Prologue

The sunlight crept through the bars above her, illuminating the far side of her cell. The reinforced door reflected no light, leaving her in the same darkness she had felt for so many years. The room was so familiar now, nine feet by nine feet on all sides with the only escape route being the hatch above her; she had given up trying to reach it a long time ago.

Clutching her knees to her chest, she sighed, looking up at the walls in the dim illumination of the morning. The scratches she had originally started making to mark her time had tapered off a long time ago. What had been the point anyway?

They announced the date every morning over the loud speaker. She assumed that's what you were supposed to hear in prison...every day...every agonizing, unforgiving perpetual day. She cracked the smallest smile; pointless and dumb yes, but then again, she'd never been the smartest of her siblings in retrospect, and she wasn't certainly going to change now. Her small laugh permeated the cell.

She wondered what they were all up to, her family. Lori and Bobby probably got married a long time ago at this point. Lisa was probably creating some crazy experiment in her spare time like she always did, nearly leveling the house in explosive intensity. She could imagine Lana probably dragging home a wolverine and begging to keep it, And Lincoln, he must be playi...…

"...oh...right," she weakly huffed out. The smile dissipated as she remembered.

Lincoln was gone.

In place of her scraped calendar of misery she had begun scraping a memorial instead, but what that memorial was to wasn't clear in her mind. A memorial to him perhaps? To what she had lost? To the visage of that young man? This boy? Before it had shattered? She didn't know, she didn't want to know really…maybe she thought...maybe...she should just finish herself, break a shard out of her metal framed bed and jam it into her throat. Join the people she'd lost and be done with all this bullshit. "I've dealt with this for so long...why? I...I want to fuckin die...I really do...but I can't kill myself...WHY CAN'T I FUCKING KILL MYSELF," she roared at herself internally as she grabbed her temple with a twisted, sad smile.

"Weeeeelllllll good morning prisoners," the overly cheery sound of the warden's voice said as it nauseatingly permeated the dusty, dead and parched acoustics of this god-forsaken prison.

"Ah do hope y'all're doin' well, rehabilitating yourselves so tha' you may one day face the world with open arms once more as productive members of our fine society" She groaned as she put her face in her palms.

"Jesus fucking christ...does this CUNT ever quit?" the tormented young woman complained with her warped, twisted smile still planted on her face.

"Today's date is the third of March, in the two thousand and twentieth year of our good lord Jesus Christ."

She froze, feeling whatever vestige of a soul or anything comparable to life evaporate into godless dust.

"That date…has it really been th-three years? Three years to the day since he…" she stuttered, now feeling her soul crush to nothing morally salvageable. Tears filled her eyes as she swallowed that horrific but blunt fact of reality, as cruel as it was.

"I…have to get out of here" she assured herself, "...I...I have to get out…I have to...NO...NO! I NEED TO GET OUT! I WANT REVENGE... for Lincoln...to find my family... and to kill the sick son of a bitch that put me here...that mutherfucker...I PROMISE, BEFORE I DIE, YOU'RE GONNA GO DOWN WITH ME! I'M GOING TO TEAR YOU APART LIMB FROM LIMB WHILE WE BOTH DESCENT TO HELL! I WILL SHRED YOUR FUCKING CORRUPT SHITTY SOUL TO PIECES AND WATCH THE LIFE LEAVE YOUR EYES BEFORE I FEED YOU TO THE DOGS!"

She sighed like her gloomy sister in exact detail; their time together now seemed so much more precious, even if they had such polar opposite personalities and interests, her gloomy younger sister into the gothic and macabre, herself always into sports.

"...sigh...every time...it's the one thing I feel that makes me think my family is still with me...that...and the little things about them I miss...so...so much...Lucy...Lincoln," she tapered off as she felt her eyes watering up.

She wiped them off before tears could descend downwards, and swallowed that bubbling lamentful lump that trying to force its way out.

"Not today...not now...I wanna ruminate...just think...think...and see...ruminate..."

As she allowed her mind to gravitate towards this crude form of meditation, she glared up at the grate above her.

"Those fuckers; they never bothered to lock it, do they…why bother anyways when I'm nine feet below it?"

She looked up at the grates, momentarily grinning. Then on a rather familiar impulse, probably the millionth time she tried from a number of failed attempts, suddenly y ran to the wall and began trying to push herself off in a run, up along the wall to make a jump for the grate.

And like the many desperate times before, succeeded to only to fall crashing down to the ground on her side. She yelped in momentary pain as her body collided with the hard, cold, gritty ground below her.

"Second time is the charm" she told herself, instead trying to climb up using her bed as a ramp. She made her way to prep her jump as best as she could physically do at the grate opening again.

"Come on... come on...it's around mealtime…yes! This is the moment ...freedom...FREEDOME!" she yelled as she reached out her left arm to grab it.

She jumped.

"I got…OH FUCK!"

She was falling…she forgot; her arm was still missing like it had been for three years.

"GOD FUCKING DAMN IT! HOW STUPID COULD I BE!?"

She was falling, just like all those years ago, the memory played faintly in her brain…that horrid shock of realising her arm was gone, the desperation of attempting to hold him with her remaining arm in a feeble and doomed attempt to save him, and the animalistic raw pain in her throat from screaming.

As she collided with the ground, the air escaped her lungs in the form of an anguished scream, her ribs colliding with the ground. As she laid there barely conscious, the sounds of the guards above her indicated that a ladder was being lowered into her cell. For some reason, those creaking sounds...they made her recall the day she lost everything.

All of it.

All in one forsaken, soul-destroying motion…in this moment she wanted to die, but that feeling; that feeling of powerlessness, of incalculable moral annihilation...she had to hold it back. She needed to get out, she needed to see them again, and she needed to kill the bastard that put her here.

"Prisoner#327? PRISONER#327?" The guard asked frantically his fingers pressing against her neck checking for a pulse. She didn't stir, what could she do anyway? She had these grandiose dreams of vengeance, but what could she do? Her old life was a faded memory, those dreams of seeing her family again, of avenging her brother began to sink back into the clouded miasma of her mind

"Lynn! Ms. Loud can you hear me? Lynn!"

Lynn, the word brought her back slightly…there was something she hadn't heard in a long time…the name stirred memories, good and bad alike. Like adding kindling to a dying fire, her resolve began to reawaken.

Lynn, that was her name…

As the guard laid her on the Prison Nurse's table he failed to notice her expression change to a faint smile slowly form on her weak frame, her life…her past…the people she loved, she was Lynn Marie Loud and she would see her family again or she would die trying.