Free The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers Page B

of some hardcase System Pig—it was the difference between juvie and just being beaten to death, or worse. It had been easy time, and I’d made my first big-deal contacts back then, older kids on the cusp who introduced me around, put the first knife in my hand, pointed me at someone’s jugular and the big money. Easy as it had been, there’d been chores, and bored Crushers with electric prods to get your ass in motion, and I’d gone to bed every night sore and exhausted from cleaning the fucking bathrooms until they glowed and a million other backbreaking chores.
     
Chengara Penitentiary was something completely unexpected. I’d been in-house for a week and so far hadn’t been given a single chore, command, or beating. There were Crushers around, sure, but we only saw them when something went seriously off the rails, when a riot seemed to be brewing. Then they were everywhere, all at once, but only as long as it took to get things back in order, and then poof! They were gone again.
     
Mainly, they used water to keep us quiet.
     
The heat was like a heavy bolt of fabric stretched all around us, suffocating. Twice a day we got our nutrition tab and water ration. We lined up, meek and quiet, took our share, and did our best to make it last, to make it seem like it was enough. It wasn’t. It was just below enough, making us all shrink. And when we acted up, the next ration got canceled, and you spent a sleepless night feeling your own body chewing on itself. In my week it had happened twice, and already I’d been trained to just get on line and keep my mouth shut.
     
Meanwhile, there was no work detail, no required activity, no schedule at all aside from the dole. We lounged around, we got into fights, we worked a primitive economy, and we talked a lot about the jobs we’d pull when we got out, and the Crushers let us. As long as we didn’t cause too much trouble, they let us do whatever we wanted and didn’t seem to care.
     
I eyed my two admirers while the dole line moved forward a step. In front of me were five or six soft-looking middle-agers, two men and a woman in their thirties who’d aged considerably since arriving, their faces haggard, their posture slumped. They wore their jumpsuits like they hurt them. When they’d arrived a week before they’d been plump and sleek, if a bit ruffled. Politicos, support staff for some Undersecretary—now just People of Interest, like the rest of us. It was the strangest prison I’d ever heard of, but some things were universal, like having people who wanted to kill me.
     
The skinny Asian kid who’d jumped me off the train and the longhaired asshole I’d disarmed out in the yard a few days ago had made friends and were out of line a dozen feet ahead of me. They leaned against the wall in their bright orange suits, staring at me. When I’d first noticed them, I’d been incredulous—was their plan really to just stand there waiting for me to come within reach and then jump me? It seemed impossible. The line moved a foot at a time toward the little booth where the single Crusher stood, taking his damned time about issuing each prisoner’s ration. I kept my hands in my jumpsuit’s pockets, one wrapped around the shiv I’d taken from the longhair, the other curled into a fist.
     
The line lurched forward, and suddenly someone was at my side. Since he only came up to my elbow, I knew it was Michaleen, and didn’t even look down at him.
     
“Fucking morons,” I muttered. “You see this?”
     
It was amazing how quickly I’d taken to the little man. His wrinkled, loose face was folded around an unlit cigarette, as usual, and his hairy, short arms disappeared into the deep pockets of his own jumpsuit. “The youth of today,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a fuckin’ tragedy.”
     
I nodded. “Give me some room, Mickey.”
     
He pulled one short arm from his suit and laid a calloused, gentle hand on my arm. “Not here, Avery, not here. You can get away with a lot, but you don’t fuck