I had trouble sleeping that night because Bill had a shotgun pointed at the back of my head and he told me, “Walk along the green line.”

It led to a room with a solitary shower.

“Strip,” Bill said.

“I just want you to know, I feel really bad about what I did.”

“Well, none of that matters now,” Bill said in his gravelly voice.

CLICK

“Please, no.”

BOOM

I rolled-out of bed into the afternoon light, not sure if I wanted to hear the end of Bill’s story. How could I? My brains were everywhere, scattered, by a shotgun. I put my baloney sandwich into my brown-paper bag with a Red Delicious Apple. It wasn’t—it was mushy inside, but I couldn’t afford to eat a granny. Who can, but grandpa?

I passed the check-points in my red Honda Civic. Nobody suspects a janitor to be a chemical thief.

By the time I passed the third pathetic gatekeeper with sports illustrated swimsuit girls glued to the inside of his outhouse office, I wanted to go home. I was bored of routine. They were plus-size models anyway, thanks to progressive politics. We can thank a politician and his skinny wife for saying the right things while the average American Female gets heavier by the pound.

I met Charlie in the breakroom.

Bill was stripped-down to his underwear, slipping into a gray jumpsuit.

“Are you going to tell us the story?” Charlie asked.

“Okay. If you insist,” Bill smiled. “Like I said, the warden was weird. The island, as far as I could tell, was an insane asylum. Nobody there, was in their right mind. Most of the convicts were creative geniuses. They drew pictures on the walls and composed novels that weren’t half-bad. Many times, they escaped, but there was nowhere to go. The warden fed the executed inmates to a pack of wolves that roamed the rock. It was an artificial ecosystem and there wasn’t much to eat, so they were always hungry, with a taste for human flesh. Anybody outside the wall didn’t stand a chance.”

To be continued…