This is chapter 8 of The Penal Preserve, you may want to go back to Chapter 7 or start at the beginning.

8

That night, in the prisoner barracks, Rae overheard a group of prisoners plotting escape. Franklin and his guards had believed they were alone on the island, and saw the shores as the true walls of their prison. As a result, security was not terribly strong. With the knowledge that there were people other than the Penists on the island, came the realization that these people likely had a way off the island. Escape from the colony was possible—it was only a matter of finding these other residents of the island.

As I have already said, Rae had become quite devoted to the anti-Alien cause. By so closely associating his own sobriety with the Penists’ mission to abstain from Alien products and technology, he made the matter intensely personal. As Rae lay in his bunk, listening to whispered escape plans, all the righteous anger he felt at his own past impotence in the face of addiction settled on these three prisoners who wanted off the island. Rae resolved to join them.

At first, they were reluctant to include him, but they relented when he informed them that he had an ax—everyone knows the utility of such a thing.

Escaping the stockade proved as easy as they expected, finding the Vacationers was much more difficult. The four prisoners set out into the interior of the island, wading through brush and crawling up slopes. The bush was unpropitious. Dense scrub and savage forest impeded their path: they were lost in gullies, entangled in thickets, bewildered in morasses. They tried to use the moonlit sea as their guide, but quickly lost track of which side it was supposed to be on.¹

And then they came upon a lonely cabin in the woods. All four prisoners crouched in the brush, but there was no sign of life in the cabin, and all was quiet. One of them, a man known as Moocher, approached the cabin and tried the door. It was unlocked. He pushed it open and disappeared inside. The others waited, expecting the startled yells of discovery, but all stayed quiet. Moocher returned to the doorway and beckoned them.

The owners of the cabin were not at home, and the prisoners quickly ransacked the place for food and other things. A man named Vetch held up one of the Alien lava lamps, marveling. Rae decided he would wait no longer. He slayed Vetch with one switch blow from his ax. The man fell to the ground, twitching, and the lava lamp shattered on the floor. Startled by the noise, Moocher came into the room from a different part of the house, and Rae struck him, too, with the ax.

The third prisoner, called Sanders, came upon Rae before he was able to pull the ax out of Moocher’s head where it had stuck. Sanders screamed and bolted out of the cabin. Rae had no choice but to abandon his ax and give chase. He caught Sanders in the small dirt yard before the cabin, diving off the porch and knocking him to the ground. Sanders kicked and struggled, but Rae pulled himself grimly up the man’s body like a ladder and slowly strangled him.

Rae could not bring himself to look at the bodies, or even go back inside the cabin. He stumbled away, down a slope, horribly aware that the bodies of the three men he had killed were there behind him. Rae kept moving, not paying attention to where he was going, but simply trying to get away. Eventually he curled up in the hollow of some tree’s roots, and slept. He spent the next two days wandering through the woods with nothing to eat, trying to find his way back to the penal colony.

Eventually, as he was following a creek down a hill, he came upon a clearing where yellow-clad figures were laboring with the roots of some ancient tree. Rae shouted and screamed, and waved his tattered garments in the air.² It is doubtful that the Penists would have recognized him if it weren’t for the yellow hue of the jumpsuit he was wearing. When they finally realized that he was one of the escaped prisoners, the guards put him in chains and brought him to Franklin.

Chapter 9 tomorrow, same time, same place.

The bush was unpropitious. Dense scrub and savage jungle impeded his path; barren and stony mountain ranges arose before him. He was lost in gullies, entangled in thickets, bewildered in morasses. The sea that had hitherto gleamed, salt, glittering, and hungry upon his right hand, now shifted to his left. HE had mistaken his course, and he must turn again. For two days did this bewilderment last, and on the third he came to a mighty cliff that pierced with its blunt pinnacle the clustering bush. Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life 1874 ↩
He shouted, screamed, and waved his tattered garments in the air. Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life 1874 ↩

8

Footnotes