attached to her left arm. The saline solution was infusing at a keep open rate. Nothing more than a drop every three seconds, a precaution. If she started to hemorrhage or go into shock, her veins would close up fast, and then an I.V. could become impossible to insert. None of the three nurses were willing to risk that situation.

  The I.V. had to stay. "Oh, God. Please. It hurts. Please."The guard coughed, moaned and then tried to reach the tubing once more. The bandage on her abdomen was fresh, but already streaked with blood.

  Lylah Caldwell pulled a couple of sheep skin straps from a drawer and began strapping Elaine Brown's arms down. "There's no sense hanging around. Everyone's short staffed; you won't get an escort. Get going.

  A guard is down." Jenny moved toward the back room where the O2 tanks were stored. Things were moving too fast for her to understand what was happening inside the prison grounds, but ten years of working under pressure-everything from crash sites to emergency rooms-kept her grounded. She scooped up a small, portable tank and then grabbed a mask and a nasal cannula. There was no way of knowing which would be needed, so it was best to take one of each. When she entered the examination area, Lylah handed her a Sat. Unit. The small device was designed to slip over a patient's finger and read the amount of oxygen in the person's circulatory system. "Now get moving. And don't worry.

  The prisoners are on lock down and the guards have everything under control. The two of you will be safe." Jenny placed the tank on the gurney next to the bags Barbara had stacked in its center. She then took a clipboard filled with forms and the keys Lylah was holding out to her. The call for medical had caused her stomach to tie into a knot. The three of them had just finished counting everything in the room. Keys, pills, injectables, bandages, scissors, ink pens.

  Everything and anything that could be considered contraband inside the walls. Twenty minutes straight. One thing right after another. She had been briefed on the deceased heart attack victim, Greg Lowry, being held down the hall in a small room with bars. Brown's status had been assessed, and they were just beginning to go through the calls for the 3-11 shift when the radio announced a guard was down. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax. Gunshot and knife wounds were not new to her, just something she hated seeing. So much for moving out of the city and slowing things down. She could hear Lylah, the R.N., talking on the two-way. She was telling someone they were leaving the building. Jenny took another deep breath. This was real. It was what the month-long self-defense classes taught to state employees had been geared toward. She was on her own. And if something went wrong she had just one job. She had to survive long enough for the guards to rescue her. The average length of time for their arrival-after they knew you were in trouble-was three minutes. That was one hundred and eighty impossibly long seconds. She gave the gurney a shove. The familiar feel of the cart's wheels wanting to turn right while she wanted to go straight helped calm her nerves. "We better hurry," Barbara whispered.

  Jenny sped up. "The nurses are never hurt," Barbara said, panting a little as she worked at staying up with Jenny. "We're the ones who give them their pills and make their appointments with the doctors.

  They're nice to us. Afraid to get us mad. Afraid we won't get them what they want." Jenny looked down the dark side street they were passing. The reassurances that everything was safe scared her. She could tell by the nurse's tone of voice, Barbara's hurry to reach the guards had less to do with the injured man and more to do wit
h her wanting to be surrounded by guards with guns. Jenny increased her speed. Experience had taught her that anything that has to be said over and over is usually not true. They rounded the next corner and Jenny came to a complete stop. There were about a dozen C.O.'s standing near a man lying on the ground, his head on a woman's lap.

  The woman was crying. A prisoner, a deadprisoner, lay just a few inches away. There were another three prisoners crumpled on the ground several yards away, obviously dead. A guard was kneeling next to one of them. She took a breath of the morning air; it was warm, filled with moisture. Then she noticed the sun was rising. Surprised, she stumbled, caught herself, then kept moving toward the man dressed in blue and black. Her patient. The other man, the one checking the prisoners, had held her attention for a little longer than she liked.

  Even in the dim light she could see his face. It stirred up a set of emotions she still wasn't sure how she felt about. He was Captain Andy Blacklock. She knew his name even though they'd never spoken. She'd seen him leaving the facility as she was arriving every morning of her orientation. He was tall and thickly built. His complexion was ruddy and his hair-color a light brown. And even though he looked nothing like her husband Matt, she couldn't deny the attraction. That attraction had bothered her at first. After a couple of mornings, she found herself looking forward to it. Matt had been dead for almost three years. It felt good just knowing she could still feel. She took a quick glance at her patient, and forgot about the captain. The guard had been stabbed in the groin area, just centimeters from the femoral artery. She knew the artery had been missed because he was still alive. That was the good news. The bad news was, he had lost a lot of blood. Jenny patted the woman holding the man on her lap, then gently lifted the young man's head so she could move and the wounded man could be laid flat. She then applied a pressure bandage and motioned for Barbara to apply additional pressure while she checked his vitals.