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fredbassettTitle : Within These Walls, Chapter 22 of 30
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Nick, Stephen, Connor, Danny, Finn
Disclaimer : Not mine (except the OCs), no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : 59,000 words in 30 chapters of approx. 1,500 – 2,500 words each
Spoilers : None
Summary : Ending up in Dartmoor prison for refusing to recant their belief in evolution is only the start of the problems facing Nick, Stephen and Connor. And Sir James Lester soon ends up with other problems on his hands than just an over-crowded prison population.
A/N : For acknowledgments etc please see Part 1.
The noise of the bolts being drawn back on the cell door jolted Stephen out of an uneasy sleep in which the living and the dead had jostled for space inside his head, bringing back memories that he would rather not revisit.
He propped himself up on his elbows and waited for the door to be closed and relocked before he said, “Cutter? Is everything all right?”
“Depends on your definition of all right, lad,” Nick said quietly.
Familiar with the cell even in the pitch dark, Nick made his way to his bunk beneath Danny’s bed, the creaking of the wooden slats under the thin mattress telling Stephen when his friend had settled down.
“Someone’s been sharing the guv’nor’s scotch,” Danny said admiringly. “Hob-nobbing with the big boss, eh?”
Danny had obviously smelled the same thing as Stephen had, the sweet scent of alcohol on Nick’s breath.
“Drinks Lagavulin so he can’t be all bad,” Nick muttered, as though he was trying to convince himself as well as them. “He needs our help.”
“He needs your help, you mean,” Danny said. “You can write what I know about dinosaurs on a fag-paper and still have room to spare.”
“You saw what was on the other side of that anomaly, Danny, so you’re in this whether you like it or not.”
Danny let out a low whistle. “Great, does that mean I get to drink decent scotch with the guv’nor as well?”
“You never know your luck,” Stephen commented. “If anyone can, you can, Danny boy. So what sort of help is he looking for, Cutter?”
“He wants us to work with Captain Ryan and his men, identifying what creatures might represent a threat”
“He wants us to help the military decide how big a gun to use, is that it?” Stephen had worked with animals enough in his life not to view them through rose-tinted spectacles, but he didn’t like the idea of destroying any creature unnecessarily, especially ones that could teach them so much, even though such knowledge was now strictly forbidden.
“No! We can’t kill these creatures unless there is absolutely no other way. I’ve already told Lester that he could wreak untold havoc by doing that.”
“A butterfly flaps its wings in the Permian and we all end up with two heads?” Connor chimed in from the bunk underneath Stephen’s.
“Aye, something like that, laddie.”
“And he believed you?” Stephen was conscious of the fact that he seemed to have slipped into the role of Devil’s advocate, but this seemed the sort of situation that the phrase ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ had been coined for. He wondered quite how much help they could be to the governor, or to Ryan and his men. He supposed they could make a few educated guesses about what time period any creatures might come from and Connor’s encyclopaedic memory would be a distinct bonus there. Stephen’s tracking skills had already come in useful, so maybe they did have something to bring to the party…
“The man’s not an idiot,” Nick said. “He knows this isn’t a situation where they can just send the soldiers in, all guns blazing, much as he’d like to.” Nick chuckled. “I think he would have preferred to be dealing with an alien invasion than this.”
Stephen couldn’t help laughing. In a country where the authorities locked you up and threw away the key for not espousing the beliefs of the young earth creationists it looked very much like they might just have found themselves jobs as dinosaur hunters.
* * * * *
“Get up, you lazy bastards!”
The cell door was kicked open, startling everyone awake. They’d all talked late into the night and had finally fallen asleep not long before their usual early morning wake-up call was delivered by one of the guards. Stephen’s head felt like someone had poured cement in through both ears and then stuffed some up his nose, for good measure.
It wasn’t advisable to be too late into the breakfast queue, not unless you liked eating stone-cold food. The three of them had followed Danny’s example and had perfected the art of rapid rising, helped by the fact that they all slept fully dressed in a usually vain attempt to stay warm. It didn’t take long to brush your teeth, splash some cold water on your face and scramble out of the cell, especially when shaving was something that only got done once every few days, if at all.
The general atmosphere in the prison seemed even worse than usual, if that was possible. The breakfast queue was bad-tempered, with arguments flaring for no reason as men pushed and shoved, not wanting to back down over even the smallest of slights, real or imaginary. Stephen did his best to avoid eye contact with anyone, giving up his place in the queue to a multiple rapist from Cardiff without complaint. Danny caught his eye and gave an approving nod.
They got their food and a hot – or rather lukewarm – drink and quickly made their way over to an unoccupied table.
“I don’t like the fucking atmosphere in here,” Danny muttered.
Stephen raised his eyebrows. “I haven’t liked the fucking atmosphere since the day we arrived.”
“This place is ticking away like a bloody time bomb.” Danny jerked his head in the direction of a small huddle of guards over by one of the walls. “Look at them, they’re scared. Shit scared, the lot of them. Something’s about to go down and they know it.”
“What sort of something?” Nick said quietly.
“I don’t know, but if anything kicks off, we get back to the cell and stay there. Got it?” Danny’s eyes met his and the ex-copper gave Stephen a hard stare. “No heroics, Hart. We get back to the cell and stay there.”
Stephen nodded. He’d disregarded Danny’s advice once and he knew where that had got him. The tension in the air was all too palpable. Stephen found himself automatically checking the enormous central area of the wing to see who was between them and the relative safety of their cell. Darren Price, a drug dealer from Plymouth, was in a huddle by one wall with several of his cronies. Stephen caught the swift movement of hand to hand between two of the men and thought he’d seen a shiv – a homemade blade – change hands. In prison almost anything could be made into a weapon, even the handle of a plastic toothbrush, and there were plenty in circulation.
Nick stood up abruptly. “Let’s take a turn around the yard. This place is starting to make my skin crawl.”
Stephen agreed with him. The air was heavy with tension, like a storm about to break. They made their way through the recreation area to the door to the exercise yard. The guards on the outer doors stood with their hands on their tasers, looking more nervous than Stephen had ever seen. Their brash confidence was gone now and they wore the hunted look of men who knew it would take little for the veneer of control to be stripped away from them. Only the soldiers retained any outward veneer of confidence.
Once outside, they drifted around the yard, following Danny’s rule of keeping themselves to themselves and not making eye-contact, whilst doing their best to pick up snippets of conversation as they went. A guard had been assaulted the previous night on D wing when one of the inmates had wanted to finish a game of pool before returning to his cell for the night. When the guard had refused to let him, the man had stabbed him in the stomach with the thin end of the cue before he was tasered and dragged back to his cell. Only the presence of three of the soldiers had prevented the trouble spreading.
The weather outside was miserable, the air damp and cloying, like standing in the middle of the very fine spray from a lawn-sprinkler. The two guards stayed under cover in the doorway, but the sentry posts on the walls were manned by soldiers with guns, keeping a watchful eye on the few prisoners who had braved the weather for some semblance of exercise.
Looking up, Stephen realised that one of the men keeping watch was Rob Finn, the young soldier who had helped him track the Andrewsarchus across the moor. Finn held his rifle across his chest ready for trouble, but when he saw Stephen below him in the yard he raised one hand in acknowledgement.
By the time they’d made a circuit of the grey-walled yard, Stephen was cold and damp, but that was still preferable to breathing the stale air of the prison, redolent with cigarette smoke and the smell of stale sweat. Unfortunately for non-smokers, the smoking ban had not got as far as prison, with the cells being defined as the prisoners’ homes, and with the constant back-drop of unrest and violence, depriving the inmates of that particular pleasure was seen by many to be a step too far so far as stability was concerned.
On their third circuit of the yard, Stephen noticed that Finn was staring out across the moor, not down into the yard. Stephen nudged Nick and gestured up at the soldier.
“He’s seen something,” Nick muttered. “If there’s a break in the mist, he might have caught sight of something up on High Tor.”
Nick’s theory was confirmed when Finn called down, “Hart, get up here!”
The soldier was talking rapidly into one of the personal radios the military contingent all carried as Stephen climbed the ladder to the guard post watched by every one of the men in the yard, curious to see what had caused Stephen to be summoned like that. As soon as he arrived on the top of the stone-built tower, Stephen knew exactly why Finn had wanted him there.
The mist covering the moor had thinned in places and it was just possible to see the glint of silver amidst the rocks of the distant tor. Stephen drew in his breath sharply, which was all the answer Finn needed.
“Boss?” Finn was speaking into his radio again, presumably talking to Ryan. “Yeah, I’ve got Hart up to take a look and he agrees with me. There’s definitely something out there.” He paused, listening to the response but whatever he was being told was suddenly drowned out by a long blast on the klaxon horns mounted throughout Dartmoor Prison.
Even after his relatively short stay at Her Majesty’s expense, Stephen was familiar with that particular signal. It meant that lockdown was being announced with immediate effect.
At his side, Finn swore luridly and said, “OK, I’ll do my best, but if this lot don’t use lockdown as an excuse to kick off, I’ll eat Lyle’s keks.” Finn was silent again for a moment and then he ended with the words, “Oh shit. Copy that, boss.” He turned to Stephen, a troubled look on his normally cheerful face. “D wing has gone fucking ballistic and this lot won’t be far behind them. I need to get you four out of here and to the guv’nor’s office.”
A high-pitched scream from across the yard drew their attention. One of the guards in the doorway was clutching his face, blood streaming between his fingers; the other was on the ground, curled into a defensive ball. Prisoners mobbed the two men, hands grabbing for both keys and weapons.
“I can’t get a clear fucking shot,” Finn said, his voice calm, despite the sudden explosion of violence in the courtyard.
“They’ll rip you to pieces if they get half a chance,” Stephen said, already swarming down the ladder to get back to Nick and Connor, knowing that the flashover from the attack on the guards would now be as indiscriminate as it was violent. He could already hear shouts and screams rising even above the strident noise of the klaxon.
“They’re not going to get the chance,” Finn said grimly. “I’d sooner face this lot than the shit I’ll get from the boss if I don’t get you four out of here.”
It didn’t seem like the time to mention that if he failed to get them out, Finn would probably not be in a fit state to take shit from anyone but, from the look on the young soldier’s face, Stephen felt that he was probably well aware of that.
Ahead of them, one of the rioting prisoners was kicking hard at the prone form of the guard on the ground. The guard’s face was already as much of a bloody ruin as that of his colleague who looked to have had his eye gouged out by a shiv like the one Stephen had seen being flashed by the drug-dealer in the recreation room. The man’s cries had changed to a sort of gulping whine, sounding like an animal in distress rather than a human being, then the noise was abruptly curtailed and the sudden silence was even more chilling than the noise had been.
“Get behind me!” Finn ordered. “I presume none of you want to stay here, do you?”
It was clear in a matter of seconds that none of them wanted to throw in their lot with the rioters. Stephen suspected that news of Nick’s late night talk with the governor had probably reached the ears of some of their fellow prisoners by now and they had almost certainly been labelled as grasses, even if none of the men knew the nature of the conversation. A disturbance like this was an excuse to settle scores both with the guards and other prisoners and with two guards already dead, the reprisals were going to be fierce, no matter what happened next, so there was going to be a huge element of being hanged for a sheep as a lamb that would now come into play.
There had been no more than about ten men in the exercise yard, but they had proved more than enough to bring down two guards. Stephen hoped that the soldiers would prove less easy to overpower, and no doubt Ryan’s men would by now have been given orders to use deadly force if needed.
That thought was confirmed a second later when the head of one of the prisoners still kicking the lifeless body of one of the guards suddenly exploded like an over-ripe watermelon, blood, bone and brains spraying out in a wide arc. Behind him, Stephen heard Connor let out a choking cough. He turned around and grabbed his friend by the arm. They couldn’t afford to become separated if Connor stopped to be sick.
Finn stuck the pistol he’d used to shoot the prisoner back into his thigh holster and turned the butt of his rifle against one of the other men, dropping him easily while the man gawped at the nearly headless body on the ground, a homemade knife still clutched in his hand.
Stephen reached out and grabbed the weapon. Broken pieces of razor blade had been set in a long, serrated line along the edge of a piece of wood possibly fashioned from a bed-slat. The shiv was coated in blood and had most probably been the weapon used to blind the first guard to have been taken down.
The sound of the klaxon made rational thought hard to sustain. The noise was augmented by the sound of furniture being smashed and the familiar sound of tin mugs being beaten against the metal of the cell doors, but now the drumming was louder and more ominous that it had ever been before.
And as they shouldered their way through to the door, Stephen heard the rattle of automatic fire and smelled the acrid reek of smoke.
The trouble on D wing had now flashed throughout the prison.
It would take nothing short of divine bloody intervention to get them out in one piece.
Unfortunately, it looked very much like their career as dinosaur hunters was about to come to an abrupt end.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Nick, Stephen, Connor, Danny, Finn
Disclaimer : Not mine (except the OCs), no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : 59,000 words in 30 chapters of approx. 1,500 – 2,500 words each
Spoilers : None
Summary : Ending up in Dartmoor prison for refusing to recant their belief in evolution is only the start of the problems facing Nick, Stephen and Connor. And Sir James Lester soon ends up with other problems on his hands than just an over-crowded prison population.
A/N : For acknowledgments etc please see Part 1.
The noise of the bolts being drawn back on the cell door jolted Stephen out of an uneasy sleep in which the living and the dead had jostled for space inside his head, bringing back memories that he would rather not revisit.
He propped himself up on his elbows and waited for the door to be closed and relocked before he said, “Cutter? Is everything all right?”
“Depends on your definition of all right, lad,” Nick said quietly.
Familiar with the cell even in the pitch dark, Nick made his way to his bunk beneath Danny’s bed, the creaking of the wooden slats under the thin mattress telling Stephen when his friend had settled down.
“Someone’s been sharing the guv’nor’s scotch,” Danny said admiringly. “Hob-nobbing with the big boss, eh?”
Danny had obviously smelled the same thing as Stephen had, the sweet scent of alcohol on Nick’s breath.
“Drinks Lagavulin so he can’t be all bad,” Nick muttered, as though he was trying to convince himself as well as them. “He needs our help.”
“He needs your help, you mean,” Danny said. “You can write what I know about dinosaurs on a fag-paper and still have room to spare.”
“You saw what was on the other side of that anomaly, Danny, so you’re in this whether you like it or not.”
Danny let out a low whistle. “Great, does that mean I get to drink decent scotch with the guv’nor as well?”
“You never know your luck,” Stephen commented. “If anyone can, you can, Danny boy. So what sort of help is he looking for, Cutter?”
“He wants us to work with Captain Ryan and his men, identifying what creatures might represent a threat”
“He wants us to help the military decide how big a gun to use, is that it?” Stephen had worked with animals enough in his life not to view them through rose-tinted spectacles, but he didn’t like the idea of destroying any creature unnecessarily, especially ones that could teach them so much, even though such knowledge was now strictly forbidden.
“No! We can’t kill these creatures unless there is absolutely no other way. I’ve already told Lester that he could wreak untold havoc by doing that.”
“A butterfly flaps its wings in the Permian and we all end up with two heads?” Connor chimed in from the bunk underneath Stephen’s.
“Aye, something like that, laddie.”
“And he believed you?” Stephen was conscious of the fact that he seemed to have slipped into the role of Devil’s advocate, but this seemed the sort of situation that the phrase ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ had been coined for. He wondered quite how much help they could be to the governor, or to Ryan and his men. He supposed they could make a few educated guesses about what time period any creatures might come from and Connor’s encyclopaedic memory would be a distinct bonus there. Stephen’s tracking skills had already come in useful, so maybe they did have something to bring to the party…
“The man’s not an idiot,” Nick said. “He knows this isn’t a situation where they can just send the soldiers in, all guns blazing, much as he’d like to.” Nick chuckled. “I think he would have preferred to be dealing with an alien invasion than this.”
Stephen couldn’t help laughing. In a country where the authorities locked you up and threw away the key for not espousing the beliefs of the young earth creationists it looked very much like they might just have found themselves jobs as dinosaur hunters.
* * * * *
“Get up, you lazy bastards!”
The cell door was kicked open, startling everyone awake. They’d all talked late into the night and had finally fallen asleep not long before their usual early morning wake-up call was delivered by one of the guards. Stephen’s head felt like someone had poured cement in through both ears and then stuffed some up his nose, for good measure.
It wasn’t advisable to be too late into the breakfast queue, not unless you liked eating stone-cold food. The three of them had followed Danny’s example and had perfected the art of rapid rising, helped by the fact that they all slept fully dressed in a usually vain attempt to stay warm. It didn’t take long to brush your teeth, splash some cold water on your face and scramble out of the cell, especially when shaving was something that only got done once every few days, if at all.
The general atmosphere in the prison seemed even worse than usual, if that was possible. The breakfast queue was bad-tempered, with arguments flaring for no reason as men pushed and shoved, not wanting to back down over even the smallest of slights, real or imaginary. Stephen did his best to avoid eye contact with anyone, giving up his place in the queue to a multiple rapist from Cardiff without complaint. Danny caught his eye and gave an approving nod.
They got their food and a hot – or rather lukewarm – drink and quickly made their way over to an unoccupied table.
“I don’t like the fucking atmosphere in here,” Danny muttered.
Stephen raised his eyebrows. “I haven’t liked the fucking atmosphere since the day we arrived.”
“This place is ticking away like a bloody time bomb.” Danny jerked his head in the direction of a small huddle of guards over by one of the walls. “Look at them, they’re scared. Shit scared, the lot of them. Something’s about to go down and they know it.”
“What sort of something?” Nick said quietly.
“I don’t know, but if anything kicks off, we get back to the cell and stay there. Got it?” Danny’s eyes met his and the ex-copper gave Stephen a hard stare. “No heroics, Hart. We get back to the cell and stay there.”
Stephen nodded. He’d disregarded Danny’s advice once and he knew where that had got him. The tension in the air was all too palpable. Stephen found himself automatically checking the enormous central area of the wing to see who was between them and the relative safety of their cell. Darren Price, a drug dealer from Plymouth, was in a huddle by one wall with several of his cronies. Stephen caught the swift movement of hand to hand between two of the men and thought he’d seen a shiv – a homemade blade – change hands. In prison almost anything could be made into a weapon, even the handle of a plastic toothbrush, and there were plenty in circulation.
Nick stood up abruptly. “Let’s take a turn around the yard. This place is starting to make my skin crawl.”
Stephen agreed with him. The air was heavy with tension, like a storm about to break. They made their way through the recreation area to the door to the exercise yard. The guards on the outer doors stood with their hands on their tasers, looking more nervous than Stephen had ever seen. Their brash confidence was gone now and they wore the hunted look of men who knew it would take little for the veneer of control to be stripped away from them. Only the soldiers retained any outward veneer of confidence.
Once outside, they drifted around the yard, following Danny’s rule of keeping themselves to themselves and not making eye-contact, whilst doing their best to pick up snippets of conversation as they went. A guard had been assaulted the previous night on D wing when one of the inmates had wanted to finish a game of pool before returning to his cell for the night. When the guard had refused to let him, the man had stabbed him in the stomach with the thin end of the cue before he was tasered and dragged back to his cell. Only the presence of three of the soldiers had prevented the trouble spreading.
The weather outside was miserable, the air damp and cloying, like standing in the middle of the very fine spray from a lawn-sprinkler. The two guards stayed under cover in the doorway, but the sentry posts on the walls were manned by soldiers with guns, keeping a watchful eye on the few prisoners who had braved the weather for some semblance of exercise.
Looking up, Stephen realised that one of the men keeping watch was Rob Finn, the young soldier who had helped him track the Andrewsarchus across the moor. Finn held his rifle across his chest ready for trouble, but when he saw Stephen below him in the yard he raised one hand in acknowledgement.
By the time they’d made a circuit of the grey-walled yard, Stephen was cold and damp, but that was still preferable to breathing the stale air of the prison, redolent with cigarette smoke and the smell of stale sweat. Unfortunately for non-smokers, the smoking ban had not got as far as prison, with the cells being defined as the prisoners’ homes, and with the constant back-drop of unrest and violence, depriving the inmates of that particular pleasure was seen by many to be a step too far so far as stability was concerned.
On their third circuit of the yard, Stephen noticed that Finn was staring out across the moor, not down into the yard. Stephen nudged Nick and gestured up at the soldier.
“He’s seen something,” Nick muttered. “If there’s a break in the mist, he might have caught sight of something up on High Tor.”
Nick’s theory was confirmed when Finn called down, “Hart, get up here!”
The soldier was talking rapidly into one of the personal radios the military contingent all carried as Stephen climbed the ladder to the guard post watched by every one of the men in the yard, curious to see what had caused Stephen to be summoned like that. As soon as he arrived on the top of the stone-built tower, Stephen knew exactly why Finn had wanted him there.
The mist covering the moor had thinned in places and it was just possible to see the glint of silver amidst the rocks of the distant tor. Stephen drew in his breath sharply, which was all the answer Finn needed.
“Boss?” Finn was speaking into his radio again, presumably talking to Ryan. “Yeah, I’ve got Hart up to take a look and he agrees with me. There’s definitely something out there.” He paused, listening to the response but whatever he was being told was suddenly drowned out by a long blast on the klaxon horns mounted throughout Dartmoor Prison.
Even after his relatively short stay at Her Majesty’s expense, Stephen was familiar with that particular signal. It meant that lockdown was being announced with immediate effect.
At his side, Finn swore luridly and said, “OK, I’ll do my best, but if this lot don’t use lockdown as an excuse to kick off, I’ll eat Lyle’s keks.” Finn was silent again for a moment and then he ended with the words, “Oh shit. Copy that, boss.” He turned to Stephen, a troubled look on his normally cheerful face. “D wing has gone fucking ballistic and this lot won’t be far behind them. I need to get you four out of here and to the guv’nor’s office.”
A high-pitched scream from across the yard drew their attention. One of the guards in the doorway was clutching his face, blood streaming between his fingers; the other was on the ground, curled into a defensive ball. Prisoners mobbed the two men, hands grabbing for both keys and weapons.
“I can’t get a clear fucking shot,” Finn said, his voice calm, despite the sudden explosion of violence in the courtyard.
“They’ll rip you to pieces if they get half a chance,” Stephen said, already swarming down the ladder to get back to Nick and Connor, knowing that the flashover from the attack on the guards would now be as indiscriminate as it was violent. He could already hear shouts and screams rising even above the strident noise of the klaxon.
“They’re not going to get the chance,” Finn said grimly. “I’d sooner face this lot than the shit I’ll get from the boss if I don’t get you four out of here.”
It didn’t seem like the time to mention that if he failed to get them out, Finn would probably not be in a fit state to take shit from anyone but, from the look on the young soldier’s face, Stephen felt that he was probably well aware of that.
Ahead of them, one of the rioting prisoners was kicking hard at the prone form of the guard on the ground. The guard’s face was already as much of a bloody ruin as that of his colleague who looked to have had his eye gouged out by a shiv like the one Stephen had seen being flashed by the drug-dealer in the recreation room. The man’s cries had changed to a sort of gulping whine, sounding like an animal in distress rather than a human being, then the noise was abruptly curtailed and the sudden silence was even more chilling than the noise had been.
“Get behind me!” Finn ordered. “I presume none of you want to stay here, do you?”
It was clear in a matter of seconds that none of them wanted to throw in their lot with the rioters. Stephen suspected that news of Nick’s late night talk with the governor had probably reached the ears of some of their fellow prisoners by now and they had almost certainly been labelled as grasses, even if none of the men knew the nature of the conversation. A disturbance like this was an excuse to settle scores both with the guards and other prisoners and with two guards already dead, the reprisals were going to be fierce, no matter what happened next, so there was going to be a huge element of being hanged for a sheep as a lamb that would now come into play.
There had been no more than about ten men in the exercise yard, but they had proved more than enough to bring down two guards. Stephen hoped that the soldiers would prove less easy to overpower, and no doubt Ryan’s men would by now have been given orders to use deadly force if needed.
That thought was confirmed a second later when the head of one of the prisoners still kicking the lifeless body of one of the guards suddenly exploded like an over-ripe watermelon, blood, bone and brains spraying out in a wide arc. Behind him, Stephen heard Connor let out a choking cough. He turned around and grabbed his friend by the arm. They couldn’t afford to become separated if Connor stopped to be sick.
Finn stuck the pistol he’d used to shoot the prisoner back into his thigh holster and turned the butt of his rifle against one of the other men, dropping him easily while the man gawped at the nearly headless body on the ground, a homemade knife still clutched in his hand.
Stephen reached out and grabbed the weapon. Broken pieces of razor blade had been set in a long, serrated line along the edge of a piece of wood possibly fashioned from a bed-slat. The shiv was coated in blood and had most probably been the weapon used to blind the first guard to have been taken down.
The sound of the klaxon made rational thought hard to sustain. The noise was augmented by the sound of furniture being smashed and the familiar sound of tin mugs being beaten against the metal of the cell doors, but now the drumming was louder and more ominous that it had ever been before.
And as they shouldered their way through to the door, Stephen heard the rattle of automatic fire and smelled the acrid reek of smoke.
The trouble on D wing had now flashed throughout the prison.
It would take nothing short of divine bloody intervention to get them out in one piece.
Unfortunately, it looked very much like their career as dinosaur hunters was about to come to an abrupt end.