Novel Excerpt: Faraway
You can read the first chapter of Hannibal Tabu's second novel, Faraway, broken into parts for mobile consumption.
What's the story about? The biggest problem with building the world's smartest prison is an inmate whose life's mission has been to get inside.
One week after Morgan Summers greeted his "nephew," Keniston Spaulding muttered incomprehensible curses under his breath as his bare feet slapped and echoed down the hallway. Three thirty in the morning! Something of extreme importance had better have alerted him, stirring him from a dream of his departed Abigail, and not just more of that Simpson boob's nonsense!
Spaulding stepped through the door of the Situation Room looking like a sleepy character from a Dickens novel -- long nightshirt trailing, bare feet and spindly pasty legs rushing, and even a nightcap which Abagail had sewn herself. His blotchy skin was all the more ghostly in the harsh halogen luminescence of the prison's Situation Room, so close to Spaulding's own office.
Three guards sat within, each at a computer station monitoring various data streams on the prison environs, and each turned to regard Spaulding's approach. Despite Spaulding's comical appearance, each guard's eyes were filled with apprehension, and Spaulding was at a loss to explain its source.
The gray of their uniforms seemed so much cleaner and better maintained than the day staff, Spaulding noted absently, before setting things back into motion.
"What?" Spaulding bit out.
"Warden Spaulding, emergency message from DOC headquarters," the young one on the end, Hathaway, said. A slip of a man, only twenty-six, he'd been assigned to Faraway just seven months before, fresh from DOC Academy in Joliet. Spaulding's brain began to spit up more data on the guard, but sleepiness marred its efficiency and at this time of morning Spaulding just didn't care. "Marked priority one, your eyes only, action alert." the man finished, the last word almost lost as his head dipped nervously.
Spauldings harrumphed. "Probably some cutback in supply rations, issued by some third level quartermaster with too many ambitions and too high a security clearance," Spaulding grumbled. "I'll take it in my office."
Filing past the pale, anxious night watchmen, Spaulding walked the thirty feet of blank corridor to his office, still grumbling incoherently. He sat down at his desk and cleared off the central space of the LCD tablets that comprised his working area. He tapped on the cleared desktop area and a large, flat screen slid up from the far edge of the desk, quickly crackling to life with the blue background and gray eagle of the Department of Corrections. There was a post-it note attached to the top of the screen -- "Batteries never arrived, Simpson" it said -- and Spaulding quickly removed it with a snarl.
"Keniston Phillip Spaulding," he yawned at the screen, "warden and chief operating officer, Faraway Federal Penal Facility, authorization code VPQN7793, alpha, beta, omega."
VOICE CODE MATCHED, the screen read, before dissolving into blackness and fading up on an old man, seated in a nicer office laid out much like Spaulding's own.
"Grayson," Spaulding gasped. The Secretary of Corrections, number one cop in the country, staring electronically at its number one jailer. The years had not been kind to either, and the deep creases and jowls of Stuart Grayson were only made more noticeable by the smart and crisp silver crew cut atop his head.
"I'm sorry to contact you indirectly like this, Ken," Grayson began, wringing his hands like the dishes were done. "I know you didn't believe me when I told you that Faraway was an assignment of the utmost importance, but I was right all along. You may or may not have noticed that Faraway has been sealed off from outside communication for almost two weeks. Considering the hermit-like disposition of most of your staff, I wouldn't be surprised if almost none of them noticed. With your internal entertainment networks secure, no news of this would have reached you, so I'm going to be the first to tell you ..."
Grayson looked down at his desk, and Spaulding began to notice things. Grayson was notoriously clean shaven, but a day's growth of beard lined his ample cheeks. The usually sparkling blue blazer, bedecked with honors and medals, was unbuttoned and open, a sweat stained t-shirt behind it, and the signs of valor either damaged or missing. Likewise, the normally bright office was dimly lit, shadows lying across wood grain paneling like vacationing tourists. A creeping dread like being under a piano's growing shadow began to find its way into Keniston Spaulding, and he listened intently when Grayson raised his head and began to speak again.
"Today, July 14 2036, the capital of these United States in Kansas City, Missouri was overthrown and burned to the ground by Black Muslim extremists armed with modern military weaponry," Grayson said evenly, with no trace of humor nor guile. "The NORAD command center has likewise been sacked by a coalition of Brown Beret groups and Native Americans, who somehow infected our whole defense network with a nasty computer bug called Coyote that disabled all communications and coordination. The infrastructure of the whole damned country has fallen, and the effects are immediate. Los Angeles is gone. Mexicans surged across the border like a broken dam and reclaimed all of Southern California. Even our so-called allies like Japan, Norway and Saudi Arabia have joined the likes of Syria, Iran, and Cuba in attacking our now lost borders. It's worst-case scenario, Ken. It was like they all had it planned, and we never saw it coming."
Grayson took a breath, obviously holding in strong emotions, and continued, gazing at a point on his desk and fidding with a pen. "The surviving military cells not infiltrated by one of these insurrectionist groups have walled themselves in and mostly gone rogue, fending for themselves. DOC cops are slain by the thousands in the streets as the whole world turns against them. At least the nukes are gone, back in '16, but there's so much trouble everywhere ... there is effectively no United States now. No power within nor without can enforce unified rule." Grayson glared up at the camera, out of the screen, and at Spaulding with rippling fire behind his eyes. "For the love of God, Ken, they burned the Constitution! They burned it and the first flag, slew the entire congress with a firebomb, President Nicholson's body is on a flagpole being carried from town to town ... I'm telling you all this for a reason, Ken."
Calming down some, Grayson kept talking. "Faraway is the last completely viable and operational facility of the Federal Government still considered loyal. I am going to count on three decades of knowing you to assume you're not going rogue, to set up your own little fiefdom out there in Arizona. The surviving members of the government are here, in Omaha with me, but to be honest, we may not make it there. We've got one jetliner and one fighter escort, the rest burned or shot down by local malcontents or foreign air power. Even the damn Canadians attacked us, Ken! We're ... we're gonna try to make it, but if by tomorrow we're not there, you're it, you're the President and the Supreme Court and responsible for holding on to America until ... hell, I dunno. 'Til something happens.
"I tell you this so I can encourage you not to be a hero and try to go out pacifying the world -- that's what got most of our people killed. Faraway is pretty much impregnible, as well as being next to impossible to escape from. Your facility there can operate as is, from our understanding, for nine months. Things should, God willing, calm down some by then and the loyalist forces of this country can reunite to get us back on track. All I ask is that you be that rock upon which this country can hold on to, not to slip into the abyss. After more than thirty years, Ken, I can think of no better man for the job. Hopefully Kelly and I will be there in a day to sit down and have dinner. Until then, you can do it. See you soon."
Grayson stood, saluted smartly, and the screen faded to black.
Spaulding sat staring at the screen for twenty minutes. His thin face, bereft of color and slack jawed, was a blank palette, as though he expected the world to paint him back out of this corner.
The world began to fade inside his head. Patches would come in and out, leaving black spots on his vision like splattered paint on a windshield. Slumping back in his chair, nothing held him to reality, the world becoming opaque, like sliding into deep water.
Finally, Keniston Spaulding began to cry. It started as a shudder, like a convulsion at first, that devolved quickly into jagged shaking and then into a near fit, finally leaving him, head between his legs, bawling loudly with a pool of salt tears forming between his bare feet. Like that, shaking, weeping like a broken hearted debutante on prom night, he remained for another twelve minutes before stopping suddenly and standing upright like a geyser going off.
"No," he said coldly to the empty room. "No, no, no, no, no. I will not be weak. No weakness, Spaulding!" His red-rimmed eyes blazed with a mix of fury and determination, as he sniffed a snotty sob back into himself. "I can't be weak. I have been appointed, I will serve. I will ..." His voice trailed off as he began to look around.
The three guards from the Situation Room had just started to relax. Hathaway had his boots up on the console and was munching at an apple, while the other two poked through drawers and folders for a playing-card e-panel. Spaulding burst into the room and knocked Hathaway down as he rushed through, moving to stand on the raised dais that showed a topographical map of the blank radius around the prison.
"Hathaway! Get me some coffee, black, hot, and right now, dammit!" Spaulding barked, completely controlled, his back to them, gazing at the map. "Richards, wake up Simpson right now and get him in here with me, stat. Put the on-shift guards at Defcon 3, not 5, not 4, but mother-f**king Defcon 3! Cody! Alert all off-shift guards, wake them up, and have them meet in the Conference Center right the hell now! And none of you ask me any goddamned questions!" Spaulding whirled, eyes red with the blaze of mental activity and the remnants of his tears, as the three younger men stared at him, normally the picture of sedentary listnessness, suddenly channeling George Patton. "MOVE!" he hollered.
The three young guards jumped with a start and ran out the door in different directions. Spaulding turned back to the map and gazed at it, using the time to further compose himself. He traced the pentagon shaped outline of the prison on the map with his left index finger, quietly muttering the Lord's Prayer. He signaled down to the guard posted on the floor where his quarters lie and ordered the young man -- Rayner, second year at Faraway, graduated from Texas A&M -- to retrieve his dress uniform and have it brought up yesterday.
| continue to part four | index |
