Nancy
"Some of those guys in there were in control of forces the size of small armies or well maybe armies actually,"
Matin
Matin’s
large muscular arms braced against the center counsel and the front dash. His body was propped, tense against the
passenger seat door. His head was bent
down over his chest, asleep. The cramped
car reminded Nancy of the trips she used to make with her family to Culver’s
and then to her grandmother’s house back in Newtopia. This was accompanied by a sting of guilt from
running away from her grandmother’s the last time she was there. It was from there in Sam’s Town that she
started her journey to where she was now.
Noisy chunks of stone kicked up into the car’s metal belly beneath her
seat. Partnered with occasional local
traffic the larger stones were wildly loose because of the recent higher
traffic volume. The news that brought
so many was brought to Nancy from a short-wave Italian radio station: a man
convicted of murdering fourteen children was returning to the hometown prison
for most of the victims. Some thought is
a sign of respect for the victims and their families. Others’ thought it was an atrocity. Either way both sides flocked from
neighboring villages to protest something.
The protests did not fascinate Nancy but rather she was interested in
the fact that he was from the same prison as her fiancé, Seamus Grant, which
was The Cretan International Super Prison.
Nancy
had only been engaged with Grant four weeks longer than he had been in custody. Since then she had made her own way over the
Atlantic, across half of Europe, and now was driving south through Italy to the
largest international prison ever created to bang down its door.
Nancy
had hoped to break Seamus out but Matin had successfully convinced her to do
otherwise. “It’s got international criminals, warlords, and militant
revolutionaries,” Matin explained. “Look,
see, it’s like this: some of those guys in there were in control of forces the
size of small armies or well maybe entire armies actually. And the prison people
know this, Nancy.” He had bordered on demeaning her intelligence but in looking
past his dumbed-down terminology she realized he was right. There was not much she could disagree with
and it soon turned into a short lecture. “Didn’t you learn anything about it
last year when they gutted the administration and staff at that prison?” Not
waiting for an answer he continued, “Geese, it was on every station. There were guard beatings, inmate rapes, and
I think there was a case of an inmate getting lost. Lost?! They did half a dozen T.V. specials on the
place. It is a bunker; no way in, no way
out.”
The
drive south had been fast until recently but the last two hours were physically
and mentally draining. The curves in the
road seemed to shrink the concrete to a single lane. When the convoy went west to the sea the road
met the edge of cliffs and steep drops.
Panic had gripped her the first time the convoy curled around one of the
corners. Matin had driven the first five hours so she could not ask him to take
the wheel. Even if he was well rested he
could not actually take the wheel while she pressed down on the pedal, closed
her eyes, and hoped for the best.
Instead the young Newtopian woman gripped the hot pleather steering
wheel tighter and squinted just enough.
She went around the bend at fifteen miles an hour and it felt like a
roller coaster. The darker it got the
slower they moved. Nancy liked that even
better. Her goal was to reach Crete as
soon as possible but she wanted to get there in one piece.
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| "Haney Takes the Clubs to Africa" by Steve Roll at steverollart.com |
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