Here is my rough first draft of the first scene. I used almost nothing that is in the AI chapter 1 which is in the post below this.
The same lack of guards as yesterday. None of them leaving their command tower. Soon.
I come in the bleach stinking library and see Glother, sitting there with a cup of coffee, tapping his finger. He opened two minutes ago and is already anxious for me to show up. As I would be if he came two minutes late. Day two in our regiment. He helped me out when I first arrived and drugs were the only escape from the shit in my head. He saw me reading all the time, sometimes jonesing. Told me he did two days on, one day off. No physical addiction. We buddied up to get through the third day on clonazepam's. I write letters and teach reading to make my daily bread. Glother gets money from his family, sells a bit. He had kept in touch with them since he was caged, at 15, after being ordered on a do or die hit by his gang.
I sat down across from him and he just pulled the spoon out. Usually there was checking the halls, hiding in the closets, whatever the hell. The battlefront was nearing them and the guards were not patrolling. I was already determining how to get out if the guards abandoned us.. The battlefront was moving closer.
On the table between us an old fashioned radio with an antenna. Chicago 2 is on. The last free media. Every other channel is Koch propaganda now, interspersed with music, famous celebrities live talking about private matters in all new ways, anything to get people to stop thinking about the war.
When the war in my head is washed away by a warm wave of morphine, I can finally feel relaxed enough to concentrate on the radio. Glother is pointing at it. The front is five miles south of us. We were in the last bit of the USA, in Southern Illinois... "Do you think they will hold?'
"Never did." I had been telling him I thought so, since he started asking this.
"Why'd you lie?"
"Why add to peoples worries." A few years into my career, I ended up thinking why fuck up someone's life today, with the classified horrors coming in the future?"
"No guards came out all night." He tells me.
I feel myself steeling the weak one. The guards were abandoning them. He had a contingency; he had no choice in the matter. Way he had taught himself to be. He had expected more from himself than he would anyone else, and the last years... Just when he was probably needed more than ever, he fucked up. Got drunk and fucked up. They deserved it and everyone knew it except a command that was trying to hide war crimes. They thought they were so protected they could laugh about rape within my earshot in a bar, knowing if they had been under me in the field there would have been summary executions, Three bullets and my career was over. Hero to zero.
Had I remained in command I would have been executed by Koch Securities by then. They classified the hell out my retirement threw me in jail. I disappeared. My soldiers heard about what happened and when none of them could find me, they knew better than to ask too many questions. By now with the government gone no one knew he was anyone other than John Haufman. A junkie with a degree to the prisoners, protected by the gang leaders for his scrabble skills. Like Glother. Few of the younger guys were literate. They kicked my ass every time, which is probably what endeared me to them the most.
Here they had allegiances and got along. Maya, a social worker, did a hell of a job keeping the peace. She met them all once a month. He was going to exploit that when he put the forces together.
"Glother, a force in motion, can only be stopped by a force of equal, or greater force."
"You, are talking Einstein, to me? "
"You underestimate me. I know you read math for fun. I have been figuring out how to protect this perimeter, and begin an advance toward the Chicago Sanctuary. First, we have to ...""
"You got us all way to Chicago in your head."
"Well, no, there are variables that will arise, so ... Yes, I do."
"Can you win?"
"Why would I make a plan where we lost?"
He laughed for the first time in awhile. I hadn't laughed since a few years into the bloody shit. Lost me a wife who married the before me. Another topic I don't think about.
"Hundreds of millions are gone..... General"
"Don't ..."
He holds up his hand to shut me up.
I nod an apology for interrupting him. I want to just lay back into the high.
"Chaos out there man. Refugees all trying to get to Chicago... and.. you think..."
"Yeah, because I FUCKING HAVE TO!" I stand up, walk through the lines of books. I push the air slowly out from the bottom of my lungs to the top until I am empty, then slowly breath back in. Enough. I turn around walk back to the table.
Glother is rolling a jail joint, looks as thin as the middle of a Q-tip. "I almost changed my name to 'The' once. Because in prison everyone is the killer, or the drunk driver, or the rapist, or the pedo-fucking-deads."
"Oh, deep." I do think he is deep. Years with soldiers, even my crowd, had not always left me with a lot of time to indulge my humanities degrees.
Kareem comes in. Three muscles follow. "Hey, General, you need to come with me."
"Scrabble before lunch?"
Glother lights the thin line of tobacco and takes in a tiny puff, passes to me. None of the Muslims smoked.
"I talked to Maya, the guards want to talk to us. They told us who you are... Said we should call our families and have them come here, like they have."
"
As I stand up Glother says, "You gonna tell them? He's..." Glother kind of nods at Kareem, the most powerful man in the prison.
Kareem looks at me with a hard look I was not used to having aimed at me.
Glother was a de-escalator, had to be running the library, and before I could say anything he was off. "He knows how to get us to the Chicago Sanctuary, families too. This is General Fucking Butler, man."
Kareem doesn't believe him. Looks at me with a questioning with a bit of threat.
"I knew this was coming since they locked me up. I have been planning every day since. Always making changes when new intelligence arrived. This is what I have done for twenty years. Brain doesn't stop..." I am grimacing from the memories filling my mind as I think again of battle. We can defeat Ellsbergs folks easy. These are conscripts, who do not even want to fight. We will be motivated as all hell. Do or die. I know how to do this, Kareem. Nothing works though without your help.
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