Breakout by Paul Herron (notion reading list .txt) 📕

—and the walkway lurches beneath our feet.

I barely have time to shove Sawyer to safety before the structure gives way with a grinding shriek, and I fall.

There is a moment of emptiness, followed by the jarring thud as I hit the water. Stars erupt across my vision as my head hits submerged concrete. My eyes close and I feel myself sinking down into nothingness. Darkness enfolds me, embraces me. It’s like a lover’s caress. Comforting. Calming.

It would be so easy just to let go.

To drift away.

No.

My eyes snap open.

Blackness greets me. My chest is tight, my lungs empty. I open my mouth for air, swallow water instead. I surge upward in shock and fear, breaking the surface. I retch, vomiting water as I stagger to my feet.

The sounds of the hurricane burst against my ears, broken only by the shouts and screams of the inmates. I turn in a confused circle. I look up and see Sawyer moving toward the stairs, peering down at me with wide eyes. She gestures frantically toward the guard tower.

The cell doors.

I limp to the tower and climb painfully up the stairs that corkscrew round and round, emerging into the security room at the top. The windows have cracked and splintered, some of the frames now entirely empty. The wind and rain pummel me, a physical force trying to shove me back down the stairs.

I glance quickly around the room. There isn’t much in here. Nothing electronic. It’s all old-school. I see a series of heavy levers sticking out from a metal control panel. There are faded signs underneath them: Level 1, Level 2…

I yank the levers in turn, pulling them all the way down. I can’t hear anything over the storm, but I see the cell doors slide open, one after the other, level by level, all the way up to the top of the Glasshouse.

The inmates explode outward, sprinting along the walkways, lowering themselves down over the broken sections, and dropping to the floors below. I retreat back down the stairs to find Sawyer waiting for me at the door to the tower.

The inmates are already milling around by the time I get there. I cup my hands around my mouth. “You want to live, follow this woman! We’ve got a place to hide out from the hurricane!”

Sawyer heads toward the exit, then pauses when she sees I’m not following. “You coming?”

“I’ll bring up the rear. Make sure everyone gets out.”

She hesitates.

“Go. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

She nods and disappears through the door, the inmates following. There’s another crash, and more bricks fall from the wall, tumbling down into the water. I step back and wait while the inmates make their way into the corridor beyond.

I’m waiting for a reason.

Wright and Tully appear. They hesitate when they see me.

I stare at them, not moving. They glance at each other, then slowly move past me and through the door.

I wait until there’s no one left; then I turn and follow them.

Twenty-Five7:20 a.m.

As I make my way back through the Glasshouse, I feel shell-shocked. I can’t believe I let them live. After all these years. After what they did…

Was Sawyer right? I try to imagine having a conversation with Amy, talking it through. I try to add my viewpoint, but every time I do, Amy shuts me down.

She wouldn’t want me to ruin my life. Not any more than I already have. I’d convinced myself I was doing it for her. For our child. And in a way, that was true. But really it was for me. I’d hoped it would lessen the pain. Would give me… I don’t know. A sense of peace? Closure? But that was just stupid. If I’d gone through with it, I would have been signing my soul away.

And Sawyer knew that. Just as Amy would have.

Nobody speaks as we hurry through the corridors. There’s no point. The deafening sounds of the hurricane overwhelm everything. The threat of destruction, of death. So close to all of us, held at bay by a few bricks and tiles and ninety-year-old mortar.

We retrace the steps I took earlier, arriving back in the corridor where we first entered the Glasshouse and following Sawyer down into the depths of the old building.

There aren’t many lights that work down here. We make our way through long patches of darkness, broken only by an occasional bulb hovering in the distance like a streetlamp in the night. The water is deeper here, past our waists, and the lower we go, the higher it rises.

Finally the line of inmates comes to a confused stop. I wait at the back. I can’t find the energy to move forward, don’t have the will to shove my way through the crowd to see if there’s a problem.

We start moving again after a few minutes. I push myself off from the wall and wade through the water, eventually emerging into a wide room. There’s a huge rusted door to the left that has been pulled open, and inmates from the Ravenhill side are now shuffling through. Some of them are holding flashlights. Someone must have had the bright idea of raiding a supply cupboard.

Felix and Sawyer stand by the door as Leo guides everyone through, pointing to an open door to our right.

“Through there. Keep going. Come on, people. Move it.”

Felix sees me and approaches. “So? Did you get them?”

I shake my head. “Sawyer talked me out of it.”

Felix glances over at her, surprised. “Okay…” he says. “Didn’t see that coming. But… I’m glad.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. The coldhearted-killer thing—it’s not you. You need to leave that to those of us with the experience.” He slaps me on the shoulder and heads back to the door.

I feel distant as I watch everyone move to safety. Over two hundred inmates. Say three hundred, counting those from the Glasshouse. That’s all that’s left from the eight hundred or so that were locked up