30 Minute Plan - 13

His fear was bleeding over into anger. Danton hated being afraid. The last time he'd felt this was he was still in the penitentiary, right as the world had started going to hell. He remembered hearing a guard had attacked an inmate and a few days later things had dissolved into chaos.

 

General Tarver had marched in and made camp just outside the outer fence. Danton and a few others had tried to tear their way through the fence, one had tried to climb over and gotten tangled up long enough for Ziggy to pick him down piece-by-piece.

 

"You gotta get me out of here," Danton had begged, banging on the fence.

 

"No son." General Tarver's tone was impossibly calm. He didn't shout, but his voice carried to Danton just the same. "You need to do one of two things: get yourself out or survive the next three days."

 

Danton shuddered at what he'd had to do to make it. But at the end of the third day the general and his men marched in and slaughtered every Ziggy in sight. Danton and two others had survived unscathed, but there were dozens of men who been bitten or injured. That was when Danton had learned fealty to his fellow man.

 

He'd been in the system over five years. He could honestly say he'd spent majority of the time hating everyone in there. The Aryans, the Brothers, the Chicanos, the Asians. Danton didn't join the Aryans because he'd been a dick on the outside, but not that kind of dick. But that didn't stop the other gangs and the Aryans from coming at him. But Danton had always been able to handle himself. He almost always had given more than he got.

 

But Tarver showed him that all these men—regardless of color—were his brothers. There was a new enemy that was counting on men being divided to win and when he turned his back on his brothers he was offering his throat to Ziggy. General Tarver had seen to it personally that each man who had been bitten or scratched was put down in the most humane way possible. By the last few he'd had Danton take over—a clean shot to the dome.

 

Danton was weeping by the time he'd shot the second man because he truly understood. All this time his love for these people had been disguised as hate, but he was making amends for it by sending them home.

 

The other two prisoners had had to go through the same process and by the time they were done they were crying too. But Simpson couldn't pull the trigger on the last one, he just didn't have it in him. And the man, even though the infection hadn't taken him yet, jumped Simpson, biting off two of his fingers before two dogs swiftly dispatched him.