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  None of us saw a thing. ECPAP was like that – always hiding the X-rated stuff from Elton, Bobby, and me. But that program did tell us that Congressman Bart Holman had had one helluva tumble that night. The girls? Seemed like they just slept through the whole ordeal.

  I started to voice my concerns about April. Like I said, she wasn’t the head-turner like the other girls, but she had a figure. And if she was hanging around with the Bitch Clique, somebody in Administration was bound to think she’d make an excellent hooker.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Bobby said, and he put his face in his hands. “It’s not —”

  “I’m afraid it already has,” Elton said before I could stop him. And it really didn’t matter that he said it. Bobby would’ve found out on his own since Elton had just revealed to us the recent developments which, why he was alerted to all of this before Bobby was, was a mystery. And a few minutes after the crime we’d just witnessed, Elton synced our tablets with his and showed us how to tap into SNUPE’s secret networks.

  Bobby got up and headed to his room. Elton followed him out. Me? I took a crap, got a sample, and slipped it into a small Ziplock bag. Congressman Burt Holman and his two guys would be joining us for breakfast in the morning. And, as protector of the student body, it was my job to feed our guests a meal they would remember.

  The following morning, three hours before breakfast, the Boneys were hustling up and down the halls, banging on everyone’s doors, dragging everybody out, shouting, cursing – the usual things when something was up. Come to find out, Boney Burlison had clogged his toilet. The whole thing had run over and seeped down through the ceiling and into the room below. Heck of mess. I know, because I had to go up there, plunge that toilet, and clean up everything up.

  And the reason they made me clean it up was this: the Clog Droid, which had been on duty only hours before, had just up and vanished. DEAD couldn’t recall it, SNUPE couldn’t find it, and Administration couldn’t raise the droid’s location on the GPS. Even Elton Peacock, our boy wonder, couldn’t figure out what had happened. But there it was. The Boneys searched the entire building for two solid days and questioned every student in the prison for the next five days. They never found that Clog Droid.

  I find it strange that officials at Long Wait never once wondered why Congressman Burt Holman left so quickly that night after his little soiree. After his lengthy, midnight debauch with those three girls from the Bitch Clique, he got dressed, told his aides to find their own way home, and left. Nobody saw him leave, nobody watched him get into his car, and nobody watched him drive away. Not Elton, not me, not Bobby Griffin – not anybody inside Long Wait Prison.

  The next day, just as I started closing up the cafeteria for the night, one of my big dishwashers took to rattling. I said goodbye to Elton and Bobby and walked back to my office closet to get my tools. When I got there, half my kit was gone, including all of my power drills and cutters, spare batteries, chargers, wrenches, everything.

  I grabbed my tablet from my back pocket to report the theft, but stopped myself before sending the message. I don’t know why I decided to not report the incident. Not really. Looking back, I like to tell myself I turned a blind eye for all kinds of reasons. In the end, though, I guess I just followed my gut instincts. And those instincts told me to keep the tool theft under wraps.

  I asked Bobby about the tools and the droid the next morning.

  Bobby, never missing a single beat with his spoon and oatmeal, said, “DEAD can build another Clog Droid. You can get more tools.”

  Chapter Eight

  I guess this is as good a place as any to tell you that, in the Fall of 2039, when Bobby turned nineteen, April left her little gig on the seventh floor and came back to work in the kitchen. It was like a dream come true for our little club to see Bobby and April get their thang back together. In fact, those two kids came together seamlessly, almost like they’d just picked up where they’d left off a few years earlier. It looked to me like they hadn’t missed a heartbeat in all that time. But that November was also about the time Headmistress Zoe Miller vanished from Long Wait Prison. Elton said she took the elevator down to the basement with Boney Burlison and his guys and, as far as he could tell, she never came back up.

  And neither did Karson ‘Nice Guy’ Burlison.

  A week later, Long Wait got a warden. Not a headmistress, but a warden. A hard one. A black bodybuilder of a woman by the name of Qwanisha Neal who wore the thin nap on her head like scrubbed steel wool. She’d never let you forget the fact that it was the President of the United States who had commissioned her to Long Wait. And the bulging mass just above her eyes and the razor nicks on her face never let you forget she was doing steroids. Her job? To find out why ECPAP wasn’t finished, to tighten the screws on everyone in Long Wait, and to oversee another government project the likes of which had some guys here jumping for joy.

  I know. You’re thinking all of this sounds too crazy to be real. And I will admit that, though I can remember things perfectly, it has been proven that people remember every single detail of things that never took place. I sometimes wake up at night pinching myself, asking if it’s possible that I can be dreaming and pinching myself. But the broken skin on my leg and the taste of the blood on my fingers tells me my nightmare here is very raw and very real.

  Warden Neal was after Bobby the moment she arrived. She hadn’t even unpacked before she had him standing at attention in her office with him stripped down to nothing except his socks and his boxer shorts. Okay. I get it. The socks and boxer shorts thing. It’s about power. About who’s in charge. But, with Warden Neal being the one plugged in here at Long Wait, it was also about who had the zap. Bobby told me she turned on some music, danced around him like he was a brass pole – whatever that meant – and stripteased herself down to her metallic gold bra and matching panties.

  Bobby wasn’t zapped, apparently.

  And Warden Neal beat him until he was nearly unconscious.

  Maybe it surprised me. Having been in the joint for as long as I have – coming at a time when there was still an innocence about me – I just assumed the best in people, Boney Burlison notwithstanding. And I still believe the best in people. But I knew right then that if Warden Neal was the best the President of the United States could do, then the country, if it wasn’t dead already, might be sucking its last breath.

  Bobby spent the next two days in the infirmary. Elton, April, and I came to get him the day they released him, and we all went to the common room on the second floor. There were a lot of kids there that day. Like us, they’d come to check out the new one-hundred-fifty-inch flat screen TV that had arrived at Long Wait in the wake of Warden Neal’s appointment. Don’t ask me how we got them or who sent them. But one was installed in every common room on every floor. Not only that, we got cable and a subscription to Netflix Horizon. By now, it no longer mattered that we had unlimited, unsupervised access to network news. Of course, we’d been allowed a certain amount of news on our tablets, but what we had now was different. It was part of a move by Administration that had something to do with normalizing Long Wait’s students.

  Normal. That was the word the people in Administration used. But I figured out pretty quick that what the word normal meant here, inside Long Wait, might not mean the same thing on the outside. My fears were confirmed about a month later when Warden Neal and the Federal Government started their infamous Seeding the Future Program.

  I know you’ll believe me when I tell you this because it’s all a matter of public record. You found out about the Seeding the Future Program in the comfort of your own home in front of your own TV. And that’s how we found out about it, too.

  One night, Bobby, April, Elton, and I were watching TV in the second floor common room with a bunch of other kids. We’d just finished looking at a slasher film. Why it was always slasher films may have had something to do with our true, inner feelings about our hosts here at Long Wait. Anyway, after the villain died, we s
aw an infomercial. And I’ll be if that infomercial didn’t start off with movies of Elton – Elton was still only sixteen at the time – lathering up in the shower. It would’ve been funny had it not been for the fact that none of us knew about any cameras in the stalls. Sure, we had a laugh or two as we sat there with our eyes glued to that TV. But when the lady on the infomercial introduced Elton, calling him by a different name, the room fell silent. Not only we did we hear about Elton’s IQ, but we got everything else, too. The color of his hair and eyes, his weight, his height, what his hobbies were, that he had no medical issues, that he wielded a five-and-a-half-inch truncheon, that he was nineteen years old – all of that. But, to top it all off, the lady said he was a virgin who would be able to take care of business in the blink of an eye, that he had a higher than average sperm count, and that his calendar was booking up fast. “Call and reserve Connor now and have the baby of your dreams!” the woman said, and an eight hundred number flashed on the screen. What followed was a clip of some naked kid and some older woman showering beneath a waterfall in the middle of nowhere with music playing.

  Bobby came next, as did several others. You get the picture, so I’ll spare you the details. Me? I never made it into the program. I was grateful nobody was looking for tall, blue-eyed chefs like me. In a way, it hurt my feelings because I hadn’t been chosen to participate in the program. But I knew right then that that was the Devil talking to me.

  Elton coughed and stirred in his seat. I knew right then that the news hadn’t bothered him in the least. “Well,” he said. “I don’t shower with women – not yet, at any rate – but I think —”

  “Cletus Hooper,” April whispered, with an evil grin. “The boy from Lick Skillet, Alabama!”

  We all laughed ourselves silly.

  Elton motioned for everyone to be quiet. He took everyone’s tablet, stacked them together, and set them under the coffee table. Elton had figured out sometime earlier that the tablet signals went goofy when you did that. But, like everything else that boy knew, he’d forgotten to tell us about it.

  With the tablets out of the way, April shared her plan. Cletus Hooper, the kid working landscaping on the roof, wasn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. He was dim or, like April put it, totally out. And I’m not talking about somebody who was just average. I’m talking stupid – and mean. Cletus Hooper’s family tree, which grew only in Lick Skillet, Alabama, was nothing like a tree. It was more like a telephone pole. And all he ever talked about once the hormones hit was how he needed to get laid. Elton was of the mind to oblige him. All we had to do was find out which room Elton was assigned to when the ladies arrived to be impregnated and get Cletus down there a few minutes before the party started.

  By this time, DEAD had any number of droids working the floors. There were lots of house cleaning droids – droids that mopped, dusted, vacuumed, and even one that picked up the trash. And Elton had control of every single one of them up to a point. All we had to do was put Cletus in the Garbage Droid, sneak him down to the first floor, and dump him. He’d hide under the bed and wait. When Elton arrived, the lights would go out, and the two boys would trade places. Those women would never know the difference. The money they were paying for Long Wait’s stud service included a small party with plenty of wine beforehand, and most of those gals were pretty well liquored up by the time they got to Elton’s room to be serviced by Cletus.

  “That’s kind of poetic,” Bobby said. “The droid picks up the trash and dumps it – right in the room. But how is that going to work for me? I don’t want to – to have you-know-what with a bunch of you-know-whos!”

  “Mario Kaepernick,” April said. “He’s about as handsome as you are.”

  I just knew that April had said the wrong thing, bringing up Mario Kaepernick’s name like she did. She’d left Bobby for that guy, and she’d spent quite a long time up there on seventh working with Droid Engineering and Development. But April and Bobby just looked at each other eye to eye for a couple of seconds. And then they started laughing, and I mean those two really shook the room. They laughed so hard that they had tears streaming down their faces. Elton and I just looked at each other wondering what we had just missed.

  By the time those two had laughed themselves hoarse, it was nearly time to call it a night. Come to find out, Mario Kaepernick, aka Mary Kaepernick, wasn’t a guy at all. He was a she – a dyke who, like Warden Neal, did all the steroids. He – she – even had undergone surgery where doctors had attached some donor’s – well, no need to go there because that’s just plain vulgar, unnatural, and sinful. The Good Book says so, and that’s all I needed to know.

  And the funny thing? Mario – Mary Kaepernick, once we talked to her, decided she was all in on our little plot to satisfy the ladies. Our little agreement ended up costing me a fair amount of grocery goods down the line. But it was worth it.

  Mary played her part perfectly. A few months into the Seeds for the Future Program, Administration declared Bobby Griffin (Mary Kaepernick) sterile and took him off the line. Elton? Or should I say, Cletus? He became a legend over the next few years, a star, as some would say. Not only could Cletus service two women a night, but he was also good for seven days a week for six months straight. Because he was working so hard – I did the math and figured he’d generated some serious money for the Federal Government and impregnated more than one hundred eighty women – Warden Neal cut his hours back. No longer would Cletus, who was subbing admirably for Elton, be working seven days a week. Instead, he’d be performing on Friday and Saturday for a total of six encounters a week.

  When it was all over, Cletus Hooper had impregnated over two thousand, high-society women, all of whom later gave birth to stupid or below average children. And not a single kid resembled Elton Peacock in any way. I could only imagine what the future looked like long after all of us who’d done time here at Long Wait Prison had passed away. Of course, near idiots would inherit their families’ fortunes and squander them long before the ink on the checks even dried. And I have no doubt that, sooner or later, genealogical and DNA research would lead those people to a yearly family pilgrimage to Cletus Hooper’s hometown of Lick Skillet, Alabama.

  And they would wonder about what had gone so terribly wrong in the gene pool.

  Chapter Nine

  2044 was the year that rocked the world as we knew it at Long Wait Prison. We’d heard it on the news, read about it on our tablets, talked about it among ourselves. That was the year the President of the United States, Marquez ‘Wonderboy’ Forti, issued an executive order to implant chips in every single person in America. He announced it one day on TV, and we all heard it.

  Carrying tablets was one thing. They could be fooled, and we knew how to dodge prying eyes and listening ears in a pinch. We’d get caught every now and then trying to sidestep surveillance, and then we’d get a ticket to the eighth floor to see the Boneys. Since I was the chef, I’d get a light beating and nothing more. No solitary confinement for me: I was the guy who did all the food. That, and everyone knew I was the man with the power to make you regret doing just about anything. Sometimes, my Boney informant would let me off with a warning, but it cost me.

  About this time, there was a new Senator from Tennessee. The guy’s name was Kevin Tyler. He’d been appointed by the Governor of the State, Otis Youngblood, after Senator Wayne Billings had been arrested on child porn and child molestation charges.

  “There’s something about this Tyler guy,” I said to Bobby and Elton one night as we watched the new senator live on Rod Binkman’s late-night talk show.

  “Yeah,” Bobby said, with his eyes glued to the TV. “You don’t know if you want to laugh or cry.”

  And Bobby was right. I'm not sure if it was Senator Tyler’s sense of humor that hooked us, or if it was his painful past that spoke to us. Maybe it was both. But this guy was special.

  “Everyone wants to get close to him,” Elton said, smiling and nodding at Bobby. “Seems like he’s th
e guy to get your picture taken with.”

  “And his is the name to drop,” Bobby said.

  Senator Kevin Tyler had the looks, that was for sure. His brown, perfectly-groomed hair hung awkwardly over a sculpted, friendly face. He had violet eyes, eyes that said, “I care” in a way you knew he did. And the guy had perfect bearing and a countenance that screamed, “Luck!” Not bad for a guy only thirty-five years old.

  “Guy’s from an orphanage,” Bobby said. “Poorest of the poor. He works his way through Vanderbilt University, becomes a lawyer – the world’s his oyster. And did you hear —?”

  “Shush,” I said, because I wanted to listen to what the senator had to say.

  “I hate to say it, but President Forti is trampling the Constitution,” Senator Tyler said, and the entire studio audience began to stir and mumble. “First of all, the President’s chip program is immoral and illegal; and, second, even if it weren’t, it’s Congress’s job to write the laws.”

  After that, you could hear a pin drop. Here was a guy who’d just been named to the Senate, a young, charismatic guy, and he’d just made it clear that he wasn’t about to play ball with any of those sumsabitches up there on Capitol Hill. Even Rod Binkman – a guy known to jab at politicians every now and then – looked like he’d been numbskulled by what the senator had just said.