Walter Greatshell - Apocalypticon

After an hour of rancorous debate, they arrived at a consensus. Their leader was a man they all knew, a jailhouse celebrity who did not put on airs or demand special treatment, a humble and private man. He was Joe Angel, aka Angel Suarez, aka El Abrigo, aka El Dopa-this last being the name he was best known by, as it was the name he recorded under. In his two years in the joint, El Dopa had somehow managed to be a jailhouse musician, a convict-rights advocate, and a crusader for world peace through the healing power of transcendental meditation. He was a uniter, not a divider. This had served him well not only in the joint but on the outside, where record executives were falling all over themselves to sign the next big crossover star.

The truth was, El Dopa had never been a criminal, and his teenage years had been characterized less by drive-by shootings than by drive-thru cheeseburgers. He was a suburban kid from a solidly middle-class family; there were no ties to gangs and crime syndicates, not even any crimes to speak of. His conviction on illegal firearms possession was a calculated PR stunt arranged by his agent and record company to boost his street cred upon the release of his debut studio album, El Dopa Represents. As a first offender, he'd expected to get off with time served, probation, and a stint of community service that he could use to push his album in schools, but his arrest coincided with an election year, the War on Terror, and the governor's tough-on-crime campaign. Joseph Xavier Angel, twenty-nine, small-town boy, small-time crook, Vedanta Yoga enthusiast, was blindsided with five years hard labor.

Marcus Washington-Voodooman-had no objection to El Dopa's election as spokesman-Why not? He didn't know the man personally, and frankly he didn't much care. Like all the inmates, Marcus had sat in his cell for the last three days staring at his three hungry cellmates and grimly contemplating the future. They were all doing it, in every cell of the prison: sizing each other up, assessing each other's weaknesses, coming to a consensus. No tortuous discussion was required; the process of elimination was subliminal and automatic, as if on some level they had always known they were going to eat each other. Only the victims were unsure-that was what identified them as victims.

Marcus was everything El Dopa pretended to be: Born into backwoods poverty in the wilds of Texarkana, he had run away from home at twelve and started making deliveries for drug dealers in New Orleans. He graduated to gang membership at thirteen, dropped out of school at fourteen, and wound up in the system at fifteen, convicted for killing three rival gang members. Then it was years in juvenile detention, followed by more years at the ACI-medium security-where he was convicted a second time for murdering another inmate before finally being transferred to the private supermax facility at Huntsville.

At first, the whole business about Agent X had seemed pretty promising-any lifer serving six consecutive terms for capital murder had to be interested in any change in the status quo. It was like the bull in the card game: Without some kind of major intervention, Marcus had no hope of ever again tasting freedom. He barely remembered its flavor.

El Dopa met with Major Bendis for several hours, then came out and freed the leaders of every major prison faction, holding a private discussion with them for more long hours. Water was provided. Finally, the council emerged, and El Dopa addressed the rest of the population:

"Those with the most power bear the most responsibility-how could it be otherwise? They're the ones most capable of doing anything. In our society, money equals power. Thus it follows that those with the least money should bear the least responsibility. The poor should be given the most slack. And yet we here have borne not only the least opportunity but the harshest punishment. Most of us have never known the benefits of civilization; how could we be expected to uphold its laws? Especially when the rich and powerful are exempt. It isn't us who profit off war, or religion, or political corruption, or the rape of the environment. Those crimes, which cause misery and death to billions, go unpunished, or are in fact rewarded, while the corporate media demonize our petty crimes of poverty, our acts of human desperation, our very survival, and we are sentenced to lifetimes of slavery.

"Well, we have finally been freed. We are in charge of not only our own destinies but the destiny of the country as a whole. The reins of power have been handed to us, and we must act accordingly-responsibly. If we just leave and scatter in all directions, we will end up like everybody else out there: crazy or dead. We gotta stick together, work as a team, as an army, to build a new society. Everything we need is out there, free for the taking, but in order to get at it, we need technical assistance, and that's where Major Bendis comes in. He's been sent not only to help us but to ask for our help. He says there's a new world government being formed out there, a government we can help create, which will correct the mistakes of the past. A government in which we will all have shares."

El Dopa held up a certificate resembling a treasury bond. It read, ONE MOBUCK, and in smaller print, This Mobuck entitles the bearer to 1/125,000 share of all benefits accruing from membership in the entity known as the Mogul Cooperative or MoCo, redeemable in gold or services. "You see this? Money's no good anymore-this is the official currency of your new country. This is power. It represents a percentage of the total wealth-the more you contribute, the more it's worth. The more you're worth. That makes us all major stockholders. People, this is like having a share of McDonald's back when it was just one restaurant-priceless.

"But we gotta move. There are other groups like us, other prisons all over the world, and if we don't get on board quick, the shares will be divided into smaller and smaller fractions, sold and resold until they're watered down to nothing. Right now we have the early-bird advantage-we're the Founding Fathers." He waited for this to sink in, then said, "Okay, then. Go ahead, Smitty."

The chairman of the Prisoners' Rights Committee stepped forward. "Y'all been waiting long enough, so we are going to open the cellblocks and let you out, but that don't mean you can up and leave. That would be suicide. There's a plan for how to do it right, and we're respecting you enough to trust that you'll assemble in the main hall and listen to the rest of what we have to say. It's very important-all our lives depend on it. Give me a shout-out if you agree."

Everyone shouted yes, and the cellblock doors were rolled back.

There was a stampede for the exit, like the ringing of a school bell.

The prisoners were scared, they were hungry, they were thirsty, and they were pissed off to have been kept waiting here one minute longer than they had to be when they could already be seeing to their mothers, their wives, their children, or otherwise making the most of this Get Out of Jail Free card. They had more important things to do than sit here listening to bullshit speeches.

Of the five thousand men in camp, only a few hundred had actually witnessed what happened the night of the rodeo; the rest could barely make sense of the garbled reports coming over the airwaves or the goofy horror stories circulating by word of mouth: Crazy blue bitches? Maenad what? Agent X? What the hell is that? Many of the men were in the joint for crimes against women-assault, rape, murder-and were accustomed to forcing their will upon the opposite sex, making women cry and plead, using them, breaking them, then turning them out to earn pocket money to spend on fresh bitches. The thought of a female being dangerous was laughable: Women were generally weak and gullible, suckers for any man with a sweet line of patter; they needed a firm hand to control them. Scrape away the clothing and makeup and high-ass attitude, and they were helpless as baby chicks: holes that begged to be filled. Their only purpose was to serve men, and if they talked back or got out of line, it was a simple matter of laying down some tough love… which was where the police, and the judges, and the prison system came in.