Hell and Gone

21

Hey, you bastards. I’m still here.

—Steve McQueen, Papillon

SOMEWHERE, IN THE darkness, was a crackle.

A tiny audible pop inside the infinite soundscape of his mask. Like the sound of a cheap metal satellite colliding with an obscure, unnamed moon.

Then, from out there, in the void, came a voice:

“Ah, hell, it’s back again.”

“Shit.”

Static.

An Australian voice: “Who is that? Is that you, Eve?”

“Yeah. Cam?”

“Yeah, s’me. Why are these on again? After all this time?”

“I don’t know. Probably want to fuck with us again. Or listen in, see what we talk about when we’re all alone in our cells. Isn’t that right, you assholes?”

“You’re probably right. Spying on us again. I suppose they’re bored with sucking each other’s dicks.”

Then came a deep, guttural voice in Italian—the prisoner known as Horsehead.

“Is that you, Silvio?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hello, Silvio. Welcome back.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Archie, you with us, too?”

A British accent: “We shouldn’t be talking. They can listen.”

“What else do we have to do? We don’t have to plan our great escape over these things. Why not read poems to each other? Who has one? Eh? Anyone?”

Nobody spoke for a while. Every so often you’d hear an exhalation, loud enough to be picked up by a mask’s internal microphone.

A soft, female voice:

“So…are you out there, Charlie?”

Hardie did not respond.

Eve didn’t give up. Sometime later she tried again:

“Hey, Charlie, you out there?”

Faint static.

“Charlie, come on. Need to talk to you. Let me hear your voice. Even a hearty ‘fuck you’ would be welcome at this point.”

Faint static.

“It’s not your fault, Charlie. You couldn’t have known. They’re all sociopaths out there. Victor. Whiskey. X-Ray. Yankee. And if any of you assholes are listening, then feel free to chime in anytime! Cameron could tell you all about the guard who calls himself Victor. Couldn’t you, Cam?”

“Yeah, I could.”

“Why don’t you tell Charlie the truth?”

“Don’t want to give the wanker the satisfaction.”

“Come on.”

Cameron, the man known as Prisoner Three, sighed.

“Victor’s real name is Ash. What he never tells anybody is that it’s actually Ashley. I know, right? He hates to be called that. Probably why he’s taken to his fake guard name. Anyway, we used to be partners. Two halves of a team back in Sydney. We solved problems for a living. He was the front man, the charmer, the talker, the snake; I was the guy in the background, on the fringes. Ashley would draw them out, I’d move in for the kill. We took the cases nobody else would take. We were a good team. Until we were sent here.”

“Tell Charlie how you were brought here.”

“Chasing a bunch of sex traffickers and we walked into a trap. Still don’t know how I didn’t see the signs.”

“I didn’t, either.”

“Yeah, well, none of us did, and the moment we woke up down here everything changed. Ash lost his mind, accusing me of shit. At first I thought he was just stir-crazy, then I realized something. All this time, our entire partnership, the whole joking-around thing? The charm? It was a mask. Took coming down here for me to finally see his true face. YOU HEAR ME, YOU FUCK? I KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID UP THERE.”

Hardie said nothing.

Still, Eve pressed on with her case.

Namely, that the cards were stacked against Hardie from the beginning. That this prison was topsy-turvy, the good guys inside, and the bad guys out, and that was the special hell of it.

He couldn’t have known.

None of them did.

Prisoner Four’s real name, Eve explained, was Archie. He was a former British military man who been betrayed by his superior. Disgusted, he’d left the U.K. and gone ping-ponging around the continental United States for the better part of a decade, helping people with their problems in return for a small fee. Nothing extravagant. Just enough to eat, buy a toothbrush, whatever. He wanted no earthly attachments.

“Tell Charlie about X-Ray,” Eve urged.

“You tell him,” Archie said.

“You’re so modest.”

“You know I’m not.”

So Eve told the story.

For years, Archie had been investigating a disturbing case—one in which people were found in hotel rooms all over the U.S. (and around the world, he learned later) with their organs missing or rearranged or barely functioning or replaced by handmade parts. The victims weren’t slaughtered. They were left alive…barely. As if some demented surgeon were experimenting with radical operations that tested the endurance of the flesh. This surgeon was also thought to be responsible for the death of Archie’s half brother, an American military man stationed in Berlin. Archie thought he was close to catching the surgeon when he ended up here, at site 7734.

“The surgeon is the guard who calls himself X-Ray,” Archie told them. “I believe he’s keeping me alive to experiment on me. He has some of my brother’s organs in a jar. He’s just waiting until I’m healthy enough to undergo a transplant.”

Hardie remained silent.

Faint static.

“Charlie, come on. Let me know you’re there. Look, I’ve got something cool to share. You should be happy for me.”

Static.

“Now that I’ve found you I’ve got a ninety-nine-percent success rate as a professional finder.”

Static.

“Yeah, there’s always one that got away, you know how it goes.”

Static.

“What’s that? You want to hear about that one time? Good. Anyway, this was my earliest case, when I was just starting out in the business. I was hired by a woman named Julie Lippman to find her college boyfriend. I know, sounds lame, right? This was a real case, though, and it’s dogged me my whole career. Now this Lippman girl’s a rich snot, and one night at a campus Christmas party she makes this joke about her boyfriend—this not-so-rich guy named Bobby—having to work for, like, an entire year before being able to afford an engagement ring. She knew she was being a snot, but meant it to be funny. She said her boy Bobby got this weird look on his face, then left not long after. She kept drinking. Didn’t think much of it. Bobby was kind of a brooder that way. Besides, they were supposed to be spending the Christmas break together. She wasn’t going home to her family. They were going to hang around campus and drink and fuck and give each other presents and basically avoid real life. She goes home, Bobby’s in bed, already asleep. Well, the next morning she gets up and…no Bobby. She has this dim memory of him kissing her on the forehead or something, but boom, splitsville. That’s when it dawns on Julie that wow, maybe he really is pissed. After a day of waiting, she knows it’s true. He’s super pissed. Which makes Julie super pissed. Since she assumes he went home to his parents’ house, she goes home to her family and does all kinds of stupid shit. Halfway through the holiday, though, she really starts feeling bad and missing him and vows to make it all right again when they’re back on campus. She gets in early and waits in his dorm room for him. Sunday, all day, waiting. Then comes the news. Twenty-four students, dead. She gets hold of a list of victims, and sure enough, her boy Bobby’s on the list. She’s like, Whaaaaaaat the fuck? Bobby didn’t have money to fly, Bobby was afraid to fly, where the hell would Bobby fly to, anyway, spur of the freakin’ moment? It made no sense to her. She refused to accept it. The more she looked into it, the more walls she hit. Finally she hired me—her parents are loaded. Well, the more I looked into it…the stranger the whole thing was. That was my first introduction to the world beneath the real world. A world I think you’re very familiar with, Charlie.”

Static. A few pops and crackles on the line.

“Charlie, you there?”

Static.

“Come on, tell me your story.”

Static.

“Très uncool, Charlie. Leave a girl hanging like that.”

Static.

Nothing.

Barely a minute later Horsehead started going off in Italian. He must have heard the others’ stories and decided to jump in on the act. Which wasn’t all bad, because you could follow the emotion in his words. The sadness. The fury. The disgust. The loathing. The self-incrimination. Again, fury. All-consuming fury. A reckoning. A final, lingering sadness.

After that, no one spoke for a long, long time.

Still, a few shifts later, Eve tried again.

“Hey, Charlie.”

Nothing.

“Come on, Charlie. Say something. Even a little ‘fuck you.’ Our little communication system won’t last forever. They probably turn it on and off to screw with us, but so what? Doesn’t mean you can’t say hi or something. Let me know you’re still breathing.”

After a long pause.

(A long,

long

pause…)

“Fuck you.”

Eve exclaimed, “Hallelujah! There we go! At last. He’s alive, ladies and gentlemen. So go on. Tell us your story.”

Tell us your story.

Right.

Eve persisted.

“Hey, you know our deal. Tell us yours.”

Hardie hesitated, then figured, What harm would it do, even if the guards were listening? It would be nice to know if he could still form words.

“I was a house sitter. I tried to protect some people, but I screwed it up. They sent me here.”

“They?”

“The Accident People.”

“Is that what you call them? The Accident People?”

“What do you call them?”

“They’re just one group in a field of many. There’s a Secret America, Hardie. Beneath the one you know. Beneath everything. Run by the people who really call the shots. They’re the ones who make things happen. The ones who never sleep. I’ve spent the past few years studying how they conceive and execute their goals. They run secret hospitals. Secret prisons. Secret airports. Secret factories. Anything you can think of in the aboveground world, there’s an equivalent in the shadow world. This is the real America, the shadow structure under the structure we think is real. And here’s the really weird thing, Charlie—the thing that’s going to drive you right out of your mind. The more I dug, the more I learned, the more I started piecing things together, the more the truth became clear: this isn’t a nefarious global plot. They espouse no particular ideology. They have no viewpoints or goals. They’re so massive, so vast, they’re like this big benign thug. They merely work for whoever signs the biggest check. Like Frank Zappa said—they’re only in it for the money.”

Static.

“Are you listening to me, Charlie?”

Yeah, Charlie Hardie was listening.

And thinking about the images they showed him inside the mask.

Hearing the prisoners’ stories made Hardie realize:

This “Secret America” would never, ever leave his family alone.

Unless he forced them to stop.