Looking For Trouble

Chapter 1: Walk the earth, alone and free

CHAPTER 1

Carter Reynolds

"Open on 40!"

The shrill bell sounded across the Block, followed by loud groans from half-asleep inmates. The barred door to my cell slid open, and a bull came to stand in front of it.

I scooped up my belongings from the bottom bunk, which merely consisted of a book and a t-shirt. I gave my cellie one last hug, before following a sleep-deprived bull towards the stairs. I had almost descended to the ground floor when I heard Zack call out from what was once my prison cell.

"I'll see you on the other side, C!"

I smiled to myself, not bothering to reply because Zack already knew that I'd be waiting for him arms wide open, outside those prison gates, the day he was released.

When I reached the ground floor, I scanned A Block one last time. The closet-sized cells lined neatly against the walls, all the bastards the prison housed fast asleep. It was almost peaceful, and I felt strange when I stood there a moment, taking it all in. Here was a barbaric institution that had taken so much from me. Yet, I was almost savoring the feeling of being in the prison. For a second I laughed to myself, thinking it was true what they said about prison sucking the sanity right out of you. If I was standing here, in this hellhole where I had suffered for four long years, cherishing my time, then I truly had lost it.

But maybe it wasn't so much the time as it was the people that I was thinking of. The archaic institution had taken so much from me, but then again, ironically, it had also given me so much. It had given me Zack, the Don, old man Winston. And it had given me her. So, what I think I was doing in that moment, waiting for the bull to unlock the door to the Control Panel Room, was cherishing my memories with three men. Old man Winston, who was like a grandfather. The Don, who was like a father. And Zack, who was like a brother. The prison had given me a man for each generation, ones I had never had in my life.

The heavy door being pushed open snapped me out of my reverie and I followed the bull out of A Block, through a never-ending maze of barred checkpoints, until we reached a part of one of the other buildings I had never been in before. It looked like the intake area where convicted men were brought in, searched, dehumanized into serial numbers, and then carted off to their cells in the Blocks. Here, however, the process was reversed.

I was instructed to place my belongings into a tray where they would be put through a scanner for security. What they thought I'd be smuggling out of prison was beyond me. Another ugly bull shoved a bulky brown paper bag into my stomach and barked at me to go change in the sorry excuse for a bathroom in the corner of the room.

The bull's hostility didn't really phase me. The reality of the situation hadn't really hit me until I stepped into the disgusting bathroom and slipped into the clothes that had been folded neatly inside the brown paper bag. It was like I had stepped back in time. I stood there, staring at my reflection in the cracked mirror, wearing the clothes I had on the day I was arrested. The day that everything had gone to shit.

The only thing different about the clothes and shoes was that they were clean. Memories of a distant past flashed in front of my eyes. The police snapping handcuffs on me, my clothes drenched in another man's blood. I blinked the memory away and refocused my gaze on the very same clothes, in the mirror. They must have had them washed before storing them away as my belongings when I was incarcerated.

I sighed deeply and crumpled the brown paper bag in my hands, not looking away from the surreal image of myself in the mirror. My ears picked up on a soft clink and my eyes reflexively spotted that something had slipped out of the paper bag I had just thrown aside. My chest constricted at the sight of what had fallen to the floor.