Once I got my bearings, I saw that Mario Kaepernick and I – or was it Mary? – were standing face to face. About all we could do was glare at each other about the tight space and try to get comfortable, wondering who was gonna knock the other out. I’d push Mario, and he wouldn’t budge. He’d push me, and I wouldn’t move an inch. Mario tried to look mean, tried to look like a tough-guy, or a tough gal. But after a minute, those two eyes of his looked too tired to care.
“Fifteen of us,” Mario said.
“I make sixteen,” I said, getting a look at the dimly lit septic tank we were standing in.
“We had a system,” Mario said. “Everbody stands from now on. Thanks to you.”
Mario was right about that. I’d like to say that we were all like sardines stuffed into a tin. But this place made a can of sardines in Louisiana Hot Sauce smell like the ankles of some girl who’d just perfumed herself. Not that I’d ever smelled anything like that, but I hoped to one day.
“What’s the gig here?” I asked Mario.
“Meet DEAD and SNUPE,” Mario said. “Well, half of us.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “The system?”
“Yep. The system goes down, somebody skips, and either we were involved or knew it was happening. According to the warden.”
I could feel the heat now, and sweat was dripping down my neck and back. “Trick is, the system is supposed to go down when nobody knows it’s going down.”
“Listen,” Mario whispered. “It’s gone down before. A couple of times. And always early in the morning – five o’clock or so.”
That was about the time my Boney informant appeared, shaking like a leaf on a tree, and made April jump into that Garbage Droid. “Anything going on with the trash?”
Mario looked down at the floor. Then he got up on his tippy toes and yelled, “Zebulee! Zeb! Zebulee Martin! Can you get over here?” Mario shouted.
A black kid about six feet tall was standing right behind Mario. All he had to do was turn around. But that was easier said than done, and the people wedged in around him didn’t look too happy that he’d caused a ripple in their discomfort.
“Man, what’s with all the yelling, boy?” Zebulee said, and he looked tired and weak. “Been standing here crapping myself for three hours now. What do you want, Mario Speedwagon?”
“You told me a guy – the garbage guy – pulls up to get the trash container a few Sundays back, but he doesn’t load it up on his truck or leave the new one behind,” Mario said. “You’ve had eyes on the back, right?”
“Yeah, seems like every Sunday at five a.m., yo,” Zebulee said. “And the trash folks don’t usually show up on Sundays, not till recently. Guy gets out, looks at his watch, waits for five minutes, and leaves. Nothing to it, I guess. Odd, but what’s not odd ‘round here?”
I knew then that April had in fact gone out with the trash. She must have. I also suspected that, like my Boney informant, the garbage guy had been in on April’s escape. The only question now was – well, heck, there were lots of questions.
“We need more Garbage Droids,” I said. “How many more can you make?”
“Got a few prototypes sitting around, why?” Mario said. “Excuse me – got the runs.” And Mario just dumped it all out right there like he was sitting on the can. The smell of that boy’s filth was worse than an ammonia and chlorine cocktail. I felt a wave of nausea spilling over me.
“Set you up with some goodies when we get topside,” I said, trying to distract myself. “Fried Chicken, Ben and Jerry’s, watermelon, you name it, I can get it.”
“Trying to be funny with that racist stuff, whitey?” Zebulee said.
“I like fried chicken and watermelon,” Mario said.
“And greens?” Zebulee said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was sincere. “I didn’t mean to —”
“What are you thinking, white boy?” Zebulee said with a scowl on his face. “Got something you need to be taking out in the trash?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking,—”
“Cause I do. Seems like that cracker garbage man is waiting for something when he arrives, and I just assume we give him something, if you know what I mean.”
Mario nodded.
I didn’t know it then, but DEAD SNUPE had just come together: Mario – Mary? – Kaepernick of Droid Engineering and Development, Zebulee Johnson, a snoop for Surveillance Network Performance Engineering, and me, the lowly chef.
Chapter Twelve
Two days in that cell were nearly more than I could take. I had no water, no food, and no place to lie down. On the second day – or was it night? – I managed to sleep on my feet, wedged in between Mario Kaepernick and some guy who’d died next to me. Vertical death, I’d thought at the time. What a way to die – standing in a pool of human wastes. But it sure as heck beat dying on the floor. On the day of my release, I was sent up to the infirmary, treated, and let go. I found my way back to the cafeteria the next morning in time to start breakfast.
Emma saw me coming, and she gave it to me good. “I don’t know what you did or where they took you,” she said with her voice down to a whisper. “But you can’t be doing things, Shorty. You gotta just play the game. Promise me?” Then she threw her arms up and hugged me hard and long. That seemed to make up for the scolding she’d just given me.
I got on the sausage, Emma got on the eggs. A couple of the younger kids from the group went to work on the toast and drinks. We had a pretty good team that morning. It wasn’t always that way, though. Sometimes kids would show up, other times they wouldn’t. This job was just too early and too much work for those young kids. But then I got to thinking about how Sunday was just a couple of days away.
Mario and Zebulee shuffled clumsily into the cafeteria that morning. I was serving eggs and sausage, daydreaming about getting two kids in the Garbage Droid and two more into another, and sending them out to the dumpster. One by one, I could get these kids out of here until there was nobody left at Long Wait.
Zebulee stepped up and coughed to get my attention. Mario pounded his fist on the counter and made the whole thing shake.
“Whassup?” Zebulee whispered.
“Shorty,” Mario intoned with a nod like some dude in a detective movie.
I called for Emma to cover for me, and I went to the small gate between the kitchen and the dining area and stepped out. Mario and Zebulee nodded towards the kitchen and we all headed for it. Mario smelled sweet this morning, like a girl, and that shocked me. He even walked funny. Maybe that was the day he decided to stop being a man and go back to being a girl. I can’t tell you how all that works, but a few weeks later, Mario was Mary – for good – and Administration was fine by that. I don’t know how that boy – girl – kept all of her goodies upstairs hidden, but it must have been painful. And when she finally went back to the girls’ clothes, Mary turned out to be quite a woman with a sizeable rack. Now, I don’t usually say things like that, nor do I ever call woman’s bozos a rack, but’s that what it was, pure and simple. That girl had come from the hills of Tennessee and had brought the mountains with her. And her lower anatomy? Prosthetic, come to find out. And, according to Zebulee, who had no interest in Mary-O, as he called her, said she’d ditched her John just after her little stint in that tiny, filthy cell where more than one kid had died.
“Got something,” Zebulee said as we all took a seat at a table in the kitchen. “Wait’ll you hear this.”
“I’m all ears,” I said.
“Lemme grab a bite now, and don’t rush me,” Zebulee said, and he whirlwinded through his breakfast in less than a minute.
“I did it,” Zebulee said with his mouth full. “But I don’t know if it was all me. Know what I’m saying?”
“Uh, yes,” Mary said as she rolled her eyes. “We understand every word.”
“Just shut up and listen, fool,” Zebulee whispered. “Like I just said, I – we – got into prisoner records. But who the ‘we’ is, I haven’t got the
foggiest idea. I – we – had help.”
Bobby and Elton, I thought. But I wasn’t about to give them up to anybody. Not right then, anyway. “And that means —?”
“Shut up and listen,” Zebulee said. “I can take kids’ names out of the system – as easy as peasy gets.”
Mary smiled. “Implant and all. Seems like the little devices in our guts won’t work outside Long Wait Prison. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be reacquired if the authorities go looking. Which they just might do.”
I knew where all of this was going. Mary and Zebulee had just confirmed it. Kids going out with the trash. “How many can we get out this Sunday?” I whispered as quietly as quiet could.
“The second Garbage Droid is up and ready,” Mary said. “How many kids can you have working for you on Sunday at five a.m.?”
And that’s how DEAD SNUPE finally started what we called the Trash Run. Starting the following Sunday, DEAD SNUPE went to work. Mary sent down two Garbage Droids, Zebulee got into student records erasing names and – if you can believe the luck – disabling implants, and Emma and I sent a handful of young kids to the dumpster outside where they were picked up and driven away.
And every one of us could only trust that Long Wait’s surveillance system was going down just long enough for the Garbage Droids to make their runs.
Twenty-three kids got out of Long Wait, thanks to the magic of DEAD SNUPE. Who on the outside was picking up those kids, and where they were taking them, I couldn’t tell you. I’m sure those who’d gotten out would have had to stay under the radar. But what did that mean in real-world language? They were out of here, and that’s all that mattered.
Emma and I, and some of the kids in the small group, kept the kitchen running like clockwork. After the evening meals, Emma and I would grab a Ben and Jerry’s and hurry to one of the common rooms and watch the news. She insisted we share the pint. And the spoon. And that was what, in the end, got me hooked on Ben and Jerry’s.
A week later, some of the kids at Long Wait started buzzing big time about Senator Tyler. Most of them didn’t know what to make of the man. But they did know that Senator Tyler had recovered from his bullet wound like a champ. The slug went in just above his belt, bounced off his pelvic bone, and exited through his right side. He was lucky, the doctors had said.
And that bullet had made him a real hero to everyone in the United States.
Emma and I, and a bunch of others, kept a close watch on Senator Tyler and his exploits after that. It really wasn’t all that hard. We could read about him on the news briefs on our tablets, or we could watch the news at quitting time. Quite a few of us at Long Wait did both.
The presidential race started heating up in late August of that year, with several notable names appearing on the Republican side. One of the early primary candidates was Ivan Shepard, the governor of New York. Many hateful words could be said about him, but the fact that the man was inconsiderate and obsessive was just the tip of the iceberg. The guy was pedantic, agonizing, and self-indulgent. I knew it to be true. He’d spent more than one night here at Long Wait with some other congressmen who, if they weren’t screwing the country, thought that screwing underage young ladies was the next best thing. But Governor Shepard always managed to say the right thing at the right time, and hand out welfare to just the right people at the best possible moment. And he seemed to be gifted at dodging whatever political bullet came his way. It was said by a couple of girls he’d been here at Long Wait five times.
Others had put their names in the hat, too. Congresswoman Sheila Bates from California was a notable one. “A lovely woman with lovely hair,” is how one reporter described her. “A woman who could barely fit into her bra.” Then there was Senator Tom Seagraves from Maine, and a businessman going by the name of Shooter Darnell who was skinnier than a telephone pole but whose checking account was fatter than a stuffed turkey. There were a few others, but these were the notables, the ones who later made it into the debates.
President Marquez ‘Wonderboy’ Forti, a black Spanish Italian from the sound and looks of it, was running for his second term on the Democratic ticket in 2048. He’d won in a landslide in 2044, taking 60 percent of the popular vote. Of all the politicians in America at the time, President Forti appeared to be the cleanest. In fact, nobody had a thing on him and, as far as any of us knew, he’d never visited Long Wait.
Which leads me, of course, to the presidential election of 2048. I’ve lived through precious few of those in my short life, as did just about everyone else here at Long Wait. It’s not that elections aren’t exciting and not fun to watch, it’s just that you’ve got other, more pressing things to worry about when you're behind bars. But, in January of that year – and I mean the moment that the ball in Times Square dropped at midnight – politics took over the entire country.
Over night, it seemed that people started screaming and fighting over just about everything from education to taxes to welfare to term limits in Congress. And the news people just kept fanning the flames of discontent, following every candidate and every topic until Americans were ready to kill each other. There was some good news that got reported from time to time, and I’m glad to say that most of it had to do with Senator Tyler. Though he was beating the campaign trail just as hard as the others, he still had time to cut ribbons on several Christian Homes for Children that he’d helped finance. Most everyone noticed it, too, because good news was hard to come by.
By late February, some of those wanna-be presidents dropped out of the race. Maybe they’d been bought out by President Marquez ‘Wonderboy’ Forti – that’s what most of us believed at the time – or perhaps, like one talking head had said, Forti had some dirt on his competition. My guess was it was probably a mix of the two. But when all was said and done, that left Ivan Shepard, the governor from New York, Congresswoman Sheila Bates, the lady with the nice hair, and Senator Kevin Tyler on the Republican side. That Senator Tyler was still in the running, given the fact that he had very little support from leaders in his own party, struck everyone as peculiar. Add to that the ongoing investigation into the man’s financial situation, and you have to wonder why he didn’t just cash in his chips and go home to live the comfortable life. Had he done that, I’m sure the investigation would have ended as quickly as it had started. But Senator Tyler didn’t quit. He was driven, and he had convictions. And it was also clear that President Forti didn’t have a bit of dirt on the man. Otherwise, he’d have grabbed a shovel and buried Senator Tyler.
The following May, Emma and I were putting the lid on the cafeteria for the night when Mary Kaepernick showed up. And I’ll be danged. Mary had gone full blown woman. You name it, it was all over her. Eyeshadow, lipstick, that pancake stuff the girls put on their faces to give it color – but in the right amounts – dress, heels, the works. Even Emma did a double take.
“Like coming out of a nightmare,” Mary said, and she smiled. “Ditched the steroids – everything.”
“How did Administration take it?” I said, though I suspected the folks behind the controls here at Long Wait hadn’t said diddly to Mary about her change. Lately, the folks in Administration had kept pretty much to themselves. As long as classes were going on and the work was getting done, they didn’t mess with anybody. The Boneys were still around though, roughing up a kid once in a while, dragging someone up to the eighth floor every now and then. But even they seemed like they’d been neutered.
Mary got real close to me and put her lips against my ear. And she whispered so softly I could barely understand what she was saying. “We’re sending out two more kids tomorrow, some special magnets, some hardware, and some flat-printed circuit board coils. Pick which two children you’re sending. They’ll be the last.” And she left.
And Mary Kaepernick danced out of the cafeteria like a ballerina.
I looked at Emma. They say that if you love something, you’re supposed to set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t? – W
ell, the last part of that saying I don’t remember. But I knew I loved Emma, and I knew I wanted her to be free. I didn’t even have to think about it.
The following Sunday, two Garbage Droids showed up in the cafeteria at five a.m. Emma, with tears in her eyes, promised me she’d wait for me – whatever that meant. And I promised I’d wait for her.
On May fifth, Emma reluctantly went out with the trash along with three other kids. All that was left to me personally was my job in the kitchen, a bunch of kids looking to me for some guidance, and the election of ’48. I tried my best to keep my mind off my age – I was now twenty-nine – and the single year standing between me and a trip down to the bait-processing machine in the basement.
But I never lost faith in Bobby Griffin. And, deep inside, I knew I would see Emma again.
Chapter Thirteen
On November 3, 2048, Senator Kevin Tyler won the Presidential election by a slim margin. But something else happened that day, too.
Bobby Griffin and Elton Peacock escaped from Long Wait Prison.
And they didn’t take me with them.
All I can tell you is that, on the night of the election, I knew my old friends were breaking out of Long Wait. I knew because Bobby, Elton and I spent a few minutes on the tablets before they left. Somehow or another, Elton had gotten us all on a secure, private network, and we had a chance to spend precious few seconds texting each other. That’s when I knew those two rascals were leaving without me. And it made me resentful.
Bobby briefly mentioned his ECPAP project. It was fully operational, he said, though he no longer had any control over it. What that meant, I hadn’t a clue. I asked him about Override, but Bobby ignored the question and said that, as far as the government was concerned, ECPAP/HIRAD was ready. In the morning, officials would be arriving at Long Wait Prison to be briefed on the project before taking control of it. Bobby didn’t say much more than that, but he did say they’d be in for a big surprise. I read between the lines: Bobby and Elton had no choice. They needed to get out. There is no question in my mind that the government would not have allowed those two boys to live after they’d completed their work.
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