New Taboos (2 page)

They were thirty-six-inch-diameter wastewater pipes—Rudy could see the lengths of black plastic pipe stacked up against the cinderblock wall of the interior barricade. There weren't any windows on this side of the prison because they didn't want the inmates to have a view of whatever was past the wall. Which had given rise to a theory … that Statewide staff lied about the extent of the prison system. That it wasn't really as big as all Arizona. Rumor had pod 775 only about forty miles from the southern border, and if this was, as some claimed, actually the southern edge of the prison, then it was desert between here and the border. There'd be the occasional drone flying over, out there. But a man would have a chance, if he could jump that robot freight train …

Steve was taking several white towels from inside his shirt. He must have stuffed them there when they'd passed through laundry.

“You sure it's blind on this side?” Rudy asked, his tongue thick from the Vicodin.

“Cameras dead over here,” Steve said, going over to manhandle a segment of pipe. “Just another thing they're ‘working on.' Hey hodey-man, that ever a surprise, something doesn't work around here?”

No, Rudy reflected, that was never a surprise. The McCrue corporation spent as little as possible on prison maintenance. Air conditioning often went out in the summer; heat in the winter. Electricity had blacked out twice in the last three months. Water stopped flowing five or six times a year. McCrue would do maintenance on the auto guards before it'd fix air conditioning, of course. Sometimes the computer-controlled cell doors opened in
the middle of the night, for no reason. The gates would immediately close again, because of an emergency override switch.

Wincing when he bent over, Rudy helped drag the six-foot pipe segments out, and lined them up. Steve started hooking them together. The wall was only thirty-three feet high here, not counting the antipersonnel wire. Maybe this would work.

Rudy could see blood blotching through Steve's loose orange trousers, in the back, where his own tracker wound was starting to bleed from all the activity. He felt his own rump—yeah, it was starting to bleed too.

Just power through it,
he told himself.
Cowboy up.

He looked around for guards, living or robotic; didn't see any. Didn't see any inmates, either. This area was supposed to be closed off but a maintenance door had been left unlocked for the sewage pipe crew.

“It's show time, kumquat,” Steve said. He took the lower end of the joined-up length of pipe, Rudy took the upper, being taller, and they leaned it in place against the cornering of two walls. The connected pipes sagged a little, but Steve had jammed them together hard. It might hold. Climbing was going to hurt, though.

Cowboy up.

Rudy steadied the lower end of the pipe, as Steve draped the towels around his neck and started to clamber up, like an islander going up a palm tree after a coconut. He used the slight bulge at the joins for handholds. His weight pressed the pipe's lower end into the soft, sandy earth. Rudy kept expecting it to fall apart, but it didn't. Steve didn't weigh as much as he did, though.

It was dark now. When Steve got to the top he was a silhouette against a blue-black sky. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “You coming or not?”

“No way it's gonna hold my weight …”

But Steve was up there, hunching on the wall, looking down at him. Waiting. Rudy could see the towels Steve had draped over the antipersonnel wire, to make it climbable. If he turned back now, he'd look weak in the pod, and anyway he'd lie awake nights wondering if he'd lost his chance. He was stuck in the system, here; he wasn't likely to get out for at least fifteen years. Just too much debt, too many rule infractions. They had too much incentive to keep prisoners in.

He wanted to see Lulie. He could arrange for her to come to Mexico …

“Are you coming or what, Rudy?”

“I guess.” Rudy took a deep breath and started up the pipe, teeth grinding with the pain in his buttocks. After a few yards he felt blood seeping down the back of his leg, and the pipe sagging under his weight. He expected the pipes to fall apart at the joins any second.

Then Steve grabbed him by the collar, and Rudy scrambled the rest of the way up.

He and Steve starting pulling the plastic pipe up, grunting with the weight of it. It stayed together, jammed by their climb. It seemed all one piece of pipe now.

They got it up, then over the wire, and tipped the pipe down. Then lost it. The pipe fell sideways with a wince-making
clunk
to the ground on the other side.

“Shit!” Steve muttered. But he wasn't talking about the pipe. He was standing, holding onto the towel-padded, waist-high razor wire, staring south.

“Shit,” Rudy echoed. They had both hoped the rumor was true; that they might see nothing but desert beyond the wall. But prison rumors were usually wrong, and what they saw was a road, a deserted highway. And on the other side of the highway stood another wall. And beyond that, a ways back, was another wall. And beyond that, another prison building rose up … and guard towers …

Along the highway were alternating streetlamps, leaning in over the tarmac to cast down cones of yellow light …

“Shit,” Steve said, yet again.

“Yeah. We better go back, man.”

Steve shook his head. “We're
locked out
now, dumb shit. The
time.
You know? Locked out of the tier! We got to keep going! That highway has to lead to a way out. We've still got the pipe for the outer walls.”

“We're taking the pipe with us down the road?”

“We got no choice, kumquat.” Steve was already climbing over the wire, using the towels.

Rudy groaned and followed. “We got no way down …”

“Sure we do,” said Steve, pausing on the top of the wall, the other side of the wire. “You want some of this before you go?”

He held a little plastic bindle of yellow powder over the wire. Prison meth. Cheap and dirty.

“No, hodey, I don't need a fucking heart attack on top of bleeding to death.”

Steve shrugged, grinned, horned some up off a fingernail—and stepped off into space, pulling Rudy with him.

“Shit fuck!” Rudy hissed.

Then he hit the ground. First his feet, then his wounded ass—then he was sliding in sand until he felt dirt clods on his shoulder blades. He jarred to a stop.

He heard Steve chuckle beside him. He thought that was
funny?

“You hurt, Rudy?”

Rudy was trying to figure that out himself. He turned over, got to his feet, swaying. His feet hurt, maybe one was a little sprained; his ass cheek was bleeding. But nothing seemed broken. “Not much.”

“Okay. Let's get the pipe …”

They picked up the still-joined pipe, carried it across the highway, half running, Steve taking the lead, like two men with a battering ram. They got it to the ditch—and both of them dived flat in the concrete ditch as headlights came around the curve of the highway ahead.

A car hummed up, and by, headlights coming, tail-lights going, all in a moment.

They lay there by the pipe, breathing hard, listening. No more cars.

But Rudy thought he heard something else: a whining sound overhead. “You hear a drone?” he whispered.

“Maybe … maybe so … but they're always whizzin' around the grounds. They're self-guided, these around here, and cheap as shit. They don't see much, especially in the dark.”

Rudy doubted they didn't see much, but he didn't argue. He didn't even want to think about the drones. Or the worm.

They stood, and wrestled the pipe up to waist level. Sweat was coming out on Rudy's forehead, burning his eyes.

“Come on, Rudy, goddamnit. We keep going, we find that robot train.”

“Don't get ahead of me, you'll pull the pipe apart, Steve.”

They trudged along till another set of lights came, this time from behind them. They flattened and the truck rumbled by. They waited till it was around a curve, and then they started off again …

There was a sliding, chuffing, metallic grinding sound, from behind …

Rudy was afraid to look.

“Fuck,
fuck,
” Steve muttered. “They sent out the …”

Feeling all clenched up, Rudy dropped his end of the pipe, turned—and looked.

The worm was coming at them like a bad dream. It was about sixty feet long, its body about three feet in radius. It was multi-segmented, its outer skin a mesh tube, nickel-titanium alloy for its muscle—shape-memory alloy expanded and contracted to some internal heat-based prompt. The former IT engineer in Rudy almost admired the worm—unspeakably sophisticated inside, outside it was based on one of the most primitive of organisms. Peristaltically humping, stretching out, humping up, stretching out, it came toward them, in and out of light pole glow, a lamp on its near end for the cameras mounted in the rotating eye cluster.

The worm was a legend at Statewide—but they knew it was real, too. They hadn't known their own pod had one. Staff was secretive about security tech, and the lockiffers just smiled mysteriously when asked about the worm.

Steve had always said, “That creepy smile is just to scare you. They haven't got one here …”

But they did.
The drone,
Rudy thought. The drone had seen them, and it had sent the worm.

“Fucking run!” Steve shouted, dropping the pipe.

“I don't think we should, man! We gotta surrender! We can't outrun that thing—”

But Steve was already running. Rudy just watched the worm coming—raising his hands over his head so its cameras could take in his surrender. Maybe that would work, maybe not.

The worm turned its segmented metal and plastic snout toward him, reared up, seemed to hesitate a moment. Then it turned, rushed past him, humping with flashing speed, stretching with a whoosh and a
creak,
speeding up … catching up with Steve. Its mechanical body blocked Rudy's view as it reared over Steve. One second …

Then it slapped down. Steve's scream was short, and sharp.

Rudy waited where he was, keeping his shaking hands over his head. Pretty soon the lockiffer trucks came, and he shut his eyes against the glare of their headlights.

2. JULY

Welcome to Arizona Statewide Prison and Park Access

Underneath those words, in much smaller letters, it said,

A Joint Project of the McCrue Corporation and the State of Arizona.

Faye had abundant time to look at the sign. Her old Chevy was only thirty feet away from it, in a long line of idling cars flanked by other lines of idling cars on the sun-washed highway. They were all waiting to get through the border into Arizona from southeastern California.

Most of the cars had their engines going so they could run the air conditioner in the hot July midmorning sun. Light splashed from the solar collection roofs of the cars. Lots of wasted reflected sunlight, Faye thought.

She sighed. The tedium of the wait was like a stiffened thumb pushing on her forehead. Maybe she shouldn't have come alone, should've brought a photographer at least, someone to talk to. But it had taken months to get permission for her own visit.

She looked at the line of cars to her left, going through one of three entry lanes. They mostly contained people alone in their vehicles, like her. She saw only one family; chubby mother and father, chubby little girl and boy, in a shiny blue hybrid minivan, all of them watching a movie on a popped-up dashboard screen. The rest of the waiting drivers were mostly young to middle-aged men and women, tapping smart phones or staring at the checkpoint; probably here for an interview, hoping to get a job in the penal system.

Stretching, Faye thought about eating some of her fig cookies, and told herself,
No, you're not really hungry, don't eat till you are.
She distracted herself toying with the car radio. Stations blared and receded, crackled and chattered; Spanish-language and Spanglish voices came through. Then she found the public service channel she was looking for: a woman's pleasant voice, her tone like a
recording cheerfully welcoming you to a theme park. She sounded as if she might burst into laughter at any moment.

“ … a warm Arizona welcome to visitors. Visitors to inmates may enter only in Statewide visitors' buses. Non-detention visitors to the state fall into four categories. Tourists are category one, and are required to take the overland express to State and National Parks; category one visitors will need a One Pass. Job applicants are category two and will need a Two Pass. Contractors or prospective contractors on business are category three and will need a Three Pass. Category four is miscellaneous media or retail workers …”

That would be me, Faye thought. Miscellaneous media? Maybe I should introduce myself as Miss Alaneous instead of Ms. Adullah.

If she did, they wouldn't laugh. They'd stare. They'd double check her. It was like going through an HSA screening but worse.

“… and if you're category four, you will need a Four Pass, preprinted with correct scan code.”

She patted the folder on the seat beside her, with her print-out Four Pass in it, and all the contingent paperwork.

The line inched forward …

About noon she ate the fig cookies and drank some coffee, looking around for a restroom. There was a cinderblock restroom building to the side of the road, but suppose the line moved while she was in the bathroom?

She waited. She thought about her father in Tel Aviv, and wondered if he was going to get his own pass, for over there—a Palestinian Parentage Pass. She remembered Dad watching her sister Weilah die in the Second Ebola Wave.
Dad's face mostly hidden by the white protective mask as he wept soundlessly. He'd left the USA for Tel Aviv, after that, to help his brother in his shop, within a month of Weilah's burial.

She rarely heard from her father anymore. When they talked onscreen he didn't look at her much. She looked too much like Mom, maybe, except for her dark skin, big dark eyes—those were from her father.