I am not a smart man. I’m not stupid either. I never figured out how a BluRay disc could hold more information than a DVD. After all of the books I’ve read while in here you would think I would have come across something or other that would have explained that to me. It’s funny, I use to watch a lot of movies when I was on the outside and never understood how it was all made possible. All of that information packed onto a flat piece of plastic. I remember seeing all of these movies about guys in jail who had libraries to check books out of or at least carts that one of the old-timer screws would walk around with and hand out books. Thanks to the money my wife puts into my canteen account I’ve been able to buy books written by all the greats, even a few of the not so greats.

You have a lot of time to kill when you’re in for life and the reading helps to keep your mind off of the times you watched a guy get his face stomped or when you got beaten for not washing your hands before using the phone on your first day in. Escaping into the world of Poe or Hemingway drowns out the sounds of the new guys getting raped in the night by their cellmates. That was the way of life here in Maxwell Full-Term Penitentiary.

Maxwell’s Pen is a super jail, built with sponsorship by the Maxwell Corporation, developers of non-lethal weaponry and pharmaceuticals. This is the kind of prison they talked about twenty years back; a large capacity facility intended to house convicts with a life sentence.

The only way out of Maxwell’s Pen is death - by another inmate or your own hand.

I’m writing this where I can in the pages of a worn copy of Farewell to Arms with a stubby little pencil I have to keep sharpening by rubbing against the walls. I’m not sure why I’m writing and I’ve read enough to know few people do when they start to write about what led up to their deaths. Maybe if there are any survivors, they’ll find this and read it or just as likely some alien anthropologist will read it a thousand or so years from now and discover what wiped out the human race.

I wish I could see my wife and son to know they are…

I catch myself thinking about my wife and son. It’s hard not to. My wife hasn’t been in for a visitation for over a week now and I’ve been in lock down for three days. There’s nothing I can do. If the power fails I might be able to force the cell door back on its sliding track and that’s if starvation doesn’t kill me first. So it’s no use thinking about them.

I said earlier that I’m not a smart man or a stupid man.

I may not know much about technology but I know common sense told me the Gun Ban of 2028 was one of the more stupid things the world could have done. Bullets are one of the few things that would be guaranteed to penetrate through their skin. What’s happening outside of this cage proves my point. Most of the others are quiet now, except every now and then I can hear the sound of one of them feeding. That ripping slurping sound. Most of the screams have stopped but at night I hear some of the guys crying. I get chills when I listen to the sound of a grown man whimpering. I can honestly say I prefer it when they pray.

I ended up here after a long day of work. I was a middle-income factory worker making expensive boats I’d never own for people who paid guys like me to do their work at their own factories. I got home and I knew something was wrong when I saw the front door was open. I checked the ground floor for my wife (our son was at school thank God) when I couldn’t find her, the shotgun in the basement was my next objective. It was kept it in a cabinet downstairs so it wouldn’t be visible when we had company over. A man has a right to bear arms to protect his family and I wasn’t going to give it up. There were signs of a struggle in the laundry room, the detergent spilled out onto the floor, clothes pulled from the hanger where my wife hung them to dry. I was angry. I could feel it growing in the pit of my stomach like a rotten jalapeno pepper fermenting. Someone had been or was still in my house and the thought enraged me.

Going up the stairs to the second floor as quietly as possible, I saw our bedroom door was open a crack. Before I saw the door, I could hear the sounds. The grunting and heavy breathing. Not even for a moment did I assume my wife was having an affair. We have a happy marriage and times may have been tough but we were in it together for the long haul. The sounds made the pepper in my gut turn sour. This man had invaded more than just my house.

So I could catch the bastard by surprise I gently pushed open the door. There he was, on top of my wife, who was naked and tied to the bed. I saw the tiny cut he’d made above her breast, the red syrup pooling in her cleavage. He was thrusting himself inside of her, oblivious to the muffled whimpers she made behind the tape on her lips and oblivious to me standing in the door way with the shotgun leveled at his hunched back. She saw me and her eyes were pictures of fear. I still see the way she looked as I laid on my hard bunk at night.

I stepped forward. My footsteps were dampened by the pile carpeting. At the moment of cumming he flinched as he felt the cool steel barrel at his temple. His body jerked and came to a shuddering stop and then I pulled the trigger.

My wife sold the house after I was convicted, said she couldn’t get the guy’s brains out of the carpets and walls. She was always on my side, by her, I did no wrong.

That’s how I came to be here, keeping company with the dead. One count of first degree murder and one count of possessing an illegal firearm. They made an example of me to warn all others who still believed in the right to defend themselves.

The idea for the gun ban came in 2027 when the United European Alliance, the council of all the countries of the European continent, confiscated and destroyed all registered firearms, the public’s and the authority’s. The European authorities were outfitted with Maxwell Corporation’s new Tasers. They came in all shapes and sizes and were pretty effective on living people.

It wasn’t long before other governments followed suit. They may have been disposing of their guns but Maxwell Corporation developed other technologies that took their place and were helpful in encouraging the more reluctant countries. Murder rates were halved and the population hit an all-time high. Maxwell stock soared and over the next fifteen years they were the saviors of mankind. The pharmaceutical division developed a treatment for AIDS and a new drug that reduced the fatality in most forms of cancer to less than twenty percent of what it was.

I see my cellmate has started to twitch again. I don’t have much time. I don’t think he’ll be able to get himself out of the bed sheet noose wrapped around his neck but there is no way of knowing. I’ve heard the bars bending in some of the other cells which means they grow stronger when they die. I don’t think they are strong enough to make a hole big enough to get out though. If they had I would have seen some wandering around the walkways.

As I was saying… to the world, the Maxwell Corporation was a miracle worker.

Two years ago they announced they had created a vaccine against the common cold. No more sniffles and sneezes. The sale of tissue papers dropped overnight and the world rejoiced. Governments mandated the inoculation of everyone in the general public. The mandate did not apply to us lifers. The only inmates in here who had their cold shot are the newbies, like my cellmate. He joined me about a year ago along with another fifteen percent, roughly, of the prison population. He was just a kid himself yet he raped and strangled a little girl. I said the murder rate went down, not wiped out.

Flu shots and booster shots. We’re all inundated with needles being stuck in our arms our whole life. I don’t understand why the scientists of the world didn’t see it coming.

No one really knows much about the common cold. It’s afflicted the human race since God knows when but the answers to its riddle has always alluded us. Has the strain of the Rhinovirus ever changed? It did when we tried to wipe it out.

I heard one of the guards talking while I was out in the yard, he said the World Health Organization thought that the vaccine interacted with all of the other antibodies that formed in the body after you were given an injection for all the other things, the flu, polio, etcetera. When the new organism’s host died it assumed control of the body. Kind of like when your parents die and you inherit their house.

People still die and at greater numbers because of the population boom. Day by day the number of infected grow. The only problem is the virus needs to consume living flesh to survive.

I hear someone screaming somewhere down the walkway.

All of the guards left to go be with their families. I wonder how many of them have become? They don’t have guns and the Tasers don’t stop the infected. What effect could electricity have on something that is already dead? The guard who I had heard talking said the only way to stop them was to cut off their heads.

This whole thing is like a bad zombie movie from back in the 1980s, except “zombies” isn’t really the right word for them. Their skin gets thicker when they die, almost scaly with hard boils. I don’t know that from the guard. I know it from my cell mate who hung himself an hour ago. I’ve been watching him change as the virus wakes up inside of him. I watched as different parts of his body twitched, new rooms in the house being moved into.

I pried a bar from the bed frame, pretty much useless unless I can figure out a way to use it to damage his brain. At least it’s something. A chance to defend myself. Having it in my hand makes me more confident and it calms the shakes that make it hard to write with this pencil. It’s barely bigger than a thumbtack now. I know there is no chance of me getting out of this cell but I’d rather starve than end up the main course.

It sounds like something just ripped behind me.