They’re just people, trying to survive. They don’t want to create a perfect society or further the human race. They want protection from the Floraes, and given all that I know, maybe that’s better than anything New Hope has to offer.
Jacks continues to pull me along, and I follow, clinging to his hand. I need to find Ken, and Jacks can help me with that. Maybe I don’t need to find out what else there is to know about this awful place. Jacks holds my arm as I leap over a pool of sewage. A man pushes by Jacks and stops dead in his tracks when he sees me. He’s all sinew, gleaming black eyes and rotten teeth.
“Well, hi there,” he says with a leer.
Jacks knifes between us. “She’s mine,” he says quietly, nose-to-nose with the man. Jacks’s face has hardened into a mask. It’s the same expression he wore when he spoke to Tank and Pete. The man with bad teeth doesn’t argue and gives me one final glance before moving on.
“Yours?” I ask as we resume our trek through the chaos of the exercise yard, as if nothing had just happened.
“Listen, it’s just how it works. I told you. Do you want a bunch of ex-cons fighting over who gets to own you?”
I shake my head. Subservience—even fake—doesn’t come easy, but if it means my safety, I’ll let people think that I “belong” to Jacks.
A child scurries by me, and I feel his small fingers brush over my hip and rest on my pack. I grab his arm and he looks at me, wide-eyed and innocent. He can’t be much older than Baby, and my heart softens. I take a protein bar from my pack and give it to him. He scowls and runs away without a word.
Jacks watches this interaction with a strange expression I can’t quite place. Does he approve, or is he thinking I’m weak?
“You have food?” he asks.
“Some . . . and a few other things.”
“You’re better off than a lot of these people. They have nothing to barter.”
We continue to make our way through the pathetic shanty-town. Emaciated children eye us warily through the holes in their boxes. Because of the crowds, progress is slow.
“What do they eat?”
“They grow mushrooms and edible flowers if they can find a few bare inches that get sun. A few—the brave ones, or the desperate ones—go outside the walls to gather berries and any other free-growing food they can find. Some catch rabbits and squirrels.”
Despite myself, I cringe. I thought I was done eating squirrel.
“How big is Fort Black?” I ask, remembering when I asked Rice that same question about New Hope, and was shocked to learn almost four thousand people lived there.
“About two thousand people, all crammed into the space of six football fields. It’s crowded, but it’s better than being outside.” He motions around him. “These walls are thick on both sides of us—they keep the Floraes out.”
“So it’s like a double wall?”
“Yeah, exactly. Here.” He pulls me toward the side and up a flight of wooden stairs to the top of the wall. It’s comparably empty here. A man stands with a rifle, surveying the empty expanse that is the world outside Fort Black. He glances at us and offers Jacks a curt nod. On the wall, Jacks leads me to the front so I can look out over the prison. As we walk, he explains that the corridor in between the two walls used to let the guards get from one end of the prison to another without going into the prison itself. It runs around the whole facility, three floors high. Most of the rooms in the wall, former offices, serve as guard quarters, handy for Florae control, just a flight of steps or two from the top of the wall.
Jacks stops suddenly and turns, motioning for me to look. I gasp. The entire prison is laid out before me. The front half is the exercise yard, which Jacks says people just call the Yard. It’s about the length of a football field, a hundred yards or so, but squared, taking up the front half of the prison. From this vantage point, it’s even more disturbing than it was walking through it. Desperate bodies everywhere. People are packed in so tight that even from up here it’s hard to spot pavement.
Beyond the Yard are three large gray concrete buildings. “Cellblocks A, B, and C,” he tells me, pointing each out in turn. “I live in the middle one there: Cellblock B.”
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing to a relatively empty area to the left of Cellblock A.
“That’s the Arena. . . . You should avoid the Arena.” He points to the opposite area on the other side, next to Cellblock C. Instead of an open area, it’s occupied by another tall building, but this one is black. “And that used to be the cafeteria, library, and visiting center. . . . See how it’s connected to the side wall? In the back is the parking garage, and visitors would check in, be escorted through the wall, and taken to the top floor. Prisoners would have to go through the bottom and three security checks before being brought to the visitor area.”
I take it all in. “And what’s in the back, past the buildings?”
“The Backyard . . . don’t laugh. And don’t go there, either. The corridor at the back and the rooms above it are blocked off now, used to quarantine people recovering from the Pox, and as a morgue. Doc took over almost all the offices in the front wall to keep track of who came and went, and to monitor their condition, trying to stop infections before they spread.”
A man with a rifle walks past us, searching the horizon for Floraes. “And the guards will let me leave if I want to? Anytime?” Once I get to Ken, we’ll need to go straight to New Hope.
“Yup. Anytime. But you’d really choose hungry, flesh-eating creatures over a protected, walled complex?” He’s looking at me as if I’m crazy. “I’d take a prison full of criminals over the Floraes any day.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have a three-hundred-pound sociopath named Tank sweet on you,” I say. Why would anyone stay here? But then, I have my sonic emitter, synth-suit, and Guardian gun, and I’ve been to trained to fight the Floraes. Any normal person would just want a place to escape Them. They would gladly trade the Floraes for a place with high walls, regardless of the people inside.
“What about you?” I ask. “Did you make your way here after all this started?”
“Actually, I was here when the infection broke out.” He looks at me, but I remain motionless. “I had this great shop in downtown Amarillo—you should have seen it. At first I just loved that I could practice my art, but after a while I got sick of the local crowd. A lot of people don’t understand that tattoos are more than just a thing people get when they’re drunk or want to look like a rebel. They can tell a story. It’s more than ink on skin; it’s a window into a person’s past. It’s an art.”
“So tattoos were your passion.”
“They still are. At the time I wanted to study everything I could about the art. Different techniques and practices. I had the start to an amazing portfolio. I was supposed to study tattoo practices in the Pacific Islands. I had my plane ticket and everything. Then my uncle suggested I start by studying some prison tats and their meanings.”
“Interesting form of research.”
“I almost brushed him off and said I’d do it after my trip. But my uncle can be very convincing. He said I should come here first, talk to some of the prisoners. It was only an hour’s drive, so I thought, why the hell not? I could visit him before I left the country and do some research. Kill two birds with one stone. I didn’t know being here would save my life. It’s like my uncle somehow knew what would happen. He was desperate to get me out here.”
“Were you scared?”
“No . . . My uncle helped me out. Also everyone liked that I was a professional tattoo artist. Anyone with tattoos wants to show them off, especially if they let everyone know what a badass you are.” He smiles. “I’m not going to say it wasn’t tough at first, though. Everyone was scared of what was going on. Some guards went to go find their families. The Warden decided to let the prisoners out. He said anyone who wanted to leave could go. A lot ran.”