Creepers Chapter 7

Chapter 7
A Bad Place with a Garden View

The new prison south of Immokalee was a disappointment even before it opened: originally proposed as a minimum security facility, a lockup for white collar criminals of little risk to anyone but fools with fat wallets. But two years into the project funding dried up like beer spilt on sun-baked asphalt. Florida’s crime rate was on an upward spiral and the voters had had enough, pressured by both sides of the political isle lawmakers agreed something had to be done. Florida didn’t want another summer camp for criminals. What the people demanded was a slaughterhouse for scum, a maximum security prison built to confine and kill inmates. The year after the Immokalee Maximum Security Prison went online violent crime dropped twenty-five. The methods of execution employed varied depending on the vengeance of the victims or their families: lethal injection, firing squad, hanging, electric chair or the worst, the gas chamber.
With crime ever on the increase, the country was glad to have a place where they could send the Nation’s most menacing, often gang connected criminals to die. The Hatch Act passed by an overwhelming majority of both houses and had effectively turned the nation’s prisons into abattoirs. No longer was first-degree murder the only capital crime. Rape, armed assault, armed robbery, child molestation and a dozen other crimes all carried the sentence of death. And the sentences were carried out, often within a matter of weeks. The public’s true feelings on the harsh changes were put to the test when in one week four catholic priests were put to death for molesting children in their parishes’ decades before. Polls taken before and after were seventy-five percent in favor of the executions.
At the time of the Creeper infestation the Immokalee Prison had a population of 428 condemned men and 78 women. The new, Three Strikes and You Are Dead Law, as it was commonly referred to, kept the prison busy. Boxcars full of condemned men rolled into the death dock behind Immokalee every Friday night, full of men and women whom society had unanimously decided to exterminate. Their deaths meant lower taxes, lower crime rates and safer streets. The statistics proved it. Liberals could no longer argue that Capital Punishment didn’t work. It was working swell. The violent criminals who died at Immokalee made room for other less dangerous criminals, criminals who in the past found themselves back on the streets days after being incarcerated due to overcrowding. The few thousand executions a year had had a profound effect on crime. The Professional Juror’s Act alone increased the number of executions nation wide by two-hundred-percent. No longer could jurors be swayed by slick defense attorneys and no longer could they acquit defendants because of racial, ethnic or their opposition to the death penalty. The new professional jurors, always college graduates who specialized in criminology, understood the facts of every case and they were quick to convict. When DNA evidence proved a defendant guilty appeals were rarely granted, when they were, only one in a hundred was over turned. Immokalee Prison from dawn to dusk was never, not even for a moment, a safe place to be. The condemned were confined in cells twenty-three hours a day. They were randomly placed in different cells each day and only the central computer new where each man would be placed. This made escape plans nearly impossible to formulate. All meals were served in-cell, the diet was bland and repetitive not for cruelty but for economy. Breakfast was always scrambled eggs and warm orange juice. Lunch was always bologna sandwiches and red punch (a concoction similar to Kool-Aid) served at room temperature. Dinner was meatloaf made with greasy ground meat and ketchup served with one slice of week-old buttered bread and washed down with the same bug-juice left from lunch. Everything was sanitary: the food was prepared under State guidelines by trained kitchen personal. Inmates were never served coffee or anything that contained caffeine; smoking, was forbidden, even by the staff.
Prisoners were not allowed any personal possessions, not even a Bible, watch or underwear. The men wore one-piece safety orange jumpsuits. Showering was done in cell for five minutes every other day at specified times, the water temperature, computer controlled.
The little exercise the inmates got was a solitary activity, each prisoner had one hour outside in The Dog Run, a series of ten confined areas, sixteen feet long and seven feet wide, constructed of twelve foot, concrete walls. The runs were topped with steel spikes laced with razor wire. A prisoner could not see who was in the next run and talking or communication of any kind was forbidden.
Each run had microphones embedded in its walls so that any attempt at conversation could be detected. The exercise arena was crowned by four guard-towers that threw imposing shadows beneath the blazing sun.
The rules at Immokalee were simple and strict, infractions were dealt with severely, capital punishment (canning) had been permitted in American prisons ever since the Crime Reform Act VII that’s when all American prisons adopted the Total Control Method of prison administration, perfected by the Japanese. Basically, inmates lived in silence and isolation. Boredom was the cruelest punishment and was suffered by all, even the guards. Nothing in the life of a prisoner except his bed and cell ever changed, only dreams or death ended their endless march of monotony. Even illness was not an escape: a sick prisoner’s execution was simply bumped up.
Suicide or the Death Chamber was the only means of escape. No one had ever escaped from Immokalee and no one ever would. Many had taken their own lives, cheating society of a crueler vengeance.
Executions were carried out daily, as per the request of the victims’ families. This was due to Family Input Act VII, which stated that prisoners were to be put to death as per the request of the families of their victims. The exception to the choices statute were prisoners sentenced by the State for federal crimes that had not resulted in the direct death of anyone but none the less demanded a death sentence. These men were lucky they were usually the only prisoners put to death by Lethal Injection
At the time of the Creeper infestation there was only one man incarcerated in Immokalee for a federal crime. His name was Jasper Roundstar, a half-blooded Apache who held a PHD in biological engineering. Jasper Roundstar had worked as a weapons engineer at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. He had been asked to design a delivery system for a top-secret weapons system targeting Russia, Asia and the Middle East. Roundstar protested, sighting the Chemical/Biological Weapons Ban Treaty, which even China had signed. The weapons system, code named Raptor was meant to deliver a toxic dust that would mix with chemically induced rain. These bio-engineered toxins killed only humans with specific genetic make-ups and only men of a certain age range (give or take six months). It was called: Selective Kill Technology or SKT pronounced Skit.
China, considered the number one potential threat to the United States was the perfect target for such a weapon. Korea, Japan, India, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt were due to have Raptor toxins engineered for their potential destruction too, just in case.
Jasper Roundstar not only refused to help design the delivery system but he emailed key project specifications to the target countries, including the chemical blueprints for the toxins, unfortunately for him and the target countries, his message was intercepted. He was arrested, tried for treason and sentenced to death. The case received little publicity because the case was Top Secret and contained information considered a threat to National Security.
The government wanted Roundstar dead. He was due to die at Midnight. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Jack McDougel was waiting in his office, anticipating the call that would confirm Roundstar’s execution.
There was a time for each method of execution: Lethal Injections at midnight, Hangings at sunset, Gas Chamber executions were always at dawn, Electrocutions were scheduled to begin at noon, sometimes they would do four or five at once. Lined up and strapped down like members of a doomed audience. Those sentenced to be shot were never given a time, the guards came for them without warning, usually the condemned accepted their fate; others had to be restrained.
Axel Craven paced, sweating like a fat man in a marathon. He’d been trying to think of a quick way to kill himself for weeks but the bastards watched his every move. Now it was too late: he was in the observation cell. He was a Gasper, that’s what inmates called men sentenced to the gas chamber, which was the worst way to be put to death. Gaspers were moved to observation cells three days prior to their executions. These cells were actually cages built in the center of D-block.
A bored guard sat at a desk thumbing through a copy of Penthouse. Someone was assigned to the desk twenty-four hours a day. Death Watch Guards were not permitted to converse with their charges. And just in case he decided to doze off or break the rules, two security cameras recorded his every move.
Axel couldn’t eat. His stomach was kicking like a sack full of kittens. Sleep was nearly impossible because the cell was brightly lit 24/7 by overhead lights. Prisoners were not permitted to cover their faces or eyes. The air-conditioning was on full blast, for the first time since his arrival, he was cold. He pulled his blanket up around his chin and laid his hands to his side: prisoners were not permitted to have their hands beneath their blankets. No jacking off in this jail. Hours passed, when he finally drifted off, the nightmares came. He awoke in a sweat, gasping for air. The guard looked up from his magazine took a sip of his coffee then went back to reading.
Axel never thought about his victims, there had been many, mostly women. He felt no remorse for their gruesome murders. He was not haunted by their screams. No, all Axel felt was fear, cold and constant, fear of the big blue door at the far end of the hall.