Proven Guilty (Treadmill III)

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Was that exciting enough for everyone?

Asking questions to a blank sheet of paper is not so fun. They become rhetorical when you don't mean for them to be. You start to answer them yourself—yes, that was quite exciting; or no, that sounded like a poorly-plotted action film—and then you start to think you might be going insane.

Except I can't go insane, because I believe I already am that way. At least deep, deep down. I don't think you go through everything I've gone through without coming out the other end a bit damaged.

I know what you're all thinking, though.

"Kennedy, why did you have to escape? Why couldn't you have just waited for your trial? What was so bad about jail?"

Let me give you a little history lesson.

The death penalty has been around since the 18th century B.C.E. I can't even fathom how long ago that was. In 1608, George Kendall was the first recorded execution in the newly minted American colonies. In 1632, Jane Champion (ironic name) was the first woman to be executed in the colonies. And then states started doing their thing and trying to find their own footing when America became a sovereign nation. Jump ahead to 1972, and the Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia suspends the whole thing. But then, four years later, Gregg v. Georgia (damn, Georgia, make a decision) reinstated it.

1977 marked the first state to approve the use of lethal injection (Oklahoma.)

2007 earned New Jersey the award as the first state to actually abolish the damned thing since its reinstitution.

22 states in America don't use the death penalty. The other 28 still do.

4 of those 28 allow death by firing squad.

Oklahoma, Mississippi, Utah...

And South Carolina.

You hear a lot when you're stuck in a jail cell all day, every day. You hear the guards whispering about you.

I heard two of them whispering about me one week before I came up with my escape plan.

"The Abrams girl? Joanie told me the state's going for capital." One of them had said.

The other one had scoffed, like she couldn't believe it.

"Not for killing one dude."

"For killing one ADA and for killing her boyfriend. They're gonna combine the charges or some shit."

But that wasn't the best part. The best part was when the second one said:

"Think she'll be the first one for the firing squad?"

Nothing could have chilled me to the bone faster than that.

><><><

8:58 AM. Kennedy snorted in her sleep to the point that it woke her up and she jumped in the armchair, trying to remember where she was and how she had gotten there.

Memories of the past 12 hours flooded into her head with the force of a tsunami, and she looked over at the bed. Rebecca was still out cold; her snoring having faded into a soft hum between breaths.

The room itself looked worse in the daylight. The walls were a pale yellow that looked like they had once been white, and the carpet had clearly not been vacuumed in weeks. The bed looked relatively clean, and Kennedy hoped neither of them caught a disease from the place.