Elkhart County Prison

He would not die in Elkhart County Prison. He swore this to himself as he laid in his cell late at night, staring at the concrete ceiling and its grimy yellow light. He would not live here any longer. He would not let it slowly kill him any longer. He would feel the outside air and breathe it in again. He would see the moon and the stars again. He would escape or he would die trying. All of this he promised as the weight of exhaustion slowly lulled him into restless, aching sleep.

That night, as he slept, he dreamt of solid white paper. It unfolded around him in all possible directions, along the floor, up the walls, across the ceiling, into an all-encompassing blank canvas. He couldn’t tell where the edges met, seemingly stacked together in infinite sheets, neither ending or beginning in any point in space. Black lines began to trace themselves along the void of paper, drawing out boxes and lines. He watched them converge to form a map of the prison, the hundreds of cells circling around the central pillar in a stout cylinder, all of it attached to a vestibule which separated the prisoners from the rest of the world. The lines drew themselves around him, forming the shape of his cell, the bunks inside, his own sleeping form laying on top.

He woke with a start in the middle of the night, suddenly seized by a headache that seemed to sear through every crevice in his brain. As he clenched his eyes shut, he could still view the map of the prison in his mind’s eye, drawn in black ink on white paper in three dimensions. Little blots moved along the hallways and cells like ants on concrete, each step creating a throb of pain in his head. He writhed in pain, groaning as the assault of information cut through his psyche. In his vision, he watched a blot of ink step its way towards his cell, matching the tell-tale stomp of a particular officer’s steel-toed boots.

“Hey! Shut the hell up!” Officer Hunterdon barked, pounding his fists against the bars.

He supposed that he’d been moaning in agony too loudly and had started to disturb the other prisoners, or more likely just Hunterdon. It wasn’t as if he could change any of that though, he could barely form any words to explain his condition as the officer came into the cell. In his eyes, no crime was too minor to warrant a punishment.

“What’s the matter with you?” he snarled, digits already wrapping around his standard issue collapsible baton, an item he had become deeply familiar with in his time in Elkhart County Prison.

He struggled to respond. Between pained blinks he saw Officer Hunterdon rapidly swap between his silhouette backlit by the yellow ceiling light and simple hatched shapes on a paper background, watching as an angular limb raised the baton high into the air. From a 2-dimensional slice of room the 21” baton took its path straight to his ribs, tracing a perfect compass arc along the paper and landing with a horrible crack. He cried and twisted out of the bed, crumpling in at the feet of the officer, clutching his head.

“Come on, get up.”

He continued to writhe on the ground, groaning unintelligibly. Another assembly of humanoid shapes entered the room next to Officer Hunterdon.

“I think something’s wrong,” it said to him.

“No fucking shit.”

“He needs to get to medical, might be something serious.”

“Jesus Christ. Fine,” he ordered, prodding the other officer’s square chest with the baton. “Then you take him to medical, you fuckin’ saint.”

He kept his eyes tightly shut as he was dragged to the medical bay, wincing as he saw through the walls of the hall into all the other rooms of the prison. He was slowly beginning to get accustomed to the onslaught of detail, but at that moment it still remained unparsable. They set him down in the chair of the examination room, bringing in the in-house resident to assess him. The resident too was rendered in rough polygons in his mind’s eye, his scrubs drawn in rough blocks on top of a spindly and jagged humanoid body.

“Can you open your eyes for me?” the resident asked, scribbling something on a clipboard.

He shook his head. Seeing things like this made his head hurt just a little less than normal, opening them would probably knock him right back on the floor. The resident sighed.

“He’s probably having a migraine. Does he get those often?”

“I dunno,” the guard replied, shrugging square shoulders under a rectangle of a bulletproof vest. “Lots of the inmates get headaches.”

“It’s not a big deal. Just go get him some Excedrin and I’ll go log it in his file. ”

The two of them left the room, another two inkblots joining the trail of ants walking an ink maze. The computer room was down the hallway at the last left, and the drug cabinet was on the opposite side of the medical bay as he was on. The computer terminals had been installed over two decades prior, and were considered “out of date” about a decade into service. Inside the lock of the drug cabinet, he saw that the 6th security pin had gotten jammed, and the key would not open the lock without tremendous force to knock it loose. He figured that between the ancient computer terminals and the busted cabinet lock, he had about 15 unsupervised minutes.

Above him, an empty attic space stretched atop the entire medical bay, with wires, pipes and ducts snaking through the space. The ceiling was the kind that could be pushed up to reveal the hidden guts of the building, creating a route for him to escape the room. Oversight after oversight, if there were this many here, how many are there elsewhere?

He scrambled to the exam room counter, carefully pushing himself on top of it and reaching up to the ceiling. He balanced his shoe on top of the exam chair, hoisting himself into a precarious stance as he pushed up the ceiling tile and gripped the sides. He blindly pulled himself up into the cramped attic plenum. His lithe frame slipped easily into the space, and he slid the ceiling panel back into place, as if nothing had happened.

The realization dawned on him as he saw himself laying in the space above the exam room. He’d already taken his first step to the possibility of freedom, that first irreversible step. His polygonal heart pounded in his chest. He realized he didn’t have much time now, sooner or later they would notice that he was not where he was supposed to be. The thought made him giddy.

He crawled through the plenum, following the ducts and wires, the flow of air and electricity traveling through Elkhart County Prison like bundles of nerves to the brain, a room labeled “Master Control” on the map in his mind. Inside, dozens of CCTV monitors formed a wall, providing access to every angle of every room in the prison, with one man sitting in front to watch over it all.

Slipping into a vent, he slowly descended down through each floor, watching the rest of the prison through the lines in his brain. Everybody still awake milled about in strict regiment, not a single space unmonitored on the prison side. Conversely, the other side of the vestibule didn’t have a soul in sight. He strained to see beyond the walls of the prison, but the ink ended there, and absolutely nothing lay beyond it. He tried to imagine what had been outside the prison the day he was incarcerated, but only it only elicited a murky memory of dead trees and endless asphalt roads.

The vents twisted and weaved through the walls of the building, splitting and rejoining haphazardly. The path he traced through them led to an electrical closet. He punched his shoes through the grate and emerged into a concrete room filled with breaker panels and wires, standing up and catching his breath in the cool, damp air. The room itself was pitch dark, but every corner of it was still perfectly visible in his mind. Three rooms now stood between him and freedom. Master Control, the security hallway, and the lobby. However, the final hurdle was the single guard remaining in the Master Control room on the other side of the door in front of him.

He wrestled with his decisions, changing into a spare maintenance jumpsuit and cramming his prison jumpsuit into the vent. Master Control could call dozens of other officers to cuff and beat him the second he’s noticed, which as a missing prisoner he would be, and it would all be for nothing.

For years as he sat in his cell, he was blind to the structure of the prison. It blinded him from the outside, from the path of the guards and inmates. But Master Control saw it all, every single day. To have the upper hand, he just needed a way to blind him all the same. His hands felt for the breaker panel at his side, flipping the door open. The wires leading to each switch burned their paths through the paper walls, his trembling hand braced against each and every switch. Now or never. Now or never. Now.

He slammed the switches to “OFF” and kept his eyes shut tight, flinging the closet door open, following the map of his mind to the security hallway. He slunk out amidst the confusion of the Master Control guard, and crossed the security hallway into the lobby.

He opened his eyes. The lobby of Elkhart County Prison was dim and completely empty. The tile floors and fake plants were weakly illuminated by orange streetlamps outside through massive, crystal clear windows. It could only have been more beautiful to him if he was on the other side of the entrance doors. He was almost there, he just had one more room. He took two steps before hearing the sound of doors slamming open and police officers shouting.

“Don’t move! Hands in the air!” they ordered.

He clamped his eyes shut to see the officers on the balcony above, pistols aimed at him. Tears began to bead in the corners of his eyes. He would not die in Elkhart County Prison, but he was willing to settle for dying on its front steps.

He broke into a sprint, eyes still shut tight, hearing each round fire from the officer’s pistols, numbered off in his brain with each report. A dotted line extended out from each bullet, following a path from the barrel to their impact point. He pulled every ounce of his strength together to make it to the one point in the room where each bullet would narrowly miss, feeling a round bite the cloth of his jumpsuit before he burst through the glass doors and felt the cold, dry night air against his skin for the first time in over a decade.

The map of the prison disappeared from his mind, along with his headache, as he crossed the barrier. The black ink against the white void of paper faded out, each of the police officers in hot pursuit behind him turning to phantom dots in his vision as he opened his eyes to the dimly lit parking lot of the prison. He was on his own from now on. Pulling his legs into a sprint, he fled into the nearby business park that had grown around the prison in the past 10 years.

Long, winding corridors of newly paved streets and dark, empty buildings flew past him as he outran the officers behind him, sticking to the shadows as the constellations of orange streetlamps guided him along. His heart pounded in his chest, only able to know how close the end of his freedom was by how loud the shouting sounded. He was swiftly running out of energy, and knew he could only run for so long. Above him, he heard the approach of a helicopter. There was now no choice but to hide.

Off in the side lot of a printing business, a cargo van sat in a dark corner of the concrete, blending into its surroundings as well as a tree in a forest. He scrambled to it, cramming his body under the vehicle and laying as still and flat as he could. The chopping sound of the helicopter grew louder and louder, and he watched as a spotlight traced its way across the parking lot, lighting it up as bright as if it were day. Just outside of the car, he could see sprouts of weeds peeking up from the concrete, bright green as they were illuminated by the searchlight. A cricket on the ground stopped chirping, confused as to why the sun was out again so soon. The light left as soon as it came, and the chop of the helicopter blades faded into the night, replaced by the noise of the cricket again.

He waited until it was all he could hear. No helicopters, no sirens, no baying dogs or shouting officers. Just the silent cover of night around him. Finally, truly, free at last. He crawled out from under the van, took in a deep, long breath of the fresh night air, and looked up at the moon for the first time in 12 years.