(Note to Anonymous51... THANK you for reminding me of Melissa Smith's name; I've been trying to remember it since I started writing in this branch, but it kept escaping me. Gabby was supposed to be Melissa's stand-in, but I would much rather have gone with an established character to keep this storyline in line with the general Fiction Branches "canon" that has developed over the years. I'm glad you were able to work Melissa into the story.)
Brick scowled and beat his fist against the door in frustration. He'd come too far to have to stop so close.
It had taken a while, and he'd gotten lost a couple of times. But Brick had wound his way through the serpentine halls of John Wilson Penitentiary from the depths of the solitary confinement wing to the central offices of the prison. Somewhere in here, Brick knew he would find a control panel, and on that panel he would find a series of... buttons, or switches, or something. He'd overheard some of the guards talking about it a couple of times, and so he knew exactly how the panel worked. Flip the switches one way, they locked all the doors in a particular hallway in the prison. Flip them the other way, the doors unlocked. The guards used it to save time when it was time to take prisoners to the exercise yard or the cafeteria. But Brick had a different plan in mind.
Looking past the flabby face of Phil Hendricks, the guard whose identity he wore, that-was reflected in the glass window set into the door--Brick didn't know he'd switched places with Phil, but it seemed to be happening all over the prison--Phil saw what looked like an old supercomputer from the sixties. This had to be the room. But the door was locked, and it required a code to get in... and Phil didn't know the code.
"Hey, Phil, man," said another guard, entering the room where Phil stood, a cup of coffee and a half-eaten pastry in hand. "Something wrong? I thought I heard a crash in here."
"Uh, yeah," Brick said, looking the guard up and down. This guy looked young, barely an adult, and just a little naive; he had probably just been hired onto the prison staff. "I forgot my code."
"Man," the guard said, "that happened to me a couple weeks ago. My supervisor really chewed me out. Let me help you out." The guard placed his cup on a table and approached the door; after the guard had punched a few buttons on the keypad next the door, there was a beep and a click, and the guard took the door handle and pushed the door open.
"Thanks, man," Brick said, "you saved my neck. Dinner next week, on me, okay?"
The guard smiled and retrieved his coffee. "Wow, thanks, man. That'd be greeat. Really, it was no big deal."
Once the guard had left the room, Brick ducked inside and let the door shut behind him, careful to check first that it could be opened from the inside without a code. Then he turned his attention to the monstrosity of buttons and LED lights that took up most of the room.
At first Brick was lost. There were way too many knobs and buttons and switches and displays for him to just start pushing stuff at random. He saw that several of the buttons were marked, though, so he began studying the labels for something useful. At last, on the far end of the room, he found a panel marked "Sector Containment Grid," with a large array of switches marked with letter and number combinations that were familiar to Rick; the letters referred to the various wings of the prison, and the numbers to individual hallways. This was it; this was what Biff was looking for.
Over the five years he'd been incarcerated in John Wilson, Brick had made a careful study of the prison's inner workings, committing every detail he could to memory. He knew the floor plan, he knew the guards' routines, he knew the best route to the exit. He knew exactly how many snipers were perched on the outer walls, and where exactly each of them stood. He'd sworn to himself that he would escape from this place one day, and he'd made plan after plan about how he coud make that happen. So when he had suddenly found himself dressed in a guard's uniform and standing in the hallway down in solitary, Brick had been prepared. Sure, the body switching thing was had come totally out of the blue; there was no way Brick could have expected that. But he was quick on his feet, and he had the discipline that only a decade in the army could bring a man. So Brick had immediately composed himself and started figuring out how he could take advantage of the circumstances that has suddenly been thrust upon him.
It hadn't taken him long to come up with a plan. And it hadn't been too difficult for him to find his way here, to the central control room, to the heart of the prison's security systems. And now he knew exactly what he had to do to escape the prison unnoticed.
Despite the stupidity of the guard who'd let him into the control room, Brick knew that the prison's warden ran a pretty tight ship. If Brick had simply walked out the front door of the penitentiary, someone would have called him on it; prison guards didn't simply abandon their shifts. He could have simply waited to the end of Phil's shift, he supposed, but the small taste of freedom he'd gotten when he'd jumped into Phil Hendricks's skin had left Brick impatient for the real thing. He wasn't sure, eithr, if he knew enough about Phil or about the procedures of being a prison guard. And there was the question of the real Phil... what if he was in Brick's cell, and what if he started talking? How long before he convinced the guards to check out Brick? And besides... Brick had done way too much preparation to simply leave at the end of the shift. He wantd to exit with style.
As he'd walked through the corridors of the prison, he'd seen and heard a lot of weird stuff. All over the prison there were prisoners scouting, screaming, claiming that they were innocent, that they weren't really the people that they looked like, that they were innocent men, women, and children who had switched lives with the criminals who they appeared to be. Most of them were probably opportunists trying to lie their way to freedom, or simply wags making fun. But considering Brick's own circumstances, he knew that some of them were probably telling the truth. Brick had seen a few of the guards in fistfights with each other, too, and a few of the prisoners for that matter. And even aside from all the weird stuff... Brick had lived among these prisoners for years, and he had experienced life as a prisoner himself. He knew how angry these guys were. There was a seething hatred throbbing through every inch of this prison, just waiting to explode. Put that together with a few dozen people who had just switched bodies and were feeling confused and afraid, light a match, and... boom.
In the chaos of a full-blown prison riot, no one would notice a single guard leaving the premises. All it would take to set off a riot this afternoon would be a single spark. And right now, Brick had the match in his hand.
He flipped one switch. Then another. Then three all at once. Then the whole panelful of swtiches.
The last row of switches was for the J-wing. Brick thought about switching those as well, but he thought better of it. That was solitary confinement. Those guys were whackjobs. Brick had roomed with one of those guys, a man named Vic Rudolph, during his first year in prison, before Vic had been carted down to solitary for getting into repeated scuffles with prisoners, with guards, and with Vic himself. Brick had killed eight men in his life, not counting all the people he'd killed in his time in the military, but Vic scared Brick. Brick considered himself a professional killer; he was calm, meticulous, skilled, and personally reasonable when he wanted to be. Not so with Vic. Vic, in Brick's opinion, was a full-blown sociopath... passionate, impulsive, reckless, remorseless, and conscience-free, and willing to do absolutely anything to get what he wanted. Brick wanted a riot, but he didn't want someone like that on the loose. If all the guys in solitary were like that, he wasn't sure even he would feel safe.
Brick looked at the panel in satisfaction. He knew that all over the prison, all the thieves, drug dealers, rapists, murderers, and violent offenders within its sturdy walls were about to realize that their cells were suddenly unlocked. A moment after that, they would burst from their cells, and then...
A siren went off, ringing through the halls of the penitentiary. Showtime. Brick smiled, opened the door, and went casually on his way.
Chelsea huddled in the corner, trying to be as small and as invisible as she possibly could. She didn't understand what was happening, but she was afraid.
Half an hour ago she had been playing Wii with her best friend Morgan, then suddenly, she'd seen a flash of light, and the next thing she knew she was in a darkly-lit hallway lined with bars, and there was a man shouting at her. She'd noticed right away that she was weaing a uniform that looked kind of like the one her uncle Ted, a police officer, always wore when he was working.
Chelsea was smart. She got all As at school. So it hadn't taken her long to put all the clues together and realize that she was in a prison. But that was the only thing she'd understood; she didn't know how she'd gotten there, why she was wearing a guard's uniform, who the angry man yelling at her from inside his cell or the fat man in the other uniform who seemed so creepy to her were, or how she was supposed to get out of the prison and back to her house.
She'd wandered around the prison for a while after that, trying to ignore all the prisoners who shouted at her as she passed, though she did find ther shouting scary. At last she'd found a restroom, and she'd ducked inside to get away from all the yelling. Because it wasn't marked as a boys' or girls' restroom, she'd expected it to be a small, private, unisex bathroom like the one at the doctor's office, so she'd been surprised to find urinals lining one of the walls; the only time Chelsea had ever seen urinals before was when she and Morgan had snuck into the boys' restroom at school. They were, however, not nearly as shocking as what Chelsea saw when she turned and looked into the mirror.
Instead of seeing the nine-year-old girl she should have seen, Chelsea saw a tall black man in a prison guard uniform looking back at her from the mirror. Chelsea stared at the strange reflection, and watched in amazement as its movements matched her own. How was it that she looked like a grown-up man? It should have been impossible; Chelsea was too old to believe in magic and dragons and fairies and magical transformations. Beginning to hyperventilate, she sat down on the nasty floor and tried to do her breathing exercises to calm herself down.
Once she'd calmed down a litte, Chelsea had gotten up and went back out to the hallway to keep trying to find her way out. She kept trying to tell herself that this was an adventure, just like out of a Harry Potter book... but Chelsea had never wanted an adventure like this.
The prisoners continued to yell at Chelsea with each cell she walked through. She tried to stay calm and keep her eyes facing forward instead of at the scary prisoners, but it was hard. At one point she'd tried to close her eyes to shut the prisoners out, but then she couldn't see, and it was even harder for her to find e way around. She must have gotten turned around while her eyes were shut, because she suddenly heard bang to her right, and when she opened her eyes she saw a man throwing himself repeatedly against the bars of hi cell, which were only a foot away from her now. The man was screaming terrible things at her, and there was a horrible, monstrous look on his face.
That was when the last of Chelsea's courage had broken. She'd started running, running, until she was out of breath; and then she darted toward the darkest, most remote corner she could find and curled herself up into a ball and begun to cry.
Suddenly, though, a siren burst through the air. It was loud, and it hurt her ears. Chelsea looked up as, one by one, the cells in the hall opened up and the prisoners began to step out. Chelsea had to bite her tongue to keep herself from shrieking. Pulling her arms and legs even tighter to her body, she scooted even deeper into the shadows and hoped that they would keep her safe.
Scarlet sat on the bench, despondent. Wiping her tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her orange jumpsuit, she tried for what felt like the thousandth time to understand what had happened to her. One minute she'd been in Rachel Harris's occult shop... the next, she was here, in a prison cell, and there was a man with a goatee and shaved head and tattoos all over his body looking back at her. She tried to remember everything Rachel had told her about auras, and how people could sometimes look like a different person on the outside than what they really were on tn the inside. But, though it helped Scarlet understand why she seemed to look like a man now, it didn't tell her why it had happened, or how. If she'd been free, she could have gone to Rachel's shop and consulted with her friends to try to figure out what had happened and how it could be fixed. Instead, though, she was locked away in a prison cell, and no matter what she said to the guards, they didn't believe her. Why would they? Even Scarlet wasn't sure sure believed it.
To make things worse, the man in the cell across the hall seemed to have it in for her. He had been shouting at her ever since she had shown up in the prison. A relentless stream of taunting and threats. If the bars of her prison cell kept Scarlet trapped inside, at least they kept the other prisoner out.
Suddenly an alarm went off. Scarlet covered her ears and buried her head between her knees; she had always been sensitive to loud noises, along with bright like, strong flavors, sudden movement... any violent sensory input. Rachel had said it was because Scarlet was more awake, more in touch with the world and with her senses than most people, and that had made Scarlet feel good about herself. At times it was a nuisance, though, and right now, with a loud siren screaming into her ears, it was a nightmare.
Then she heard a squak in front of her, and she looked up. The door of her cell was open, and the prisoner who had been taunting her all afternoon was standing in her cell, a foot away from her, a terrible grin on his face. "Good afternoon, McCarty."
