Hell and Gone

18

If you’re standing out in the yard in San Quentin and something’s going to come down, you’re scared to death and you can’t show it. Inside you’re dying, but outside you’re saying, Bring it!

—Danny Trejo

VICTOR’S EYES DARTED back and forth—prisoner, warden, prisoner, warden—waiting for someone to answer.

“Nothing,” Hardie said. “She’s crazy.”

“Okay, come on. Fun’s over. X-Ray’s coming back soon.” Then turning his attention to Eve: “And you—put that mask back on.”

As they walked back toward the control room in silence, Hardie glanced over at Victor. Seemed like a perfectly nice man. But didn’t all the nice young psychopaths? Hardie tried to summon his inner Nate for some guidance. Nate told him: No idea, buddy. You’re on your own here.

The situation boiled down to two possible realities, didn’t it? Either Eve was lying, in an attempt to worm her way into Hardie’s brain so that she could turn him against his own team. Or Victor was lying, along with the rest of them—and they were cunning psychopaths just toying with him before destroying them.

Neither made sense—not really. That’s what bothered Hardie the most. There was a Sherlock Holmes line that Nate Parish was fond of quoting: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. But that was the problem. Which possibility was more improbable? Both were absurd. This whole facility—his whole life—was maddeningly absurd.

Why couldn’t Mann have just put a bullet in his face and been done with it?

“You get what you needed?” asked Victor.

Hardie just nodded.

“Hope it was worth it, because I had no other choice but to pull Zero’s real urine tubes. Got piss all over myself. So not only do I have that evil bastard’s waste products sinking into my skin, I’ve forever incurred his wrath.”

They ascended the metal staircase up to the break room.

“Well, I owe you one,” Hardie said.

“I should say you do,” Victor said. “So what did she say?”

“Nothing useful.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Great. All that effort for nothing useful?”

They went back toward the control room. Hardie had been awake for what—three or four shifts straight? There was so much to process, to get straight in his own mind. If this prisoner, Eve Bell, was telling the truth, and the real bad guys were the guards, then what was he supposed to do? Incapacitate them one by one, then free the prisoners and restore order? He was a broken man who needed a cane to walk. And that’s if he trusted her. Big if.

“Seriously?” Victor asked as he opened the door to the break room. “She didn’t tell you anything?”

“No.”

“She didn’t say, ‘Hurt me, stupid asshole’?”

The blood in Hardie’s veins went frosty.

“She didn’t say, ‘The guards are the bad guys. We’re the real guards, trapped in these cells’?”

Inside Hardie’s room, X-Ray, Yankee, and Whiskey were waiting for him.

“We heard the whole thing,” Yankee said.

Whiskey added, rather unnecessarily:

“You are fucked.”

Hardie quickly pulled the tactical pen from his pocket—X-Ray slapped it away. The weapon flew out of Hardie’s hand, bounced off a wall, landed on the cement floor, and started spinning. Whiskey, who was closest, punched Hardie in the head, drawing blood. At almost the same time Yankee attacked from behind, kicking the cane out from beneath his hand. Hardie’s arms pinwheeled. He collapsed to the ground. Victor pinned Hardie to the floor with a meaty forearm.

“Thought you’d be different,” he said, a childlike bitterness in every word. “I really did, mate.”

“Listen to me, Victor…”

“No, listen to this—”

Upon that last syllable Whiskey smashed a boot into Hardie’s stomach, which immediately forced his body into a fetal position. Come on, breathe through it. Breathe. Breathe… Hardie stretched his fingers out, grasping at the floor as though he were trying to claw through the cement. Victor loosened his grip to let him respond to the pain; Hardie took the opportunity. He’d been hit in the stomach many times before; he knew how to contract the muscles to minimize the damage. And while Victor thought he was fighting for air and trying not to puke, Hardie marshaled all the strength he could into his right arm. And then he launched it up like a guided missile directly into the space between Victor’s testicles.

Victor’s entire body seemed to float up in the air a moment, just a few millimeters in orbit above the surface of the floor. His mouth curled into an O shape.

Hardie blinked the blood out of his eyes and saw that X-Ray and Yankee had their electrified batons out. The ends of them sparked and snapped, like portable Tesla coils.

From the floor, Victor spoke in a quavering voice that—although not a full octave above normal, had definitely changed in pitch.

“It was a test, you stupid bastard,” he spat. “After all that I told you, why couldn’t you believe me? You’ve chosen the wrong side. This is what she does. She gets inside your mind, twists everything around.”

Behind them, one of the guards spoke in a harsh language that Hardie didn’t recognize. The meaning, however, was clear:

We’re going to kick your ass unless you submit to us.

The other three guards moved in closer with their snapping, electrified sticks. One touch, Hardie realized, would probably cause him to wet his pants and forget who he was for a half hour. The object, then, would be to avoid being touched with the business ends of those sticks. And what then? If by some miracle he were able to overpower the guards here, and maybe knock out the Aussie cocksucker on the floor, what then? Where do you go? What do you do? Take the elevator up, so everyone else down here dies? Good guys and bad?

“Shit,” was all he could say.

Because this was his last stand.

The battle was brief yet violent. The electrified ends of the batons did touch Hardie, and more than once. He did not soil his pants, but he did scream, and punch and kick and try to repeat his trick with Victor—namely, aiming for private parts. This was not effective.

Before long Hardie was pinned to the floor, and Victor picked up his walking stick. What, were they going to beat him with it? Didn’t that break all kinds of disability rights laws?

Victor twisted the cane just so and removed a cover that Hardie never knew was there. At the end of the stick were two metal prongs. Victor pushed a button on the side of the cane. Electricity jumped from prong to prong and made a fat thick snapping sound. They had given him a weapon after all. Only they had forgotten to tell him.

Hardie was about to curse at them but Victor was too fast—the prongs already slamming into his chest, his entire body seizing up for what felt like forever, to the point where he thought he smelled his own flesh burning.

After they dragged him to an empty cell and began to beat him again and strip him out of his suit, Hardie realized that he probably had lost his job as warden.

As Victor ran his knuckles under cold water in the slop sink, his earbud crackled to life, startling him a little.

“You did the right thing,” the Prisonmaster said.

The PM had a strange way of seeing and hearing everything down here. Victor had personally searched for hidden cameras and was never able to find a single one. Sometimes, Victor thought the Prisonmaster was the only voice of reason down here. The place had a way of making you doubt everything, even what you see with your own eyes.

“Did I?” Victor asked.

“Oh, yes. Rest assured. Now, you know I’m not supposed to divulge any details about the real-world activities of anyone sent down to site seven seven three four, but…”

“Come on. Don’t be coy. Who the hell is he? Why was he sent down here?”

“You know I can’t tell you that. But let’s just say you were right to be suspicious of the warden’s insistence on questioning Prisoner Two. He has a history with females, and the females don’t always come to a happy end.”

“Goddamn it.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Victor. Like most sociopaths, the new warden is a gifted liar. You couldn’t have seen it coming.”

Victor came to visit Hardie later in his cell. He stood outside the bars, arms crossed. “Very disappointed in you, buddy.”

Hardie chose to not respond. He was still bleeding from his face and his tongue felt thick in his mouth, so it was probably best if he didn’t speak anyway.

“I guess I’ve learned my lesson. You see, we never really know what they’re sending down. Could be another guard, could be another prisoner. That’s part of our job. To figure it all out.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Hardie said. “I’m supposed to be the warden.”

“Everybody’s the fuckin’ warden when they come down here! That’s part of the test! It’s the only way to separate the heroes from the bloody villains. Eventually, your true colors emerge. Oh, yes they do. Didn’t take long with you now, did it?”

“You’re insane. All of you.”

“In fact, you might be the most diabolical one yet. You had a lot of us fooled. Oh, yes you did. Lie after lie after lie, all delivered in that deadpan style of yours. And to think I wasted one of my beers on you!”

“That beer sucked,” Hardie said.

“From now on, you’ll be known as Prisoner Five. You will not answer to any other name.”

“Oh, fuck you. My name’s Charlie Hardie.”

“Don’t want to hear it.”

“CHARLIE—”

Victor walked back to the control room across the hallway.

“—HARDIE!”

Slammed the door behind him.

Some small part of Hardie still clung to the belief that this was another test, or maybe some high-spirited hazing, a taste of the so-called torture so Hardie’d be better informed in his role as warden.

But when they all left and didn’t come back…

ever…

he knew the small part of him was full of shit.