but that didn’t matter, because this was the road now, and hey, you have to deal with the road as it comes.)
The guards didn’t like the half push-ups, either. They would yell at him and tell him this wasn’t exercise time and give him an electric jolt through the metal floor of his cell. Which was fine, because at first, Hardie couldn’t do a half push-up for more than thirty, forty seconds. But he kept at it, got right back up after being thrown off by a shock. He knew there were limits. They couldn’t just keep shocking the snot out of him. So they had to try something else. They had to open the cell to get to him.
Which they did, kicking him and punching him and spraying him with their wristbands full of mace and telling him to knock it off. Hardie ignored them, ignored the burning fury in his eyes, and went back to the half push-ups a few hours later anyway. After a while it became too much of a pain in the ass to open the cell. They ignored him, and only beat him every once in a while. By then, Hardie was up to three minutes. Then five.
Soon Hardie was doing full push-ups and leg squats—which killed. He did them when no one was looking. When he was caught he was shocked and beaten. Which Hardie considered to be a workout on its own, toughening his skin, his muscles. He grew to welcome the intrusions, actually.
Hardie knew that he was doing a slow-motion version of all of those insane get-back-in-shape, get-armed, build-weapons, plant-traps, don-the-body-armor, smear-war-paint-on-your-face montages from countless movies, the most egregious of which were, of course, from the
Don’t get Hardie wrong; jail still sucked.
But with the same self-awareness, he understood that he’d merely adapted to his surroundings. This was nothing special. This what people did; he’d seen
And, like Tim Robbins, he had a plan.
The next shower.
Hardie knew one had to be coming at some point.
The waiting was the worst part. No watch to check, no calendar pages to rip off the wall. Just the vague notion that at some point the guards would have to release him from his cell and place him in the shower room for a few minutes.
But when?
Or had they decided to revoke his shower privileges forever?
Finally, at long last, during a long dull fuzzy moment when Hardie’s brain truly tuned out of reality, Victor appeared at Hardie’s cell door, with Whiskey in the backup position.
Hardie had to pull it together. Reload the plan. He’d had a plan at some point. It had been a good one, too. Both guards had their batons ready, in case Hardie decided to try anything funny. Which he totally was going to! Only he couldn’t remember exactly what the hell it was…
Snap out of it. Wake up. Come on, WAKE THE FUCK UP.
“Back against the bars.”
Hardie complied. Victor slid the key in hard, forcing Hardie’s head to bob forward. Something beeped. The binds loosened. Hardie reached up and slipped off his mask as Victor slipped another electronic key into the cell door.
“Up.”
Hardie crawled to his feet and they nudged him forward, around the block of cells and to the right, toward the shower room.
“Take your smock off,” Victor said once they’d reached the door, which had a thick opaque glass panel.
“Could you turn around? I’m shy.”
Whiskey poked him in the ribs with her baton.
As Hardie stripped and dropped the smock to the ground, he said, “Okay, okay. Want to join me, Whiskey? Wash my back, maybe? Squeeze my testicles again?”
Whiskey’s reply was to shove him inside the shower room with both hands, causing Hardie to clumsily tumble forward and slide across the tile floor.
“Guess that’s a no.”
And the door slammed shut and locked behind him.
Hardie climbed to his feet and waited for the water, as there were no handles on the tile wall. Just three rusted-out nozzles. And then without warning the cold water blasted him, almost knocking him down on his ass again. Once he recovered, Hardie started cleaning himself with his bare hands. No soap, but whatever. Even though the water was freezing, it felt good on his skin. More important, it cleared up his fuzzy mind. The plan came back to him. No time to psych himself up. He just had to be ready to do it NOW.
When the water died, Hardie limped back over toward the door, dripping wet, and pressed his back up against the wall. Here we go. All or nothing, do-or-die time.
The plan:
Hardie would keep his back pressed up against the disgusting tile wall, out of sight. When they opened the door, one of them would have to go in, to see what was going on. Not both of them. For both of them to go in would be stupid, and these guards were not stupid. The next move depended on speed. Hardie would grab whoever entered (probably Victor) and smash his head against the tile floor as hard as he could. It had to be done in one swift move, because one chance was all he’d have. If a fight broke out, the other guard (probably Whiskey) would jump into the shower room, and one carefully placed electric shock later the escape would be over. So the face- pummeling had to be powerful and brutal.
Next move: grabbing Victor’s electric baton.
Then Hardie, if his legs would cooperate, would rush Whiskey and jam the business end of the baton into her chest and give her a jolt. Just enough to drop her to her knees, so that Hardie could snatch the keys from her belt and run over to Cameron’s cell. Once
Because when you got down to it—and this occurred to Hardie in his cell days and days ago—the prisoners outnumbered the guards right now, five to four.
Okay, considering Hardie’s arm and leg, maybe it was more like
So he kept his bare back against the gross wall, waiting.
The door had to open any minute now.
Hardie played and replayed the move in his mind. Grabbing Victor’s head by the hair and just slamming it down, using his body weight to propel it along until bone smashed against tile…
C’mon, door.
What were they waiting for?
Had to open. It just felt like forever because he was anticipating it, right?
And then, finally, the door opened.
Just not the door Hardie expected.
The opposite door opened—the one leading to Whiskey’s quarters. But Victor was the one standing there.
“Over here, quick! Don’t let her see you.”
What the hell was this? Well, there went his brilliant plan. Had they somehow figured it out, and this was their way of defusing it? No. That made no sense. He hadn’t uttered a word of the plan. It had been entirely hatched in his mind.
