Winter World (The Long Winter #1)(4)

I was sentenced at age thirty-one. I’ll be seventy when I get out of here. (There is no parole for federal crimes. If I behave, I’ll be released after serving eighty-five percent of my sentence.)

When I arrived at Edgefield, I devised six ways of escape. Further investigation revealed that only three were viable. Two had an extremely high rate of success. The problem became: then what? My assets were seized after the trial. Contacting my friends and family would put them in jeopardy. And the world would hunt me, probably kill me if they caught me.

So I stayed. And did the laundry. And I’ve tried to make a difference here. It’s in my nature, and I’ve learned the hard way: human nature is perhaps the only thing we can’t escape.





Every day, fewer guards show up for work.

That worries me.

I know why: the staff and guards are moving south, to the habitable zones. I don’t know if the federal government is moving them, or if they’re going on their own initiative.

A war is coming—a war for the last habitable zones on Earth. People with military and police backgrounds will be in high demand. So will correctional officers. The camps will likely resemble prisons. The government will need men and women trained in keeping order in large, confined populations. The population’s survival depends on it.

And therein lies my problem. Edgefield, South Carolina, is about halfway between Atlanta and Charleston. It’s snowing here (in August), but the glaciers haven’t reached us. The ice will be here soon, and they’ll evacuate the area. The evacuations won’t include prisoners. The truth is, the government will be hard pressed to save all the children in this country, much less the adults, and they certainly won’t be dragging prisoners with them (and definitely not across the Atlantic to the habitable zones in northern Africa). Their priority will be making sure prisoners don’t escape to follow them south and make even more trouble for an already strained government. They’ll lock us up tight in here. Or worse.

Accordingly, I’ve revived my escape plans. It seems all of my fellow inmates have too. The feeling here is like sitting down for a July Fourth fireworks show. We’re all waiting for the first explosion to go up. It’ll likely be fast and furious after that, and I doubt any of us will survive.

I need to hurry.

The door to the laundry room swings open, and a correctional officer strides in.

“Morning, Doc.”

I don’t look up from the sheets. “Morning.”

Pedro Alvarez is one of the best correctional officers in this place, in my opinion. He’s young, honest, and doesn’t play games.

In one sense, prison has been good for me. It has been a uniquely valuable place to study human nature—which, again, was my blind spot, and the real reason I wound up in here.

I have come to believe that most correctional officers go into this line of work for one reason: power. They want to have power over others. I believe the common cause is that someone, at some point, had power over them. Therein lies a seminal truth about human nature: we desire in adulthood what we were deprived in childhood.

Pedro is an anomaly in the pattern. That drew me to him. I pursued a friendship and have extracted data points that revealed a different motivation. I know the following about him. His family—parents, brothers, and sisters—are still in Mexico. He has a wife, also aged approximately twenty-seven, and two children, both sons, five and three. And finally, I know that his wife is the sole reason he’s working here.

Pedro grew up in Michoacán, a mountainous, lawless state in Mexico where the drug cartels are judge and jury and murders are more common than traffic accidents. Pedro moved here when his wife was pregnant, because he didn’t want his children to grow up the way he had.

He began working for a landscaping crew during the day, and at night and on the weekends he studied criminal justice at Spartanburg Community College. On graduation day, he told his wife that he was joining the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Department—because he didn’t want to see this place become what Michoacán had. There is law and order here, and he wanted to keep it that way, for his children’s sake.

Another truth: parents desire for their children the things they never had.

After Pedro’s announcement, his wife got on the internet, looked up the fatality rates for police officers, and issued an ultimatum: find another profession or find another wife.

They compromised. Pedro became a corrections officer, which carried fatality stats and working hours that were acceptable to Maria Alvarez. Plus better benefits, overtime pay, pay plus twenty-five percent on Sunday, and access to the government’s hazardous duty law enforcement provision that would allow him to retire with full benefits after twenty-five years of service—right before his forty-ninth birthday. It was a good choice. At least, before the Long Winter started.

I had expected Pedro to be one of the first officers to leave this place. I figured he would head back to Mexico, where his family is, and where the habitable zones are being set up. That’s where the Canadian and American hordes will be going soon.

But instead, he’s one of the last ones here. The scientist in me wants to know why. The survivor in me needs to know why.

“You draw the short straw, Pedro?”

He cocks an eyebrow at me.

Pedro is about the closest thing I have to a friend in here, and I can’t help but say these next words.