The Exodus
by David Fairchild
Genre: Dystopian, Sci-Fi
Two-time award winning book in the classes of E-book from NGIBA and Science Fiction from IAN
A girl who feels nothing; a boy who sees shadows and hears what others cannot; a baby without license to be born; a deaf teenager and scientific savant; offensive people; a general who passed law to hunt, imprison and kill them all. Where do they hide when the sub-nations of the United States draw their own lines in the ground that dictate which people get to be oppressed and who gets to be offended?
The Salvo Cartel built the tunnels to help them escape, to aid those with mental ailments, those who question, those who refuse to conform, gays, Christians, artists, people with scruples, and other deviants. Do they flee to Salvo’s underground cities, with eyes set on a grander safeplace? Where do they go when Lady Liberty douses her light? Perhaps the same place she’s been pointing her torch towards ever since she stepped atop her pedestal and realized at once that one day she too would be told to shut up.
The guard dropped a copy of Merle Dixon’s Huckleberry Finn: Revised on the metal shelf at Slieve’s feet. Slieve stared at the wall. He wanted to stay in that position, staring at the wall. The wall was his friend. It never betrayed him. Never asked him to swallow anything he didn’t want to.
He stared at the wall and pretended he could see the sun casting shadows of bars over it. The wall would have liked that. Slieve would have liked that. He was hungry but didn’t care and didn’t realize it. Did the wall know it? That he was hungry? Or did it know he had work to do?
Frank Lee Morris had escaped Alcatraz by digging a hole through the wall with a spoon, but Frank Lee Morris had a spoon to dig a hole to escape through.
A rat appeared in the sunlight, not real, like the sun. He knew that. Stare at a wall long enough and you know what’s real and what’s not.
The guard searching through his open metal cabinet, flipped through his journal and ate one of his chips from a tiny bag.
“Your chips are stale,” Officer Felman said. “How old this is?”
“How old is this,” Slieve corrected.
“Scuse me?” Felman spilled the chips on the ground, stepped on them, kept digging through Slieve’s shelves.
Slieve turned his gaze to his ceiling and imagined there was some sort of light fixture hanging from it. Ted Bundy had escaped through a light fixture, but Ted Bundy had a light fixture to escape through.
“God, this room is stank,” Felman announced, mostly to get under Slieve’s skin. Felman was good at that.
Felman was kind of stupid though. His back was to Slieve. If Slieve had a gun, he could have used it to take Felman Hostage.
John Dillinger carved a fake gun out of soap or wood, or something like that, and marched his way right out of jail. John Dillinger had a knife though to cut that gun. Why didn’t he just use the knife to take a real gun from a guard?
Guess it could have been worse, he could have used the knife to carve another knife, but they probably didn’t make silver shoe polish back then to make the blade shiny. In any case, Slieve didn’t have dumb enough guards for that.
Why couldn’t he have dumb guards like Dillinger?
Felman turned to the bed and waved his fingers back at him.
“All right,” he said. “Up.”
Slieve rolled, sat, stood from the bed, and Felman peeled back the mattress.
“Something funny, offender,” Felman asked.
“No, officer,” Slieve lied and thought about the prisoner who had made nectarines look like grenades to escape prison, but Slieve had no nectarines.
“Hello,” Felman announced. “What we got here?”
He held up a crucifix on a piece of thread. Slieve had made it out of a napkin and spit. The thread was from his mattress and fairly strong.
“Crucifix,” Slieve replied.
“I can see what it is,” Felman replied. “You ain’t supposed to have it.”
“I can have a religious object so long as it doesn’t pose a security problem,” Slieve replied.
“Say who,” Felman asked.
“The Supreme Court of the United States.”
“You ain’t in the Supreme Court. You in prison, and this offensive. You know you can’t have anything offensive. You got reprogram.”
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David Fairchild resides in Spanish Fork, Utah and teaches writing at Utah Valley University. He has a background working in the amusement and entertainment industry, including: amusement parks, haunted houses and theatre. He is a retired stand-up comic. He holds degrees in writing and communication. He wishes he could say that he loves to write in a way that entertains people, but that would be a lie. He never gets to write because all the characters he’s ever created keep stealing his keyboard. Did I say characters? I meant bullies. They’re all bullies! In fact, his work is always taken over by that bunch of bullies who each strive to fill the pages on David’s computer with their own stories, leaving absolutely no room for David to tell his own. To date, he hasn’t written a single one of his own stories. He just gives birth to bullies who take over his book pages and tell him how bad of a job he does talking about them. They’re so mean, and they talk behind his back. They say they’re not, but he can hear them. Anyway, he never gets to write what he wants. Well, there it is! Fairchild is a fraud who stands on the shoulders of the characters that have punched their ways out of that pea-brain of his. Suppose it makes sense. They’re all smarter than he is. His brain is just too small to contain all that bully intellect. David does want everyone to know though that some day he will finally write the story he wants, but what does anyone care? They all just use him so they can get close to his bullies.
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