The Slammer
The Slammer is what passes for justice on the Rum Coast: a pre-fall storage warehouse converted into a prison where each inmate occupies half a shipping container stacked five rows high. The most dangerous prisoners get the top row, where a hundred-foot drop to the concrete below serves as the only escape deterrent the facility needs. The Hunter boys monitor the upper levels with sniper rifles, and if a prisoner so much as sticks an arm through the gap in their container, the shot comes before the warning.
Martin Hunter runs the operation with twenty-seven members of his immediate family. The Hunters were not always the wardens. Martin, his father, and his uncle were originally inmates, confined during an earlier administration. When a massive riot and undead incursion overwhelmed the guards, the three of them fought their way free. Martin's father died in the escape. Martin killed the guards, freed his family, then turned the guns on the remaining prisoners and claimed the facility for his own. The Hunter family has run the Slammer for twenty years since, with every male joining the guard force at seventeen and working month-long rotations before returning to the family farmstead nearby.
Local town mayors rent cells for their criminals, presenting a sentence in the Slammer as an act of mercy when in reality it is closer to a death sentence. There is no recreational time, no medical care, and no intervention when prisoners fight. If one inmate enters another's container, the guards watch until one is dead or unconscious. Once a month, bare-knuckle bouts give inmates a chance to win their freedom. The winners walk out the front door. The Hunters claim they "escaped," maintaining the illusion that no one ever leaves the Slammer alive, a fiction that keeps the facility's reputation as a deterrent intact and the betting profits flowing.
Martin Hunter runs the operation with twenty-seven members of his immediate family. The Hunters were not always the wardens. Martin, his father, and his uncle were originally inmates, confined during an earlier administration. When a massive riot and undead incursion overwhelmed the guards, the three of them fought their way free. Martin's father died in the escape. Martin killed the guards, freed his family, then turned the guns on the remaining prisoners and claimed the facility for his own. The Hunter family has run the Slammer for twenty years since, with every male joining the guard force at seventeen and working month-long rotations before returning to the family farmstead nearby.
Local town mayors rent cells for their criminals, presenting a sentence in the Slammer as an act of mercy when in reality it is closer to a death sentence. There is no recreational time, no medical care, and no intervention when prisoners fight. If one inmate enters another's container, the guards watch until one is dead or unconscious. Once a month, bare-knuckle bouts give inmates a chance to win their freedom. The winners walk out the front door. The Hunters claim they "escaped," maintaining the illusion that no one ever leaves the Slammer alive, a fiction that keeps the facility's reputation as a deterrent intact and the betting profits flowing.
