Joe was ready to put the terror in Terror Towns. After a couple of successful operations with the Electric Eagles, they bumped him up to the more civilian role of a federal agent. Yet, don't let the rise in the system fool you. Joe wasn't just any old federal agent—he was the Federal Agent. Agent Franco on the case. What was his task? Well it took a great deal of patience and temperance on his part. He had to reside with the Muslims in the Terror Towns.

Now why the hell would they put him in a TT? Joe was asking the same question when they first handed him the job. Then he realized that they needed people to keep an eye on the Muslims from the inside. The thing about TT's was that, Middle Eastern people weren't the only people living in TT's. Of course, they made up a supermajority of the population, but a small percentage of people included other races that practiced Islam. In short, the TT's were keeping Islam in check. It was illegal to practice Islam outside of the TT's. Anyone caught doing so would either be imprisoned, sent to a TT, or worse—imprisoned in a jail within a TT.

Although Joe would stick out like a man in a suit walking in a ghetto run-down neighborhood, the people wouldn't question why he was here. They knew that the only people in the TT's were there because they were forced to—and they were forced to because they were Muslim.

Each TT was different, some were huge and had few members, and others were small and were as crowded as a metropolitan city. With his luck, and lady luck had been flipping him off of late, he had been assigned to a crowded small TT. Now Joe was used to bunking in rooms of up to five men in a room, all sharing one bathroom and shower. But he was not prepared to be bunking with 13 guests to a room all sharing one toilet and a shower that precipitated hail.

Out of the 13 people he was forced to live with, there were two people whom he would love to set fire to their intestines, and watch them puff out columns of smoke from their mouths. One was a girl named Stephanie. Stephanie was 'the rudest bitch in the world.' She constantly complained about the lack of space, she always took hour-showers, she always had new guys coming over to sleep with; but that wasn't even the worst. The things she did with these guys was bad—but she didn't just limit them to guys. She had a taste for young flesh, and captured boys as young as 12 in her bosom. It was disgusting. Everyone tried telling her to stop, but she liked to believe that if she was meant to die here, she might as well live life, while she could, to the fullest. Joe's attitude towards her was probably the most lenient, since he wasn't really Muslim. The rest, found her a disgrace to womanhood alone, let alone to their faith.

Then there was Khalif. This guy was almost the opposite of Stephanie. While Joe wanted to burn their intestines, Joe also wanted to mutilate Khalif's corpse and drive it around the town for fun. But Joe had his reasons: Khalif never took a shower and constantly smelled like burning sewage on a hot and muggy summer day. The whole building stunk because of his refusal to take a shower. Secondly, he constantly cursed out America, and although he may be in the right, some of the things he said were terrifying even for Joe. He's threatened to gather a needle with a deadly virus, and stab every white person he could get his hands on; he'd promised to tear off the breast of every woman in the U.S. and hang them in a museum; he'd swore that America was Satan disguised as a nation; and he vowed to make America burn forever for the crimes they have done against humanity. He blamed America for WWII, saying it was really the Americans who killed the Jews, not the Germans. In fact, he claimed that the Americans paid off the Germans to do the dirty work for them, so that they wouldn't take any heat if the whole thing fell apart. He held that, even though the Americans warned the Japanese about the atomic bomb and the fact that they were going to drop it, America refused to accept their surrender when the Japanese conceded hours before Hiroshima—basically he thought Americans killed for sport because killing humans was the best game out there to hunt. It was people like him that gave people like Joe a reason to sign up for the armed forces in the first place.

Yet, while Joe was basically a sleeper cell agent, other federal agents, and national guard soldiers patrolled the streets and perimeter of the TT's. They would barge in on residences that seemed suspicious. On occasion they had barged in on Joe's residence and even roughed him up a bit. To the agents, he was one of those untrustworthy Muslims. Although he regretted this part of the job, Joe could see the reward in the near future. Of course he couldn't fight back whenever the agents invaded, nor could he reveal his identity—or else the whole operation would exposed.

To play his part, Joe grew out a full beard and did not cut his hair. He spent extra time out in the sun, and his skin caramelized. He would wear a brown robe, sandals, and try to fit into his stereotypical vision of a Middle Eastern Muslim. For the most part it worked. Few people questioned him, and those that did, Joe was easily able to convince them otherwise when he popped out the Arabic.

Yeah, he was that good. Of course, he did advance towards an intermediate level of Arabic while doing ROTC back in CTU. [28] There were three things he took to heart in college: parties, studies, and drillings. Sometimes the three would collide. Joe couldn't help but laugh at that joke. The girls he met at some of these parties...

Either way, he brushed up on some Arabic over the past month training for the new job. Of course he was no master at the language, but he was more than capable of holding up a casual conversation—which was all he needed since any person caught speaking Arabic in the TT's would either be fined, beaten, or imprisoned. Speaking Arabic meant you were plotting something, which also meant you were an enemy—if you weren't one already.

As you can see, life was tough in the TT. In here, the Constitution had no effect. There were no such thing as the Bill of Rights. That concept existed outside these walls. Inside here, you had no freedom of speech, religion or assembly; you had no right to carry any weapons of any kind; law enforcement needed no warrant to search a house—heck, they already had agents living in your quarters; trials were non-existent within these walls; and the punishments—they were cruel. In fact, Joe took pleasure in the violation of that right. He loved cruel and unusual punishments—well as long as he was inflicting them on other people.

So when he found out that one of the two people he hated within his residence was attempting to build some sort of device or weapon to "even the score," Joe was quick to report his findings.

It wasn't long before Joe found himself escorting the culprit outside for a friendly chat, which led to a bag and grab by federal agents within the facility. Soon the culprit was transported to a prison on the opposite side of the compound. The people here called the prison, the Wailing Mansion. Echoes of blood-curling cries vibrated the air throughout the night, and during the day, a somber symphony of whimpers flooded the town. No one knew what was going on inside the Wailing Mansion, but they figured that the people who disappeared in the TT ended up there. To date, anyone who has disappeared has never been seen again.

Since the suspect was Joe's, and since he knew more about the man than any other agent, he was credited with interrogating the suspect. This was the reward Joe had been waiting for. The moment to spill blood—blood for blood.

The suspect was waiting in a dark room with a flickering light—a perfect setting for an "interrogation." The suspect sat with his head against the table, whimpering.

Joe took a deep satisfying breath, savoring the smell of fear and victory. "Welcome mi amigo, to the Wailing Mansion! I am your host, Agent Me. I hope you're finding everything relatively uncomfortable today. If not, I'll make sure to accommodate you for your stay."

The man simply cried and Joe mocked. "What's the matter? No more hating on America? No more threatening to shoot people up with diseases or ripping women's breasts off to display in a museum? No more conspiracy theories about World War Two?"

The suspect stopped crying and remained silent he looked up and recognized Joe's face. "Dah'rek? It's you? You betrayed us!"

"I was never on your side to begin with buddy. Now let's get down to business."

Joe pulled around a metal chair and sat purposefully the wrong way as he leaned on the table and stared intently at Khalif. "So I'm going to ask you some questions, and you're gonna make this difficult. You're going to lie to me, and then I'm going to get to have some fun."

Khalif spat at Joe's face. "You sick fuck! I've done nothing!"

Joe wiped the hoagie from his face. "Cute." Then Joe proceeded to ram Khalif's face with his fist. The impact sent two teeth launching straight out of his jaw and onto the floor. Thick blood oozed out of Khalif's mouth as he hunched over the side of the table, with his arms tied behind his back.

"Try that shit again, and I might just make a shit load of money from the tooth fairy. Now where were we...oh yes, the device. I know it's a bomb. Now your job is simple, tell me where you got the parts from, who else is apart of this little street gang you got going on over here, and then maybe—just maybe—I won't rip your intestines out and choke you to death with them."

Khalif continually hung his head beside the table, blood seeping from his mouth. Joe got frustrated and banged the table really loud to get Khalif's attention. "Answer me damn it!"

Khalif didn't even flinch, and Joe laughed. "I love it when they play hard to get. Boys, the suspect doesn't seem to be cooperating. I think it's time to ruffle some feathers a bit now—shall we?"

Within seconds two security guards were inside the dark room escorting Khalif outside. Joe followed behind and snaked through a corridor of jail cells where many malnourished inmates huddled up against the floor in a fetal position rocking back and forth—mumbling some inaudible nonsense. Joe could only imagine what fun the other agents had with these pricks that caused them to feel so defeated. Joe was as anxious as a child on Christmas Eve to see Santa.

One of the prisoners, however, still had a little juice left in him. He got up and his withered body rushed to clutch the iron bars. He thrusted his hand through the gap—gurgling at Joe as if the prisoner was some type of soulless corpse. The poor thing was like a rabid creature—he needed to be put down. One of the guards banged on the cell for the man to go back to his corner, but he kept on growling. Joe walked up to the cell and started making hushing noises.

"Shhh, it's okay. I know you must be going through a lot of pain right now. I promise I won't hurt you. You see, I'm a doctor, and I was about to treat that victim over there, but it seems like you need far more help than he does."

Joe calmly approached the jail cell, but the man only allowed his guard to go down slightly. He was still reaching through the bars, grasping at the air.

So Joe soothed his voice and studied the decaying inmate. "What have these bastards done to you? This is...outrageous."

Joe's concern got the man to slowly remove his hand from the outside of the slips of the jail cell. He eventually found the bars of the cell to be sturdy enough to grasp his hands around. As Joe examined the man, he found that he was really staring at a creature who had lost all rationality and who had become a beast. He had no skin—his entirely body was covered in blisters. His hair was nearly nonexistent, a few wild strands here and there, but otherwise he was completely bald. He had about three teeth left, two on the bottom and one somewhere closer towards the upper back. Upon close analysis of his hands, Joe realized that the creature was missing a finger, and that all the nails on his remaining fingers had been torn off.

As Joe looked into his eyes, he saw complete blankness. The eyes are the windows to the soul, and Joe saw no soul on the other side of these windows. He saw nothing, but yellow jaundice eyes and streaks of red trying to break through the yellow like cracks in dry dirt.

Joe couldn't help but feel sorry for the creature. Sure he could've been a crazy terrorist who wished to kill many innocent Americans, but looking at what had become of him...he couldn't believe that we were capable of reducing a man to such a miserable condition.

Joe slowly reached his right hand around the creature's face and although the creature flinched at first, he allowed Joe to touch him. Once he allowed one hand, Joe found it easy to extend his left hand towards the left side of the creature's face.

And Joe calmly promised him. "I'll make the pain go away."

The creature seemed to nod, almost like a spark of intelligence. A single tear dripped from his eye and drizzled down his scarred face. As the drop took off from his face the sound of a snap echoed across the room, then a squishy noise clattered against the ground, and finally the drop splattered against the floor besides the source of the tear drop.

Joe turned to the guards who had stopped and stared at him. Joe simply cleared his throat and blurted out. "Well—we needed an extra cell anyway. Now we have one. Start clearing this mess out for the new prisoner—that's if he even survives what I'm about to do to him."

Footnote:

[28] CTU = Christian Texas University.