Nathaniel's gaze swivelled inside the hospital room while a TV played quietly in a corner, his calloused fingers drumming restless patterns on his thigh. He raised its volume a bit, shoulders lifting in a half-shrug when the sudden noise made Valerie flinch. The attempt to distract his wife from her mother's deterioration felt hollow even as he did it.

Maria remained motionless and unresponsive despite Valerie's and the doctor's best efforts. Nathaniel's jaw tightened as he watched his wife's reflection in the darkened window - her trembling hands compulsively smoothing the same wrinkle in the hospital blanket, over and over. Again, he wanted his wife to calm down, give her hope, and assure her that everything would turn out for the better, but he knew his words at that moment would result in empty promises. Maria would not survive. His throat burned with the truth he couldn't voice. How could he say those words to his wife? The mother whom she had adored so much. The mother who had spent her life as a slave for her children.

"Hon, would you like to go home?" Nathaniel whispered as he leaned his head onto the back of his wife's shoulder, his stubble catching on her cotton blouse. The familiar scent of her lavender detergent clashed violently with the antiseptic stench of the room. "Take the kids with you, I will stay with your mother."

Valerie turned to face him, eyes filled with tears that magnified the shattered hope in their brown depths. Her fingers dug into his forearm like drowning woman clutching driftwood. "I wanted Sheldon here." The admission tore from her raw, like flesh from bone.

Nathaniel understood the worry written on his wife's face through the way her left eyelid kept twitching, a nervous tic she'd developed during her first pregnancy. Valerie's younger brother was loved dearly by their mother. Maria would be heartbroken - if she still had the conscious ability to do so - if Sheldon failed to visit before her demise.

"San Fernando is about six hours away." He thumbed away a tear tracking through her freckles, salt lingering on his skin. "I will leave at daybreak," he assured his wife, mimicking the exact promise he had made hours ago with military precision, back straightening as if donning invisible body armor.

Valerie shook her head, copper curls swaying like a pendulum counting down final moments. "I don't think she has a lot of time left." Her whisper hung between them, a death sentence rendered in three breaths.

At that moment, faith confirmed in reaponse as Maria's heart monitor gave another dangerous beep. Nathaniel's combat-honed reflexes had him halfway to the code button before conscious thought, but his wife suddenly froze - statue-still except for the violent tremor in her clasped hands - and then began to cry again.

In the corner of the room, a low grumble was heard. The sound from the monitor had jolted the sleeping kids into awareness. Their granddaughter rubbed fistfuls of sleep from her eyes, pajama sleeve catching on a loose tooth. Their hazy eyes stared back at their grandfather and grandmother, full of confusion.

"Is Gigi-grandma sleeping forever now?" the five-year-old asked, index finger poking at the oxygen tube dangling near the bedrail. His question turned Valerie's cry into an ear-splitting wail. Nathaniel immediately wrapped his arms around his wife's shaking body, her tears soaking through his shirt to brand his collarbone. "I will leave right now. I'll make sure to bring your brother home before sundown tomorrow." The promise tasted like blood - he'd bite through steel to keep it.

Valerie gave her husband a forced smile that didn't reach the shadows under her eyes and bobbed her head. She stared at him lovingly. Her palm found the scar above his heart through the thin fabric, a familiar anchor. How could she have married such a man? Her mother had always told her that she must choose her future partner wisely. Her mother repeated the words daily as if she feared Valerie would end up meeting a jerk. So Valerie hadn't only chosen wisely. She had found the best. The thought fractured into silent gratitude as monitors screamed behind them.

 ***

Before Nathaniel left the hospital, he once again asked his wife if it was alright to leave her alone with the kids, his boot tapping an anxious staccato against the linoleum. She assured him that it was, patting his chest twice in their decades-old gesture of temporary farewell. However, Nathaniel couldn't keep worrying so the marine gave his brother a call, the phone slipping in his sweaty palm as he scrolled through contacts. It was almost two in the morning, and his brother was probably asleep, but Nathaniel knew his wife needed company. His thumb hovered over the call button, thumbnail chewed raw from hours of silent panic. So he persevered despite failing to have his call picked up after several attempts.

Nathaniel stalked toward the vending machines, their humming glow revealing a constellation of old gum wads plastered beneath the snack coils. On the third failed call attempt, he braced one palm against the glass where a Twinkie package hung askew, hospital ID bracelet rattling against the plexiglass. Finally, on his fourth call, his brother answered. The voice on the other line sounded sleepy and tired. Nathaniel's shoulders hunched forward like a penitent man at confession as he rasped, "I hate to ask, but Val... she needs somebody. Can you come?"

He pushed off from the vending machine, leaving sweaty fingerprints on the glass as he moved toward the elevators. Luckily for Nathaniel, it didn't take any heavy convincing on his part for his brother to agree to accompany Valerie and the kids at the hospital. A lifetime of shared trauma lingered in the pause before his brother's sigh - the unspoken debt from when Nathaniel had dragged him from that car wreck in "99.

The elevator doors hissed open on a janitor's cart piled with bloodied linens. Nathaniel recoiled from the copper stench, back hitting the bulletin board where smiling cancer survivors grinned beneath thumbtack scars. He stared at his distorted reflection in the elevator doors, watching his hands compulsively straighten his wedding band...

 ***

San Fernando Correctional (North Wing)

"Take us with you, or we'll make sure none of you gets out of here!" the inmate inside cell ninety-five screamed, spittle flying through the crisscrossed bars as he shook them like a caged baboon.

The two convicts who spent years planning their escape turned toward the man, their silhouettes backlit by the guard tower’s searchlight slicing through the barred enclosure. One of them took out a bottle from his pocket, a bottle provided by the guard they managed to bribe. He slowly walked towards cell ninety-five, the hollow clang of his boots echoing through the skeletal grid of iron bars. Leisurely, he opened the small bottle he held, letting the acrid fumes curl upward to sting the screaming inmate’s eyes, and then signaled for the criminal behind bars to approach him.

The convict smiled, grinning through the geometric shadows cast across his face by the cell’s latticework, thinking he finally found a way to escape his twenty-year sentence. The man with the bottle grinned when the unsuspecting prisoner positioned himself an inch away from the iron bars, chest pressed to the cold metal in a grotesque parody of embrace. Without warning, the convict, standing from the outside, poured the contents of his bottle over the metal bars. The liquid ate through steel with a sound like bacon frying, giving enough room for the inmate inside to crawl out.

Prisoner ninety-five released a chuckle when he found himself free from the confines of his cell, knees scraping raw against the jagged edges of melted bars, but his joy was short-lived. The laughter he emitted was immediately replaced with horror and a disrupted cry after a knife was mercilessly sheathed from behind his neck. The silver metal pierced through his neck severing his cervical vertebrae, breaking his thorax until it found release through his throat, amidst muscles and tissues.

Blood arced through the air, splattering diagonal bar patterns onto neighboring cells. Immediately, some of the remaining prisoners moved to the farthest corners where perpendicular bars met, trying to vanish into right angles, but a large number of them began to wail and scream for the guard whom they knew to be positioned above their iron confinement.

The two convicts who stood beside the fallen prisoner glared at those who created a ruckus, their faces fully visible through the open-grid cells like actors on a stage. One of them walked up towards an inmate who kept screaming, "Guard, guard!" intent on silencing him, but his deed was cut short when a bullet was shot from above. The convict managed to dodge the bullet, missing him only by an inch. The round pinged off a horizontal bar, sending sparks cascading into the dark.

A few more bullets were fired —each ricochet creating discordant chimes across the barred labyrinth— until surprisingly, a guard's body fell from the top. The confused convicts inside their bar-walled cells watched in terror as they realized that it was another guard who shot his comrade down. The corpse slumped against a cell’s bars, arms dangling through gaps like macabre wind chimes.

"Didn't I tell you to be careful?" the convict asked, directing his question to the guard who was standing in front of him with a wide grin on his face.

The guard, a middle-aged man named Farlow, smiled at the convict and answered, "I even sleep with this thing on my chest," whilst raising his rifle upfront, its barrel briefly aligning with Oscar’s face.

"Whatever," Oscar answered, palm slapping the floor as he rose, dust motes swirling in searchlight beams between them.

"I have to ask, though, would those old sticks be able to keep up?" the other escapee, a man by the name of Rudolf, asked, fingers drumming a taunt on his thigh.

Oscar snickered as he shook his head, muscles rippling beneath his prison jumpsuit like coiled cables. He was perhaps an old man, but he never missed a single day without proper exercise. His daily routine—pull-ups on cell bars, push-ups on concrete—had turned his body into a leather-clad machine. He hadn’t any intention of dying inside the prison walls. He had been a prisoner for nearly forty-three years. His reflection in the polished guard station glass showed a man who’d outlived three wardens. He needed to get out. He couldn’t believe his sentence of ten years was extended to life imprisonment because of a simple brawl. Well, it did result in the death of a few guards, but hey, it wasn’t like it was all his doing. Those guards should have known their place! A riot is a riot! Who told them to stand in the way? he thought, knuckles cracking as he flexed them.

As the men mused, a loud clacking sound took the them by surprise. It was the vagabond guard who first turned to see where the sound came from. Farlow’s rifle clattered against the catwalk railing as he spun, boots squealing on metal grates. His eyes instantly widened by the surprise of seeing their warden staring at him from behind the main wall. The warden’s face, fragmented by the thick vertical bars of the security partition, twisted into a gargoyle’s snarl.

The wall, as they called it, where the warden stood behind was also made of thick iron bars, but those bars were far thicker than the ones used for the inmate’s cells. The acid won't work on it. That's why they needed the guards, but this ws an unexpected turn of events.

"Going somewhere?" The warden hissed. Eyes focused on Rudolf as if the warden already knew who orchestrated the events.

Rudolf's grin widened. He stood in the open, no cell to cage him as alarm splits the air. If Oscar was a wolf, Rudolf was his leash.

***

The air in the guards’ makeshift barracks in the West Wing hung thick with the stale scent of burnt coffee, sleep, and the lingering residue of fear from the earlier storm. Scattered across uncomfortable chairs and cold patches of floor, the guards lay steeped in a restless slumber. The low hum of the fluorescent lights, the distant rumble of the wind still pummeling the prison, and the rhythmic drip-drip-drip from a leaky pipe had been their uneasy lullaby.

But then, a sound.

It started as a shriek, sharp and unearthly, tearing through the thin veil of sleep. It wasn't the usual meal bell, nor the clanging of cell doors. This was a raw, metallic scream that vibrated through bone, demanding attention, demanding panic. The prison-wide alarm blared, a tortured, high-pitched wail that seemed to rend the very concrete around them.

Mark jolted upright, his eyes snapping open in the sudden, painful assault of the sound. He’d toppled backward in his rickety chair, the flimsy metal legs clattering against Harold’s empty one. His breath hitched, a gasp lost in the cacophony. His limbs felt heavy, caught in the quicksand of fading dreams.

Sheldon, slumped sideways off his row of chairs, blanket tangling around his ankles, pitched forward onto the cold floor. His body felt like dead weight, stunned by the sheer force of the sound. He thrashed, trying to untangle himself, his eyes wide and unfocused. He heard the alarm echo, a frantic, disembodied cry that seemed to be everywhere at once, bouncing off walls, ricocheting down hallways. "South wing—it’s comin’ from the south wing!" he croaked, his voice raw and hoarse, already mistaking the sound’s reverberation for its origin. His face was a mask of confusion, streaked with sleep-sweat.

Johnny, who had attempted to form a rudimentary bed from two upturned desks, yelped as his makeshift cot gave way. The chair leg snapped under his misplaced weight with a sharp crack, sending him sprawling. He landed with a grunt, his head hitting the unforgiving floor with a dull thud. He lay there for a beat, his senses swimming, the alarm a jackhammer in his skull. He fumbled for his sidearm, but his hands felt clumsy, alien.

Raffy, nestled against a stack of forgotten cleaning supplies, sprang to his feet, but his limbs felt like lead. He stumbled over the uneven line of furniture, batons clattering as they fell from his grip. He face-planted into a metal desk, the cold, unyielding surface a rude awakening against his cheek. He scrambled back, rubbing his bruised forehead, eyes wide with unfocused terror. His heart hammered, a frantic drum in his chest, drowning out all other thoughts save for the piercing wail.

Their minds, still sluggish from sleep and the night's earlier stresses, struggled to catch up. They were disoriented, caught between the fading dreams and the harsh, screaming reality. Their movements were jerky, uncoordinated. Fumbling for weapons that weren't there, rubbing eyes that refused to focus, cursing under breaths that tasted of stale coffee and fear.

Then, a new, terrifying sound began to filter through the incessant alarm – the distant, unmistakable pop-pop-pop of gunfire, closer now, growing rapidly louder. It was no longer just an alarm. It was the sound of the prison tearing itself apart.

"Get moving!" Harold yelled, his voice strained, finally finding some semblance of urgency. "Into the hall!"

They stampeded out of the room, their worn boots clattering against the concrete, blind to the dark, widening blood trail an intruder had left minutes earlier, snaking toward the North exit. Their panicked cries echoed into the chaotic darkness of the prison.