CHAPTER 55
BANG!
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Bellick's pistol barrel lit up orange. A round exploded out of the weapon, making a beeline towards Finn and slamming into his chest, sending him flying backwards. Sara could only watch in horror as the bullet buried into Finn's body and he collapsed backwards, blood starting to leak out of him. She was frozen in shock and was only snapped out of her paralysis when she saw Bellick cocking his gun for another shot. Sara dived on top of him, shielding his body with hers, ignoring Finn's cry of pain as she landed on top of him.
"STOP!" She shouted. Bellick hesitated. He obviously couldn't shoot now without risking hitting the girl. "GET A MEDIC!" She screamed. Medical staff made it moments later and Finn was swiftly loaded onto an ambulance and sped away, three prison guards going with him to make sure he somehow didn't break out of their custody. Once Finn was gone, Sara collapsed onto the ground in a mixture of relief and worry. She was safe and away from the rapist inmates, but at what cost? The person who saved her had sacrificed his life to do so. Two medics rushed over to her but she quickly brushed them off. She was fine, physically.
Across the yard, Pope stormed over to Bellick.
"She's walking. That's a good sign." Bellick remarked.
"Yeah. Astute observation. Maybe you'd like to share that with the governor?" Pope spat. Bellick blushed furiously.
"I was tense. I was just…"
"Next time you bad-mouth me to one of my superiors, there are going to be serious consequences! Do I make myself clear, Deputy?!" Pope shouted.
"Yes sir." Bellick replied.
"Good." Pope growled before walking away.
"Sara!" The Governor shouted, rushing towards his daughter and embracing her.
"Dad?!" Sara stammered.
"Thank God! Are you all right? Are you okay? I told you! I told you when you took this job, I knew something like this was going to happen! Didn't I? I knew something like this was gonna happen!"
"God, Dad, how about 'I'm happy to see you alive?'" She remarked.
"Oh, sweetheart, I just want you to see what you're doing to yourself." He replied. "I mean, there is nobody that is forcing you to be here."
"I know." She murmured. "Thanks, Dad."
She then walked over to Pope.
"Hey, Pope." She said. He smiled at her.
"Dr. Tancredi. Glad to see you made it out alive."
"Yeah, me too." She replied. "Um… one question. Why'd your department assign inmates on P.I. to do a toxic mold removal project?"
"What toxic mold project?" He asked.
"In the crawl space in A-Wing."
Pope shook his head.
"P.I. didn't go there. We'd never assign inmates to do that."
Oh. My. God. Everything suddenly clicked together. Finn had planned every step of that escape ahead of time. He was trying to break out of there! Sara forced a look of confusion on her face.
"Okay, sorry. I must have been mistaken." She murmured.
"No problem." Pope replied.
"Now, I must get to the hospital." She said to her father and Pope. "That man, Hudson, he got himself shot to save me. If he dies, it's my fault."
"No, sweetie, it isn't." The governor stated. Sara shook her head.
"Excuse me." She snapped before barging past them and sprinting towards a car…
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Finn groaned as he awoke. Blinding lights seared his eyes and his head and chest throbbed in pain. He didn't know where he was, couldn't remember what had happened. As he sat up, he felt a searing pain in his abdomen and suddenly, everything came rushing back. The escape. The rescue. The extraction. The gun shots. Wait, if he wasn't dead and he definitely wasn't in the prison infirmary, where the hell was he?
"Welcome back to the land of the living, Mr. Hudson." A voice remarked from the corner of the room. Finn turned his head to see Dr. Tancredi sitting in the corner of the room. "I must say, I'm surprised you're still alive."
"What can I say? Bellick's a lousy shot." Finn replied. "So, where the hell am I? I'm not in the prison anymore. I know that much."
"Very astute observation." Tancredi laughed. "Yeah, you're not in the prison anymore. You're in St. Andrew's Hospital in Fox River Grove, Illinois. You were brought here after you got shot and I have to admit, you gave us quite a scare. You heart stopped beating for a good minute and a half..."
"But I'm fine now." Finn finished.
"But you're fine now." Tancredi nodded. Finn then started to panic, ripping all of the cords that were connected to him, and he started hitting his head against the wall as hard as he could. Tancredi rushed over to him and shoved him away. "HEY! HEY! HEY! What are you doing?!" She shouted.
"I can't go back to prison. I can't go back!" Finn muttered. "I CAN'T! They'll kill me!"
"And if you keep doing this, you'll kill yourself!" Tancredi responded.
"At least I'll die on my own terms." Finn spat as he kept banging his head against the wall. Tancredi grabbed him and looked him in the eye.
"Hey hey, look at me. Look. At. Me." She murmured. Finn reluctantly met her gaze and she saw the sorrow, the anger, the desperation in his eyes. "You're not going back there. I swear it."
"You have no power in what happens to me. I'm just another bad guy, remember?" Finn spat.
"No. I might not have any power but my father does." She replied. Finn scoffed.
"What can Governor Tancredi possibly do to help me?" He growled.
"Well, move you to a better prison for starters." Tancredi responded. "And, when I tell everyone about what happened, maybe I can get your sentence changed. After what you did, life without parole doesn't seem very fair."
"You would do that for me?" Finn asked, surprised.
"Of course, you idiot. I mean, you sacrificed your life to save me. But I need to know one thing."
"What?"
"When were you planning to break out, for real?"
Finn's face immediately went from shock to an unreadable expression.
"I don't know what you're talking about." Finn said. Tancredi chuckled.
"Don't worry. I'm not going to tell anyone. You have my word on that. It's the least I owe you after what you did for me."
Finn took a deep breath.
"Well, the plan was actually to break out that day. Helping you was just a detour." Finn replied.
"If you don't mind my asking, what exactly was the plan?" Tancredi asked. Finn raised an eyebrow.
"Ok, that's going too far." Finn replied. Tancredi sighed.
"Oh, come on! I won't tell anyone, scout's honor. I'm never going back to that prison again. And besides, I didn't tell the warden about how we got out. About the toxic mould cleaning."
Finn looked at her, his eyes slightly wide.
"You knew about that?"
"Pope said that no P.I. inmates were allowed to be cleaning up toxic mould. I know that was all you."
Finn sighed and took a deep breath.
"Okay, fine. I'll tell you. No point hiding it now. Plan was screwed as soon as it even started. Well, it all began when I studied the blueprints. I examined every inch of the prison and thanks to my photographic memory, every nook and cranny of that place was burnt into my mind. I knew that there was one possible way out: through the infirmary. But I needed access to the infirmary to examine and plan my escape. Hence faking a diabetic illness."
Realisation flitted across Tancredi's face.
"So that's why your glucose levels were so low in the first test I did on you." Tancredi murmured. Finn nodded. "But then, how did you regulate your levels afterwards? With the amount of insulin I was giving you, you would be extremely sick, if not dead, by now."
"PUGNAc." Finn replied. "A drug that increases glucose levels so it would be like I was balancing out two extremes. Got it from an inmate with access to the pharmacy."
Tancredi slowly nodded.
"Okay. Now, how did you clean up the vents and crawl spaces beforehand?"
"Well, phase two of the plan was creating and modifying the tunnel system." He replied. "I created a network that could take me all around the prison: A-Wing, B-Wing, all of it. In the process, I had to clean up all of the toxic mould." He explained.
"Right, but how did you get into the tunnel system in the first place?"
"The toilet." Finn replied. "Every toilet in the prison is the same brand: Schweitzer. These toilets are attached to the wall by a fitting called 'Allen fitting'. These fittings can be loosened and undone by a single bolt called an Allen 11121147 bolt, coincidentally the same bolts that hold together the bleachers in the yard."
Tancredi's eyes widened.
"You thought of all of this beforehand?" She asked incredulously. Finn nodded.
"Back in the Army, uh… I only really went on one official mission. It was a hostage retrieval and extraction situation, and escaping the country is surprisingly similar to breaking out of prison. You have to assess every possibility, every bolt, every screw accounted for. These sort of missions, they have a 0.0001% success rate so you need to be perfect to get it right."
"Right. So you got the bolt and created the tunnel system. What next?" She asked. Finn shrugged.
"Then, all I needed was a distraction." Finn replied. "Using my tunnel system, I managed to cut the A.C in the prison, causing the prisoners to get angry."
"Wait, you knew T-Bag was going to do what he did?" Tancredi asked. Finn chuckled and shook his head.
"No. T-Bag's a wildcard." Finn laughed. "He's just a happy accident though. With his riot started, all of the guards had been driven out of the jail and into the yard, leaving me full-access to Bellick's office."
"Bellick's office? Why did you need Bellick's office?"
"Well, breaking out of the prison was supposed to be the easy part. The hard part was what to do once we're out."
"I'm sorry. WE?" She asked. Finn nodded.
"Yeah, I actually wasn't working alone. I was supposed to break out Burrows as well." Finn murmured. "He's also innocent, like me, and he was facing an execution next week. We were going to make it out and he was going to use his money and connections to get us out of the country. So, then I hacked into Bellick's computer and got access to the prison CCTV footage. I saw that he wasn't in his cell so I started scanning the footage for him. I found him, but he was already dead. T-Bag and his gang had stabbed him. Like I said, wildcard."
"Wow, um… I'm sorry for your loss. But answer me this, how did you and Burrows coordinate all of this? Death row inmates have practically no interaction with gen-pop. Just chapel and P.I."
"That's right." Finn said. "I could only communicate with him during chapel and P.I."
"Right. I understand talking during chapel but how did you manage to hook yourself up with P.I. Abruzzi's in charge of that."
"I know." Finn smirked. "And that played right into my hand. Everyone's got a pressure point, a weak spot. It look less than 20 minutes of good hacking to find Abruzzi's and I used it to my advantage."
"So, what was it?"
"Well, Abruzzi's facing life without parole, mainly due to the testimony of an anonymous source. That man is currently in Wit-Sec. Abruzzi's family wanted to find him and kill him but they had no idea where he was. It took me less than a half hour to find him."
"You sold him out?" Tancredi asked, horrified. Finn shook his head, furiously.
"NO! Of course not! Like I said a million times, I'm not a criminal. I'm just a man. A man with a conscience. A sense of wrong and right. I would never sell someone out like that. I just needed to pretend I would and Abruzzi eagerly gave me that P.I. role, so I had full contact with Burrows. Anyways, back to the escape. I saw Burrows was dead and I knew that I wouldn't get further than the walls of the prison. My best option was escaping the prison and having a bullet buried into my skull. Just as I was about to go, I accidentally clicked the computer mouse and the CCTV footage switched to the infirmary. I saw those guys about to rape you and I couldn't just stand by and do nothing."
"My hero." She smiled. Finn rolled his eyes.
"Don't thank me. I'm still the criminal." Finn murmured. "Anyways, I saw the footage so I went up to the infirmary, and you know the rest."
Tancredi nodded.
"I do, and I honestly say that I can't thank you enough for what you did for me. I know that I wouldn't have made it out of the prison alive if it weren't for you."
"All in a day's work, ma'am." Finn replied.
"I just have one question though." She said. "All of this planning, you clearly have been working on it for a while, longer than the couple of hours you spent before arriving in Fox River. How did you know you would be transferred here?"
Finn smirked.
"This was the coup de grace. The piece de resistance. I was originally in a high security prison in Pennsylvania. Although breaking out of there would be a piece of cake, I knew that there was nobody in that prison who had the connections to help me stay on the run for the rest of my life. I needed people that only people in supermax prisons could provide me with, and the closest supermax to home would be Fox River State Penn." Finn replied. "I knew there was no proving my innocence in court so I started planning the whole thing the day after my arrest. Everything was accounted for. Nobody knew my plan but Burrows. Nothing could go wrong. Or so I thought."
As he finished the story, Tancredi was speechless. That was absolutely… brilliant. His mind worked in ways that she couldn't even fathom. Planning all of that before even setting foot in the jail… it was simply incredible.
"If you don't mind, I think I'm going to rest now." Finn said. "My head is pounding."
Tancredi smiled slightly.
"Of course. See you soon, Finn." She said before tiptoeing out of the room.
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That afternoon, the Governor had just met with his daughter, Tancredi, to discuss everything that had happened the day before. They sat in the hospital lobby and talked.
"So, how did you get out?" The Governor asked.
"I already told you. That man up there, he risked his life to save me."
"No, I know that. I mean, how did you get out? If there's a breach in the prison, it must be addressed." He pressed. Tancredi's mind was still fresh with Finn's explanation of his escape. She took a deep breath and looked her father in the eye.
"I really don't know. It all happened so fast." She replied.
"Oh, come on, sweetie! You must remember something! Think!" He exclaimed. Sara scowled at him.
"Look, Dad, yesterday was by far the worst day of my life. Every time I close my eyes, I see those deranged inmates trying to break into the infirmary storage room to rape and kill me. The last thing I want to do is relieve that experience!"
The Governor nodded.
"Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry, sweetie." He replied. "Forget about it."
"Thanks." She replied. "Now, look… that man up there is about to go back to prison, after saving my life, for a crime he didn't even commit! There must be something we can do!"
"He isn't." The Governor stated.
"Huh?" Sara asked.
"He isn't going back to prison." The Governor said.
"He… he isn't?"
The Governor shook his head.
"Last night, Lima PD caught the real culprit of his crime. He's out of jail, for good…"
