by John Shirley
A car hummed up, and by, headlights coming, tail-lights going, all in a moment.
They lay there by the pipe, breathing hard, listening. No more cars.
But Rudy thought he heard something else: a whining sound overhead. “You hear a drone?” he whispered.
“Maybe … maybe so … but they’re always whizzin’ around the grounds. They’re self-guided, these around here, and cheap as shit. They don’t see much, especially in the dark.”
Rudy doubted they didn’t see much, but he didn’t argue. He didn’t even want to think about the drones. Or the worm.
They stood, and wrestled the pipe up to waist level. Sweat was coming out on Rudy’s forehead, burning his eyes.
“Come on, Rudy, goddamnit. We keep going, we find that robot train.”
“Don’t get ahead of me, you’ll pull the pipe apart, Steve.”
They trudged along till another set of lights came, this time from behind them. They flattened and the truck rumbled by. They waited till it was around a curve, and then they started off again …
There was a sliding, chuffing, metallic grinding sound, from behind …
Rudy was afraid to look.
“Fuck, fuck,” Steve muttered. “They sent out the …”
Feeling all clenched up, Rudy dropped his end of the pipe, turned—and looked.
The worm was coming at them like a bad dream. It was about sixty feet long, its body about three feet in radius. It was multi-segmented, its outer skin a mesh tube, nickel-titanium alloy for its muscle—shape-memory alloy expanded and contracted to some internal heat-based prompt. The former IT engineer in Rudy almost admired the worm—unspeakably sophisticated inside, outside it was based on one of the most primitive of organisms. Peristaltically humping, stretching out, humping up, stretching out, it came toward them, in and out of light pole glow, a lamp on its near end for the cameras mounted in the rotating eye cluster.
The worm was a legend at Statewide—but they knew it was real, too. They hadn’t known their own pod had one. Staff was secretive about security tech, and the lockiffers just smiled mysteriously when asked about the worm.
Steve had always said, “That creepy smile is just to scare you. They haven’t got one here …”
But they did. The drone, Rudy thought. The drone had seen them, and it had sent the worm.
“Fucking run!” Steve shouted, dropping the pipe.
“I don’t think we should, man! We gotta surrender! We can’t outrun that thing—”
But Steve was already running. Rudy just watched the worm coming—raising his hands over his head so its cameras could take in his surrender. Maybe that would work, maybe not.
The worm turned its segmented metal and plastic snout toward him, reared up, seemed to hesitate a moment. Then it turned, rushed past him, humping with flashing speed, stretching with a whoosh and a creak, speeding up … catching up with Steve. Its mechanical body blocked Rudy’s view as it reared over Steve. One second …
Then it slapped down. Steve’s scream was short, and sharp.
Rudy waited where he was, keeping his shaking hands over his head. Pretty soon the lockiffer trucks came, and he shut his eyes against the glare of their headlights.
2. JULY
Welcome to Arizona Statewide Prison and Park Access
Underneath those words, in much smaller letters, it said,
A Joint Project of the McCrue Corporation and the State of Arizona.
Faye had abundant time to look at the sign. Her old Chevy was only thirty feet away from it, in a long line of idling cars flanked by other lines of idling cars on the sun-washed highway. They were all waiting to get through the border into Arizona from southeastern California.
Most of the cars had their engines going so they could run the air conditioner in the hot July midmorning sun. Light splashed from the solar collection roofs of the cars. Lots of wasted reflected sunlight, Faye thought.
She sighed. The tedium of the wait was like a stiffened thumb pushing on her forehead. Maybe she shouldn’t have come alone, should’ve brought a photographer at least, someone to talk to. But it had taken months to get permission for her own visit.
She looked at the line of cars to her left, going through one of three entry lanes. They mostly contained people alone in their vehicles, like her. She saw only one family; chubby mother and father, chubby little girl and boy, in a shiny blue hybrid minivan, all of them watching a movie on a popped-up dashboard screen. The rest of the waiting drivers were mostly young to middle-aged men and women, tapping smart phones or staring at the checkpoint; probably here for an interview, hoping to get a job in the penal system.
Stretching, Faye thought about eating some of her fig cookies, and told herself, No, you’re not really hungry, don’t eat till you are. She distracted herself toying with the car radio. Stations blared and receded, crackled and chattered; Spanish-language and Spanglish voices came through. Then she found the public service channel she was looking for: a woman’s pleasant voice, her tone like a recording cheerfully welcoming you to a theme park. She sounded as if she might burst into laughter at any moment.
“ … a warm Arizona welcome to visitors. Visitors to inmates may enter only in Statewide visitors’ buses. Non-detention visitors to the state fall into four categories. Tourists are category one, and are required to take the overland express to State and National Parks; category one visitors will need a One Pass. Job applicants are category two and will need a Two Pass. Contractors or prospective contractors on business are category three and will need a Three Pass. Category four is miscellaneous media or retail workers …”
That would be me, Faye thought. Miscellaneous media? Maybe I should introduce myself as Miss Alaneous instead of Ms. Adullah.
If she did, they wouldn’t laugh. They’d stare. They’d double check her. It was like going through an HSA screening but worse.
“… and if you’re category four, you will need a Four Pass, preprinted with correct scan code.”
She patted the folder on the seat beside her, with her print-out Four Pass in it, and all the contingent paperwork.
The line inched forward …
About noon she ate the fig cookies and drank some coffee, looking around for a restroom. There was a cinderblock restroom building to the side of the road, but suppose the line moved while she was in the bathroom?
She waited. She thought about her father in Tel Aviv, and wondered if he was going to get his own pass, for over there—a Palestinian Parentage Pass. She remembered Dad watching her sister Weilah die in the Second Ebola Wave. Dad’s face mostly hidden by the white protective mask as he wept soundlessly. He’d left the USA for Tel Aviv, after that, to help his brother in his shop, within a month of Weilah’s burial.
She rarely heard from her father anymore. When they talked onscreen he didn’t look at her much. She looked too much like Mom, maybe, except for her dark skin, big dark eyes—those were from her father.
Another uncomfortable forty minutes, and she was at the window. “I have a pass, and an appointment,” Faye said, smiling. “Faye Adullah.”
“May I have your preprinted pass, and your ID?” asked the sturdy black woman in the brown-trimmed yellow uniform. She was looking past Faye, as she spoke, at the horizon; at nothing in particular.
Faye had the folder open on her lap now; she handed over the pass. Why did they say “may I,” she wondered, when there was no “may I” about it?
Ten minutes passed, the woman looking at paperwork, scanning codes, gazing into the wafer-thin computer monitor, asking questions that fell between them like abstract shapes in Styrofoam.
“Welcome to Arizona,” the woman said, at last, her voice almost inaudible. “After you pass the barrier, drive to slot number five for scan, and then drive directly to your destination.”
The scan station at slot five was almost identical to airport TSA. Two white middle-aged men checked the trunk of her car, looking under the spare tire; they ran an instrument over t
he inside of the car, sniffing for some chemical. They attached a long-distance monitoring device to her car’s aerial, one of them explaining that the device would be removed when she left the state.
They rescanned her Four Pass, squinted at her ID, offered her another faint welcome, and sent her through, with a quick warning that drones would be monitoring her car, as they monitored everyone’s.
“Well,” she said aloud, as she drove onto AzPrisSystem Road 35, “I’m here, Phil. I said I’d get here.”
She was in his office, when she said she’d get here. Sitting across from him, two weeks after they’d agree to end their affair.
She reran that wet April morning in her mind; the rain lashing sideways when the wind rose, and it rose as often as a woman takes a breath.
The umbrella hadn’t been much use. She was wiping rain from her face and hair when Phil’s receptionist told her to go in …
Like Phil, the office was neither large nor small. It was carefully arranged for appearances.
She’d been here before but, after all that had happened between them, the office seemed new to her, its walls and desk festooned with memorabilia of his other life; with pictures of his wife and kids—two sons with curly black hair like Dad, and ornate yarmulkes. There were photos of him interviewing presidents, generals, CEOs. But her eyes kept coming back to the pictures of him with his wife.
Phil was at the window, hands in his pockets, pretending casual interest in the rain. “It’s not a heavy rain but it’s sneaky,” he said, turning toward her. “I see it snuck up on you.”
She returned his practiced smile with a weaker one. “Yep.”
He motioned toward a chair and sat down behind his desk, leaning back casually as if saying, The desk isn’t between us. We’re still friends.
Were they friends? Faye doubted it. But Phil was the third most influential internet magazine editor in the USA, according to NewsReader.com. He was a fixture at Priority Media, a genuinely powerful corporation, and she was just a freelance journalist. So she kept on smiling.
“So—I read your proposal,” Phil said, altering his smile to fit his shrug. “I doubt if I can get Priority to go for it. Everyone knows about this stuff already. Not like there was any shortage of controversy when Arizona became one big privatized prison.”
“That was then. How much reporting has there been on actual conditions in the state—in the prison?”
“Quite a bit, from what the search engines tell me.”
“It was all done in-house, Phil. That’s not real reporting.”
“You’re claiming corporate censorship, spiking, that sort of thing?”
“They don’t have to censor anything if it comes from in-house. They hire a journalist who does a little segment that he syndicates out, and cable news buys it. They get a pass from any real scrutiny, Phil. I mean, it’s a multi-billion-dollar business, and McCrue’s financing half of Congress. The company gorges their PACs with cash, it spends millions on lobbyists—and any kind of oversight gets voted down.”
Phil nodded mechanically. “Statewide in Arizona, North Louisiana Penal Systems—they’re big employers. Not that many flesh and blood jobs around anymore. The jobs give them clout.” He swiveled his chair a little, looked out the window again. “And you know, since the ACLU sued ICE over conditions for illegal immigrant prisoners, things have changed. ICE settled, reformed the whole thing.”
“That was a long time ago and it was only specific to families with children. The basic situation hasn’t changed since then—they get money from government for each person in prison, so they’re motivated to just keep people there any way they can. And privatized prisons are always, always motivated to cut corners to maximize profits. Word on the street says it’s gotten worse—especially at Statewide … Christ, Phil, it’s not just Americans and illegal immigrants there! They’ve brought hundreds of thousands of prisoners in from other countries—they contract with Brazil, Pakistan, the Sudan, even the Chinese. Some of them are political prisoners! And when a prison takes up an entire state … how much oversight can there be? How many people do they have to manage? Millions, Phil! What’s it like for that many people behind bars? I mean—their electrical systems keep failing. Temperatures get up to a hundred-twenty in some of those pods—three people that we know of died in solitary during the heat wave last summer. Who knows what else goes on?”
Phil screwed up his mouth into a twisted cone. “I’ll give you that—McCrue runs the place shady. No transparency. They put money before inmate safety. I mean, maybe, if you can get in there on your own, but—you’ll want your trip paid for, yeah? You’ll want us to provide you with some kind of imprimatur … I don’t think we can do that, Faye. If you can get there on your own and come back with a good piece … documented … Then maybe …”
Faye knew she was supposed to be happy with that and just go away. But it wasn’t good enough. She needed this assignment. She was deep in debt, and with the print magazines folded up, she had nowhere else to go. And this story mattered.
She had just one card left to play. “Phil—you have the authority to assign this! You owe me one. Just one! I really need this …”
He looked at her, his shoulders stiffening, eyes narrowed. The wreckage of their intimacy was there in the room with them. His promises. Yes, I’ll divorce Miriam. Give me time, Faye. Another year …
And his betrayals. Can’t do it. It would wreck my life, Faye. My career.
Finally, Phil exhaled noisily through his nose. “Okay. Okay, fine.”
Faye had three more hurdles after the border, each human hurdle closely inspecting her Four Pass: first, another checkpoint; next, a meeting with one of Statewide’s staff attorneys, a buff, lisping man named Biggle, who tried to get her to sign a nondisclosure agreement even after admitting that it was a strange thing to ask of a journalist. But when she referenced the ACLU—which had been making a comeback, after being almost nonfunctional following the countersuits of 2025 and 2026—he got a resigned look on his face and went to make some phone calls. When he came back, he sighed and said, “Well, I can let you go to select pods … One, anyhow. Pod Seven-seventy-five.”
The third hurdle was McCrue’s Statewide media liaison—a tall, vulpine blond woman named Rita Burse.
“They’ve asked me to be your guide around pod seven-seventy-five,” she said, looming over Faye in the warden’s reception room. Burse had a beakish nose, small lips, and her blue eyes seemed oddly far apart. Her accent was Southwest; her suit dress was light blue tweed; the color of her pumps matched the dress. She had an e-board tucked against her lapels.
“Will I see the warden, today?” Faye asked, glancing at his office door. The small plastic sign on the door said Ervin Holmes, Warden.
“Warden Holmes is on vacation,” Burse said, looking at Faye’s laptop case. “We’ll have to inspect your laptop for webcams—we can’t allow those here at all, or any other photography.”
“No photography? I’m a journalist, Ms. Burse.”
“Do please call me Rita. Um, we provide photos, we have a set for every pod. You can take some pictures from of the building from the parking lot, if you like …”
“I can see how this is going to go, Rita.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Doesn’t matter, really,” Faye said, adding dryly, “Long as I don’t have to wear a blindfold.”
They wouldn’t let me take photographs of the interior of the pod might be a good opening line for the article, Faye thought.
“Here’s your badge,” Rita said, handing her a badge with her photo on it, plus her name and a sensor chip.
“Where do we start?” Faye asked, clipping the badge to her jacket. “Could I see a map of the facility? I mean—of seven-seventy-five.”
“That … no. I didn’t get an authorization for that. Most of the facilities have pretty much the same layout.” The door to the corridor opened and a bulky, uniformed man came in. “Here’s Samuel. He’s our Special
Officer …”
The burly shaven-bald guard was swag-bellied but wide-shouldered. The flat-black and yellow uniform didn’t fit him properly—around the middle and the shoulders it seemed small; it seemed a little too long in the legs, wrinkling over his shiny black shoes. His ID badge said, Samuel Gull, Cust. Spec, SpecOff. He wore a glossy black belt with a variety of cryptic items holstered in it.
The guard stepped closer to Faye, towering over her, smiling thinly. His lower jaw stuck out a little more than his upper. She saw that he had a headset plug in his ear, with a little projection snaking from it to the corner of his mouth.
What a couple you two would make, Faye thought, looking back and forth between Rita and Gull. Or maybe you do …
“Samuel?” Rita said. “This is Faye Adullah.”
Faye thought there might be a flicker of suspicion in his eyes at the Arab last name.
She stuck out her hand; his enormous hand was like sandpaper on hers. “Welcome to McCrue Statewide,” he said. He had a voice like a tuba.
“Samuel, we’re going to Crafts and Training One, first,” Rita said.
“Yes ma’am. Right this way …”
It was a long walk. The door to the corridor was the first of six doors—or was it seven? Faye thought she might’ve lost count.
Two of the doors were within a few paces of one another, both of those were metal, with wired glass panes, and both opened by “buzzing in” after inspection by someone on the other side of the security camera.
Gull led the way down a long corridor to another door, his shoes squeaking as he walked. He waved to someone on the other side, held the buzzing door open …
They clip-clopped through more passages, more doors, walked down a narrow side corridor. The place looked clean, the walls painted peach, here; dun in other places. The floors were pale green. A middle-aged Hispanic trustee with slicked-back hair and a small goatee was kneeling beside a floor-cleaning machine, a kind of wet vacuum cleaner, trying to clear a jam. He wore a one-piece orange uniform, and a white plastic ID on a thong around his neck.
