Hell and Gone

“Sure.”

Victor laughed, shook his head. “I can tell you don’t believe me. That’s okay. When I first arrived, I didn’t believe the warden, either. But here’s something I’ve come to realize. As bad as the outside world might be, with nutty bastards blowing up day-care centers and terrorist technicians constantly trying to find the best way to hide liquid explosives up someone’s ass so they can fart and take out a jetliner…as bad as that is, it could be worse. Far worse. There could be more serial killers, more bin Ladens, more monsters roaming the planet…if not for facilities like these. We’re the first and last line of defense.”

Hardie said:

“Just open the door.”

13

Knowledge of the outside world is what we tell you.

—Patrick McGoohan, Escape from Alcatraz

AS HARDIE HOBBLED forward into the small, cramped room housing the control panel and looked through a dingy partition of thick, shatterproof plastic onto the rest of the facility, he finally got a sense of the place.

He’d seen prisons before. But none like this.

The entire site was one low-ceilinged room, about the size of a cafeteria in a shitty inner-city high school. This control room, like his own quarters, was one of a series of small rooms on the outer perimeter—like luxury boxes in a sporting arena, only minus the luxury. Cement floors with chipping paint, cement walls with chipping paint, steel supports with chipping paint.

And the prisoners? They were crammed into poorly lit rusty cages. They sat on metal floors and had metal masks strapped to their heads.

Two of them, in three cages.

“The hell…?” Hardie muttered, thinking: This is it?

“Told you,” Victor said.

None of it made sense. This was supposed to be the most secure prison facility in the world?

There had to be more to it than this. Something Hardie wasn’t seeing. Maybe force fields, or invisible electronic barriers, or some other high-tech sci-fi bullshit. Mann’s employers, whoever they were, seemed to have an unlimited budget. So what was with this cheap-ass prison?

“We mostly watch them from inside this control room,” Victor said. “There’s one on the opposite side, too, facing the other row of cells. Six cells, four prisoners on the floor. Of course, we do go in there to feed them and do roll call and drag them to the shower room when the smell gets too strong. But yeah, the idea is to minimize contact. These are clever fuckers. They’d crawl inside your skull and hot-wire your brain if they could.”

“Huh.”

“Like everyplace else, we’re tragically understaffed. We work in four shifts, six hours each, but you often end up watching someone else’s back.”

Hardie said, “Where exactly are we?”

“What do you mean? We’re in site number seven seven three four.”

“No, I mean geographically. The place we’re standing. Where is it?”

Victor squinted as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Where is it? Are you kidding? We don’t know. None of us knows. That’s the whole point of an escape-proof facility. Didn’t they explain any of this to you?”

“How did you get here?”

“Like everybody else. Like you did.”

Nobody, Hardie thought, got here like I did.

Yankee and Whiskey wordlessly slipped past both of them and unlocked a door that led out to the cages.

“Anyway, this is good timing,” Victor said. “You’ll get to see how we do roll call.”

“All right, lights…”

Victor reached for an ancient control panel and stabbed a dirty plastic button. An insanely bright light filled the three cells facing them.

“Cameras…”

Yankee and Whiskey unclipped little plastic devices the size of TV remotes from their belts.

“And action.”

Inside the first cage was a pale-skinned, lanky, yet muscular man whose head was hanging low. He was stark naked except for the metal mask that was strapped to his head like a welder’s helmet. There were breathing holes, but otherwise the mask was featureless. The prisoner sat with his back against the wall, feet flat on the floor, knees a good three feet apart so that you could see his limp cock and slightly larger-than-average balls just hanging there, gently resting on the cold concrete floor.

“Meet Prisoner Four,” Victor said.

After an awkward silence, Hardie asked, “Can’t you get him something to wear?”

“Wanker refuses to wear anything,” Victor explained. “He’s renounced all material possessions, or some such shit. We give him clothes, he rips them up into strips.”

“Yeah. He’s just oozing honor there, isn’t he?”

At which point the lanky man—Prisoner Four—lifted his head. He could sense the other two guards approaching. Yankee barked his orders at the prisoner, his voice sounding tinny through the small speaker in the control room.

“Number Four, back against the bars.”

“No names for these guys, either?”

“Nope. Just numbers. But we do have nicknames, which relieves the tedium of the numbers. We sometimes call this one Bollock. As in ‘bollocks’?”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“Sometimes Americans don’t.”

Once the prisoner’s back was against the bars, Whiskey reached out and yanked Bollock’s head backward, pinning it to the bars and keeping it still. Yankee took a key from his ring and inserted it into a small lock that joined the straps on the back of the prisoner’s mask.

“What’s the deal with the masks?”

“They’re only allowed to remove the masks when they eat and when there’s roll call, which we do with digital photographs.”

Yankee said, “Now turn around. Back against the wall.”

Prisoner Four, aka Bollock, complied. With the mask off, he turned out to be a long-faced, grim man, with unruly, wispy blond hair. Yankee lifted his digital camera and snapped a photo just as Bollock hoisted a long, bony middle finger at them.

“See what I mean?” Victor said inside the control room.

Whiskey’s response was quick and brutal. The bird was flying for only two seconds before a baton jabbed Bollock in the stomach. As the prisoner doubled over, Whiskey removed the baton then jammed it into the hollow of his throat, choking him. Yankee snapped a new photo.

“Say ‘cheese,’ scumbag,” Victor muttered.

“Over on the left is Prisoner One. Also known as Horsehead.”

The heavily muscled man inside the cell lazily rubbed the back of his head. Unlike Bollock, this prisoner wore a plain smock. But it didn’t cover the scars and puncture wounds that snaked up and down his arms and legs, and presumably his torso, upper thighs, and many of his major internal organs, too. He was a large, thick slab of scarred muscle.

“Horsehead?” Hardie asked.

As if on cue, Horsehead’s masked head whipped up to attention. Moved a fraction of an inch to the right, then the left, then the right again, as if his brain were a satellite trying to tune in to a signal. Then he began to jibber