AncilChapter 35: Escapism
She caught on. I felt her arms wrap around me and drag down my back slowly going lower and lower. She was pretty convincing. It felt like given another second she would have cupped my butt and squeeze it. She didn’t. She fingered my right pocket till she grasped the knife. I felt her hand tighten in my pocket and the other hand that was on my back tightened as well. I felt her nails digging into my back. She seemed to be trying to gather some strength. Suddenly, she pushed me away then ran in the direction of the blue devils. I heard the sounds of crushing bones and two short painful yelps. I wasn’t able to turn around in time to see what had happened. When I did I saw the two blue devils motionless on the floor. Sara was digging up in the pockets of their short pants for anything she could find. She took out a card and a key which she threw at me as if she expected me to actually catch it with my hands cuffed. She then walked away as the key fell to the floor in front of me.
“Come on. You know I can’t open these myself,” I said.
I didn’t hear her respond but I heard talking. It sounded like chatter of a group of people.
I scampered out cell 334. Staring in the direction where Sara took off, I saw Sara along with four other people standing in front of a couple opened jail cells. Three out of five of the people were male and only one was female. The three males were big and muscle packed. One of them had so much hair on his face and head that all you could have seen of him was part of his forehead and eyes. The other two had much less hair but their beards and mustaches were still much more than I could ever have. The woman on the other hand had no hair on her face, as expected. She was slimmer than the rest but I couldn’t tell how strong she was under the big yellow jumpsuit though. Unlike the three men, her muscles weren’t bulging but I had a feeling that her body had a lot of mileage and that she could have beaten me to a pulp in a heartbeat. Her black skin looked hard and rugged like stones, almost bulletproof..
I walked over to them and just awkwardly stood beside hoping that Sara would have had the common decency to introduce me to her friends. Luckily, she did.
“Jed, these are my old friends. Johnny, Jack, Jordan and Jinx. Johnny, Jack, Jordan and Jinx, this is Jinx. I mean Jed,” she said, getting a bit tongue tied at the end. I couldn’t blame her, there were a lot of J’s.
I shook everyone’s hand. I shook the female’s hand last and while shaking it I said, “Jinx huh.”
“You have a problem with my name?” Jinx asked.
“No, no. It’s a wonderful name. It’s just Jinx is usually associated with bad luck.”
She fixed her face liked seemingly disrespected by the comment. “So you saying I’s bad luck?”
“No, no. I never said that. I just meant….”
“Shut up Jed,” Sara interjected.
I felt insulted but Sara was right. I needed to shut up.
“You planning on coming out anytime today Ronald?” Sara asked, looking into a jail cell.
“Ronald?” I asked softly before looking into the jail cell she was looking into. On the floor, a bareback male was doing pushups among ripped pieces of his yellow jumpsuit. It was a tough material and ripping it would have been extremely difficult. Ronald, or whatever his name was must have been really strong. His back was carved out like a pumpkin on Halloween and with every rep you could see his muscles moving. The way Sara looked at him made my face green with envy. She never looked at me like that.
“Four ninety eight, four ninety nine, five hundred,” Ronald groaned, finishing his reps. He grabbed a bottle of water that was on the floor of his cell and gulped the whole thing down.
“Water is not enough to replenish your body after five hundred pushups,” I said to Ronald who was clearly much taller and bigger than me.
“Who’s this guy?” Ronald asked Sara, his frowny eyes fixed on mine.
“My friend Jed.” Sara started. “He saved my life.”
“I saved your life too,” I said to Ronald looking up at him. He towered almost a feet above me.
“You couldn’t even save a drowning fish. Look at you,” Ronald said.
“Do you even lift?” I teased.
Without hesitation Ronald pushed me to the floor. “I could lift 100 times your body weight. Just remember that.”
“Dead people does push harder than you,” I teased again.
