by JT Pearson
*
“Hurry up! Open the cell!” The doctor kicked the bars while one of the guards fumbled for the key. Once the door was open the doctor moved inside quickly and without caution. The second guard grabbed him.
“I’m sorry, doc, but we’ve got procedure to follow.”
The doctor groaned with disgust as the first guard grabbed each of Jeff’s wrists and chained them to the bed frame. Then the doctor knelt down and took Jeff’s vitals. He pulled out a small flashlight and examined Jeff’s eyes as they twitched and moved.
“He’s in a coma.” He turned and looked at the two guards. “What the hell type of people leave a man by himself for so many years? Such cruelty. His brain is mush.”
“Can he hear us?” the first guard asked.
“Who knows what’s going on inside his head right now. I just hope that he isn’t suffering anymore.”
“So, what do you want us to do with him? He’s just been wasting away like this for weeks.”
“There’s nothing you can do. He’s not coming back from this. Take him up to the infirmary where they can have him a lethal injection. He’s finally going to escape this hell hole.” The doctor grabbed his bag and left the cell without looking back.
An hour later - BOOM! The grid ruptured obliterating Jeff, Chief, and everything in that world.
ABOUT THIS STORY:
The man in the cell, Jeff, never left the cell to repair an energy grid. The interaction between the guards, and then later the guards with the doctor, are reality. Everything else was a fantasy world created by the mind of a suffering man. The elements of his delusion are derived from his outside surroundings. Jeff had been going insane from isolation, and just as he thought, he had created an imaginary friend, the rabbit – Jack. Both of the names Jeff and Jack are actually derived from the name John. Jeff was also Jack. Jack told Jeff (talking to himself) that he was on the cusp of completely losing his grasp on reality, and that was accurate. Jeff’s headaches were described as feeling like a winged creature was trying to flap its way out of his skull. And the warden’s name was Warden Raven. These details were also warped into the story by Jeff’s subconscious. The explosions that Jeff saw in his head came from the startling noise created by the loud pipe that banged intermittently below him for years. The intense heat that followed the noisy pipe also lent to the story that his subconscious created, making him dream of fire. Jeff was Native American, as one of the guards stated early on, and grew up on a reservation where he became familiar with the theory of the animal spirit world. The line on the grid that Jeff was about to work on at the end of the story blew up in his fantasy world, terminating his life at the very same time that the lethal injection was administered by one of the prison guards, by order of the doctor.
THE TRUE BUT BIZARRE FACTS THAT INSPIRED THIS STORY:
There really are four times as many miles of pipeline under our feet as there are miles of highway, and the vibration from the product that is sent through those lines causes them to erode over time until they are dangerous. Maintenance and repair is required in order to keep our pipelines safe. Many houses and other structures in our country and others have been destroyed by exploding pipeline. And many people have died from these explosions. You can look these disasters up on Google. I worked on volatile gas lines that were in danger of blowing up for some of the bigger oil distributers when I was younger. An electronic device called a pig travelled through the pipe and collected data which detected anomalies that might cause a rupture, that would’ve sometimes resulted in a spill, and occasionally result in a severe explosion. We were generally as careful as we could be but always in danger of dying when we performed this work. The lines that carried everything from natural gas to crude were left to carry product in most cases while we worked on them, the pressure lowered slightly. A high level company man once told me that paying for funerals and flowers was a lot cheaper than the cost that they’d endure if they slowed down the production of their products. Many times I sat in the dirt while eating my lunch listening to men that described the conversations that they had with their wives about how they wanted them to quit the type of work we were doing and do something safer. But a lot of money can be made doing this work. Sometimes we worked sixteen or seventeen hours straight, finishing the night, completely exhausted. Plenty of overtime pay. I remember working a job late at night, eight of us, under insufficient lighting, in the pouring rain, jack hammering rock away from a 32 inch pipe that was carrying natural gas. I couldn’t even see the pipe. Whenever I ran the jack hammer, mud splashed up and covered my goggles, but as tired as I was, I just kept reaching down blindly and feeling around for the pipe so that I knew where it was before starting the hammer up again. Six of the other men that filled out the crew that night had simply given up from exhaustion and just laid in the pouring rain along the ditch, waiting for our replacement crew to arrive from another state. Thankfully, neither I nor the other man that remained working blew us up that night. I would imagine that there are still crews out there doing this type of work. I hope that the situation is a little safer for them now. Contrary to the character in the story, I did like the people that I worked for. The Native American folklore elements of this story came from the Natives that I worked with on those jobs. The stories that they told me were handed down to them through their religious traditions. The story about Jesus coming to the Natives on the river in a canoe made of rock is one of those stories. When I was writing this story I thought of the movie The Usual Suspects, and how Kevin Spacey playing Verbal Kint told a story about a demonic figure named Keyser Soze, how all of the details of the story came from all of the objects that surrounded Verbal at the police precinct. I used a similar technique, drawing the details from Jeff’s cell to enter into his madness. I truly hope that you enjoyed this story. If you liked it, please leave a nice review with 5 stars. If you didn’t, please never mind leaving the review – kidding – sort of. I also hope that those stories out there that I’ve heard many times, about mobsters that work for big oil, the kind that eliminate big mouths like me, are simply that, stories. I’d hate to end my association with the oil companies with a bullet to the brain because I let a few dark company secrets go public. If those mobsters do exist, to all the people that read this story, please just assume that the factual portion following the story is fiction as well, that the oil companies would never involve themselves in practices so nefarious. Nobody ever hears about these practices. How could it be true? Who would believe that such dangerous conditions go undetected, existing just below our feet? Or that there are men around our country out there blowing up, trying to maintain our fuel transportation system? Then again, what was Verbal Kint’s line from The Usual Suspects in regard to the infamous Keyser Sose? The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Yeah, I guess what oil companies do might be sort of like that.
