The Prisoner

Suspense Stories | Jan 26, 2013 | 2 min read
64 Votes, average: 4 out of 5
He was walking through a deserted town – one of dozens or hundreds or thousands he had passed through since his journey began. While the surrounding desolation did nothing to warm his soul he was still somehow glad there was no greeting party waiting for him near the weathered welcome sign. Most of the greeting parties these days were happy to see you as their next meal. He touched the butt of the revolver strapped loosely to his left hip. It was ironic that once upon a time these places were called the Wild West – clearly the people who had given the name had no understanding of what wild really meant. If anything, the time before the last Great War could be described as tame and enlightened age. No longer now as gangs of deformed creatures roamed earth or at the very least the area that used by known as the United States of America. They had a leader and an agenda, which basically meant that they had a boss they were profoundly terrified of and tried to restrain from killing the other packs but instead directed their infinite bloodthirstiness towards the few remnants of the Old Kind – that is how the non-mutated humans were known in this brave new world. He was one of the few representatives of this now almost extinct species of humans – albeit not a very sophisticated specimen, at least by the old world standards. He was a convicted criminal serving a triple life sentence at the time when the bomb was dropped.

He survived not because of the selflessness of the prison personnel but because he was considered dangerous enough to be kept on the bottom floor of a maximum security underground prison. The EMP from the blast distorted the computer brain of the prison, which decided to put him and the rest of the inmates into a medically induced coma. When he came to hours or months or years later – he was the only survivor surrounded by the dried corpses of his fellow convicts. Getting out proved to be a tricky task but he did it nevertheless – after all, lucky escapes were his specialty (along with armed robberies, blackmail, contraband, scams, fraud, arms sale, bribery and management of one of the largest prostitution rings on the west coast). He grabbed what little supplies he could muster and broke out of the facility after cheating the computer into believing that he was a priest on his way out after visiting a death row patient. All that was good – what awaited him outside was not. His prison was supposed to be at an undisclosed location in Nevada, which, of course, was a desert but the last time he checked, there weren't supposed to be rusty corpses of giant airplanes all around him. His recollection of the events was hazy and there really wasn't anyone to ask what in the fuck was going on. And so he – Charles Waters aka the White Shark aka Charlie the Choo-Choo aka Mr. Waters (solely for his bankers and lawyers) started his long journey through the new world, which, and that was a real dubious achievement, he liked even less than the old one. And as he moved through the dead town, he suddenly got a feeling that he was being watched – and in the post-apocalyptic world that is never a good thing…

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