Hell and Gone

a mercenary and recovery specialist who loved to right wrongs. He was a man obsessed with law and order, and it was a dark day when official law broke down for him and he swore to uphold a higher law and assist those screwed by the system. For years he’d done just that, first in St. Louis, then throughout the Midwest. Jed had been great at it, too—until the rainy morning they ran his truck off the road, pried him out of the wreckage, and he woke up here as the warden of this friggin’ place.

The only thing that consoled Jed was that he could still do good, still uphold the law…even in hell.

It came to Hardie all at once. He flashed back to what Mann had told him in the waiting room:

I think you’re going to find working with them extremely rewarding. I mean, they’re all truly good people. Heroes, really.

Yes, she had been fucking with him. Sticking it in and twisting a little. But she’d also been telling him the truth.

It was the Prisonmaster who’d been lying to them.

Feeding them bad information.

Turning them against each other.

Why?

Because this was a prison for good guys.

All of them, played off against each other endlessly. Keeping each other in check. Keeping them from meddling in the affairs of the Accident People in the outside world. One by one they were sent down here. Sorted. You ended up either as a guard or as a prisoner. The lines were drawn; the struggle never ending. Because you couldn’t just have eight or nine good guys holed up in one place. Not without them teaming up and trying to mount an escape. You had to divide them. Push them. Break them. And then, when things settled into a pattern, you could shake the insect jar again and watch them all scramble for safety.

And somewhere, there was one psychotic kid holding the mayonnaise jar.

The Prisonmaster.

He was the only one who told them things, pushed them in certain directions. He’d tried it with Hardie, with his bogus crap about trying to help him escape, and bringing a “moral rectitude” to the facility.

The Prisonmaster had been playing him; he had been playing all of them.

And he was probably listening to them right now.

Hardie recovered his cane from the floor and used it to climb to his feet, pulling himself up the shaft one badly shaking hand at a time until he was standing. None of the guards moved to stop him. They stared at him with faraway expressions in their eyes.

“My name is Charlie Hardie. I messed with the wrong people, and they sent me down here as punishment. Probably the same for all of you, too. Think about it. Why are we were? What are we guilty of? Cameron and Victor used to be partners in the outside world. What lies has the Prisonmaster been feeding them? Feeding all of us? What proof do we have of anything? We all thought that escaping would kill the rest of us. None of us could bring ourselves to take that exit, because none of us could stand the thought of innocent blood on our hands. It’s a line we refused to cross. And it’s been used against us this whole time. Well, fuck that. There is a way out of here, but the only way we’re going to find it is if we team up and tear this place apart brick by brick.”

Hardie looked around at his fellow prisoners and realized that he was acting like a leader after all. Channeling his inner Nate Parish.

Yankee said, “Shut up. You’re going back to your cell.”

So that’s how it will be this time, the Prisonmaster thought.

Split decision.

Well, he supposed he saw it coming. The latest addition to the facility, Charles D. Hardie, was simply too combustible. The connection between Hardie and that missing-persons investigator, Eve Bell, was enough to tip it over the edge. He would have to speak to his employers about that once again. The facility worked best when the subjects did not know each other and had no preexisting history.

That way, you could convince one man (Archie, the Brit) that another man (Lucas Dabrock, the German doctor known as X-Ray) was actually his archnemesis. And vice versa.

Or you could convince a good old law-and-order man like Jed Ayres that he’d been charged with keeping an eye on the notorious Charlie Hardie, the man who’d killed beautiful actress Lane Madden, strangling her to death in a dumpy Hollywood hotel one summer evening.

Dealing with those two Australian subjects—former partners, no less!—had been a true challenge. It had taken much effort to drive a wedge between them, but it was the only choice, really. The facility would break down without constant conflict.

Well, the Prisonmaster realized it was time to hit the reset button. Rebuild the experiment from the ground up once again.

Maybe this time he’d demand permission to dispose of one of the Australians. Pin the botched escape attempt on him.

And perhaps maybe this time he would mix among the population as a guard. Playing the role of a prisoner was always satisfying…right up until the moment it wasn’t.

He whispered softly into the microphone mounted inside his metal mask:

“Good-bye.”

Hardie saw it happening. One by one, a message from the Prisonmaster, delivered individually to the guards’ earbuds. Heads turned quickly; hands went to ears. Yankee, then X-Ray, then finally Whiskey.

“What is it?” Hardie asked.

Yankee looked at him. “He said…good-bye?”

Whiskey nodded. “Oui,” she said. “Au revoir.”

 * * *

Next came the hissing from every air vent in the facility.

To Hardie, it was precisely like that moment in a nightmare when you realize that everything is not going to be all right.

That you are falling toward an unforgiving piece of concrete and you are not going to be rescued.

Your body is going to hit the ground and your blood will explode out of your useless body.

There is nothing you can do about it. There is no one to save you.

Hardie and his fellow inmates—because surely they were all inmates now—scrambled out of the room. No thoughts of fighting now; it was time for flight.

And the gas—visible as a fine, foglike mist—followed them.

Hardie nearly tripped over his cane on the way out of the room. He grabbed it, figuring if things got really bad, maybe he could shock himself unconscious to avoid the choking and vomiting and dying.

Stop it. Keep your head. There’s an escape out of this prison, right, Batman? You’ve just got to come up with it right now. In the next two seconds.

Or you and everyone in this room will DIE.

(No pressure.)

The other inmates began to drop—that is, the ones who weren’t already knocked unconscious. Hardie felt something tug at the back of his jacket. Eve. Pulling him toward her.

Hardie would have asked Eve what she was doing, but he didn’t dare open his mouth. Instead he stumbled behind her, leg-cane, leg-cane, trying to keep up, feeling like an asshole because she had to practically drag him along the row of cells. There was retching and coughing all around them. Hardie stumbled. Eve slipped her hands under his arms, pulled him back to his feet. He could hear her grunting. He screamed at his legs to work, already. Then they were moving again, across the cement floor. The gas was spreading. Hardie’s brain went woozy. Where was she leading him?

When Hardie heard the squeaky creaking of the door, he finally got it. The showers.

He felt the patter of hard water drops against his suit jacket, Eve’s hands over his back, his chest. Hardie did the same, brushing her back, her shoulders, her breasts, feeling strange for touching her, even in this situation.

You couldn’t consider this adultery—not in a secret prison where you were desperately trying not to die… could you?