Processing was a tiny office in the back of the compound. Steve stood in a line of prisoners, and the guards took their prints, assigned their prisoner IDs, and patted them down for contraband. One of the guards had found the dime-bag of weed Steve had on him, then pocketed it and told him to get his uniform. The uniform was gray and ratty-looking, and had his prisoner ID stamped on the back. The guards said he could keep his pants and boots, but they had taken the laces ("One guy went and choked himself dead with his laces," the guard had said, smiling around a mouthful of chewing tobacco. "You ain't getting out of this the easy way, kid"). Then they were herded into the prisoner barracks, which smelled of dog shit and stale sweat.

The soldiers had taken his father away to another barrack, on the far side of the compound. The barrack he had been assigned to was a long single-floor building. The bunks were stained with dark colors, and Steve couldn't decide if it had been shit, or someone's blood. A naked bulb hung from the ceiling on a thin rusty chain, and one of the prisoners informed him that it didn't work. Further down, past the bunks, were the showers; the tiling was cracked, or pieces of it were missing, and only two of the four showers worked, so prisoners had to double-up or wait, and were only allotted ten minutes to bathe ("The Warden Alfred? Yeah, that guy's an asshole," said one of the prisoners, a man who had simply called himself Bob. "I used to work for him. He does that ten-minute shit so he don't have shell out extra cash for the water bill when it comes, the cheap fucker").

Steve settled into his bunk. The prison guards had taken all of his personal items, including the wristwatch his dad had bought him. The only thing they were allowed to keep was a notebook, which was provided for them. Steve reasoned that the Warden got off on reading about other people's misery, and that was why he let them have notebooks.

Bob had bummed a cigarette from one of the friendlier guards, an older guy named Williams. He occupied the bunk opposite Steve. Bob had once worked for Alfred Ashford, as some kind of secretary, and there had been some falling out, though Bob never went into the details. Bob looked like an anorexic sitcom dad from the early 90s. His skin was sun-browned, his hair was greasy, and the bones in his face were starting to show, and gave the impression of a human skull paper-mached by brown bag paper.

"Things are easy the first day," said Bob, around the cigarette. "Guards let you settle in. But tomorrow, you're gonna be up at the ass-crack of dawn with the rest of us."

"Why the hell you in here then?" asked Steve.

Bob showed him his foot, which was wrapped in a dirty blood-stained bandage. "Hurt my foot," he said. "Well, hurt it myself. Stabbed it with the shovel and said it was an accident. Lost some toes. Been healing up. But I'll be out there again." He looked absolutely miserable at the thought. Fat beads of olive oil sweat dripped down his nose and beaded on his upper-lip.

Steve frowned and said, "The Warden. What's his deal, man? He shot some guy 'cause the dude joked about his sister."

Bob shook his head. "He's fucking crazy," he said. "How I got here in the first place. I asked about Alexia. You never ask the Warden 'bout Alexia, kid. Your buddy made the fatal mistake." He finished his cigarette and put it out on his palm. His palm was calloused to the point it no longer resembled human skin. Steve wondered if it had hurt to put the cigarette out like that, but decided it probably hadn't.

"Alexia's his sister, I'm guessing?" said Steve, wiping his forehead on his arm. "Why's he so touchy?" He was drenched in sweat from the oppressive jungle-heat of the climate, and the heat of all the bodies in the room. He took his shirt off, but felt no relief.

"There's a lot of rumors surrounding Alfred and Alexia," said Bob, picking at a thick black scab on his arm with a dirty fingernail. "Guards like to gossip, see. Alexia died back in '83, and others are saying she's alive, and the two of them are up in their private mansion humping. Fucking European nobles, kid. Bunch of fucking inbreds. You ever read about how all the European royals are related in some way, 'cause they fuck each other?"

Steve shook his head.

"Well anyway, they say Alexia's supposed to be fucking gorgeous," Bob continued. "Way some folk describe her, she'd put all the women in Hollywood out of business. I saw her once on television, way back in the 1980s. She was a pretty little girl, sure thing. Didn't know it was her until Williams told me, when I'd brought it up."

"Who was that big guy with Alfred? The dude in the black suit. Didn't look military."

Bob scratched his head with the urgency of someone suffering from a severe lice infection. Then he said, "Oh, that's Grayson Harman. Guy's pretty much a ghost, but sometimes he comes down into the compound with Alfred. He's the Ashford's butler. So Williams tells me, and Williams ought to be telling the truth 'cause the old bastard's been around this prison for years, Harman was good friends with Alexia when they were kids."

"Alfred doesn't wig on the guy when he talks about Alexia?"

"Williams says Harman and Alexia were childhood sweethearts," said Bob. "Crazy fucker, if you ask me. You don't stick your cock in a woman with a crazy brother, kid. Philosophy to live by." One of the prisoners told Bob to shut the fuck up, but Bob ignored him, as if he was accustomed to being told to shut the fuck up, and no longer cared whether people liked to hear him talk or not. "But no, far as I know, Harman's the only guy Alfred likes even a little bit." He held his thumb and finger slightly apart to indicate little. Steve noticed he was missing the tip of his thumb. "I don't like Harman," he added. "He's not Alfred's brand of crazy, but he's definitely borderline psycho. You gotta be somewhat of a psycho to be friendly with a family like the Ashfords, or to even entertain the idea of wanting to fuck Alexia Ashford."

"Wouldn't mind fucking Alexia, if half the descriptions of her are true," said one of the prisoners, who had been eavesdropping on their conversation and was lying naked in his bunk, his skin slick with sweat. "Hear she's a blonde, like the Swedish model type, with long legs and nice tits."

"Why don't you shut the fuck up, Cal, and wank someplace else?" said Bob, and he shook his head with an annoyed look. "Don't mind Cal," he said to Steve. "Guy's desperate for some female company. I guess we all are, to varying degrees. Unless you subscribe to men, in which case, there's plenty to be had." He leaned toward Steve and said, with particular gravity, "Watch yourself in the showers, kid."

Steve swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded. "Right," he said.

Bob was gone by the morning. When he asked one of his bunkmates about it, they said the guards had taken Bob away during the night, and informed Steve it was a pretty common occurrence, and that he should watch himself. The guards marched them into the mess hall, which consisted of two wooden picnic tables. Steve sat down for breakfast: a bowl of watery prison oatmeal, a small bottle of orange juice, and an apple. He ate without enthusiasm. Then they were herded out into the compound, where his task for the day was to repair the roof of one of the barracks which, one of his groupmates explained, had been damaged in a recent tropical storm.

Steve was jimmying one of the ruined shingles loose when he said to Angel, a convict who had once worked for Umbrella and was serving time for embezzlement, "I shouldn't even be here, man. It was my old man who fucked up." He slid the shingle out. The sun was fully out now, beating down on his back. He could feel his skin blistering under his shirt. "I just got caught up in this shit."

"Yeah, you and everyone else," said Angel, nailing down the new shingle. Angel was a person of ambiguous race. He had a smooth brown face, green eyes, and a shaved head. "Who's your dad? Maybe I know him."

"David Burnside," said Steve, jimmying another shingle loose with the flat bar.

"Nah, don't know him. What did he do?"

"Stole from Umbrella."

Angel whistled, fishing nails from the bucket and nailing down another shingle. He smacked the nail once with his hammer, then a second time, with two loud thumps. "Yeah, I learned the hard way not to fuck with Umbrella," he said. "Rockfort is the last place you want to be, my friend. Ass-end of nowhere, and it's run by a guy who would give the Joker a run for his money."

"You a Batman fan, Angel?"

"Yeah," said Angel. "I was. But I figure I'll never see another Batman movie, or read another Batman comic, so what's the point of staying a fan? Just makes me remember better times, and then I get angry."

"You know anything about the Warden?" asked Steve, shifting the subject, hammering down a new shingle. "Bob told me a few things. But you used to work for Umbrella." He kept his voice low so the guard watching them couldn't hear. Sweat dripped from his face, and his throat was dry. Every breath came like a cloud of dust.

"Alfred?" said Angel, and he shook his head. "Not much. Most as anyone does on the low rungs of the Umbrella ladder. He's from England, from some rich fucking family. Really paranoid guy. Only talks to his pet butler."

That was the second time someone had brought up Grayson, the Ashford's butler. Steve wondered if the guy had some sort of reputation he hadn't learned of yet, like maybe he was some kind of Dr. Mengele, and he had been the one who had taken Bob. "Is there something I should know about the butler?"

"Nah. Guy's rarely seen. And he never talks to anyone," said Angel, loosing the old nails from another shingle with the flat bar they shared and replacing them with new ones from the bucket. "Guy's like a shadow. He's there, but he's not. He gives me the creeps, man. I'm pretty sure Harman's crazy, but he's the dangerous kind of quiet-crazy. Like he's always on the brink of exploding. Like... like his flesh is an overstuffed bag, right? And it's barely holding in the contents of his crazy."

They were given thirty minutes at noon for lunch, which was every bit as unappetizing as breakfast, and then they were sent back to work. It was dark by the time the guards had sounded the horn, and they were packed back into the barracks. Most of his bunkmates went to bed, or they lingered in the mess hall playing cards, or leafing through ancient issues of Sports Illustrated and Newsweek. Steve waited for his turn in the shower. Watch yourself in the shower, something with Bob's voice said. Nobody bothered him. He showered without shampoo and cleaned himself with a mostly-gone bar of soap. Every part of his body ached. Once his ten minutes were up, he quickly dressed and went to bed, falling asleep almost instantly despite the mosquitoes sucking on his skin, and the night-heat, and the knowledge that tomorrow would be even worse.