The Highwaymen: Greyest Night

Chapter 2

Clang! I wake with a start jerking forwards. My body does not move far before being yanked back down. I look down at my arms to find that I am in shackles. As I gaze around me i find that I am surrounded by other people in the same predicament as me. I am on a bus. The windows are barred and a gate is between us and the driver.

What is going on? I thought those people were wanting me to help them kill some people. Why am I headed to prison? As I question the logic of my situation, I realize that this is not what I expected.

"I see sleeping beauty is finally awake," says a Cajun man that I hadn't even realized was sitting to my right next to the window, "man I can't believe they drugged your ass and dragged you in here with us." he starts laughing wildly.

I can only stare at him stupefied by the current series of events. Where am I, and why am I surrounded by what seems like inmates of some prison? That's when it hits me like a hundred pound anvil dropped on my chest. They screwed me. This is not the way it was supposed to go down. I look down at myself for a moment. It seems that I have been out for a while because now I look like just another prisoner. I have on the full orange outfit just like everyone else. Then I notice something different about these uniforms. Around each person's neck is a metal ring that seems to have a tube in it. I can see that on the side of them there is a green blinking light. There is no telling what it could be for.

"By the way the name's Bon Cloud but you can call me beaux(Bo)," the man next to me said after a moment of silence, "they caught me when I was right in the middle of cracking the biggest vault in the state of Louisiana."

"LeRoy," I reply casually reaching out my hand what I can and offering it to him. He takes it and shakes it firmly. I look closer at the man. His muscular figure can be seen even with the somewhat baggy suit on. His long blonde hair and handsome face tell me that he must be one of those lady killers I have her about or as my father called them studs.

The grin on the man's face fades as he turns back towards the front. I quickly learn why when I look for myself. The bus approaches a gate and the driver and a guard from the watch house begin to talk. The gate opens, and we continue through it. I look out the window to see that we are in the middle of nowhere. All I can see outside of the prison is desert.  The prison itself has no noicable windows and nothing that makes it seem like anything other than one big cement blob. There is only one door which is a large metal one that opens from the middle as we draw near.

Once we enter the building, everything changes. Where there was nothing hardly outside, there is now cameras everywhere. Guards with machine guns and tactical gear line the walls and are perched everywhere.

My body jerks forward as the bus screeches to a stop. The brakes hiss and the door opens. The guards come through the gate and begin unlocking the chains from the floor. Each of us are herded out of the bus and into a room one at the time.

As I patiently wait my turn, I can feel the doubt welling up inside. Behind me Beaux mumbles under his breath, "when we get in there, no matter what happens, find me. I'm not staying here forever."

I am pushed through the door. The room is bright and clean. There are four guards lounging around the room. They seem like they are not really paying attention to me, but I catch a glimpse of one of them eying me from the corner of his eye. I grin as a fifth guard pushes me forward to a man in a white coat. I don't know what they think I might do, but I am not doing to fight them on their terms. The time will come.

The man in the white coat grabs my right arm and turns my palm up. He has what looks like a stamp in his hand. He takes it and smashes it onto my forearm. I yell as whatever he had in his hand bits into my skin. After a second he removes it and a black barcode is left behind. I rub my arm as he walks around behind me. This time he has a needle in his hand before I have time to think about what he could be planning on doing with that, a sharp pain erupts from the back of my neck for a split second and then I fall.