Wasteland Warlords Episode 5: Chapter 4 - Hostile Work Environment

Clay caught Griff’s sharp one-eyed gaze. They hadn’t planned for a cell full of people, but if they were going to get out of this prison, they would need everybody in their cell on board. Or at least not actively working against them.

“What if I told you we were breaking out of this place?” Clay asked the bark-covered tree druid.

Shifty yelped a laugh. “I’d say you’re too dumb to know better.”

“What if we told you we ain’t the only ones working on it?” Griff said, his voice little more than a gruff whisper. “When we give the signal, there’s a couple of powerful Incants outside, waiting to bust in and draw attention away from our jailbreak.”

“Well, now, that changes things,” Shifty said, rubbing his mossy chin.

From the bottom bunk, the supposedly sleeping Herman blew a loud raspberry.

“Yeah, okay. That doesn’t change shit,” he said.

The druid rolled his eyes. “Forget Hermie. He’s been in here too long. He’s institutionalized. Me, I haven’t abandoned all hope yet. If you promise to get me out of here, I know a secret that just might help.”

Clay eyed him. As a lifelong book-lover, Clay knew you shouldn’t judge a book by its title alone, but come on. The guy’s name was Shifty, for crying out loud.

Still, they needed all the help they could get. If he had inside information, that could save them valuable recon time and a lot of potentially deadly trial and error.

“Done,” he said, shaking the bundle of sticks and meat the druid called a hand to seal the deal.

Shifty leaned in close. “Okay, so you probably noticed that the Warden’s watching every second in every part of this place. That’s not just an illusion, he’s an Unknowable Cosmic Horror, so he actually can watch every one of us at all times, as long as he has line of sight. Ironically, the only time we’re out of his line of sight is in Solitary, down in the bottom of the tower. Get thrown in the hole, and you’re up against a locked room with one single ICSO standing guard. Otherwise you’re on your own twenty-four seven. That’s where I made this.”

With a glance over his shoulder toward the tower, Shifty turned his back to the center of the prison and nonchalantly pulled a tiny scrap of wood about as wide as a pencil and shorter than a pinkie finger out of his jumpsuit pocket.

“What is it?” Clay could see some kind of arcane mark winding around its wooden length, but without turning the stick over, he couldn’t tell what the sigil stood for.

Shifty grinned. “That, buddy, is my pinkie. Snapped it off while I was in the hole. It only took a day for it to grow back, no biggie. Especially not once I carved this rune into it.” He twirled the former pinkie around so they could see the rest of it. “That’s a Hearthworld original, there. Ngom. It nullifies a portion of the effects of all activated runes and sigils within a ten-foot radius.”

Griff eyed the withered appendage with interest. “You can cast spells in here using that?”

“The most minor of minor cantrips, but yeah. I don’t have a lot of that low a caliber, but it helped speed up my healing, and I’ve been trying out Beguiling Whisper to see if I can get in touch with my girlfriend.” He shrugged. “No way to know if it’s actually working, though.”

Clay nodded. “Because the receiver can’t respond to Beguiling Whisper.”

“A cantrip man?” The knobby protrusions over Shifty’s eyes rose, and he grinned, showing mossy teeth. “I knew you were good people.”

“I might have a way to find out whether it’s working,” Clay said. “But we’re not gonna get a chance to do a test run. When I send the Whisper, we’ll have to be ready on our end to break out. That’s the signal for our Incant friends on the outside.”

Shifty snatched the twig away, stuffing it back into his pocket.

“I’m not so sure I want to hang my freedom on the possibility a guy I just met isn’t going to screw me over and leave me behind, you get me?”

Right away, Clay knew arguing that he was trustworthy would just make Shifty less inclined to believe him. He didn’t exactly seem like the type who hung out with a lot of folks who could be taken at their word.

“I see where you’re coming from. It’s definitely a risk to hand over something that valuable to someone you’ve never met before. But if you don’t let me use it, you lose any possibility of breaking out,” Clay said. “That’s a hundred percent chance of being locked up here forever, versus whatever percent chance you think there is I’ll betray you and leave you behind.”

Shifty slung an arm around his neck. “Trying to get me to play the odds, huh?” He patted Clay’s chest condescendingly. “I don’t put any money down unless I know the outcome is a sure thing, buddy. Do you, Clay Jaeger, promise to take me, Shifty Shagbark, out of this prison when you break out?”

A corresponding notification popped up in Clay’s field of vision.

“I promise,” Clay said, accepting the Oath.

“Oath of the Binding Vine.” Little roots as thin as threads shot out of Shifty’s fingertips, dug through the fabric of Clay’s jumpsuit, and pierced the wall of Clay’s chest. He winced as they wrapped painfully around his heart, sending pain shooting down his left arm. He doubled over.

After the threat of failure was abundantly clear, the vines eased off.

Clay scowled at Shifty as he straightened back up. “I would’ve done it without the coercion.”

“Hey, you can never be too sure of a sure thing.” Shifty detached his hand from the vines, leaving them nestled inside Clay’s chest. “So, what’s the plan, good buddy? How are we gonna get out of here?”

***

Griff wandered the glass perimeter of the cell, hands in his jumpsuit pockets. In the corner, Shifty swayed and hummed along to a song only he knew. Herman hadn’t moved from his spot on the bottom bunk and was now actually snoring.

When Clay caught Griff’s eye, he sent him an obvious nod. The old weed gave him a low thumbs-up, right in sight of the Warden.

Nonchalantly, Clay pulled the sheet off the top bunk and wound it around his fists, while Griff detoured to saunter over to Shifty.

“Now!” Clay yelled.

Griff jumped Shifty. Clay whipped the bedsheet garotte around Herman’s neck, yanking him out of the bottom bunk.

The sleeping Marine came out of the rack like a mountain lion caught in a bear trap. Clay caught a fist in the teeth that staggered him, but he didn’t let go of the sheet. Together, they crashed and rolled around the minimal floorspace, Herman kicking, clawing, and biting hell for leather. Clay couldn’t see Griff and Shifty, but he could hear the tree druid screaming like he was being axe murdered.

As Shifty had informed them during the planning stage, and Herman had begrudgingly backed up, there was one thing the Warden absolutely wouldn’t tolerate: fighting amongst the prisoners. You didn’t want your meal tickets shivving each other to death, especially not when you had invested millions of dollars’ worth of potions into each one on their first day. Start a fight and everyone involved would be sent to the hole for thirty days. Upon release, you would be divided up and shuffled to different cells to make sure it didn’t happen again. The rare inmate stupid enough to repeat offend tended to disappear and never be heard from again. Clay wondered how many of those guys ended up in the Soul Overload potion.

Scrambling on the stairs and yelling from outside let him know the ICSO were on their way. As the door buzzed open, he spotted the first guy into the cell—a lamprey swinging a baton crackling with electricity.

Clay braced himself just in time to take a knee to the gut from Herman and a baton to the back of the neck from the lamprey. The unexpected benefit of being knocked unconscious was that he didn’t have time to feel the pain from the knee.

When he came to, the lamprey and a crablike ICSO were dragging Clay between them toward the Warden’s tower.

“El?” Griff’s gravelly old voice said.

Clay twisted, craning his neck over his shoulder. The old weed’s good eye was locked on a cell high in the innermost ring of the prison.

A willowy girl of maybe nineteen or twenty with slate-gray skin, lavender hair, and matching eyes ran to the glass wall. She pressed her hands to the glass. Based on what Clay knew about Griff, he’d been expecting the Old Weed’s daughter to be more or less a chip off the ol’ block, a wild west Texas tornado sort of kid.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Her vibrant hair was pulled into a pair of low pigtails, and although she had on the same prison greens that everyone was saddled with, she’d used her time in the clink to transform the baggy jumpsuit into a pleated skirt that sat just above her knees and a cropped jacket with rolled sleeves. A white sleeveless T, tucked into the skirt, and a pair of heavy boots completed the ensemble. To Clay, she looked less like a southern belle and more like a hardnosed K-Pop fan doing a stint for assault and battery after someone popped off at the mouth about her favorite boy band.

“Dad?”

“Ella!” Griff dug his boots in and tried to break away from the starfish and sea sponge guards holding him.

Disbelief and love and dismay all crossed the girl’s face at the same time. She punched the wall hopelessly. “Dad, what in the hell are you doing in here?”

“Everything’s okay, kiddo,” Griff yelled.

The pink star kicked the stubborn old man in the back of the knee, buckling his legs, and dragged him after the rest of the B-29 cellmates bound for Solitary.

Clay had just enough time to catch Ella’s quivering bottom lip before her face and the world outside the tower disappeared behind thick white walls.

Unlike his first visit to the tower, this time they went right, in the opposite direction of the lab, and down a spiraling set of stairs. Rather than the blinding white of the rest of the tower, the basement was a bare concrete room, no doors leading off anywhere else. Eight grates had been set into the floor, each one with the red/green light combo from the cells above.

“Open Solitary One through Four,” the lamprey yelled.

“Geez, Frank, I’m right here,” said the anemone-human hybrid posted next to the controls. Like, literally stuck to the wall next to the controls. “Use your inside voice,” it muttered, reaching a human hand out of the central oral disc wriggling with tentacles and using it to toggle the appropriate switches.

Green lights across the floor switched on. The anemone hit another set of buttons and the grates on the first four cells swung open.

The lamprey and crab man dropped Clay into the grate closest to the door.

“Oh yeah, take the easiest one so the other guys have to fight their inmates all the way to the end of the room,” the anemone muttered.

“Cram it, Jeremy,” the lamprey snapped as Clay’s grate buzzed shut overhead. “We’re all sick of your passive-aggressive crap. Keep it up, and we’ll report you to the Warden for creating a hostile work environment.”

Clay stood up and dusted himself off. The solitary cell was like a coffin or a laundry chute—hardly enough room to sit down in, but with all the headroom you could ask for. He stood up and stretched, barely able to brush the grate with his fingertips.

He couldn’t see the door from his angle, but he saw glimpses as Griff and the other two were dragged in past his cell and dropped into their holes. One by one, the passive-aggressive anemone buzzed their cells shut.

The guards shuffled back out, and the thumping of their boots, tentacles, and other weird appendages tapered off, until it was just them and Jeremy.

Clay leaned back against the cold concrete wall of his cell.

Step one, down.

He slipped Shifty’s carved twig out of his jumpsuit and prayed the rune worked.

Time for step two.