She was sleeping soundly when the prison loudspeakers emitted a loud squawk, followed by the morning wake up call. She wanted another hour or two of sleep, but they wouldn’t allow that. Everyone had to be up and out five minutes after the call for the morning count. Then everyone filed into the dining hall for breakfast – at least that’s what they called it. You had two choices; reconstituted powdered eggs or runny grits, plus dry toast and weak coffee. No fruit, no “How would you like you eggs today, ma’am?” You could skip the five a.m. breakfast, but the next meal wouldn’t be served until two p.m., and that was a long time to be hungry.
If you had money in your account you could buy snacks at the commissary, but since you were only allowed to have $25 per month added to your account by someone on the outside, it didn’t go very far if you wasted it on food. Most of the inmates spent it on cigarettes and toiletries to replace the cheap stuff they gave you once a month. Anyone who used the prison soap they issued for more than a few days looked sunburned all over.
But this wouldn’t last much longer. She had come up with a plan to escape. It was risky, and could get them killed, but even that would be better than 19 more years in this hole. Here, it was all about your friends – who you could surround yourself with to keep the pack of animals away. But in this case, the friends came to her for protection, and returned the favor in one way or another. “Z” – that was the name everyone knew to call her by – was highly skilled in hand-to-hand fighting. It was rumored that she knew sixteen ways to kill someone with her bare hands. She had already put three women in the hospital; they should have known better than to challenge her. The authorities didn’t know who beat them up because the victims weren’t about to talk. Even offers of protection or transfer away from this facility were rejected. The power of Z and her minions was widespread and could reach out to anyone who crossed them.
But Z bided her time, collecting others with just the right skills into her inner circle. These were the ones who would play a role in her escape plan. She didn’t have everything in place yet, but soon . . . she would get out of here and no one would be able find her. She had to get out of here. There were people who needed payback, people who got her sent here in the first place . . . and who killed the love of her life. She owed them big time for that.
She hated it here. Why wasn’t she in a soft prison, like the one Martha Stewart served time in. . . . Maybe because Martha hadn’t killed four people. They all deserved it of course. They had wives and families that they betrayed with affairs – that’s too nice a word for it. They were simply satisfying their lust without any thought about who they were hurting. Just like her father did. That’s why Z lured them into her bed, then killed them. The police called her the Praying Mantis Killer, PMK. A female praying mantis bites the head off the male when the coupling is over.