How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: This man is not to be locked up again. He is to come with me." Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks The thing that irks me the most is this shattered prison, after all. I'm tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights The world is a...

 They have watched in horror as everyone else in that enclosure became a zombie, while the rest was starting to exhibit the characteristics of a Vampire. They can feel the aura even though they have activated the emergency partition that separated them from the contaminated portion of the enclosure not too far behind from where the original was. "Were you scared?" a voice asked the woman next to him. He was a Member of the Governance Commission that joined the Peaceful Enclosure in Los Angeles, California. "Me?" the woman replied, surprised with the unlikely question. She was a public school teacher back in the free world. "I have seen my husband battled leukemia in the past five years. I have seen both life and death straight in the face." "I am George Kennel, by the way. A member of the Governance Commission. And you are . . .?" "Joyce Tangent," she replied casually. They shook hands. "Did you actually believe in Vampires before ...

 While the New World of America was able to vanish from the common consciousness of the several elements of the Universe, the collective vision for the creation of the different enclosures remain, even after the government's sudden disappearance from reality, where its leadership had been organized into a Governance Commission of the Government Owned and Controlled Enclosures. These twelve primary enclosures had been determined to include: one in Seattle, Washington, one each in San Francisco and Los Angeles in California, one in Las Vegas, Nevada, one in Houston, Texas, one in Boulder, Colorado, one in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one in New York City, New York, one in Boston Massachusetts, one in Charlotte, North Carolina, and one in Miami, Florida. It was not deemed proper at that time to create an Enclosure in Washington, DC, the capital of the New World. It was thought earlier that the Governance Commission must include women as members, but it was late...