Hell and Gone

22

You’re stripped down to the bare essentials of what you are, and who you are as a man.

—Eddie Bunker

HARDIE STARTED WITH something small: push-ups.

One-armed, one-half push-ups, to be exact.

His old man’s favorite exercise. The only exercise a man needed, he always said. And the old man’s favorite punishment was a half push-up. That’s when you started a traditional push-up, then stopped halfway through, with your arms nearly fully extended, back straight, knees locked, muscles working. And you stay that way for as long as you can take, or until the old man tells you to drop. Mouth off? Half push-up time. Forget to take out the trash? Half push-up time.

Get your dumb ass thrown in a secret prison, causing you to have a complete mental breakdown and a resultant moment of clarity?

Half push-up time.

His body hated it at first. Absolutely hated it, because it had been softened by years of watching rich people’s homes and eating whatever and drinking whatever and reclining on whatever, confident that his years of strength training would still be there when he needed them. His body, of course, was full of shit. His body was weak and lazy and broken. But his head was in charge, and it ordered the body to do the half push-up. And there was nothing the body could do about it, because the head was safely ensconced in its cozy metal mask.

You can’t make me do this.

Watch me.

You can’t.

You will.

I won’t.

You have no choice.

And the body, in fact, had no choice.

(Hardie was aware that bifurcating himself like this would probably lead to mental problems down the road, 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 Rocky movies, in which you could go from flabby palooka to mean lean hurting machine in as long as it took for the 1980s pop song to play itself out. What ordinarily took years could play out in a matter of verse-chorus, verse-chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus. Hardie started to imagine Rocky Balboa in the cell with him. Not to goad him on, but to be there when the monotony set in so that Hardie could turn around and call Rocky Balboa a pussy. You’re a pussy, Rock.

Hey, whaddya mean?

A pussy, Rock.

Hey, I wouldn’t be talking like that if I were—

A PUSSY, BALBOA, A BIG FAT PUSSY.

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 Shawshank Redemption.

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.

“Lèves-toi!”

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 that was open, then they all officially had a prayer. Within seconds they could be up the hallway and opening Eve’s cell. Then it would be three against two, and the odds would only get better from there.

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 four and a half to four. Still, those were odds Hardie would take.

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.

“Come on, mate!”

So Hardie limped over to the doorway, and saw a dirty, torn suit neatly folded on the tile floor. His old warden outfit.

“Put these on,” Victor said.

“Where’s Whiskey?”

“Look, you want to get out of here or not?”

Hardie dressed himself quickly. The feel of the suit on his wet skin was unpleasant, but it was better than the smock. Anything was better than the smock. All he had were the trousers and jacket, no underwear, no shirt, no belt, no socks, no shoes. But it felt like a suit of armor compared to that smock. He’d hated the smock so much he didn’t even want to think the word smock ever again.

“This way.”

They moved through Whiskey’s room and then through the control booth Hardie could never see from his cage. So where were Yankee and X-Ray? And Whiskey, for that matter? Was she still waiting outside the shower door? Hardie must have slowed down because Victor was tugging on his arm, urging him forward.

“Come on.”

“What is this about?”

Victor paused long enough to whisper, “You were right. It took me a while to piece everything together, but you were right, mate, and if we’re going to do anything about it, we need to move now.”

Victor hated this next part. It really made him feel like the world’s king supreme dick. But it was a necessary part of keeping this facility running smoothly. You needed conflict, for the good of the guards, for the good of the prisoners. If you didn’t let the pressure out in small, controlled doses, the whole facility was likely to explode. And shaking up the status quo helped reveal the actual traitors, the escape plots in the making.

The Prisonmaster had carefully explained this when he named Victor the “secret warden” a little over a year ago, not long after Victor had proven himself worthy. New “wardens” may be sent to the facility, the Prisonmaster said, but Victor was still the man in charge, the one he depended upon to keep the most dangerous people on earth contained.

Victor craved the validation, the responsibility. He loved being special.

Which eased his conscience a little.

Thing was—

and Victor had no idea about this—

the Prisonmaster had told the other guards the exact same thing.

Victor and Hardie walked into the elevator vestibule, which was dim and quiet. Victor took Hardie’s arm and led him toward a corner.

“Over here.”

“I’m guessing you have some kind of escape plan that won’t kill everyone down here?”

“Oh, yeah, I do.”

Victor’s plan was this: guide Hardie to the dark corner of the vestibule. There, Victor would pick up Hardie’s electrified walking cane—confiscated when they threw him in his cell—and jam it against Hardie’s heart and press the button. After Hardie did the sixty-cycle spin, Victor would sound the sirens and flash the lights, and soon everyone would realize there had been yet another escape attempt.

The other three guards would scramble down here and find their former “warden” holding his electrified cane and wearing his old suit jacket and trousers. Hardie would have to explain himself. Hardie would be interrogated. After all, how did he manage to escape from his cell? Where did he find his old suit? How did he recover his old weapon? Answers would have to be given. Brutal yet necessary interrogations of the prisoners would begin. Guards would be questioned, too—clearly, Hardie had a collaborator. Suspicion, naturally, would fall on Victor. Hardie himself would testify to that fact.

“But don’t worry about that, Victor,” the Prisonmaster explained. “This just puts you in the unique position of being able to uncover the real traitor.”

Which was the whole point: find the traitor among them.

“Help me, Victor. Help keep this facility safe,” the Prisonmaster had said.

“You know,” Hardie said, “Prisoner Three told me something very interesting about you.”

“Oh, yeah?” Victor asked. “What’s that?”

Hardie gritted his teeth and jackhammered his right fist into Victor’s lower back, dead bang between his kidneys, giving the punch everything he had, his entire body weight focused on that single target.

Victor yelped, twisted slightly, dropped to his knees.

“That you’re a nance,” Hardie said. “Whatever the hell that means.”

What Cameron had actually said was that his former partner Ashley (now “Victor”) had once suffered a serious lower-back injury, and that in subsequent adventures, he’d added further insult to that injury.

“That’s the cunt’s Achilles heel. Punch him hard enough in the small of the back and he’ll fold like a fuckin’ deck chair. All I want is one shot at his back. Just one, for old times’ sake.”

Well, Hardie was simply passing the sentiment along.

Hardie knew he didn’t have much strength or time. He had to incapacitate his old buddy Victor/Ashley here quick and clean.

He was considering a chop to the throat and a few more punches to the kidneys when he saw it, over in the corner.

His cane.

That little black beauty with the curved handle and the fifty thousand volts of sheer electric hell inside.

Hardie shuffled over to it, unsheathed the end—oh, how he wished he’d realized what this puppy did when he first arrived—then came back and gave his old buddy Victor enough shocks to make him reconsider consciousness. Then after picking Victor’s pockets clean of cell keys and the Smith & Wesson tactical pen, military and police edition, Hardie felt armed and crazy enough to try it.

An honest-to-God jailbreak.

He quickly made his way back down to the main floor, an excitement in his blood he hadn’t felt in years.