Chapter 10: Finding Strength

A question in your nerves is lit

Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy

Insure you not to quit

To keep it in your mind and not forget

That it is not he or she or them or it

That you belong to.

Bob Dylan

Outside, something was happening.

It was as though the earth and the sky were beginning to melt. The sky was the color of freshly skinned muscle tissue, marbled with orange light and white specs of what might have been light. The trees had begun to droop and lose their leaves, the bark slowly turning a dusty black and peeling up like parchment paper. A restless, shifting wind was brought up, lifting the drying earth and flinging it harshly at the buildings, scouring them. The earth now trembled every hour or so, and the quakes were getting stronger; strong enough to send many of the freed inmates scurrying back into their cells, believing that their escape had provoked the Warden's ire and he would relent when they turned back. The sight of Alice storming across the housing unit's ground floor with her arms full of firepower sent any stragglers cowering into the nearest open cell, made daft and submissive by fright.

Only one person in Superjail knew this strange world well enough to know what the signs meant. The earthquakes, the strange transformation of sun and sky and life, the blackouts...

Jared knew that the Warden was dying. The small, nervous man in these moments had never felt more helpless, more useless, in his entire life. He sat dejected on the last step, still imprisoned in the stairwell, waiting for Alice and praying that she had made better progress than he. When he at last heard the tumblers in the door lock he scrambled to his feet, releasing a choked sob of relief that had been trapped in the back of his throat.

Alice pushed through the leaden door as though it weighed only ounces, flinging it open with such force that it nearly took Jared with it. He leapt back, tripping on the last stair and going down on his backside, eyes huge with relief and awe at the sight of Alice in her topmost form, brandishing sundry weapons as though she had been waiting for the chance to unload them on whomever she could.

"C'mon, Shorty," she grunted, seizing Jared by his collar and hauling him to his feet.

The Doctor's lab was across the grounds, past the cell blocks and behind the offices. An underground tunnel led there from the cell blocks, scooped out of the earth to facilitate the Doctor's insatiable need for new specimens on which to conduct experiments, but Jared and Alice knew better than to risk moving underground in case more earthquakes were in their future. Instead they raced back onto the first floor of the cell block and out the side door that led to the yard, Alice running full tilt and Jared struggling to keep up, puffing and blowing and regretting the extra portions he'd been in the habit of taking at dinner.

Around them, the world continued to fall apart.

The Warden was somewhere far away from the darkening world in which his body lay. He drifted, everything soundless and somehow absent of temperature. Strange snatches from this other world, like photographs, passed through his vision. His eyes remained unmoving, un-tracking; passively observing. Colors and people, the smell of his father's cigars, rainbows and the iridescence of diamonds.

But there was something else, too. Something that roiled and churned below the surface of everything like the lava in the volcano that housed the strange dimension of Superjail.

Rage.

It was subtle at first, melding with the other sensations he felt, but slowly it was becoming intensely pervasive, seeping slowly into every fibre of his being, just as his blood seeped into the fibres of the cheap carpet on which he lay. Tremors were beginning to course through him as the earthquakes coursed through Superjail; though he had anticipated the blackness on the edges of his vision to eventually envelop him, it instead began to change to the color of blood, the same color of the of the ire beneath his suffering body and mind, pervasive and powerful. So powerful...

He saw in his mind's eye his father, fallen to such a bizarre and preventable death. As a child the Warden had no presence of mind to reject this kind of death for himself, but now he lay, in a similarly preposterous position, with no prodigal son to inherit and expand his fantastic empire. Despite the emotions, the anger, he had lost a lot of blood, his body broken and bruised, and was beginning to feel complacent with the idea of death.

His mind screamed at him—fight!—but he could find no reason to do so.

Suddenly, out of the deep pit of nothing in his head, a voice emerged.

You are bleeding.

The Warden physically started at this new, booming entity. He had no idea where it had come from; perhaps some deep subterranean cavern of his soul, come to surface at his most desperate hour. He hoped so, and so he lay quiet, waiting for it to come again. Listening.

You will die soon if you do not find a way to survive.

Why should I, thought the Warden, when there's nothing left of me to save?

Superjail cannot exist without you. Save your legacy and your friends. Survive.

The unknown voice had a point. Superjail was his legacy, his birthright, and to take it from him was nothing less than stealing. He thought of Jared and hoped he was alive. Alice's face appeared unbidden in his mind and he prayed that she was still fighting, and desperately hoped his robot was still functional.

It was the motivation he needed. Somewhat grudgingly he heeded the inner voice, and began to search within himself to find the strength to fight off his injuries, and wake up and fight. He desperately looked inward, feeling as though he were lifting the coverlet of a bed housing a terrible monster, forcing himself to look even in the deep dark places where he was scared to tread. He sustained his efforts as relentlessly as he could, and after what seemed like an age he found himself beginning to have visions. Seen as though through his physical eyes, the landscape of his soul began to materialize around him. He began to make vague sense of things; there were objects strewn about this land of dust; shapeless, many dark and shrivelled, some scattered and some clumped. One object to his left had the formless outline of what might have once been a rabbit, now charred nearly to ash.

He saw the skeletons of trees that once were lush with life, and a dank pit of black sludge that might have been a clean, untainted waterscape in a former life. He stood within himself, looking around, awed and vaguely sad. He wondered what strength would look like in this place, and how he would even begin to look for it.

This was a dark place, its landscape in perpetual dusk. All the surfaces were coated with an odd black ash; as the Warden scraped at the ground with his foot, he saw that there was grass growing, but was well into the process of smothering under the ash. He felt a slight, dank breeze, and a moment later heard the soft trill of a wind chime. The sound struck something deep within him, and he suddenly jerked back, realizing.

This was the place he used to go when he listened to DL Diamond's tapes. His former eden.

The earth below the Warden seemed to shiver, and he felt a stab of emotion when he realized what DL had done to him, and how this beautiful place he loved had been hatched from an enormous nest of lies. As things began to clot together in his mind, he felt the earth tremble again, and felt the ash rain down on his shoulders. He breathed in, expecting to choke. It tasted smoky, like his father's kisses had tasted when he was young. He found the ash pleasurable in his lungs.

Unexpectedly, the rage that had been simmering beneath his hurt suddenly filled him, and he held out a hand to catch the ash. It was the embodiment his smouldering fury, raining down on him, and when it began to mix with his hot tears the smoky ichor became an elixir of strength.

He opened his mouth and let it pour in.

Alice and Jared made it to the Doctor's laboratory before another earthquake hit. Just as they entered the main room the earth jolted, less sharply than before but more pervasive, rolling through the layers of earth like a rocky tide, shifting and insidious. The atmosphere had changed as well, becoming less oppressive and more electrified; if Jared inhaled deeply enough he could smell the ozone in the air, as though he were standing in a field in the middle of a lightning storm.

The Doctor was nowhere to be seen, perhaps having fled Superjail as the chaos began. Alice appeared unconcerned, tearing through the doctor's strange cabinets in search of Jailbot's emergency power supply, cursing as each one yielded nothing. Finally, as the unsearched cupboards were growing sparse, Jared heard a triumphant grunt and turned from his fretful observance of the empty specimen cells to see Alice holding the power pack under one rippling arm. She was already heading for the door, and Jared dashed after her, struggling to keep up on his short legs.

As they entered the hallway that would eventually open up above ground, a crackling hiss drew both their attention behind them, just in time to see a white ball of light whip past them, sizzling and sparking blue. It illuminated the dark hall nearly to the end before fizzling out and leaving nothing but the acrid scent of ozone in its wake.

Alice turned to Jared, dumbfounded. "What the fuck was that?"

"I...I think it was ball lightning," wheezed Jared. "I can't believe it didn't hit us! We need to get out of here before it happens again. We may not be so lucky the next time!"

But Alice was already moving, approaching a full-tilt run, and Jared again scrambled to keep up. They covered the length of the tunnel in a matter of seconds, and Alice flung open the door that led to the open grounds. She turned to Jared and for a brief moment, as lightning flashed above, he saw the shine of sweat on her brow and the glint of light on her face— the shine of battle and of the exhilaration that only comes with a soul-deep bloodthirst. Her teeth glinted in the unnatural light as she spoke.

"Let's go, Shorty."

DL and Sharpe were unaware of the changes that were occurring in Superjail. They had come to ignore the routine earthquakes, and both were so busy ransacking the staff's private quarters that they had not looked outside. DL had occupied himself with trying to pry some of the diamonds from the walls and floor. When he wasn't hunting for more of the tiny stones, he was hunched over one of them with a screwdriver in hand, grunting like a Neanderthal.

In the meantime, Sharpe was busy with the Warden's personal quarters, plowing his way through desks, dressers, and wardrobes, trying to coax more plunder from Superjail's iron belly. He was having very little luck.

"Goddamn this fucking palace of crap!" he finally screeched, and turned over yet another chest of drawers so that its invaluable contents spilled and scattered over the carpet. "It must take a veritable fortune to run this damn place and I can't find where that bastard's keeping it any of it!"

DL groaned. "Well, some of it's in the walls. And the floor. You check that out yet?"

"I don't care about those. It's a measly fraction of what he has in here, I know it. You're wasting your time, Diamond."

"Well, it seems like I have plenty of it while you're tearin' the place apart lookin' for treasure, Sharpie," DL shot back. Instantly he regretted it and cringed, expecting to bear the brunt of Sharpe's unpredictable wrath, but the older man had again busied himself with the sundry collections of drawers in the Warden's quarters.

Neither man had any idea of what was to come.

A/N: Yeah, it's been a long time. Longer than long, and the chapter's not as long as I'd like it to be. I haven't had any time to write; this one chapter has taken me almost 6 months to complete. Such is life. But I love this damn story too much to let it sit unfinished. Stay tuned for more.