“What? Like, they knew we were coming?”
Caxton tilted her head from side to side. “The doors we need are always open, or easily kicked in. We keep running across groups of half-deads, but they aren’t armed properly. Malvern must know exactly where we are,” Caxton said, pointing upward at a camera mounted in the ceiling, “but she hasn’t sent a whole pack of them with good knives after us. It’s like she’s letting us move around the prison—part of the prison, anyway. The part she wants us in.” She narrowed her eyes. “I’m starting to think we’re being led through a maze like a couple of rats. That Malvern wanted us to end up right here.”
“Sometimes,” Gert said, very slowly, “when I was high? I would start thinking that God was trying to tell me something. Just—-just listen for a sec, okay? I would have like a really crappy day. The kids wouldn’t stop crying. The bitch at the grocery store wouldn’t let me buy cigarettes with my WIC coupons. There would be all kinds of bills in the mail for shit I didn’t even remember buying, and then when I would run in my room and slam the door, it would turn out that my mom had cleaned my room while I was out and got rid of my stash. She would never say anything, never even give me a nasty look. But she would find my crystal and flush it down the toilet, like it was just some trash I left lying around. Days like that, sometimes I felt like a voice was talking just to me. A voice telling me to do something bad. Like cut myself, or maybe burn some old letters and pictures, you know, stuff I’d been keeping for years.”
“Okay,” Caxton said.
“I need you to think real hard,” Gert said. “I want to know if this suspicion of yours is anything at all like that voice I used to hear.”
Caxton held her peace.
“Because,” Gert went on, “I found in general, doing the things that voice told me to do wasn’t always such a shit hot idea.”
Caxton took her celly’s point. There was no use worrying about the deeper game unless she could win on the surface. There was a diagram above the control panel that showed the whole of the prison’s yard, all the structures and features of the grounds between the wall and the building itself. It showed in special detail the layered defenses between the loading dock and the main gate. Gert had done a pretty good job describing the gates and tire shredders a truck had to pass through to get back to the kitchens, but she’d missed a few things. The trucks had to make three tight corners before they could reach the main gate, and each corner was watched by a machine-gun position. Then there was the main gate itself. Caxton had seen it on her way into the prison, a big slab of metal thick enough to resist a direct attack by a tank. If that gate was closed, there was no truck in the world that could just smash through it.
Still. The gate, the exit, was right there—no more than two hundred yards away. There were three trucks sitting in the loading bay, abandoned in place when the prison was taken over by half-deads. It was the best chance she was going to get to break out, to reach safety and help and sanity—