Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days Read online

  Jornada del Muerto:

  Prisoner Days

  Claudia Hall Christian

  Cook Street Publishing

  Denver, CO

  Also By Claudia Hall Christian

  (StoriesByClaudia.com)

  ALEX THE FEY SERIES

  (AlextheFey.com)

  The Fey

  Learning to Stand

  Who I Am

  Lean on Me

  In the Grey

  Finding North

  THE DENVER CEREAL

  (DenverCereal.com)

  The Denver Cereal

  Celia’s Puppies

  Cascade

  Cimarron

  Black Forest

  Fairplay

  Gold Hill

  Silt

  Larkspur

  Firestone

  Jornada del Muerto

  (JornadadelMuerto.net)

  Prisoner Days

  THE QUEEN OF COOL

  (theQueenofCool.com)

  The Queen of Cool

  SETH AND AVA MYSTERIES

  (SethandAvaMysteries.com)

  The Tax Assassin

  The Carving Knife

  Suffer a witch

  (SufferaWitch.com)

  copyright © Claudia Hall Christian

  ISNI: 0000 0003 6726 170X

  Licensed under the Creative Commons License:

  Attribution–NonCommercial–Share Alike 3.0

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  ISBN (13 digits): 978-1-938057-21-2 (digital)

  Library of Congress: 2014918630

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First edition © October, 2014

  Cook Street Publishing

  ISNI: 0000 0004 1443 6403

  PO Box 18217

  Denver, CO 80218

  For the Silent Partner,

  who frequently says:

  “remove the head or destroy the brain.”

  _____________________________________________________________________________________

  Dear Professor Alvarado,

  On July 19, 2489, after four years of looking, I discovered the following document in the ruins of what my team believes was the Santa Fe Penitentiary. It is my belief that the following record is the journal of Emil See Fwaha, Tewa Shaman, and all of humankind’s great-grandfather.

  I have authenticated the text as originating from a Remington Noiseless typewriter. The paper is consistent with that which was made in the 2040s. Carbon dating indicates that the journal came from 2040 or 2050. Further, the hand drawn image matches what we believe Emil See Fwaha looked like, and many of the entries are signed with his mark.

  The Tewa tell the story of a Tewa Shaman and his trusted friend, together with a small group of survivors, who restarted life in the Rio Grande Valley near Chimayo. The shaman wandered the continents, bringing peace and life to every area of the globe. Legend has it that this shaman lived well past two hundred years before returning to the Rio Grande Valley for his final resting place.

  The attached journal covers the month of November 2056. According to this journal, great-grandfather left ancient Santa Fe for what he calls the “Pecos Pueblo.” I have found this location on your historic maps. When we receive confirmation that you have received this artifact, my team will head to the next location.

  My hope is to locate another record of great-grandfather there. I will contact you when I get there.

  Thank you for your support of this incredible journey.

  Your humble servant,

  11/01/2056

  My name is Emil See Fwaha. I am the only person alive on earth. I don’t want to think that. I don’t want to be the only human soul left on this planet.

  I’ve never said, “I am the only living person” out loud, even to myself. The idea of being on this amazing planet all by myself is too daunting, too painful to believe.

  After everything that’s happened? I cannot imagine that anyone else is still living.

  My great-great-grandmother told me that I would be the only human soul left on the planet. She bugged me to learn to write and read. She told me I must document everything that happened. I thought she was a crazy old woman who loved me and made great elk chili.

  I underestimated her. Turns out, she was right.

  Of course, I haven’t documented anything. I should have. In the middle of the fight, I forgot about documenting everything. It’s not much of an excuse, but it is why I haven’t documented this experience.

  Computers are gone. The machines that once controlled every single moment of every single human’s life no longer function. Of course, they might function if we had electricity, but we don’t. Cell phones? The Internet? That’s all gone. The Internet went down a couple of years after the peak. With no one to watch out for the old viruses, the Internet crashed due to the Millennium Virus.

  We had electricity for a few years before it disappeared. Most “modern conveniences” were either destroyed by the wasps or don’t work. It is more like the fifteenth century than nearly the twenty-first.

  George found this old typewriter somewhere and brought it to me. It took him six months to find paper. Most of the paper was burned either by survivors trying to stay alive or by the wasps. Even here at the Penitentiary of New Mexico.

  Ten years ago? Before all this happened? You would have thought the Pen ran on paper. There was paper everywhere -- paper files, paper documents, paper orders, paper rules, paper signs, paper letters, paper pardons, paper court documents. An entire rainforest of paper, one sheet at a time. That’s all gone now.

  I don’t know where George found the paper or the typewriter. I don’t know where he finds most things. He finds things and brings them to me. That’s the way it works around here.

  I should write about George. It’s hard to think about George without remembering who he used to be.

  George was like the creator’s pinnacle human accomplishment. He was everything good and everything horrible. He was all impulse and drive -- lust, greed, rage, intelligence -- —wrapped in a monster of a man.

  His skin gleamed black, like coal. His eyes glowed like embers surrounded by a kind of mashed banana peel-brown irises. He kept his hair long. When it was clean, it stood a foot off his head in an afro. When it was dirty, it hung in his face.

  What I remember the most about who he used to be was his hands and feet. His feet were at least fifteen inches long, and his hands could easily palm a basketball or a man’s skull. He could, and did, tear men apart with his bare hands. He could, and did, squash a man with his giant feet.

  Of course, his hands and feet are the same now. His skin is the same color. His eyes still look like mashed banana peels. The fire that made him seem so much bigger, more imposing, and horribly dangerous then is now long gone.

  Like me, George was kept hidden away in solitary confinement in an ancient row of cells located in the lower basement of the Old Main Pen. The Old Main was never to be used for prisoners again. The combination of the bad economy and subsequent civilian uprising of 2017 made prison space scarce and profitable. They opened the Old Main and stuffed the prisoners inside.

  George should have been tucked away in the NextGen Super Max facility, but the guards used him to quell violence in the entire prison complex. When a new gang banger, serial murderer, sex offender arrived? The guards would bring out George to let them know what would happen if violence got out of control. No one wanted the riots of February 1980 to return. George made sure that kind of crazy rampage never happened again. Until the wasps, of cou
rse.

  I knew George because we were the only prisoners in the lower basement of the Old Main Pen. For the privilege of being in such a dilapidated facility, they gave us “exercise” together. “Exercise” meant that rain, shine, snow, or heat, we spent an hour outside. Most people in solitary confinement spent that time alone.

  I spent my exercise hour with George.

  Most people were afraid of me. Even the guards. George wasn’t afraid of anyone. So we “exercised” together. He protected the guards from me, and I protected him from me. It was a good arrangement that worked for everyone involved.

  I should say that he exercised -- pushups, weight lifting, running. Gleaming with sweat, he’d move his massive, fat-free body through what seemed to me to be a random routine. He still does these routines now. Habits are stored in the more resilient muscle memory, I think. For the last year or so, we have done these routines together.

  In the old days, during exercise, I’d read. Exercise was one hour a day I could count on decent light. In exchange for a blessing, the guards would order books with their own money and smuggle them in to me. Young guards always wanted something -- a new girlfriend, a baby, more money, a better job, whatever. My blessing brought them what they wanted, and they gave me whatever books I wanted. I’d sit on the steps and read while George worked out.

  Three times a week, by George’s decree, we spent our hour walking. He thought I needed the exercise. Looking back on it, I think we both needed a friend. He spent the entire hour talking about his life. When we were done, he’d ask for a blessing, which I freely gave him.

  Those blessings could easily be the reason he’s still alive.

  George was smart. Not book smart. I doubt he could read then. He was too busy, too active, to ever sit down and try. Even in solitary confinement!

  No, George was life smart. He had a sense of how everything worked. His intuition about people was always correct. That’s probably why the guards liked him so much.

  One of our last conversations was about whether he was a homosexual. He was a predator, plain and simple. If he saw something he wanted, he took it. Since he’d been in the Pen, he took as many men as he wanted. That’s why he was in solitary.

  But George swore he wasn’t a homosexual. He would wax poetic about the smell and softness of a woman’s touch. Having grown up in a variety of hostile prison settings, it’s likely that the only woman George ever touched was his mother. He’d been taken from her only moments after he was born.

  Because we both knew what he was here at the Pen, the conversation changed to what he would do when he got out. He was confident that, when he got out, he would get married and have a bunch of kids. He was sure that he would finally get to live happily ever after. I can still see his deep black face, bright white teeth, and gleaming eyes laughing about the glorious future. He was so certain, so sure.

  He was wrong.

  He told me once, before all this happened, that I was his first and only friend. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined what that would mean. Right now, even with all the work of taking care of him, I’m glad he’s my friend.

  Since this is the first entry, I should introduce myself. As I wrote before, my name is Emil See Fwaha. I’m of the Tewa people from the Tesuque pueblo. I’m a scrawny Ind’n, maybe five feet seven inches tall. Last time I was weighed, I topped 130 pounds. I’m heavier, more muscular now.

  I got to the Pen by way of some crime. At this point, I’m not sure if I even did the crime. I don’t remember what the crime was that I supposedly did. My great-great-grandmother told me I needed to be tucked away, so off to prison I went. I landed in solitary confinement my second day here and worked to stay there. Terrified of my power, the warden stuck me in the oldest part of the Pen in a cell that could only be opened with a crowbar and George’s extreme force. George and I lived on this silent hallway, deep in the bowels of the Old Main Pen. My sentence would have been over by now, but who knows? Prison sentences had a way of never ending in the Pen.

  Being the last person alive is another kind of life sentence.

  I should tell you about the prophecy. Around 1400 AD, a number of prophecies were made about strangers coming from afar to destroy the pueblos. My great-great-whatever father was a powerful shaman. In meditation one day, he saw the whole thing unfold. The white man would attack the pueblo people and take control of our land. He saw the white man, black man, tan man feeding on everything in their path until one day these invaders would turn into wasps themselves. A single shaman from his clan, the Fwaha clan, would survive, must survive.

  Why? I don’t remember. Maybe, someday, I’ll read the prophecy and, like a cartoon light bulb overhead, it will all make sense. I hope.

  Nothing makes a lot of sense right now.

  Every year, in November, the month the prophecy was made, my great-great-grandmother would read the prophecy out loud. All of the boys in my clan would gather to listen to the story of doom and resurrection. For months after, the boys in my clan would play “kill the wasp” as if to practice for the day the invaders turned to wasps. Every boy hoped to be the Fwaha shaman who saved the day.

  I didn’t hope to save anything. I wanted to be left to my books, my streams, and my forest. I spent most my youth hiking the mountains outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. If I wasn’t in school or working the hard New Mexican soil, I could be found out in the middle of nowhere, hunting, hiking, rock climbing, backpacking, or listening to the earth. (That’s what my great-great-grandmother called my mind-wandering dreams.) I read about explorers, travelers, and survival. By the time I was eighteen years old, I could survive in the wilderness for a month, without supplies, regardless of the season.

  When I was thirteen years old, I witnessed my mother’s death in a dream. She died a week later at the end of a stranger’s gun. I loved my mother more than I have pages to write here. Her death, and the fact that I saw it so vividly but was helpless against its inevitability, still brings me to tears.

  When summer came, my great-great-grandmother made arrangements for me to work with a Dine medicine man. I spent every summer, from then on, with a native healer -- Dine singers and sand painters, Hopi medicine men, Apache healers, and shamans from every Indian nation. I spent every afternoon with the Tewa and Tiwa shamans in our area. When I finished with the white man’s school, my great-great grandmother sent me to Mexico to live among the Wixaritari shamans in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range of Western Mexico.

  I returned to the pueblo when I was twenty-five. My great-great-grandmother was on her deathbed. Her dying wish was that I would spend my life in the Pen.

  And here I am.

  I can walk through walls, speak with the dead, control people, walk among my ancestors, heal injury, read minds, increase fertility, chat with familiar spirit guides, and a host of other things, and I’ve spent more than half of my life in this prison.

  In thirty days, George and I are leaving.

  11/02/2056

  I wrote about George and I wrote about me. I should write about what happened. But first, I should say how I know.

  I’m a shaman. As a child, I learned to talk to spirits, spirit guides, and the most ancient creatures of the earth. To me, dead people are not very different than living people. Living or dead, a human soul is a human soul.

  The Pen was a storage house for trapped souls until I arrived. The souls of human beings killed in the riot of 1980 or by the guards or by disease or whatever were unable or unwilling to move on. I spent my first couple years at the Pen sending human souls to the afterworld. It was a lot of work, but I was in solitary confinement. What else did I have to do?

  Twenty or so human souls remain in the Pen. They are as annoying as gnats to a light. They refuse to move on, to change, or to do much of anything. No wonder someone killed them. I’d have kill them myself if I had the chance.

  Sorry, I got sidetracked. In the end, I hope this will make some kind of sense. All I can say is that I’m doing m
y best.

  In March 2009, two children in San Diego, California, came down with a new kind of flu. They originally called it the Swine Flu and traced its origin to a pig farm in Mexico. I was seventeen and a year into my “experience” at the United World College, Armand Hammer’s crazy experiment in world peace.

  At that time, I read the Albuquerque Journal out loud to my great-great-grandmother every morning. I read about the flu in April or maybe May of that year. I’ll never forget the look on my great-great-grandmother’s face. She nodded to me and said very simply, “It’s started.” My great-great-grandmother sent me to the Wixaritari within the week. I never realized until this moment that I was sent to study from the Wixaritari because of the swine flu.

  By the end of 2009, the pharmaceutical companies had developed two vaccines against the swine flu, which they started calling H1N1. One was a dead virus that they injected into people, and the other was a mist of a low dose of live virus. The shot wasn’t readily available, so people chose the mist.

  Once a person took the mist “vaccine,” they promptly infected their friends and loved ones for the next twenty-one days. The mist became more of a transmission source than the vaccine against disease.

  As usual, man’s best intentions are always the ones that get him in trouble.

  Under the pressure of numerous lawsuits, the pharmaceutical companies began working on a foolproof method to provide inoculation for any virus. Three years later, they launched a program designed to create vaccines based on an individual’s unique genetics. An individual would submit his DNA for testing, and the vaccine would be doctored to match his or her specific genetics. The program was a great success. Even people who were resistant to vaccinating their children began vaccinating again. By the end of that year, the manufacturer launched a side program which harvested an infant’s unique DNA during pregnancy. The vaccines were available for the child upon birth.