by Schow, Ryan
Everyone nodded in acknowledgement.
“Whole yard,” he said, extending a hand, palm up, and sweeping it over the width of the field.
With a long section of the yard cleared for them, the group got on their hands and knees and got started. As she was crawling over the dirt field, a packed-dirt yard that was easily the size of a baseball field, she realized this was not necessary.
This was punishment.
After a few hours, one of the women got up and asked for a cup of water. She was beaten down and told that for every cup she filled with granules, she’d get one cup of water.
Skylar filled hers up just before lunch, then stood and handed it to the guard. “A cup for a cup.”
He took it and said, “Turtle position until you get your cup.”
She frowned, then she understood.
Getting down on her hands and knees, she pulled herself into the turtle shell position and waited. The sound of the zipper horrified her. What the hell? The piss hitting her back let her know just how bad it was going to be.
When he was done, he zipped up and said, “I gave you two cups of my water. You owe me a cup of dirt.” He handed her an empty plastic cup for granule collection and said, “Fill up, then we even.”
Lunch was watery soup. One of the pieces of meat she was eating had part of a tail on it. It was just this nasty piece of meat in toilet water broth.
She gagged over her dish, pushed it aside.
Finally she got up and was escorted outside to finish her work. All day long the sun beat down on her back, her neck, her exposed arms. When she was told it was time for dinner, her lips were chapped, her skin was fried and everything ached. Especially her knees and the palms of her hands.
She got a bowl of slop, located Ryker after a long, panicked look, and together they found a table. They ate quietly together, Skylar breaking the silence first.
“How was today?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, looking thoroughly spent. “What about you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it either.”
“You smell like piss.”
“I know.”
“Is it yours?” he asked, his look serious.
“No.”
“I found my brother,” he told her.
She turned and said, “That’s great! I bet he was happy to see you.”
“Yeah, and no.”
“What do you mean no?” she stammered. Lowering her voice, she said, “But you got caught so you could get him out.”
“He’s dying of prostate cancer.”
After that, she didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. That night when they went out to the yard, the yard she’d cleaned on hands and knees, all the cots were in position. She didn’t expect to see her blanket or pillow, but it was there. She and Ryker walked to them in the near dark, and without a word, settled in for the night.
Lying in relative comfort (as opposed to picking up bits of dirt and getting pissed on), she gazed up into the night sky and tried to comprehend what Ryker had gone through to get there. How he walked right into an enemy run concentration camp only to learn it was all for nothing.
“What is his prognosis?” she asked. “Your brother.”
“I…I don’t know. We only had a few minutes to talk. At least he’s inside, though, you know? Not out here in the cold.”
She reached her hand out to this total stranger, who was lying close to her. He didn’t see it at first. There was still a lot to get used to. Like how everyone was sleeping next to everyone else in the entire field, with only a foot of walkway between them.
When he did see her hand, he took it reluctantly.
“I’m so sorry, Ryker,” she said.
“This world is teeming with disappointments,” he said. “What’s one more?”
“Sadly, this is true.”
“Shhh,” someone said.
The two of them had no more to say.
Skylar finally took her hand back when her shoulder started to ache, and that’s when she closed her eyes and was swept into yet another nightmare.
Chapter Forty
The next day, Ryker and everyone else woke to the blaring screech of overhead horns. He snapped his eyes open and sat up fast. Looking around, everyone else was getting up. Next to him, Skylar was having the same reaction. She looked cold. Like she’d been freezing all night.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded, her bruised and beaten face looking better. In contrast, though, her lips were blue and her teeth were chattering.
It was an icebox outside, and their blankets were thin and smelly.
“Everyone out of bed!” the voice in the overhead PA system finally screamed. Everyone got up. “Food is waiting!”
“I don’t think there’s anything in this place resembling real food,” Skylar grumbled.
He soon realized that there was no such thing as talking, or instruction. Everything important was conveyed to the refugees through screaming. This was designed to keep you rattled, locked in fear, practically in shock from the trauma.
The bodies crushed against one another as they headed for the cafeteria. The food the night before was bad, so bad, but this looked worse. When they got a bowl of something pasty resembling oatmeal, Skylar and Ryker sat together and looked at each other.
She leaned a little closer to him and said, “I heard there was a countdown.”
“To what?” he asked.
“An EMP,” she said. He now looked over at her, stunned. “I don’t know when it’s going to go off. That’s what I needed to get from the Minister of Propaganda. That was my mission.”
“When is it supposed to go off?” he asked.
“I told you I don’t know.”
“I thought you said—”
“I said I heard of the countdown. I’m not sure when it is because the countdown is being hosted on the dark web, run through multiple servers in SocioSphere. I found one of the servers. It’s like a drop site. I was able to get the word out before I was captured.”
“So your job is done?” he asked.
“This one.”
“What’s the next one?” he asked. “Because unless you’re giving yourself orders, this is like a body farm where no one gets to live.”
“I don’t know. What I can say for sure though, is that I should have died. They should have killed me after they found out about my treason.”
“Meaning?”
“They’re going to torture me here,” she said.
“You’re one in thousands of the worst malcontents these sorry bastards could find. We’re here to work. What did you do yesterday?”
“Picked up pebbles on the lower yard.” She showed him the raw tips of her fingers, then turned them sideways, highlighting all the tiny red fissures in the skin. “See?”
“And they pissed on you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“If that’s the worst of it…”
“They said it wasn’t,” she told him. “If I can just blend in, though, maybe they’ll forget about me.”
“Did they scan you?”
She knew what he was asking and though she didn’t want to tell him the truth, she needed to. “My Cyberlink is still active.”
He nearly dropped his spoon.
“What?”
The Cyberlink was a brain-machine interface invented by Darian Welch about ten years ago. It basically dropped a host of “threads” into your brain. Each of the one hundred threads contained more than five-thousand electrodes per array. What began as an experiment in helping paralyzed people eventually ended up turning people’s brains into the internet. The volume of data each person could process was astounding.
In the early 2020’s being brilliant was no longer the exception, it was the norm.
At first, the breakthrough was earth shattering. The push for the transhumanist movement was a force to be reckoned with. Merging man with machine was the natural rout
e humans were being herded to, so when the implants became available with a simple outpatient surgery and almost no recovery time, the masses flocked to local centers to get this done.
Skylar was one of them.
“I thought that if I had increased brain power, I could make a better life for myself. Or at the very least, not get left behind like the biologicals,” she explained. “Within a year, people’s systems started getting hacked. It was mass chaos. The system eventually failed, as I’m sure you know.”
Ryker knew quite well. They were told that if the hardware interface was removed, the “client” risked not only potential impairment of their regular brain functions, they could become brain-dead altogether.
To put people at ease, and to maybe avoid lawsuits, the users were informed they could disable the GPS tracking and internet interface modules and instead use the power it had to monitor disease in the body.
It felt like a cheap ploy. It worked though.
Everyone’s awesome new brain enhancing Cyberlink had been reduced to a freaking health monitor.
“Why haven’t you taken it out?” Ryker asked.
“I needed it to get in to the Minister’s office. Everyone working for the government must have one.”
“Because it’s still a tracking device?” he said.
“Yes,” she admitted. “I found a way to shut it off before…this, but when I got here, they scanned it and found it had been deactivated.”
“Did they say anything?” he asked.
“Not at first,” she answered. “They just turned it back on.”
“Good God.
She nodded her head, her features marred with defeat. “But then they said if I got out of line, they’d jolt me with shocks to the Cyberlink.”
“They can do that?”
“Remember when the systems were initially attacked and a small spike in heart attacks were reported?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Those were Cyberlink-induced heart attacks. Basically, back when they were still online, you could hack into the system and roast someone, anyone.”
“Good Lord,” he said, truly astounded. Smiling, but angrily, like he was mad and couldn’t believe it, he said, “So basically they’ve turned your health monitor into a tracking device and a shock collar, like you’re some kind of dog.”
“When did you get yours pulled out?” she asked.
“I never got one.”
“You’re strictly biological?” she asked.
He nodded.
Looking at the time, she said, “As illuminating as this conversation is, I have to go. I hear our cot assignments are permanent, so I’ll see you tonight. Or maybe for lunch or dinner.”
“I don’t think there is a lunch once you’ve been established,” he said.
“Dinner, then.”
She got up and left, and he sat there finishing what tasted like some sort of cementing gum. Whatever it was he was eating, it was going to sit in his colon like a brick and he wasn’t looking forward to that.
On the way out of the cafeteria, one guy must have affronted another guy because all of a sudden, there was some kind of pushing match. Seconds after that, the fists were flying. He stood on his toes to catch a glimpse of one guy slamming another guy’s head into the edge of the table. They were both bloody. Then someone retaliated on the guy who wasn’t falling face down in his own blood and more joined in after that.
The Chicom guards pushed through the masses with shock sticks, hitting everyone in their way. When they got to the actual brawl, everyone got doused with pepper spray.
Groaning, they fell to their knees in compliance while everyone else scrambled out of the mist, hoping not to get any of the stinging mixture on their skin.
Ryker was slowly moving with the crowd. The closer he got to the scene of the altercation, the more he felt a tickle on his skin. He tried to hold his breath as he walked by, and blink very slowly, holding his lids closed as much as he could.
From the corner of his eye, he saw one of the guards with a shock stick just cooking one refugee’s head. Just as Ryker was passing, the man’s head caught fire causing the Chicom to move the stick to the next man.
The acrid stench of burning hair permeated the air around him. He hated what he was seeing, but he was focused on the task ahead. Still, in the back of his mind, he knew that if the Chicom guards inside San Quentin were anything like they were on the outside, they’d leave the dead men for everyone to see.
Most people just sat around the yard, the cells, and in the gym not doing anything. It was as if the Chicoms didn’t know what to do with them yet. Or perhaps they cycled work teams.
He saw them, too.
There were guys washing the sides of the buildings, other guys cleaning out trashcans and air vents and cell floors and plastic beds. Of course there was also cooking, washing dishes and the cleaning of the kitchen to do.
He’d found a guard near the wing his brother was working and asked to clean the showers and toilets. The guard just laughed.
“It’s better than sitting out in the yard with nothing to do all day,” he’d said.
“Go volunteer somewhere else,” the man said.
“I’ve tried.”
“Go to motor pool. Wash trucks.”
“That’s the first place I went,” he lied. “C’mon man, just put me to work.”
When he saw some of the guys lining up, he’d heard they were being bussed out, reportedly to work inside the city, although no one really knew what they did. He didn’t want to do that because it would put him far from his brother. Getting him out was the only reason he’d come to this refugee/labor camp in the first place.
“Let me see,” he said as he went inside the old Officer’s and Guard’s Block. “Stay here.”
“The only happiness that is true is the happiness you feel in servitude,” someone next to him said.
“Why don’t you go with them into the city then?” he turned and asked the run down looking woman.
“I hear things,” she whispered.
“About the work brigades in the cities?” he asked, now interested. She nodded, her eyes ninety percent vacant, maybe more.
“They wash the Chicom’s vehicles, polish the boots of the soldiers in their field stations, haul dead bodies to the stacks after the death squads killed them.”
“I wondered who was doing all that,” he said.
“They aren’t fresh kills, mind you. We’d only moved the bodies after they spent days rotting in the sun, or bloated from the rain and the subsequent heat.”
She picked at something in her hair, looked at it, then rolled it between her fingers like fresh booger.
“You worked in the cities?” he asked, trying not to look at her hands. She nodded, her eyes clearing. “Was it…bad?”
She looked away, her eyes returning to that thousand yard stare.
“The only happiness that is true is the happiness you feel in servitude,” he said repeating her words. “What did you mean by that?”
“Service to God,” she whispered, low and conspiratorial.
Now he understood.
Everyone had some resistance in them, whether it be physically, mentally or emotionally. This woman was a Christian, something the Chicoms hated. But she was also broken, not lost, but close.
“They hate us,” she said, her withered hand dropping the nodule and flexing into a fist. Her eyes were clear and sharp again, her mouth twisted into a grimace.
He stood back.
“They hate that we love God more,” she all but hissed. And then she was back to her old self. “My sister died when we took the bus last time. They…they do things to the girls, you know, and sometimes the boys, too. She was my baby sister. Fifteen years younger.”
“What happen—” he started to say before the guard walked back outside.
“You still want to clean bathrooms, Gweilo?” he barked.
“Yes, sir,” Ryker said.
“Come th
en!”
“Good luck,” he said to the woman, but she’d already checked out.
Before he’d managed to hitch a ride back to the one place he swore never to return, San Quentin, he’d learned from one of the Chicoms he’d befriended on the outside that his brother was in North Cell Block.
When he thought of befriending the man, it wasn’t exactly like that. It only meant that he’d given the man’s family a chance to live. The things he had to do to get information about his brother sickened him to a large degree. But on the other hand, it had been a necessary evil and he’d pay his penance on the day of reckoning if need be.
As he followed the guard down the long hallway toward the bathrooms and showers, Ryker thought of the man’s family. Ryker was basically holding a woman and child captive until he got his brother out. Arrangements with friends were made for these two hostages to remain in captivity until his brother was out safely.
When he got to the bathroom/showers, he saw several of the Chicom guards lingering about. One of them came to meet him. This was his contact—the man whose family he was holding hostage.
He looked at Ryker with the most intense hatred imaginable. Ryker was no fool. He understood the guard’s feelings toward him. It served him right, he thought. This guy was used to being on the giving end of pressure, not the receiving end.
The guard quietly said to him, “Make contact, and then I will come and get you two. Once we leave, we’ll be heading to a bus into the city. You have seats saved. The driver will take you to the specified location, a burn site you’ll be cleaning up. There’s only one guard there and he knows you will run. He won’t chase you. Around the block, there will be a car waiting. If you do not take these men to my family, they will kill you. If you release my family unharmed, you will be free to go.”
“If this works,” Ryker said, “you have my word that nothing will happen to your family, and I will release them as promised.”
“If you double cross me,” he hissed, his breath sour with rage, “I will make it my life’s mission to find you and torture you for years to come.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Ryker said, cool.
As he walked inside the bathrooms, down a short walkway with five foot tall lockers (with no benches for seating—they’d been torn out), he thought of his brother, Boyd. He also thought of Skylar, which was a surprise. He’d only just met her, and even though she made one hell of a first impression, his focus should have been single-minded.