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TWO GUARDS CAME AT sporadic intervals, stopped in front of a random cell, called a name, and carted that person away in cuffs and a shock collar. Those people did not come back. As a consequence, the inmate population dwindled, sometimes by only one per day, occasionally as many as three. No schedule, no order, and no reason given for the removal.
It was the same two guards every time, or clones from the guard factory, wearing black pants tucked into jump boots, flak vests, and helmets with black visors. We called them the Ushers of Doom.
By the end of the first week, only forty-two of the original sixty-odd CoL prisoners remained. Some cells were empty, some with only one or two occupants, and others—like ours—were full. With nothing to do but sleep, eat, and talk, my cellmates speculated for hours about where their friends were going, and what was happening when they got there. We couldn’t get anything out of the ushers or the regular guards. The only thing they ever said to prisoners, beyond commands to go here, sit there, and stop, was “fuck off.”
They said that to me a lot.
It got to where those chosen by the ushers would make their final march between the cells calling out to as many of their friends as they could, saying goodbye and remember me to my kids, and keep your chin up, keep fighting. Rah. Rah. Rah.
I stayed mostly to myself, crammed into my bunk while John counted off a zillion pushups a day before he flipped over to crunch his abs into chiseled marble. He had the right idea, using the enforced idleness to exercise. I considered it, I really did, but in the end, staying in my bunk seemed wiser. Exercise would be good for me, but it also meant displaying my pathetic lack of strength in front of Millie and the guys. I could do... ten, maybe twenty, pushups? The comparison would not be flattering.
We measured time into sections, divided by events: lights up, breakfast, lunch, dinner/TV time, lights down.
After breakfast and before lunch, on day seven by my count, the ushers escorted another prisoner to the exit. It was Goldie, the dumpy woman with the yolk poster I’d laughed at. A mother of three grown children, she liked horses, quilting, and cooking. She owned twin Pomeranians named Snowflake and Aster. Snowflake had bad hips, but Aster seemed okay and would probably outlive her sister.
Hey, it was a small lockup and sound traveled well, what can I say?
“Bye, Millie!” Goldie called as she passed. “Bye, guys! Don’t worry about me; I’ll see you soon! Oh. You too, Joe.”
Millie, John and Alex crowded close to the bars and called out encouraging, platitudinous vomitus regurgitatus until the orange metal door at the end of the hall buzzed and Goldie disappeared.
The blond munchkin put her back to the corridor and slid down the steel bars to slump on the floor. She wiped a sleeve across her eyes before burying her head between her knees. John patted her with a hand big enough to hold a watermelon, leaning way, way over to do it.
“I’m sure Goldie will be just fine,” he crooned.
“No doubt,” Alex agreed. His tone suggested rainbows and picnics for lunch, with a chocolate fountain for dessert.
Millie’s voice, muffled from between her knees, floated out. “But where are they going? What’s happening to our people?”
The trio had worked hard to keep me from learning much about their organization, but I’d picked up enough, through body language and half-heard comments, that Millie—formally known as Millicent Margorie MacCauley (Yeah, no kidding)—held a leadership position in the Chicago Children of Liberty Secret Decoder Ring Society. She might even be the group’s top dog. Well, not dog, exactly (one would not use the word “dog” in association with Millie), but head honcho, grand poobah, and Ultimate Supreme Leading Chief MF in Charge.
“What are you people so worried about?” I asked her. “It was just a freakin’ street protest. That’s like, what, a fine? A slap on the wrist? It’s not like you people were sneaking pocket nukes into the Kluczynski Building.” Meaning the John C. Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago.
“Just a street...” Millie gaped at me, her blue eyes outlined in red. “Joe, tell the truth, are you an alien from the planet Delusion, orbiting the Black Hole of Ignorance?”
“Third rock from the dumb,” Alex threw in.
“I—What the hell, de Galvez? Thanks, buddy, love you too,” I said. “No, Mini-Millicent, I am not—Look... a bunch of people with plastic signs holding up traffic, that’s what? Disturbing the peace? Obstructing traffic? Violation of grammar rules on protest posters? A misdemeanor, at most. You people act like you’re being held by the Spanish Inquisition.”
“If it’s such a small deal,” John chimed in, “why are you still here? You’re not even one of us, and you’ve been in jail a week now.”
Millie held her palms up, as if in appeal to a higher power. “Yeah, Joe, why is that? Why do you think they grilled you about the organization? Why did they invoke the DTA to arrest you for a misdemeanor? The Do-mes-tic Ter-ror-ist Act, Joseph. Think about it.”
“Hey, but they still have to prove it,” I argued. “They can’t just take you out back and shoot you.”
“There’s worse things than getting a bullet to the head.”
“Yeah, right. 24-7 in a teeny cell with you people, for one. Don’t you have lawyers lined up? A bunch of ACLU-types ready to file motions and whatnot?”
“Gosh.” Millie’s jaw dropped in mock astonishment. “I wish we’d thought of that.”
“Yes, we have lawyers,” Alex explained. He paced the narrow runway between the bunks, from the toilet to the door and back. “And I’m sure they’re causing a stink right now, and that may be why our people are being taken away, going to bail hearings and being cut loose.” He directed that last part at Millie. She nodded with a distinct lack of conviction. “But the feds have all the cards in this game. You may not know it, but they can hold someone indefinitely on suspicion of terrorist activity, US citizenship notwithstanding. It started after the terrorist attacks around the turn of the century—”
“Oh God, please no,” I moaned. “No more lectures.”
“—when the police needed more investigative authority to find the jihadists operating inside the borders. In response, the fanatics invented more devious methods to kill innocent civilians. Most attempts were foiled, but a few got through, and people died in attack after attack. Pinpricks, really, unless you were one of those pricked. Scared people want safety and security, not some esoteric concept of individual liberty, and so we have the DTA and other laws that broadened police powers and curbed our constitutional protections.”
“What do you do for your day job, de Galvez?” I said. “The way you can spin anything into an anti-government rant, you have to be an advertising exec or lawyer.”
“Heh, no, wrong on both counts.” His white teeth flashed in a smile. “High school history teacher.”
“That was my third guess.” I turned my back to him. “Look, no one has to explain jihadists to me; my parents were killed by a suicide bomber. On their first vacation in thirty years, in London.”
After that, no one said anything else. John practiced isometric exercises on the bars, pushing and pulling like he would bend the steel with his bare hands, then turned around, grabbed the bars over his head, and started vertical knee raises. Millie crawled back to her bunk and flopped on the thin mattress, one arm over her eyes, while Alex wandered around the tiny cell, poking at this and that.
I drifted into a doze and didn’t notice when the ushers showed up. A collective feeling of Oh shit charged the atmosphere in the cell; a sensation I couldn’t describe, but one that my survival instincts recognized and jolted me out of my snooze. Wake up, dummy, the lions are here to eat you.
“Oh hey, look, guys,” I chirped, “the Rainbow Rangers are here for a visit. Let’s have a tea party.”
“Fuck off,” said one of the ushers. With facemasks on, it was hard to tell which one.
“Alexandre Favio Martinez de Galvez,” said the left or right usher. “Step forward.”
“Favio?” I asked. “Seriously?”
“It’s a family name,” Alex told me. He grinned and shook my hand, back-slapped John, and hugged Millie. “See you guys on the other side.”
They went through the handcuff drill, buzzed open the door while staying well back—after, I might add, telling John to stay waaaay the fuck over there—and led Alex out, hands on their stun rods the entire time. The cell door closed with a buzz-click, and a moment later so did the exit door.
And then there were three.
***
“I SPY... SOMETHING brown.”
“Dead roach by the toilet,” said Millie. “You did that one already.”
“Oh.” I squinted. “I don’t think it’s dead. It moved under the sink.”
“And you’re telling me this why?”
Day 13, and Millie and I were all that remained of the original fantastic four. Of the other prisoners, sixteen CoL protestors occupied nine cells. We still had no idea where their friends went: if they were dancing in the streets free as birds, moldering in a damp basement torture chamber, or decomposing in a lime pit somewhere.
An influx of new prisoners added to the cellblock population—all of them low-priority burglars, muggers, dopies—another baker’s dozen inmates. They all sang the same song of the incarcerated, I Didn’t Do It, off key, but with feeling.
None of these maligned citizens had a clue about the fate of the people whose cells they now inhabited.
In my little corner of paradise, Millicent Margorie MacCauley (or 3M, as I now called her) and I had the cell to ourselves. The ushers came for John—who I now knew as John Carter Marsh (I think they made these names up)—the day after they hauled Alex away. We two remaining musketeers had reached an accord whereby I didn’t bring up certain subjects, like say the benefits of free healthcare, and Millie didn’t call me “a brainwashed product of the modern no-education system.” Everything else was fair game.
Like when I said, “What do you do when you’re not tearing at the foundations of our government and economy?”
“I sew clothes for orphan children and bring food to the homeless.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’re right, I’m kidding.” Her nose crinkled when she grinned. It was... it was cute. “No, I train dolphins to swim into the Potomac carrying sea-to-ground missiles, which they fire at the White House.”
“Hah! Don’t even joke about that in here. Besides, you can’t fool me; I know nothing can swim in the Potomac and survive.”
“You’re too sharp for me, Joe. So tell me about Chelle. What’s she like?”
That was... when the hell was that? Six days ago? Five? One day blurred into the next, and I only knew the total number from the hash marks I made in the brick mortar with a chip of stone I found. Thirteen total. Longer than I’d ever gone, post-puberty, without an erection. A novel experience for me, having a conversation with a woman where the objective wasn’t to score.
We just... talked.
It was weird.
***
MILLIE’S VOICE, FROM the other bunk. “Do you think they feel anything?”
“Who?”
“Revivants.”
“Sweet Mary, I hope not.”
“What about traces of their old personality? Memories? Would they remember who they were?”
“You’re killing me, 3M.”
“If you saw someone you knew on the street, someone who’s, y’know, an RVT, what would you do? Would you try and talk to him... it?”
“I—I honestly don’t know.”
“I think I’d try to communicate. If I were a Revivant, would you talk to me?”
“Oh, hell no.”
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“WERE YOU AN ASTRONAUT?”
“We don’t have astronauts anymore, Joe. NASA was scrapped in the 20s, and all the private stuff is unmanned.”
“I knew that. A pilot then?”
“I have a hard time reaching the pedals on a car—you think I could fly a plane?”
“What? They don’t have booster seats? You’re pretty smart under that blonde disguise you wear; I’m thinking something pretty technical.”
“And you? You put on a good stupid act with all your wiseass, and you’ve been brainwashed—”
“By the no-education system, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“—by the no-education system, but you let slip some almost bright ideas once in a while. Did you go to college?”
“I was in my second year at Northwestern, taking Advanced Electrical Engineering, when Chelle got pregnant, and I quit school to be a daddy.”
“She got pregnant? How the hell did that happen?”
“Well, when a man puts his penis—”
“No, I mean with all the birth control available today...”
“Which only works if the stuff they give you at the pharmacy isn’t too out of date.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“Exactly.”
***
“I SPY SOMETHING BROWN...”
“Joe, please. Find something else.”
“Crawling up the side of your bunk.”
“Oh, fuck! Where? Get it off! Don’t just lay there... wait, why are you laughing? You asshole. I’m going to cut your balls off when you go to sleep tonight.”
“Eh. I’m not using ’em anyway.”
***
ON DAY 22, THE USHERS came for me.