Coercion – Chapter 2 – Sneak Peak

CHAPTER TWO — THE POD PEOPLE

INTAKE

People think my story started with a SWAT raid. Choppers circling, dogs tearing through sheetrock, men in black stacking at the door. No. That was seven years earlier. This time, it was ordinary. Buc-ee’s. Bright lights, beaver mascot, gas pumps humming. I was with my girl, thank God, because when the cuffs snapped cold around my wrists, I shoved everything—phones, keys, wallet, car—straight into her hands. They got me, but they didn’t get shit. No tech, no car, no trail for them to dissect. I thought that gave me control. I was wrong.

Thirty days later they came again. Different paperwork, different charge. Staggered. That second arrest sealed it. They weren’t letting me dance back out. I got processed into Williamson County, officially an HVT—High Value Target. That means you’re not getting out until they’re finished breaking you.

The conveyor belt started with the bench. They sat me down, cuffs biting, steel cold against my back, and left me there like cargo. After that came medical. A closet barely big enough for a desk. Inside: a woman in a sheriff’s uniform, EMT patch stitched to her arm, eyes glued to a computer screen. “Any medical issues?” she asked flatly. I told her: Type 2 diabetic. Never been on insulin. She pricked my finger, read the strip, and without looking up said, “We’ll start you on insulin.” That was it. No doctor. No discussion. My body wasn’t mine anymore.

From medical they funneled me into the clothing room. “What size?” a deputy barked. I told him. He tossed me orange scrubs—shirt and pants. No socks. No underwear. No undershirt. Crocs and nothing else. Scratchy fabric on bare skin, foam shoes squeaking. You weren’t a man anymore. You were property.

Then came the camera. Flash. Click. Mugshot. That image shot into cyberspace instantly—NCIC, TCIC, mugshot mills, Google, Facebook. Within minutes my face was live, charges splashed in bold. By the time I bonded out the first time, my cousin already had it on his phone. “Your picture just came across my app.” Jail wasn’t jail anymore. Jail was content.

Only then did they march me into the big room—the main intake hall. Cavernous, fluorescent lights buzzing like hornets. Benches lined up in rows in front of a bolted TV. Women in pink sat in the first rows. Minors—almost always boys—sat in white three rows back, alone, marked like fragile packages. Men in orange filled the rest of the seats. Overflow went to the fishbowls. Four glass cages bolted along the wall. One usually for women, the others for men. Inside: a stainless toilet behind a steel partition you could still see through. No privacy. No dignity. You prayed to God there was toilet paper. A phone hung on the wall too, stripped of its receiver—just a keypad and a push-to-talk button. Anything you said, everybody heard. The fishbowls weren’t holding rooms. They were display cases. We were the exhibits.

At the magistrate, bond was set at $350,000. Ten percent down—thirty-five grand. Too much. I told myself, fuck it, I’ll sit it out. Six months maybe. What I didn’t know was WilCo’s favorite scam: the stagger. There weren’t twenty bonds, just two. They’d arrest you once, you’d bond out, and they knew your family would lose that cash, because the next charge came staggered right behind it. That second charge voided the first bond, locked you in, and drained the money. My parents had already dropped ten grand. Gone. Designed that way. The stagger wasn’t bad luck. It was theft disguised as law. A trap in paperwork.

—

R-POD

They marched me into R-Pod, the biggest pod in the jail, and I had no clue yet I was tagged HVT. To me, it looked clean. Stainless steel tables bolted to the floor, round stools welded in place. Toilets polished to a shine. Concrete floors buffed until they glowed under fluorescent light. Dropped ceilings made the space feel open. Air conditioning humming. No piss, no mildew, no stink. I thought, maybe this won’t be so bad.

The atmosphere was light. Inmates played spades and dominoes, laughter bouncing off steel. Commissary bags stacked like poker chips. A guy handed me headphones. Another slid me food. I hadn’t been in jail more than seventy-two hours in my life. I expected chaos, threats. Instead, it looked like a dorm.

Every bunk glowed with tablets. You could call home, order ramen, stream music, watch movies. Only the movies were neutered. Nothing newer than the seventies, nothing above PG. Made-for-TV reruns. Sedation. 

Accounts reset every seven days, exactly. Passwords vanished. Everyone cursed about it, called it a glitch. I realized later it was deliberate—data harvesting. At the time, I just played along, typing new codes, trying not to lose what little access I had.

On the surface, no violence. Jailhouse etiquette instead: flush while you shit, clean your table, don’t make noise when people were sleeping. R-Pod was etiquette school. Underneath, it was a lab.

Davis jabbed me with fifty cc’s of COVID, called it a “check.” My food was poisoned—I pissed blood. Medical gave me two ibuprofen a day. That’s it. I stayed awake five nights straight, sweating, hallucinating, writhing.

Ransom switched my insulin from R to what he called Humalog. My right side erupted in infection. They sent me to Brooks—the so-called doctor. Except Brooks was a fake. The Texas Medical Board says three out of four “doctors” used in WilCo don’t even have Texas medical licenses. The one that does? Based in Houston. Not even in the county. That’s who treated me. A fraud in a white coat. He blasted me with high-dose antibiotics. That cocktail didn’t cure me. It left me blind with a quarter-sized black spot in my vision. The infection burned down my leg, chewed through nerves, left permanent damage. Even now, without meds, it feels like fire ants crawling over my right side.

Even the shampoo was sabotage. My scalp broke out in sores. I thought it was cheap soap, no alcohol. I made a substitute to dry it out. Then another guy shaved his head. His scalp was raw, oozing. He puked into a bag before they dragged him to infirmary. When he came back, he wasn’t the same. He’d signed a deal. Straight to prison. They didn’t treat him—they processed him. One day he was an inmate, the next he was property of TDCJ.

Four or five months in, Nathan couldn’t keep his arrogance bottled. He leaned in, smug, and said, “Did you know the FBI is in here?” Like it was a badge of honor. I told my attorney. Her face said everything—she thought I was insane. She ordered a psych eval immediately. At the time it stung. In hindsight, it was the best gift she gave me. Proof I wasn’t crazy before the real torture started.

Nathan’s arrogance didn’t stop. After talking to Isolde, he told Derek, “Yeah, the ex-wife’s not happy, but at least I still got him on the gun.” Casual, like my freedom was poker chips. That’s when I knew Isolde’s voice was feeding the pod. And the gun? That was their hook.

Six weeks in, they rolled out the Bluebonnet trick. No razor until you went through Bluebonnet. They called it suicide prevention. Bullshit. It was facial recognition training. By forcing us to grow beards, they taught the AI to catch faces through change. They moved food trays away from the door sensors, forcing cameras to scan our faces. Inmates whispered, “You don’t even need your badge anymore—they know you now.” That badge carried RFID. Without it, the system went full biometric. Bluebonnet wasn’t therapy. It was tech. Pixels in a machine.

Six months blurred like that. R-Pod wasn’t jail. It was a lab disguised as a dorm.

—

P-POD

Mid-July they moved me to P-Pod. Smaller. Thirty percent smaller, but the same number of bodies jammed inside. The air felt heavier, stale. No vending machine, no outlet. Commissary, which had hit every Tuesday in R-Pod, started slipping. Tuesday became Wednesday. Then Thursday. Then later. Guys paced, frustrated. Commissary wasn’t just snacks. It was money, survival, comfort. Delays were tension by design.

Then my commissary bag started disappearing. Slid under the wall and coming back lighter. Honey buns missing. At first I thought I was paranoid. Then I caught him—Mighty Mouse. Buddy-buddy one day, stealing from me the next. That flipped a switch. I became hypersensitive. Every move, every word mattered.

Then came the confrontation. Little Hispanic Chris puffed his chest. “You got a problem?” I said. “Then hit me. But you better knock me the fuck out, because if I get back up, you’re done.” I stuck my chin out, dared him. He froze. They sent Mighty Mouse stomping next. I sat back with headphones in. “What the fuck you gonna do?” He had nothing.

That’s when Nathan ran to the C.O. Guards stormed in. I stayed on my bunk. “I’m not doing shit. These motherfuckers are the ones fucking with me. Take them to Southside.” Chris backed down. Mighty Mouse backed down. Nathan’s cover blew. And when his did, Derek’s did too. I’d already suspected. That moment solidified it. This wasn’t inmates versus guards. This was cops on both sides of the door. Nathan was so arrogant he’d already told me the FBI was inside. Now it was exposed. The pod wasn’t criminals. It was plants. The whole thing was a play.

—

B-5

On August 9, 2024, they moved me to B-5, Left, bunk six. Open cell. Looked like ordinary jail—bunks, steel, no tablet glow. But B-5 was where the whispers sharpened.

I overheard them planning a raid. Ten o’clock at night. My mom’s house in Travis County. Sheriff Mike Gleason himself had given the green light: “We’ll serve the warrant and let the courts figure it out.” Illegal as hell. My mom lives alone. There was nothing illegal in her house. I sat on it for fifteen minutes, chewing it. Then I snapped. I said it out loud, loud enough for the pod to hear: “Hey, by the way—all my fucking guns are legal, motherfuckers. Every one of them is registered with the ATF. They were all purchased at the same damn store.”

Two days later I heard them again. This time softer. “Yeah, Gleason said that must’ve been an angel talking. He’s thankful they misread those numbers and double-checked them.” That was how close it came. They were serious. They were ready to roll on my mom’s house. The only thing that stopped it was me blowing it up in public. Call it an angel, call it luck—I didn’t care. I knew my words had forced a double-check. That raid died right there. Survival in WilCo meant firing your voice like a weapon.

—

That was the descent:

• Buc-ee’s arrest → handoff → transfer from Travis to WilCo.  

• Intake: bench → medical closet → clothing room → photo → big intake hall with benches & fishbowls. Women in pink, minors in white, men in orange. Overflow cages with toilets & push-to-talk phones. Mugshot blast. Magistrate scam. Two-bond stagger.  

• R-Pod: poisoned food, COVID jab, insulin switch → blindness and nerve damage. Shampoo sores → inmate signed to prison. Nathan’s FBI slip. Psych eval. Gun comment. Bluebonnet psy-op.  

• P-Pod: smaller, no vending machine, commissary delays. Theft, staged confrontation. Nathan & Derek exposed.  

• B-5: Sheriff Gleason raid scare. My out-loud callout. The “angel” walk-back.  

At the time, I thought the pod was freedom.  

I didn’t know it was just the first stage of the experiment.d 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.