Coercion – Chapter 1 – Sneak Peak

By LeRoy Nellis

Bang.  

Steel on steel, the slot detonated like a shotgun blast.  

Bang again. Because once was never enough.  

That’s how mornings began in the box. Not alarms. Not coffee. Just noise as torture. The slot scream tore through the light-blue walls, rattled your teeth, rewired your nerves. The tray slid in like a hockey puck: gray steam rising, bread heels stacked like a joke. Always the ends. Always punishment disguised as dinner.  

Johnny Sacks meant brown-bag hell. Bread heels again, slab of tire-textured meat gone green around the edges, four soggy cookies, maybe a fruit if the guards were in a generous mood—which they never were. Nutrition? No. Calories rationed like bullets.  

And when the toilet clogged? Forget a plunger. It was my bare hands in the bowl, scooping waste, stuffing it into chip bags. They wouldn’t take my trash. So I stacked those shit-bags on my trays when I slid them back through the slot. Eat through the slot. Shit through the slot. That was the system.  

The air itself fought you. Two vents overhead—one tied to the HVAC inside, the other piped from outside. Hundred-degree Texas heat? They baked you alive. Winter? They froze you solid until you shivered under thin covers, teeth chattering like castanets. Sometimes the vent sucked, sometimes it blew—like the trustees next door were flushing their shit smell straight into my lungs. I tested it with toilet paper: one moment a pull, the next a push. Reverse the fan, weaponize the stench. That’s what they did.  

And when they let me out for my single hour in the day room? That’s when the real fuckery went down. Door cracked just enough for trustees to sneak in and sabotage my cell. They’d mop piss water onto my floor. When I had towels, I scrubbed it out. Once they stripped me into a smock, I had to live with it. They stole all the aces from my deck—try playing poker without aces. I built a new game that didn’t need them. They lifted my Bible, called it contraband. They wanted to strip body, mind, and spirit. I wouldn’t let them.  

And the TV—don’t get me started. Static storms on blue-sky days, shows looping like déjà vu. One afternoon I caught their slip. The news replayed, same anchor, same script. Then the seven-day forecast rolled: last week’s dates printed across the bottom. Proof the whole feed was a loop, time itself recycled to fuck with our heads. When I checked the kiosk, sure enough—the dates were off by a week. They wanted us doubting reality itself.  

Wheeless and Karg made sure humiliation dripped thick. They’d lean in the hall swapping porno war stories, loud enough for me to hear.  

“Her tits were massive, man, popping out her shirt, nipples hard as bullets. She was climbing in my truck begging for it.”  

Karg laughed, “Bet Joker hasn’t seen pussy in years. Bet his balls are bluer than these fucking walls.”  

They knew I hadn’t seen a woman in a year and a half. No skin. No softness. Just concrete and steel. Their words weren’t jokes. They were tactical strikes. Psy-ops dressed up as dick talk.  

And the smells—never bleach, because they didn’t clean. Just mildew baked into paint, piss from the drain, shit seeping the toilet bowl. That was the perfume of the box.  

Most men don’t last long here. They’re not supposed to. That’s the point. You bake them, freeze them, starve them, humiliate them until they’ll sign anything. Plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit just to get daylight. That’s why Williamson County doesn’t need trials. The box convicts you before the courtroom ever does.  

Me? I refused to break.  

My brain became my DVR. Every whisper, every laugh, every crack of the slot, I recorded it all. Thirty years in IT, plus Safe School in Dallas made me a master locksmith. Locks, safes, alarms, Medeco systems. With a file and a strip of metal, I could’ve cut a skeleton key that could have opened the locks. And it wasn’t just locks. I carried the whole building in my head. Blueprints. Corridors, pods, cages. The parts I hadn’t seen, I guesstimated. After months inside, I could’ve sketched a map blindfolded. I knew their rotations, their elevator games meant to confuse us. But confusion dies with repetition. I’d been run through the drill so many times I knew it cold. Every escort. Every blind spot. They thought they had me boxed in. I’d already drafted the box.  

And the hallucinations—those came every seventy-two hours, like clockwork. Not random, not weak. Science. Solitary rewires your brain. Shadows leaned where walls should be. Voices whispered in concrete. Smells rose that weren’t there. One time, I hallucinated a full SEAL Team 6 op. I sat on my bunk giving the NSA coordinates, calling shots through the blueprint burned in my mind. In my head, they opened a portal and sent SEALs in. Boots slammed floors. Explosions shook walls. Smoke stung my lungs. They were clearing rooms, taking bodies, pulling me out. For a moment, it was real. The box makes you command your own war.  

That’s where the book begins.  

Not with freedom. Not with trial. Not with hope.  

With four steel walls. With piss vents and bread heels. With trustees weaponizing shit and guards weaponizing silence. With crude jokes and recycled time. With my hands wrist-deep in a clogged toilet, and my mind orchestrating a SEAL rescue through another dimension.  

That’s where the box lives.  

And that’s where they left me.