“And there’s something else,” Bobby whispered. “Jack and I, we got the ECPAP working a bit, relatively speaking. The code’s all done except for some minor tweaks, and there’ll be a few expected bugs that’ll take a lot of time to work through when the whole tamale goes live.”
Bobby paused.
I looked at him, raised my eyebrows, and said, “Define relatively speaking. Or do I not want to know?”
“Nobody – not the Feds, not even the HIRAD people – can get into the Health Insurer’s Risk Assessment Database,” Bobby said, looking around the room. “HIRAD’s still up and running. We know that. And it’s still drawing information from the outside. But some sucker’s locked everyone out. Not just out of the program, but out of the server rooms, too. We can’t fully integrate it with ECPAP. It’s like it doesn’t want us to – not entirely, and not just yet.”
I surprised myself that day, and even probably Bobby. “Override.” I said, and I grinned from ear to ear. “He got you into HIRAD the first time. Maybe you need to send him another email. Problem solved.” But I knew I was just pissing in the wind, and Bobby knew it, too. Sure, Bobby and Jack had access to the outside world through the internet. Their work on ECPAP depended on it, and everyone knew that. But direct, private access? Another story altogether. All the government needed was for some kid to get an email to his folks – or to a major news source – and, well, you can figure out the rest for yourself. Besides, Bobby had inconveniently told the congressional committee all he knew about this fella going by the hacker name Override, but no person using that name had been found at HIRAD. Nor had the name appeared anywhere else in the world for that matter. If Bobby needed any information, anything downloaded, he’d have to submit a detailed request on paper to three separate people. And he wasn’t about to ask for permission to email Override for the simple reason Override would be a fool to respond.
“You’re probably right about emailing Override – that is, if I could do it privately,” Bobby said, and he shook his head slowly. “But HIRAD’s doing something I . . . something nobody’s ever seen before. And this is it, Shorty: there is no humanly way possible to get into the database. Well, no way that any of us know about.”
“And?” I said.
“The password – and it’s a long one – doesn’t seem to stay in place for very long. This thing is . . . it’s elegant. It’s something advanced, even though it’s a fiendishly simple concept. Even Washington is pulling its hair out. That’s what they’re telling me.”
“Okay,” I said, “Tell me. What do you mean when you say the password doesn’t stay in place for very long? You’re saying it’s moving around?”
“No, not at all,” Bobby said. “Well, not that I can tell. But I do know it keeps changing – not like Headmistress Miller changing the door code on administration every week. It’s changing faster than that.”
“How fast?” I said. “Like every few minutes, every few hours, days, what?”
Bobby smiled like a kid on Christmas morning. Never mind that I’d forgotten what December twenty-fifth was like. “No, Shorty,” he said. “The password is changing at nearly the speed of light.”
The moment I heard that, I knew some kinda shiznit was going down. Not only here at Long Wait, but in the wider world as well. As far as I was concerned, that speed of light crap had been nothing more than a science fiction fairy tale that sold ebooks and movies and made a white-headed German patent clerk with bad hair a national celebrity. But Bobby had said nearly at the speed of light. And that’s why I believed him. Don’t ask me why. I just did.
Shortly after being told about the arrival of DEAD and SNUPE, and just shortly after Bobby told April and me about the HIRAD problem, crazy things started happening at Long Wait Prison. Not big things, not easily-noticed things, but impossible things.
And a week after DEAD SNUPE’s programmers arrived – not one of them older than eighteen – Bobby Griffin was arrested, cuffed by the Boneys, and hauled up to the eighth floor.
April was in tears, and I wasn’t too far behind her. It cost me a lot of meat and two of those tiny bottles of Tennessee Sipping Whiskey, but what I got in return was something April and I could have lived without.
And that was the news that Bobby Griffin was going to die first thing the next morning and that there was nothing anybody could do about it. Why? Because he couldn’t get HIRAD to talk to ECPAP.
Chapter Five
I can’t imagine what it’s like riding that slow elevator from the eighth floor all the way down to the basement. Rumor has it the ride’s smooth when you pass the first level, like floating on air. And when you think you’ve hit bottom, you can’t tell it, and you wait impatiently for the doors to pull back. And you wait and you wait and you wait because the elevator is still going down all that time. It never stops, not really.
But it stopped that Sunday morning to let Bobby Griffin off.
I’m told that Boney Burlison swung his rubber truncheon with such force into the small of Bobby’s back that Bobby swooned and fell before he had a chance to get off the elevator. And when Bobby opened his eyes a few seconds later, Boney Burlison laid into him again, cursing and swinging that joystick of his against the boy’s ribs, back, and legs like a man chopping wood. Bobby never gave Boney Burlison the satisfaction of a single groan or plea for mercy. He just laid there and took it.
And the whole time, Boney Burlison reminded Bobby about why the both of them had been sent to Long Wait Prison.
Everyone in Administration, including Headmistress Miller, just sat in their comfy offices and watched it all happen. They looked at their watches, saw it was Bobby’s time to arrive in the basement, and switched over from their Facebook church feeds to the basement surveillance cameras. There must be something about a killing that draws a spectator. I can’t guess what it is because I’ve never really thought about it. I hope I never get to see one. Maybe it’s kinda like theater.
Nobody like me knows what’s down there in the basement. Not really. Sure, I’ve been told it’s like any other large basement in the city. That it’s damp, that it’s got a moldy bite to it, that it sometimes leaks when it rains and that the sump pumps are so loud you can’t hear yourself think. The paint on the walls is peeling away in sheets. Poison-resistant rats run in packs like coyotes. Half the lights are out, and nobody wants to get up on the ladder and fix them because of all the spider webs. Maybe they’re afraid to put in new bulbs because they really don’t want to see the place.
Bobby found the strength to pick himself up and stumble off the elevator.
“Get moving, you piece of sh--,” Boney Burlison growled, and he raised his truncheon up to take a shot at the back of Bobby’s noggin. One of the guards – my informant – caught Burlison’s arm when it came down, and he ripped that rubber club right out of his hand and threw it out into the darkness. Probably not the best move to make if you wanted any advancement at Long Wait Prison, but an excellent first sprint for a man running the human race. That wouldn’t be the last time that guard intervened, as you will soon see, but Boney Burlison never forgot that he’d been shamed by an inferior, and he’d spend the next few years making that guard’s life hell.
Bobby just shuffled along in the dim half-light like any kid who’d just been beaten to within a couple feet of his own life. How many more yards it was to that bait-processing machine, he didn’t know at the time, but I suspect he dragged his feet every step of the way. They say that when you’re dying, you want every last minute, every last second. But it seems to me that it’s easier to just get the whole ugly business over with as soon as you can. Put all of that emotional suffering away and be done with it. I’ve read that, just outside of London, at the famous gallows called Tyburn Tree, a man would be strung up, and his friends would all rush forward and hang from the poor guy’s legs to make him die faster. And as April and I stood together over that cooking stove on that Lord’s Day at five a.m., crying in the powdered eggs, the best we coul
d hope for was six a.m. because, by then, it’d all be over with, and Bobby wouldn’t have a thing to worry about anymore.
Bobby never said a word as he sloshed forward on that wet concrete, and he never once cried and begged for mercy. I like to think that was true, but I really didn’t know it to be. I just knew Bobby. And he wasn’t the kind of guy to give Boney Burlison any satisfaction, not if he could help it.
They came to a large, rusty metal door. Six feet tall and five feet wide it was, and the thing sagged so badly on its hinges that it had scraped a groove so deep into the floor that the worn place held water. Boney Burlison threw back the bolt – why they bothered locking it anyway is beyond me – and my guy said it took every one of them, including Bobby, to pull that door open.
That was it for Bobby. The boy collapsed on the floor, and Boney Burlison ordered the two guards to pick him up and carry him the rest of the way. By that time, everybody was damp and hot, and I hear Burlison’s Elvis Presley haircut came unglued and that his hair gel ran all over his face, neck, and uniform. It’s hard for a man to have any dignity when he’s beating the hell out of kids and trying to look like Elvis Presley at the same time. But having bad hair when you’re trying to look like Elvis really ices the cake – and you don’t know that you can ever look at the guy again and keep a straight face, no matter how hard he’s beating you.
To this day, I’ve never seen the bait-processing machine. I guess the only ones who have are the guards and Bobby Griffin, and however many others who never lived to tell about it. My informant tried to describe it to me, but he wasn’t a mechanic – hadn’t the foggiest idea of what was what when it came to machines and gadgets and things. But he did tell me there was a huge water pump on one end, a long, thick pipe that had a casket-like door cut into it in the center, and another megamonstrous machine – the grinder – at the other end. Just past that was a smaller, eight-inch pipe that disappeared into solid rock. Any fool could probably look at it and figure it out. I’m sure if Bobby saw it, he would’ve figured it out. Me? I would’ve gone down fighting.
But Bobby was out for the count. The boy hadn’t cracked his eyes since he’d collapsed after opening that metal door. Boney Burlison opened that casket lid and yelled for the two guards to load Bobby into the chamber. In the meantime, Burlison walked to the water pump, hit a switch, and started priming the flush system – I think that’s what they called it – and they say that the pump makes a heck of a racket.
The whole thing works like a garbage disposal, I think. You put the junk in the sink, run the water, and then hit another switch to start up the blades. When the water starts running, it pushes the meat into the blades, and that’s all she wrote. But that system probably had a whole different meaning to the person sitting in that large, metal pipe. He’d be sitting in that tube, screaming and trying to claw his way out of that dark, dirty space. The water would be released and, if the person could hold his breath and not panic, he’d feel himself riding a water-flume until he stopped with his feet resting on a huge propeller. A couple of seconds after that, somebody would throw the propeller switch.
And not once, or so I’m told, had those blades ever been sharpened.
Not once in twenty-five years.
I have always believed there is a God in heaven. You can call me stupid, naïve, a holy roller – whatever you like. But my faith in God is stronger today than it has ever been, because what happened down in that basement the moment Boney Burlison decided to hit that water flow switch eviscerates reason.
Boney Burlison and the two guards got messages on their tablets right in the middle of killing Bobby. But they weren’t just the usual kinds of messages sent by Administration. These messages were hot. Not only did those three tablets flash, but they buzzed like college boys’ heads after a couple of jugs of brown liquor.
STOP EXECUTION IMMEDIATELY. RETURN TO ADMINISTRATION. DO NOT EXECUTE. ACKNOWLEDGE.
But Boney Burlison wouldn’t have any of that. “Hell,” he said. “We never got no messages because we can’t get the signals down here. Can we boys?”
Don’t know why he said that, because the people that counted at Long Wait were one floor up watching him like a hawk and pulling their hair out like birds feathering their nests. Burlison had to know he was being watched. Or maybe he was so liquored up he didn’t have any idea where he was. But I don’t believe that. I think Burlison was so full of hate and rage for what Bobby had done to him and his employer, Mr. Forbes, that he couldn’t think straight. All he had to do was activate that pump and hit the grinder switch, and that would have been the end of Bobby.
I won’t say everyone in Administration was a scumbag, because I suspect there were two or three folks up there that day who were glad Bobby Griffin wasn’t gonna be flushed down the toilet. At least not on a Sunday morning.
“Get him out,” my informant said to the other guard, and the guard went to work on the latches like he was told. “Back away from the switch, Burlison. You got the message – we all did. They want the boy.”
“Bah!” Boney Burlison said, and he spat on the pipe. He stayed right where he was, his hand on that pump switch, his face twitching like a kid about to open an early birthday present. “Get away from that pipe,” he growled. But that guard? He didn’t listen. He just kept at it, flipping those rusty latches as fast as he could so he could get Bobby out of that nasty, ugly pipe.
Boney Burlison saw his sweet revenge receding like his own hairline, and he hit that pump switch with all the vengeance of a man full of blind rage and fury.
And nothing happened.
Like I said, I think God had something to do with Bobby getting pulled out of that wet, smelly pipe that day. But I also believe that God used two people to do it. Those two people? Elton Peacock and the man who called himself Override. Like I said, God gives people gifts. And I have no doubt now that he puts those gifts into the hands of people for just the right moments.
Elton Peacock? That kid was something else. He had hacked into the surveillance and electrical systems of Long Wait only the day before. That morning, he’d followed Bobby via the camera system down into the basement. When he saw Boney Burlison touch that pump switch, Elton had the good sense to turn off the power to the entire bait-processing machine. To this day, Administration doesn’t have a clue about what happened down in that dungeon. All they know is that Bobby didn’t end up taking the fast ride to the river.
Override? He must have known about Bobby’s pending execution. Seconds before Administration had sent their messages to the guards in the basement, Override had sent an email to Long Wait Prison officials, a message that caught their attention.
That email was addressed to Bobby Griffin and it was titled HIRAD. And nobody, not even Administration, could open it.
Chapter Six
My Boney informant, who’d decided to give himself a raise at my expense, kept April and me up-to-date with Bobby’s recovery in the prison infirmary. Most of what he wanted was meat – Tilapia fillets, steaks, a package of bacon – and it was a real job covering my tracks on those trades. I assure you that more than one set of eyebrows got raised when I blamed it on the Calorimeter. Of course, fair was fair, and I always made it up to the people I’d been forced to cheat. But the corrections always had to be made at someone else’s expense, I’m sorry to say, because that’s how the merry-go-round here at Long Wait Prison turned. Seemed like one wrong turn deserved another.
My Boney guy told me that Bobby had taken quite a beating that morning. A broken rib was about the worst of it. A bunch of bruises. That’s all. But a young kid could only take so much from a man like Boney Burlison swinging a rubber club, even if that club was only twelve inches long. And you just gotta know that there’s something macabre about getting beaten by another human being when all you have to save you from death in this world is another human being – that the people who should be protecting you are the very ones killing you. I just chalk that up to Satan. If something doesn’t mak
e sense in this world, if it horsewhips reason, then it’s something being fought over by angels and demons.
I remember when Bobby joined the rest of us a week later in the cafeteria for dinner. You could tell right then they’d beaten more than just the willies out of him, but I hadn’t the slightest fear Bobby wouldn’t get over the bruises and broken bones like so many others here had. We had a good doctor at Long Wait and a couple of even better nurses. They patched him up, gave him some bed rest, probably gave him some counseling, too. But there are only so many lives in any cat, and I think what happened to Bobby down in that dark, damp basement a week earlier had taken eight of those nine lives. I know for sure the same would have happened to me. That, or I would have given up completely.
Bobby came through the line. I smiled and handed him the best of what I had that day – a smoked Polish sausage – straight from Assmann's and Sons out of Cleveland – a baked potato, cheese-smothered broccoli, and what was left of a Ben and Jerry’s April and I had shared the night before.
Bobby took that tray from my hands and never said a word. And we didn’t speak again for the next six months.
Bobby’s silence worried me. Because – well -- there was an older kid at Long Wait when I arrived. Carl Ledbetter. He kept to himself and never talked to anyone. Always pushing the envelope with the Boneys, he was. From the moment I saw him until the day he moved on, he fought those SOBs with every nerve and muscle in his mind and body. He wasn’t the brightest bulb on the strand, though he was brighter than some, or maybe he was, and I just couldn’t see it – but Carl didn’t seem to know when to stop fighting and start playing the game he’d been sent up here to play. By now, you understand that it's not hard getting along here. You get a decent place to sleep, get a job, they feed you well, they allow you a fairly decent social life. It’s hard to screw that up. But Carl? He wouldn’t have any of that. He just started digging himself a hole one day and, when the spade started getting dull, he’d picked up another one.
Dead Snupe Page 4
