Radioactive Trenches

Chapter 1

Chapter 1~

"What's your name?"

"You know my name."

"Tell me your name, please."

"Prisoner 66-189."

"Your real name."

"Charlie Diamond."

"Why are you in my office today, Charlie?"

"Because I was breathing and that's illegal."

My therapist looks up from his note pad. His tangled gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses makes him look like one of those wizards in the outlawed fairy tale books. "Please be serious, Charlie. Or do I have to assign you to extra hours in the trenches?"

I let out a huff of air. "Mr. Bottlenose, I swear I was behaving this time."

Mr Bottlenose sighs. "You have said that two hundred and sixty six times to me."

I chuckle. "And every time I was telling the truth." I glance around the plain room (white walls, ceramic tiles, a lone bookcase next to a window, a sealed up ventilation shaft that leads to the other twenty floors, a metal table thats neatly organized with books on the left and containers of pencils on the right) and look back at my therapist.

Mr Bottlenose takes a paper off his desk and reads it. "It says here you poisoned an inmate by making his breakfast glow in the dark. How did you pull this off?"

A grab a pencil off my therapist's desk (chewed eraser, number two led, sharpened at the end) before he can stop me and twirl it through my fingers. "A great magician never reveals his secrets. Haven't you ever read about Harry Houdini? Oh yeah, sorry, all the interesting books in the world are banned."

Mr Bottlenose shakes his head in frustration, sweat beading on his forehead and his upper lip. The sealed ventilation- a precaution taken to keep me from escaping- is making the room very warm. "The only way society can thrive is we focus on surviving the Fall Out and nothing else."

I roll my eyes and lean back in my chair. I can't go far because my feet are chained to the ground. "Okay. You can survive. I'm gonna thrive. How does that sound?"

Mr Bottlenose bolts to his feet. I smirk, knowing I've hit a nerve, as I watch him snatch up a book ( a heavy manual on complex medicines, probably herbal remedies ) and hurl it at my face.

I stop twirling my pencil at the same time and hold it out in front of me. The book hits the chewed eraser and falls to the ground at my feet.

This time it's my turn to stand up, my chair flying backwards. I snap the pencil in half and drop the pieces on the desk. "I think today's session is done. See you tomorrow, Mr Bottlenose."

I turn and leave the office, the chains that had been around my feet lying abandoned on the ground.

~~~~~

I weave my way through the maze of hallways that make up the Fall Out Prison. Before I go to the training fields to cause trouble- and possibly explode a firework or two- I go to the art studio.

One of the ways of therapy for many of the criminal kids is "to submit their minds to the freedom and beauty that makes up the artistic world." The irony is that we're not allowed to express creativity in any other way or place. So, naturally, I like to take it upon myself to cause creative trouble

I crouch behind a wall and watch the art studio's double doors for a few minutes, keeping completely still. I don't have to worry about the cameras outside the art studio catching me because for some strange reason there appears to be a glitch in the wiring that no one can fix. The powers of orange juice never stop amazing me.