The Prisoner by Carlos J. Cortes Page A

worse.
    As if reading her mind, Raul stood, loosened his muscles, leaned over Russo, and, with a quick movement like hefting a sack of potatoes, pulled the inert form up over his shoulder.
    Laurel stood. “You can’t do that.”
    “Wanna bet?”
    Raul and his trick bets, always on the weirdest of subjects. Years before, their campus had suffered an invasion of locusts.
    How fast you reckon a locust can fly?
    I don’t know. Ten miles an hour?
    Some can do sixty and more
.
    You’re out of your mind
.
    Wanna bet?
    Raul had grabbed a few of the insects, dropped them inside a paper bag, affixed the bag under the windshield wiper of his car, and raced around the campus.
    He won the bet, but it cost him a speeding ticket.
Win some, lose some
, he’d said.
    “What would you bet?” Laurel thought Raul’s humor could be unnerving at times, as she began jogging down the secure sewer, her flashlight beam slashing the darkness ahead.
    “I bet our lives,” he said. “Yours, mine, and Woody’s over there.”

chapter 8
     

     
    18:14
    From the vantage point of the platform that held the presidential table, Odelle Marino’s eyes followed a pencil-size cylinder in a depression on the ceiling—an ultradirectional microphone, now scanning the crowd, its circuits overridden by the swell of applause after her introduction by Vinson Duran, the president of Hypnos. The banquet was over, tables cleared, but the army of guests wouldn’t feel sated without her words. After a calculated pause, she pushed her chair back, gathered her notes, and stood.
    “Thank you, Vinson.” The microphone swung in her direction and locked. “As director of the Department of Homeland Security, I’m honored to join you in celebrating the tenth anniversary of Hypnos’s inauguration of their first hibernation station.” Odelle’s gaze swept the crowd, a sea of known faces from all levels of power: the few who had it and the others who wanted it. “Today we celebrate a success story—our country’s decision to abandon an obsolete correctional system for a new, more humane arrangement.
    “As you will remember, the world was up in arms against our choice. Our country and its leaders suffered an unprecedented tide of criticism from both the foreign press and our own.”
    Odelle paused and reached for a cut crystal tumbler of water with a sliver of lime floating in it. She wet her lips, then locked eyes for the briefest of moments with Louis Hamilton from
The Washington Post
. The bastard had used the paper as his personal soapbox and harangued the do-gooder rabble into opposing the hibernation bill. Thanks to him, it had been touch and go.
    “In the year 2049, we approved a bill to close down the prisons and incarcerate those already serving time and all newly convicted criminals not in cages, where they were treated—and learned to behave—like animals, but in hibernation. Truly a more humane solution.
    “In that same year, Chairman Xu Wa closed China’s borders and launched the Second Communist People’s Republic. I hope you agree with me that Ms. Wa has made Chairman Mao seem like a moderate.”
    She waited until the chuckles ebbed and then gifted Louis Hamilton with another piercing glance.
So you know I’ve not forgotten, mister
.
    “Yet instead of demonizing China’s butchery and their new forced-labor rice fields, the press had a field day with us. Foreign nations recalled their ambassadors, while agitators, fueled by the filth pouring from the world’s media,” she darted one more quick glance at Louis Hamilton, “attacked our embassies and demanded we return to a traditional prison system—a system that never worked; a system that couldn’t work because it was built on hypocrisy.”
    The audience interrupted with thunderous applause. Odelle lowered her reading glasses and smiled. She was giving them their pound of flesh.
    “Thank you. Can I bore you with a little history?” She scanned the room, alive with nodding heads, like