The Grid's Collapse

THE GRID’S COLLAPSE COLTON LIVELY CONTENTS Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Epilogue About the Author 1 Beth Alton woke with a start, the room around her spinning as beads of sweat rolled down her forehead. It was unbearably warm outside, making the prison cell a hotbox nearly impossible to rest in. Despite being startled awake, she didn’t move. After nearly four years at the correctional facility, Beth had learned how to act. Any movement on her part would make the rickety and rusted old bunk bed creak beneath her weight. Her bunkmate, a woman not to be trifled with, rather enjoyed her nights of uninterrupted slumber. With a soft sigh, Beth looked up at the ceiling of her cage and tried to doze back off. Only two more months. Fifty-nine days, and she would be leaving the terrible institution forever. The reason she was there, the truth of the matter, no longer concerned her. She had long ago resigned herself to serve her time and put it behind her. After all, Beth knew she had received a light sentencing despite being charged as an adult. She would take the truth of that night to her grave. It didn’t matter what the government and its branches thought, there were only two people alive who had been present, and neither of them was talking. As she often did when she couldn’t sleep, Beth let her mind wander to what she would do when she was free again. In the grand scheme of things, four years wasn’t that long, but everything had changed since then. She’d been institutionalized at eighteen, tossed into a harsh world she didn’t know how to navigate. Now, after forty-six months on the inside, Beth was a different person. She wanted to believe parts of who she was still existed, but she knew when she stepped through the gates at the end of August, it no one would be waiting on the other side. Even her sister, Danielle, didn’t know her release date. The sentence had been for six years, but not once had Beth told Danielle about her parole hearings or their outcome. She’d created a wonderful little life for herself. At twenty years old, Danielle had recently graduated from a two-year college. Her degree in animal husbandry was a perfect fit for the country girl. Someday, Beth knew Danielle would take over the small homestead that had been in their family for centuries. Situated fifty miles from the prison, Beth prayed her father and sister were holding up through the summer harvest season. Suddenly, as had so many times before, the alarms rang out. Another drill for the inmates. It was starting to become routine since the last fight had broken out more than a month before. It really only came down to the guards trying to get their control back over the women locked in each of the cells. They tried to make their lives more of a living hell than they already were. At times, Beth almost thought she would lose her mind. When they’d go through drill after drill and treat them all as if they weren’t even human. Even if she knew what would happen next, the guards would change it up. She never thought of the system being as screwed up as it was until she had been locked up herself. Now, her entire thoughts had changed on the matter. There was no rehabilitation in prison. It all came down to how much money they could make off of each of them and trying to destroy anything left of their minds. Angie, her butch cellmate who made her life miserable, was starting to wake up. Just as she was trying to calm down from the night, she now had to deal with the guards and her overbearing roommate. They lined up at the door as Angie continued to grumble under her breath. Beth knew they would have to wait for the door to open before stepping out for an emergency count. As the door opened and the two women stepped out, Angie bumped her shoulder. “Hey, bitch. You better watch your back.” “What are they saying now?” Beth asked. “I heard the warden was looking for you. If I heard about it, then everyone else has, too.” Beth swallowed the growing lump in her throat. She’d done her best throughout her incarceration not to take sides or get on anyone’s nerves. Angie, though, was a harsh woman with a life sentence looming over her head. She had no reason to play nice or be helpful. She enjoyed picking off the weaker women who found their way into Angie’s block of the compound. It was thanks to Danielle and her father that Beth had managed to survive without much suffering. They had made sure that her commissary account had enough money not only to keep her comfy but to keep her safe. Given their location in the heart of Oklahoma’s tornado alley, the sirens and subsequent drills were nothing new. Only once in the institution’s history had a tornado passed through the compound, but in the twenty years since its occurrence, they worked to ensure the same fiasco would never happen again. To hear the older, lifetime convicts talk about it, the day had been a wild one. Ripping through the compound, the storm had killed five inmates and one guard while another twenty-three escaped. Of those, all but two were recaptured soon after. The two