Hell and Gone

“Go to the break room and bar the door shut. Now! It’s your only chance!”

 * * *

And Hardie could hear it.

Meanwhile the two able-bodied prisoners, Archie and Eve, battled Yankee and X-Ray back into the delivery room. X-Ray tried to use his wristband mace blast, but Archie slapped his arm away and gave him a brutal head butt to his nose. Blood gushed out and clung to the wispy blond hairs hanging down from Archie’s forehead. “For my brother, you cunt.” X-Ray staggered backward. Through the pain, though, he heard the voice of the Prisonmaster, speaking perfect German:

“Lock them in the delivery room and get back to the control room. Now! It’s your only chance!”

X-Ray grimaced and raced forward, smashing into Archie’s midsection and flinging him to the side. Out of the corner of his eye, Hardie could see that Yankee was doing the same thing with Eve, smashing his way past her body, except that he was scrambling in the other direction, toward the control room.

The realization hit Hardie and Eve at the same time: the guards were splitting up…to seal them in the delivery room.

If they were trapped in a single room, it was game over.

Hardie scuttled across the floor like a crab escaping a boiling pot of water. He scooped up his cane and threw it to Eve—who caught it and wedged it between the door and the frame just as Yankee and Whiskey were pulling it shut. The guards on the other side tried, but no amount of strength was sufficient to snap that cane in half. Meanwhile Archie held it in place, so they couldn’t kick it loose.

For the moment they were at a grunting, sweating impasse.

Eve, breathing heavily, lips bleeding, said, “Okay.”

Hardie said, “Wait—what’s okay?”

“We can’t go back to the way it was. We’ll never get this chance again. Got to end this thing now.”

“How are we supposed to do that?”

“I’m talking about winning the fucking war, the whole thing, once and for all, change everything forever.”

“Spit it out already,” Archie said.

“Send one of us up and out through the elevator.”

Hardie just stared at her. Do what?

“And trigger the death mechanism?” Archie asked.

“Hear me out,” Eve continued. “One of us gets out. Escapes the facility. Finds someone on the outside. Tells the truth about this place.”

“Killing everyone else,” Hardie said.

“But one of us gets out,” Eve added, “and the survivor has to bring the truth to the world. Hardie here knows someone who will listen. Don’t you, Charlie?”

“What?” Hardie asked. “No. No way. Bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Are you really prepared to kill everyone down here?” Hardie asked.

“For the greater good? Absolutely. If we don’t make this strike now, we’re all fucked. Things will get worse. This will go on and on and on…and nobody will know. Nobody will fucking know what went on down here! And I can’t have that.”

“No, she may be right,” Archie said. “The question is, of course…who goes?”

“Hardie goes,” Eve said.

Hardie blinked. “What? No. Unh-unh. This is insane.”

“You have a wife and a son waiting for you. Besides, I have my success rate to think about. I don’t complete my job if you die.”

“There’s another way,” Hardie said. “There’s always another way.” He wanted to quote Batman and his thing about prisons always containing their escape, but he decided it would take too long.

“No, there’s not, Charlie. You haven’t been here long enough to realize that. We all have. There is no way. They designed this thing perfectly—only one exit no one would ever dare take. Well, fuck that. One of us should take it. And I think that someone should be you. Put us all out of our misery and blow the lid off this place. Don’t forget everything I’ve told you about the people who run this pl—”

“No,” Hardie said sternly. “No. There’s no way I’m killing all of you.”

“You don’t understand—”

“No, Eve, you don’t understand. Why do you think I’m even here? Because I let my partner and his whole family die. And you want me to do it again? To all of you?”

Archie, in all his naked glory, nodded his head. “He’s right, you know.”

They turned to look at him.

“I should go,” he said.

“What?” Eve asked. “No. Fuck you—I don’t even know you. Hardie goes.”

Archie shook his head. “Mr. Hardie, you seem like a fine man and all, but the trick is going to be getting past these two guards and making it to the elevator while the rest of us are on defense—as you call it in American football. You were walking with a cane until very recently. What if you stumble? What if you can’t make it? As I see it, we only have one shot at this. The strongest and fastest should go. There is no time for false modesty here—I am the strongest and fastest.”

Archie made eye contact with each of them before continuing:

“You’re all okay with this, right? Good.”

And with that, he wrapped the fingers of both hands firmly around the edge of the door.

“Cover me.”

With almost superhuman strength, Archie wrenched open the door and dove in.

But the guards were ready for him.

The Prisonmaster told X-Ray:

“Under the table. Pull up the tile. Use any key to unlock them. Do it now.”

X-Ray quickly unlocked two weapons, keeping one for himself and passing the other to Whiskey. Now each of them had a device that resembled an electrified barbecue fork. The two prongs could be inserted deep into tissue and deliver a shock that was beyond any human being’s threshold of pain. Instant bodily shutdown.

Archie charged straight at them.

Whiskey and X-Ray braced themselves, weapons behind their backs.

They did not relish this moment.

They knew the devices in their hands could potentially kill the prisoners, and they did not consider themselves to be killers.

In fact, before they were brought to this place, they were considered heroes.

Whiskey’s real name was Mathilde Aslanides, and she’d made a career out of keeping people from harm. If your name appeared on a hit list, and the authorities failed or refused to protect you, Mathilde would. She knew how to hide, she knew how to fight, and until a team of vengeful assassins cornered her in a nasty Brazilian favela, she had helped save the lives of more than one hundred people. Her life was about preventing death, not becoming its agent.

In his former life, X-Ray worked on the flip side, helping people after their deaths. Under his real name— Lucas Dabrock—X-Ray was an expert at determining the real cause of any given death— not just what presented on the surface, not what the killers wanted you to think. If he was unable to prevent a death, then at least he could find and help punish those responsible—the ones who thought they could get away with it. Dabrock had been one of the most brilliant and sought-after pathologists in the world…until his enemies had conspired to bring him here, to this place of madness.

Now X-Ray held his weapon steady, knowing exactly where he needed to stab in order to take down the prisoner who was coming at them full bore.

At the last moment Archie dropped straight down and executed a kicking spin that knocked both guards off their feet.

In the confused tangle of bodies Archie stayed focused enough to grab one electrified barbecue fork, and, in a smooth efficient motion, plunge it into X-Ray’s testicles. X-Ray’s mouth made an O. Archie seized the other