Fifteenth

I came upon Christopher moments later. Stripped down to his underwear, but still wearing his helmet, he ran from one side of the platform to another; attempting to made controlled leaps at a sewer pipe a few feet above his head. My sigh of relief startled him. He screamed that he needed to get out of here. That he could talk to his Dad, pay the low level Governor's Tribute. The litigation would take years, he shouted, he would have time to live.

He ran up to me, grabbed handfuls of my cover-alls. At the top of his lungs he shrieked about how had never fucked a girl. How was he so stupid to give up his youth, he asked me in-between panicked breaths. I shook my gloves off and grabbed him by his shoulders, attempting to calm him. I told him to take deep breaths, even though the air quality down here was so abysmal. He would gasp for air and beg me to help him escape; convinced he could climb that ladder to freedom. Over and over he repeated "I just have to see my Dad, I just have to see my Dad." I tried to explain to him about the last guy who escaped, not mentioning how much more pleasant my existence down here has become since his exodus.

You're too young, I imparted to him. In all honesty they would have made up a hundred reasons to keep you down here until you were too past your prime to remember that you'd had paid off your debt decades before. There's a reason no one volunteers to do the hard time, but escaping will mean someone else will have to suffer for your sins. They'll go after your parents or siblings to get what is theirs. I look him dead in those pale blue eyes screaming in terror. I ask him if he could bare the burden of someone else doing this time for him. He's shaking horribly, so hard that he vomits, and only then do I notice that the sewage has begun to rise.

Fourteenth

I force myself down the passages back toward the sewer entrance hatch. My legs feel like they're dragging an ever increasing weight as I push closer to my destination. I turn the corner and hear the security guard acknowledging my arrival into his headset. Not so much for my safety, but to calculate how much time I lost today and how much more I'll be penalized. My best estimation is that our keepers will add another twenty-four hours to my sentence. I barely feel the pangs of regret.

I dress quickly. It takes a few minutes for the hatch to unseal and I enter the sewer. Down the ladder and into the muck, greeted like curious dogs by a dozen offensive odors at once. It's darker down here then usual, it must be raining topside. I switch on the flashlight mounted into my safety hat and sweep the area searching for Christopher. I wait for a moment for the magnetic hum to disappear before calling to him. The waste has risen since yesterday to just below my crotch and it's thick as you can imagine the collective excrement of hundreds of thousands can become. Moving through it is an uphill battle, but I trudge through searching for my young comrade.

In the darkness, I see a faint light in the distance of the pipe. I call to see if it's Christopher and get no answer. As the light gets brighter, I hear a quick and frantic sound getting louder. My approach finds the waste becoming less and less until I finally arrive to a raised grated platform. I pull myself upon it; moving toward a darting light and the moans of a wounded animal. I fear the worse.

Thirteenth

I extended myself as much as possible to reach the being in the door of white light. I saw the door coming closer and I shouted with joy, but made no sound. Our hands clasped with a gentle familiarity and I could feel my peace being cemented into place. In an instant, the cement was shattered by the power of a wrecking ball as the hand threw my hand aside and grabbed my wrist and yanked me forward. I flew forward at an intense speed and feel to the cold linoleum with a sickening thud. My deflation was explosive as I looked up and saw the lab coat emblazoned with the crest of our keepers.

He instructed two guards who were standing behind me to lift me up and they complied, vigorously. Before I could brace myself, I was pulled to my feet. The sheer speed of my movement from the floor to an upright position disoriented me momentarily, while the doctor checked my ears and eyes for signs of damage from the third level wake-up alarm - something I had never experienced before, heard about only through third hand experiences.

"He's fine." The Doctor barked, a bitter haze hung over both syllables like an unrelenting humidity of disdain. I was let go and told to that I was going to be docked four hours. After releasing a tired, dismissive sigh, I was waved on to my appointed task; another day in that godforsaken sewer. Perhaps, Christopher will be working with me again. It would be good to talk with him and feel human after what experiencing the equivalent of being spanked with a rolled up newspaper.

Twelfth

The cranking sound continously pierced my eardrums like razor sharp spearheads attached to pistons. I couldn't shield my ears from the terrible noise and search for the orange circles. My search became more desperate, furiously sliding my hands across the wall seemingly in vein. My cries for help and mercy were unheard; overpowered by the horrid sonic assault on my remaining senses.

Tears poured from me. Shockingly, I felt pairs of hands grabbing me and my anguish turned to fear. I was torn off of the wall and dragged away from the menancing racket in my cube. I still couldn't see, my world was a ghastly white and the ringing in my ears prevented me from hearing shouts as whispers. Hoisted to my feet, I was escorted down the halls and tossed haphazardedly into a pervasive darkness that swallowed me whole.

I felt nothing in thas place, not even the pangs of my ears that I thought would have driven me out of the city limits of sanity. An odd kind of peace in this temple of greed where I've spent these long years, something I hadn't known but in my dreams. My feet don't even touch the ground, nor can my hands feel out anything tangiable. I float in the silent black and wonder if this is what Death is like: a stationary freedom from our burdens, but freedom none the less. A rectangle of white cuts through the nothingness and a figure stands in the middle. My eyes shoot open. I smile wide and reach out for it. God has heard our prayers, my thoughts squeal with excitement, our time in Hell has ended.

Eleventh

One moment, I'm anxiously awaiting my meal and the next I've found that the walls to my prison have melted and washed reality away, leaving but the two of us. That first embrace lasts eternally, twisting our two human forms into a beautiful atom that becomes trillions more in an instant. All matter of phenomenon and life come to fruition and we are the makeup of everything in existence. In the stead of a cold and hostile place, everlasting perfection and beauty now resides.

Something has caused ripples throughout that which we have willed to be. Suddenly, our wondrous design distorts and peels apart. As time passes, untold eons since we rebuilt all that is in our image, the unraveling has picked up tremendous speed. Stars and planets and their populations become undone. She and I attempt to hide, to escape it's wrath, but it deletes every quark. If your eyes could see down to the subatomic level, you would see nothing but us.

This horrible anomaly in our perfect system made a beautiful sound that I thought was so familiar. We could feel it all around us. Suddenly, the most intense pain you can imagine beset us. In the flash of a roaring electric discharge, our embrace was broken; we were being pulled by the sound in complete opposite directions toward the nothingness that now was. The sound became low, singular note. When it ended I could feel her hand in mine no longer.

Tenth

A few hours later, we start patching up a rotted section of the piping; looking like the lead equivalent of Swiss cheese. We gab away like old hens, this young man and I, and he fills me in on everything topside. Unemployment's non-existent since Operation Open-Ends passed. Hell, that was just being debated as they were rounding up the first waves of debtors. It's funny what a no-party system was suppose to do and how it ended up enslaving the entirety of the United States.

Stock markets across the world are flying. Honduras has finally been accepted as the fifty-ninth state. Newspapers are crowing about the new American golden age; the young man lets out a heavy sigh and shakes his head because the awful lie weighs too much. But, that doesn't matter to us or the thousands under the watchful eye of our keepers. What matters is the task at hand and it seems that for every crack we slather the sealant on, we're losing another small patch of skin. The scratches, scrapes, and burns we accumulate here are the smallest price of the greater whole. Our keepers would put a value on our living souls if they could take that from us as well.

We talk less and less as the day progresses. With every sentence I can feel the reality of the situation starting to sink into the young man. By the time the bright, blinking red light signals the end of the day, his mouth might as well have been another crack that he sealed up. We trudge back to the hatch in silence. Our pace had quickened exponentially when the conversation had peaked and as we exited the sewer, slowly pealed off our layers, and stumbled into the area to be purged; we had nothing left. This may have been the hardest day of the young man's life.

We grip the handrails that hold tight to the walls of the hallways and corridors. I lead the way, he drags behind. Every breath he takes his heavy with a slight wheeze. I try to keep a slow pace, but I'm desperate to get off my feet. It's been awhile since I've been so physically exhausted, most of the time I suffer from a perpetual mental fatigue. It's a bittersweet feeling; I'll eat and then fall asleep before the gas puts me down. A whole night to dream means a whole night to dream of her. I'm not too overtaxed to smile and I do so the whole way back to my cube.