The back-up generators still ran, thank God. Even so, a hundred other gargantuan issues drove his prison down a path to oblivion.
Ole man trouble. He had come to Tom’s world and made himself at home.
The 3,653 incarcerated men and women had nothing to eat, and they were dipping their drinking water out of buckets, just like in the fifties. Tom suspected the water wasn’t even sanitary anymore. His men had pulled it from open cisterns meant for watering the greenhouses where minimum security inmates did work release.
Out of three-hundred-seventy-five corrections officers, at last count, only eighty-two of them showed up for work this morning.
As one might expect, without stringent cleanliness procedures, diarrhea and flu skipped its way through the prison like a three-year-old on amphetamines.
At this point, Tom had almost no medical staff. Almost no cleaning staff. Exactly zero cooks. He didn’t have a single pharmacist to issue the drugs that prevented his inmates from going berserk. God himself knew when resupply would arrive.
The situation was almost beyond resupply already, Tom admitted to himself. Even if resupply showed up, he didn’t think he could placate the inmates before they rioted. There were too many exceptions to the rules right now, and the rules were the only thing keeping the animals in their cages. A prison guard started making exceptions, and it was one hundred percent guaranteed that he would get his hand bitten off.
Tom Comstock guessed he ranked as the highest prison authority in the state, given that the Division of Utah Correctional Industries had stopped answering its main phone number. Calling any of his bosses by cell phone proved equally pointless.
Amazingly, cell service seemed to be working, with terrible reception and a lot of busy signals, but the cell phone system itself appeared to be up and running between him and downtown. Tom vaguely remembered that most of the cell towers had about a week of back-up power.
All the corrections division directors were briefed on emergency communications as part of the big disaster response field day the division held every three years. He had been bored to tears by the egghead communications guy droning on and on about the cell system and how the network would be reliable in case of disaster.
Yeah, right.
Anyone who worked around technical types knew that all those tech systems were supposedly bulletproof right up until they broke, which happened about every three days. The tech guy would then swoop in and show everyone just how easy it was to fix things. Of course, nobody but the tech guy could ever fix it. Everyone got used to the reality that all systems broke, pretty much constantly, and that the tech guy was a permanent addition to any team.
The cell phone communications dork at the field day had gone on and on with his PowerPoint presentation. Tom tried for about five minutes to figure out what the guy’s diagram meant before he gave up and went back to daydreaming.
He remembered that most cell towers had back-up power and generators that would run for less than a week. Every cell tower had to send signal back to the central computer at the cell phone company. There were these long lines of fiber optic cable that had to be amplified every mile or two. He remembered thinking that each one of those amplifiers also required power, and not all of them had back-up power. So the chain would be as strong as its weakest link and who knew which link it was? Tom guessed it depended on the coverage area and the network.
As far as Tom could tell, cell phones were still working seven days after the collapse. But hardly anyone was answering. Apparently the “weakest link” was the cell phone owner himself. Without power to electrical sockets, charging a cell phone became a big hassle. Tom had to run out to his truck and plug in his phone just to get a little juice. As fate would have it, that’s when one of his bosses called him back—while his phone sat charging on the seat of his truck.
Tom stewed in his juices inside his concrete office on the prison complex. He was about ten miles from the state capital. That’s where his superiors should be right now—at the Office of Corrections, working out his problems.
That ten miles had become a thousand miles in the last three days. He’d sent three of his corrections officers to the capital in person. Only one had returned, and that guy reported that the state correctional offices were vacant, the doors flapping in the breeze.
The funny thing, Tom realized, was that this was one of the most common questions regular citizens asked him when they found out he was a prison warden.
What would you do if the power went out?
Such a dumb question… The anti-government types sat around dreaming about ways the system might crash and how convicts might run loose in the streets. The thought used to make him laugh. Policies and procedures for prison systems were excruciatingly well thought out. Every possible scenario had been documented and there was a step-by-step plan to handle each and every possible event. The prison industry employed an army of people whose only job was to think of what could go wrong and plan for it.
So when someone asked him what he would do if the power went out, he would laugh. “I wouldn’t notice if the power went out because the back-up generators would kick on before the lights even flickered.”
They would follow up with, “Yeah. But what if the power went out and then you ran out of gas?”
He would shake his head and think of the two-week fuel supply in bunkers under the Olympus wing of the prison, as well as the back-up fuel resupply that came by tanker truck to top them off every three days.
If that failed, he was to load up his prisoners and shuttle them to the Central Utah Prison in Gunnison, Utah. They drilled the prisoner transfer routine every four years. It would take him two days of shuttling to move all the prisoners to Gunnison Penitentiary.
Policies and procedures―two false gods of the Modern Age.
Ole man trouble, leave me lonely.
Tom tried to picture executing on the contingency plan to move prisoners to Gunnison. First off, if he so much as cracked those jail cells, there would be a riot, and he would lose control of the prison.
Inmates were like dogs. They could smell fear. They knew something was wrong and they were the kind of animals who thrived on stuff going wrong. He could see Interstate 15 from his office and it looked like a damned used car lot. His big white prison buses wouldn’t make it to Provo, much less Gunnison.
Power wasn’t the problem. They had plenty of fuel for the generator. What they didn’t have was guards, cooks, pharmacists and water. They had spent so much time worrying about the back-up generators that they forgot the hundred other things required to keep human beasts locked in cages.
That brought Tom full circle in his thinking, right back to where he had started.
Ole man trouble.
He would be forced to make up some new policies and procedures right here, right now. Tom imagined firing up his computer and banging out a memo.
Prison Policy for a Complete Fuck-stick Mess
I. Should everything go completely tits-up in the world, Warden and Corrections staff shall execute the following procedures:
a. Leave the maximum security inmates in Uinta Building to die like the mutts they are. Shut down the mag-locks and do whatever you can to permanently disable the manual override. Sorry, folks. Thirst and starvation is what you get—you rapists, pedophiles and murdering shit bags.
b. Throw open all the cages in the other buildings beside Uinta and instruct the corrections officers to run like hell.
It ain’t pretty, thought Tom, but it’ll do.
He grabbed his bull horn and headed out of his office to call the last staff meeting he would ever call.