by Jake Packard
The General positioned himself near the front door of the prison’s administrative wing, just outside the frame of anything Branford’s camera would be shooting. He handpicked Branford Hays for this gig because he knew from past experience the cameraman would follow his orders no matter what happened. Unlike other members of the press when confronted with sudden first hand violence, they thought it became their duty to disrupt his work with some sudden impulse to search for the truth. Branford understood the running of government better than that. Branford understood cash.
Pellet had the best spot to see everything and still be out of the way. He had the latest communication tools in place, and from this direct vantage point he could call all the shots. The Mayor argued against it as too risky, but it fit his style. His troops respected him for being in the front line of any action, and for risking his life in the same way he often asked them to. It’s where his leadership started and the loyalty to him never ended.
His almost-invisible mobile phone buzzed. He patted his ear to answer it, and looked at his watch, 7:55 a.m. Five minutes to go.
Approximately fifty yards away, on the west side of the parking lot leading up to the front steps of the prison, Herbie stepped down off a ladder carrying a heavy conical device he had retrieved out of the roof rack on the Hummer. He smiled as he passed Branford sitting in the open side door of the SUV, cleaning the lens to his camera.
Branford scowled at Herbie, unable to resist any opportunity to deliver his distinctive brand of condescension. “What is taking you so long with that link-up? The whole world can’t wait for your pokey white ass today. Damn, it’s not even eight in the morning and this amigo has already got the shakes. I bet he don’t use those anti-hangover pills because he don’t want them to show up in his bio-read. Don’t make a difference, you can smell the alcohol metabolizing out his skin from across the street. And there he just goes, grinning like an idiot and bumbling through another day in paradise.”
Herbie just gave him another smile as he set the transmitter on the camera tripod and connected the antenna. He adjusted the controls manually as he had hundreds of times before, bypassing the auto locate, which took too long. In a business of deadlines, you took any advantage you could get. But Herbie didn’t really care about all that. To him it provided a distraction, a daily amusement, to find which satellite in the sky the Alliance left hot this day to carry the broadcast. He played this game not with technological toys like everyone else, but with his intuition, his sixth sense. The Alliance knew there would always be hackers who would try to piggyback onto a broadcast signal sent to the satellites, trying to angle some defiant message through Herbie’s connection and then onto the Alternet. Indeed, a suicidal game for them, because once they latched on to a signal they would always be found, and the squirrel killers in the python brigade would easily dispatch them off into the great ham radio heaven in the sky. So by not giving any techie geek extra time to hack in, Herbie felt he actually saved innocent and important lives. He had great fun patching in to the satellite as close to the broadcast time as he possibly could.
“Are we online?” Jerry asked.
“Not yet,” Herbie replied.
“What are we waiting for?”
Before Herbie could answer, Branford pushed Jerry aside and plugged the output of his camera into one of the transmitter’s ports. “This better be good, asswipe,” he said to Herbie, “because we are going everywhere on the planet today that can still get TV.”
“I don’t build the freakin’ network, big guy,” Herbie retorted, “I just aim your stuff at it.”
“Oh, listen to this. The boy talks. What’s up Herb, really, did they triple your dose of Prozac today?”
“Knock it off, both of you. We only got a couple of minutes.” Jerry looked at the time on his phone. “Give Herbie the remote and plug it in.”
“Don’t drop it, dickless.” Branford handed him the wireless headbandcam. Herbie put it around his head, while Branford plugged its receiver into the transmitter. He gazed around the outskirts of the crowd, peering into the distance, looking for crews stupid enough to get too close to the brown zone. Pellet established the perimeter of the brown zone far away from the action, and even though Branford knew those crews were out there, they couldn’t see anything even with ultra-digital zoom. For their sake he hoped they knew how easily they would end up as part of today’s body count if they disobeyed the general’s commands.
Although a big man, Jerry glided over to Maria sitting at the rear of the Hummer by her make-up vanity attached to the inside of one of the back doors. He examined the screen on his biopod.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.” Maria said without turning her head from her mirror.
“I’m not worried.” He lied. “I just know how important this is to you.”
“Thanks, Jerry, and I really mean it. Sometimes I don’t know how I could keep doing this without you and your support.”
“Me? You don’t need me. You’re the star. I’m the company man.”
“You’re my friend, and that’s not an easy thing to find these days.”
Jerry just smiled, comforted by the thought that she was right on both counts. “Your bio-read shows normal pulse and blood pressure. You are always a perfect specimen.
“Oh, please, stop this cozy-ass bullshit. You two are going to make me throw up all over myself.” Branford said, camera cocked on his shoulder like he was headed into hand-to-hand combat. He pointed to a spot on a rise a few yards away where Herbie stood holding the mic and a reflector. “I have just one minute and forty-seven seconds left before transmission. Forty-six now. So get your pretty package in front of this rig. I hope you got that opening down to less than three minutes. Because that’s when your young messiah is due to walk through the jailhouse doors that I will make sure are framed perfectly over your shoulder, so everyone at home can still see that snappy, fresh multiracial commodity that surrounds your nose, which remember is still behind our microphone with the ABCNN logo. At that point, my cherished, I zoom off your internationally coveted countenance, and the eyes of the world are completely upon him. God.”
Herbie watched Maria flash Branford her angry ceramic eyes, like hot tile kilned in Castilian fire. But she refrained from losing her focus and instead gave Branford a look that said why-do-you-always-have-to-be-such-an-asshole. Branford just shrugged his shoulders and shuffled off to his tripod.
Jerry strode over to Herbie. “Time is now.”
Herbie’s fluid hands glided like a concert pianist over the multi-buttoned black box, while lining up the vertex to an invisible object in the sky with only his naked eye and native intuitions. Confident, he punched the power button. The transmitter obeyed and within a few seconds, three little beeps indicated the connection was made.
Jerry, not smiling through this not-by-the-book procedure of Herbie’s, appeared relieved when he heard the success signal. “How do you always know how to find that thing?” his eyes went back and forth trying to discern the invisible thread of particles and waves flowing from the little black box to the unobservable satellite orbiting hundreds of miles away in the sky.
Herbie couldn’t answer. For some reason the connection seemed to drain him in a way it never did before. He felt a queasy déjà vu sensation burning in his gut of something much bigger than himself. Like a teenager driving cross country for the first time into the setting sun, with an uneasy optimism belonging only to youth, like the feeling of anything and everything being possible. However, this now felt so much more intense, because he also noticed something different about Maria.
Working with her for months, he felt he never quite saw this beautiful, strong woman before.
“Ten seconds, people,” Jerry announced with authority.
Maria looked over to Herbie with a slight surprise of recognition in her eyes.
“Locked and ready to go,” Branford announced from behind his viewfinder.
Herbie turned on the headbandcam
, which would provide an independent perspective to the main camera, but his eyes stayed locked with Maria’s.
“Five seconds, everyone,” Jerry said.
Herbie held the metallic reflector at just the right angle to fill the shadow side of Maria’s face with reflected daylight, while scrutinizing her every move, her every nuance, with greater detail than he ever has before.
“Four . . .”
The portentous red sun peeked over the garden-brown urbanscape of the East River, signaling the winter solstice and the unalterable motion of the solar system.
“Three . . .”
A great golden light shot out of the sun, striking the reflector Herbie held. It bounced off and lit up Maria’s face with an extraordinary cosmic glow. As quick as it came it then zapped away. But in that instant Herbie and Maria transcended into a time-suspending wormhole where a direct connection to each other’s essence put them at one with all the sustenance needed to fathom the secrets of the timeless universe. He felt caught in the most powerful of soft places, between the most spontaneous, perfect, and ingenuous moment of primeval being, and Maria. Her eyes looked back into his, and he knew she felt the same.
“Two . . .”
Herbie responded to this extemporaneous, overwhelming karmic connection to Maria with an involuntary, subtle, but definite wink.
And even with the most critical moment of her professional life just a milli-second away, she fully understood that out of the blue she has had the singularly strongest and most significant feeling she has ever shared with anyone in the world. She acknowledged his wink with the faintest smile in return.
“One.”
Their moment is over, but Herbie sensed he’ll never be the same.
Maria then began the broadcast she had been hoping for months would change her world.
If she only knew.
# # #
The Broadcast
“Good morning from New York City. I’m Maria Primera for ABCNN. Today is an extremely special day. Twenty-one years ago, inside this maximum-security ward of Riker’s Island Prison, a baby boy was born in total obscurity. And now, the entire planet’s population is waiting to see him for the very first time. In these dramatic and troubled times, when this world is besieged with so many dire problems for billions of people, you might ask why does the release of one prisoner merit the attention of a news hungry population? Well, on the off chance you have just arrived on Earth, and don’t know the back story of Salem Jones, let me present to you a short but compelling chronology of a man whose entire life has been secluded behind these prison walls. And please remember, almost all of the details in this story are based on supposition. Because no one on the outside has ever directly seen or spoken to Salem Jones.”
Jack stared at the main monitor on his desk in the operations room of City Hall. Maria’s broadcast played in the window he has placed on the upper left of the screen, next to the spot he keeps his ebony framed picture. The other monitors are dark. New York declined to participate in the live videoconference with the member governments of the Union of North American City-States, and Microsoft-Digi/Bell. Under fire you keep a low profile, Jack thought. Nuclear blasts, radiation, epidemics, gang wars, famine, drought, you know what to do. But this . . .?
Pellet stayed in the shadows of the prison while he studied the area around all the key positions. He half-glanced at the broadcast on his sunglasses, listening to the feed that mixed into his phone lines from each of his squad commanders. These boys, the ones he trained himself, the cream of the elite, the squirrel killers, liked to know that he will be there with them. So far, all went as planned. If it continues to go well this is one big problem that will be over in a few minutes. But why did Jack have to make it so difficult? He’ll have to be worked on; he needs to come around, or else?
His experienced eyes scanned the scene for any sign of any trouble. He spent too many years in combat, in the mountains, in the desert, to take anything for granted, anything. Cities made him far more nervous than the country. Here lurked far many more contingencies. But the intense firepower waiting to be unleashed at his command with just a single syllable will always take the day. Even though force remained unpopular with what survived of the left leaning press, at least he will be the one standing at the new conference afterwards.
“Salem Jones began life here in Riker’s Island some twenty-one years ago today,” Maria continued. “No one knows exactly when, but the word on the street says it was on the day of the infamous Jersey City bomb. Ironic that a soul which is known to be so connected with peace and harmony in this life, could come into the world on a such a nefarious day so recognized for immeasurable horror.”
Jack inadvertently blinked at the picture in the frame on his desktop where his family lives. Oh, Death, jack thought, of what ilk are thee?
Herbie kept his headbandcam pointing at the beautiful woman that he had been working with everyday for years, but because of his morbidity, had hardly noticed her before. Even so, with his senses more acute than ever, he couldn’t keep his eyes from darting about the crowd, until he stopped with a chill. A black-hooded figure stared back at him with his arm outstretched, pointing a gaunt finger his direction. Herbie blinked in surprise. When his eyes opened it had melted away in the crowd.
Branford kept his camera steady on the tripod, Pellet’s voice reassuring through his earphones only. This is a peach, he thought, nothing to it but a big fat payoff and the top shot at doing it again.
“Shortly after that world-changing disaster, our now famous mayor, John Kennedy Storm, declared by executive order the North Atlantic Alliance Penal System Privacy Codes, called simply Code 7, which refrained the media from any access to inmates that had been incarcerated for crimes of multiple murder and terrorism. A direct evolution of the Son of Sam laws, this coincided with the former Office of Homeland Security’s landmark ruling quarantining the contagious in former public spaces. After the re-configuration of the federal government, the mayor’s mandate was upheld by the city-state’s highest court of appeals. In essence, these popular laws repealed many of the freedoms that used to be guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. It is because of these legal restrictions, that no one outside these fifteen-foot concrete walls knows what Salem looks like.”
Pellet hated hearing that. He hated thinking how easily laws made with the best of intentions can backfire.
“Today, when he steps through those doors behind me, with the protection of the First Army, under the command of the chief of police, General Rodney Pellet, we will have our first glimpse of the man known for the revolutionary spiritual writings that have surfaced all over the globe.”
“What we know of his life is scant. His mother was a convict, serving time for burglary and prostitution. She also was a drug addict with HIV-7B, the offshoot sibling virus that evolved out of the cocktails of the prior decades. HIV-7B had changed all the theories of DNA mutation, which of course changed quickly again after the blast and the intense dose of radiation. This type of AIDS is still incurable, terminal, and can be passed by mother to child through the birth process. His mother died shortly after childbirth and his biological father is unknown. Because of his disease, diagnosed robotically at birth, no one expected him to live more than five or six years. So, according to law and because of his contagious condition, Salem was condemned to remain in prison for the entirety of his conjectured short life. He was placed in this ward behind me with the male inmates convicted of the most horrible crimes against humanity. It was essentially a death sentence by the authorities at that time.”
“These murderers and terrorists became his surrogate parents, raising him as their own son, right here in Rikers. But instead of Salem growing progressively sick and dying, the mandatory yearly health reports gave no signs of negative indicators. Quite the contrary, physical, mental, and emotional scores on the IQ/PP tests were extraordinarily high, off the charts high. Health officials then noted an almost unbelievable reversal amongst the prison pop
ulation in which he lived. In a group that throughout history has shown a greater percentage of infections caused by airborne and fluid borne viruses than any other modern population, the Center for Disease Control found a complete and total eradication of any disease leading to death amongst the population of inmates living behind these walls. That to many was considered his first modern miracle.”
With less than a minute left to go, the crowd throbbed in anticipation. With a subtle but discernible tension, the troops began defensing, not so much in posture but in intention. Pellet on the horn, in every soldier’s ear, inspired them and guided them. He kept one eye on the newscast on the screen embedded in his sunglasses, and saw no change in the all-important frame.
Alone in the armored office, Jack picked up a desktop phone and hit a speed-dial. Sam pulled away from the high-definition wall in the operations room and spun around to pick up the receiver buzzing on the oval conference table. “I’m zeroed in, Chief.”
Herbie’s eyes kept dancing around the crowd. People moved in ways unnatural and the crowd kaleidoscoped in color and pattern. Yet he couldn’t stop his focus on Maria, backlit by the rising sun highlighting her thick brown hair with gold.
“Now lately, and maybe most meaningfully, there are reports and sightings of writings and literature on, of all things, paper, surfacing even in remote corners of the world. The words of which are attributed to his teachings. The writings are simple, pure, and inspirational in a multicultural way. Uncanny, but the essences of these messages are communicated through universal symbols his believers swear they understand. The First Army Python corps, have conducted raids on possible distribution sites but have always come up empty. Every effort made by the multinationals to locate the source of this printed material has been in vain.”
