Early Bird

“How many days was it really?” Cue Ball asked, his dying breaths escaping his lungs, the harbingers of approaching terminal deliverance.

“Two thousand, two hundred and eighty-two.” Jackson lied.

The dying man’s eyelids spread apart in triumphant realization.

“I had you beat then” he whispered. A sarcastic smile spread across his face. “So, I was actually number seven.” Cue ball coughed.

Jackson was pretty sure Cue Ball believed him. Lying to a dying man brought little. Jackson lied anyway, angling for the remote chance the prison doctor could repair the damage done by other inmates trying to rearrange the seniority among prisoners.

Lying was the first layer of Jackson’s attempt to rewrite the facts within the prison. To control the facts was to control life and death. It was to control freedom. And in an inmate population with no formal written records, facts were sometimes easy to rewrite.

Facts were important to rewrite precisely because something had been written down. Section 4, subparagraph 2 of the Cultural Refinement and Moral Improvement Act stipulated that concurrent with the abolition of the death penalty, true humanity necessitated the yearly release of the longest tenured inmate in each of the prisons run by the republic.

Like all good legislation, the act made the underlying intent very clear. The act, and by extension Senator Gursley who authored it, was concerned with removing the stain of capital punishment from society’s soul. It also sought to elevate the moral fiber of the republic by improving the conditions of the incarcerated. After all, as the good senator was fond of stumping, “You can judge any nation by the way it treats its most vulnerable.”

Gursley’s best idea to that end had not been the improvement of the conditions inside the prisons, (The idea isn’t bad, but to pass it must be funding neutral!) but instead a celebrated release each year of the inmate who had been locked up the longest. Eight years into the program and Gursley had a spate of campaign photos with the newly released and rehabilitated.

Aside from the photos the act had provided another campaign boon. For reasons inexplicable to Gursley the prison system had seen an unprecedented rise in murder. Any inmate, including Jackson, and especially Cue Ball, could have laid out the reason very clearly for the Senator: the prospect of years of hard labor in the New Wastelands, often tantamount to the outlawed death penalty, was worth taking life to escape. Luckily the Senator had added a new paragraph to his speech and was working on a new bill to tackle prison violence just like he had solved the death penalty.

The cycle of violence was the same in all sixteen New Wasteland prisons. Year-round murder with a crescendo of executions leading to the release. In prison 4D, Jackson was saddened but unsurprised when news reached him that Cue Ball had died. Jackson didn’t care for Cue Ball, the man had been cruel and violent, but with him had died one of Jackson’s many lies. Constantly lying about his tenure was second nature to Jackson as it was for every man in the prison. Moving down on the unofficial list of length in prison was a more effective stay of execution than the act had ever provided.

The second layer of Jackson’s attempt to rewrite the facts was a small tally chart he scraped into the wall behind his bed. He had never shown it to anyone and made sure that the time it charted was appropriately longer than the lies he told. If ever discovered, he hoped the fact that it moved him up the list would make it seem more credible. The prisoners were so obsessed with figuring out who had been lying they were often willing to believe a very simple lie, so long as it proved the man in question was a liar.

The final layer of Jackson’s bid for freedom was that Jackson wasn’t really Jackson. His real name was Robert Westberg, although he had thought of himself as Jackson for years. Jackson had already been at 4D for eighteen months when he and the real Spencer Jackson had been sent to inspect organic mining tunnels for decommissioning. Spencer was relatively new at the prison and Jackson could tell Spencer wouldn’t last long. He was too soft for such a hard place. The two men were walking down one of the longer tunnels, inspecting it for any possible organic matter. War and a warming climate had ravaged biodiversity and scientists in the still habitable coastlines were hungry for any traces of DNA buried deep enough below the surface of the New Wastelands to be useable. The inmates were employed to dig below the waste-line and hunt for any plant or animal matter. This particular tunnel had been especially barren and was a prime candidate for decommissioning. Spencer had been inspecting a sinking support footer when he had what looked to Jackson like a heart attack. Miles from the prison proper there was nothing to be done for the stricken man.

Jackson did the next part on instinct; in all of his scheming he had never considered stealing another prisoner’s identity. He swapped everything with the dead man; boots, socks, underwear. Wrapped tightly around the body’s arm Jackson found a heart-shaped locket which he promptly wrapped around his own arm. Then the stroke of genius. A prison autopsy would probably match the deceased to their records with DNA. So fully dressed in the dead-man’s clothing he began to attack the untrustworthy footer. It broke and Jackson was rewarded with loud cracking in the ceiling. He turned and ran for the mouth of the tunnel, barely avoiding the collapse.

The cave in led to his first postmortem interview with the warden. Each time an inmate died the warden’s report required an interview with the last person to see the dead man alive and whoever discovered the body. Jackson sat at the desk and gave the Warden his report. Robert Westberg had died in the tunnel collapse, his body unretrievable under the weight of both rubble and funding restrictions.

From that day he had ceased to think of himself as Robert. That night, lying in the dead man’s bed, Jackson opened the locket. Inside was a picture of an angel. The girl was young, maybe only two or three. Her beaming smile was framed by large curls. In her eyes was a light and purity that put pain in Jackson’s stomach. The incongruence between the happy soul that looked out on the world and the disgusting world that looked back into the child’s face hurt Jackson even as it elevated him. He never let the other inmates see the locket. He guarded the knowledge of its existence fiercely. Each night he would open it, and during the day with the locket securely closed and hidden his mind would fixate on the picture all the same.

Jackson had no idea how old the girl was now or what her name was. He assumed she was Spencer’s daughter. In his mind he called her Early Bird because her bright eyes reminded him of songbirds.

Jackson’s interview with the Warden regarding Cue Ball’s death was unremarkable. The warden, who clearly didn’t know who Cue Ball was, or who he was interviewing, asked his normal questions and then dismissed Jackson. Still Jackson disliked the attention and decided he would not have another interview this year. The entire prison knew who the next men to die were. It would be easy to avoid being around to find their bodies.

Carter, Sandbox, and Indigo had all come to the prison in the same truck and had all been checked in on the same day. They each refused to say who had been checked in first, but among the three of them they knew the order had been Carter, then Sandbox, then Indigo. None of them realized a filing error had recorded Sandbox (legal name Devan Wiley) as the first to arrive but that most likely wouldn’t matter. No one knew the rules for releasing inmates with the same number of days served, and none of the three planned on taking any chances. According to the unofficial list these men were at the top.

An official list, and a DNA test, would prove that Robert Westberg a.k.a. Jackson, had arrived before them. Jackson planned to wait as long as he could to reveal his identity. There were still three weeks before the release, to come forward now would be suicide. Fifteen minutes before the picture with the senator sounded good to him. Maybe ten.

Carter was found strangled in a tunnel after failing to report back from a shift. Jackson wasn’t anywhere near the body, so he was angered when the Warden summoned him. He didn’t want Sandbox or Indigo believing he was doing anyone’s dirty work.

“Spencer Jackson, is it?” The warden asked.

“Yes sir,” Jackson replied.

“I’ve got some bad news for you,” the warden said, “You’d better sit down. Reba Hemp was killed in an accident last week so I need your signature regarding Sara.”

“Regarding Sara?” Jackson asked.

“Yes, because you, as your daughter’s only living guardian, are in the custody of the state we need your signature to move her into state care at the Theodor F. Gursley Capitol Juvenile School.”

Early Bird! So the girl was Spencer’s daughter, and apparently now an orphan. His bicep instinctively flexed, feeling the tightness of the locket’s chain around his arm.

“Oh yes, sure.” Jackson replied. “Just show me where to sign.”

The warden produced a set of papers from his drawer and Jackson signed them all. The warden shook his hand as he showed him to the door.

“You’re lucky Spencer, the Capitol School is very nice but its only for those whose legal guardians are prisoners of the state.”

Jackson’s mouth went dry. “And if I wasn’t a prisoner of the state?”

“Well then she wouldn’t need the school because she’d live with her father, of course”

“Oh, of course. But if she were orphaned?”

The warden gave Jackson a confused look.

“If she were orphaned, she would be the same as all the other orphans,” the warden said.

Jackson recoiled. With the war and the warming there were so many orphans that the state had largely given up on them.

“And what happens if I die in here, like Cue Ball and the others?” Jackson asked.

“Not to worry” the warden smiled, as if the thought of dying in prison really shouldn’t trouble Jackson. “Now that she has been admitted by a living, imprisoned, parent, she has been transferred to the care of the school and will be looked after perfectly well.”

Jackson slunk back to his cell. All of his rewriting, his planning, and this was the end. He thought of life outside, his earned place at the top of the list. He told himself he could find Early Bird and save her. For a happy hour he daydreamed of their life together. After all she was probably young enough that she wouldn’t remember her real father. He could be that father; he could protect her from the ugly in the world.

But even as he dreamed he knew he lied. A man who lied so often knew one when he heard it. In a city of millions he would never find her before it was too late. He opened the locket. Her innocent face filled him with joy and he smiled to himself. There would be no big reveal. He was Spencer Jackson now. He was not the longest serving inmate. And when he did finally go he would make sure there would be no autopsy, no one to unravel the puzzle, no one to invalidate the signatures on the school release. He held the locket in his hands and dreamed again, this time a true dream of a future he would never see.