Hell and Gone

24

It’s obvious what they’re after—an economy of man-power—or devil-power, if you prefer. The same idea as in the cafeteria, where customers serve themselves.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

THE PRISONMASTER LISTENED…and waited. He had his finger on the trigger, but he didn’t want to deploy the gas until the last possible moment.

So they’d discovered the truth about the so-called death mechanism. Other groups of prisoners had figured it out, too. But not many. The death mechanism was the one lie that every inmate believed at face value. Over the years, some had tried to work their way up the elevator shaft to see if they could disable the nonexistent mechanism, but such efforts were always thwarted by the guards, sworn to uphold their duty.

Twice before, an inmate had made it up to the waiting room, intent on escape, knowing that he was damning everyone else to death.

And the result was the same: the confused inmate took the elevator back down to the main floor to report his horrifying discovery:

There is no way out!

The first time it happened, the guards reasserted their authority and slipped back into their roles. So did the prisoners, for that matter. After a while the threat of the death mechanism was a nonissue; the idea of no escape was simply their new reality. Later they were all put to death, but that was only because they had all outlived their usefulness, and the site needed to be prepared for new inmates.

The second time, however, the guards and prisoners refused to accept this, and had to be gassed, their roles reassigned.

Which would it be this time?

Yankee recovered his electric baton and stood up. “This changes nothing. We’re bringing you back to your cells. Come on, X-Ray, Whiskey. Let’s go.”

His fellow guards, however, didn’t move. They were still processing the situation.

What was wrong with these people?

All this time they had been sure of one rule: whoever left the facility basically handed everyone else a death sentence. No matter how bad it got, how much the crappy food or isolation or torture drove you out of your skull, there was that one constant: if you leave, innocent people will suffer and die.

This was still the case…

…wasn’t it?

Yankee’s name in the real world had been Jed Ayres, and he’d been a bartender, a soldier, a cop, and finally 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?

Kendra, I can explain everything.

Hardie’s head felt dizzy, as if someone were choking him and cutting off the supply of blood to his brain. He started to panic and stopped brushing Eve and started clutching at his chest, then pounding his breastbone, as if he could simply will his heart to continue to pump despite what the poison gas was telling it to do. He dropped to his knees, facing the drain, and some part of his brain that was still firing neurons—

(Find the way out yet, Batman?)

—thought it almost funny, staring into a drain as you are circling it…

And then it happened.

He thought of the way out.

Fuck you, Batman, Boy Wonder, and the rest of Gotham City, because I finally figured it out.

The drain.

THE MOTHERFUCKING DRAIN!

Hardie put his lips against her ear. “Help me.” But Eve didn’t understand until he guided her hands over to the drain.

The drain, which led to the steel room containing Prisoner Zero.

The grunting moron, who, Hardie now realized, was the mysterious Prisonmaster.

They wormed through the passageway in silence. They didn’t dare breathe, not until they put enough distance between themselves and the poison. When they reached the steel anteroom where Hardie had been trapped (weeks? months ago?), Eve had to help up him to his feet. Hardie was proud, though. He’d managed to hang on to his cane.

“So you’re thinking that Zero is the Prisonmaster,” Eve said.

“There’s no poison gas back here,” Hardie said. “The Prisonmaster has to be someone who’s nearby at all times, who can gauge situations as they evolve. Who better than the guy right next door? Who conveniently doesn’t speak or move? Who has the guards take care of his every need?”

“Can’t argue with your thinking. But…he’s missing limbs, for Christ’s sake. He does nothing but grunt.”

“Ten bucks he’s got a phone under that mask and can speak just fine.”

They both stared at the steel door.

“Are you ready?” Hardie asked.

“Absolutely not.”

“We’re going to have to force this open somehow.”

“Well, I didn’t think this would be easy.”

Eve was stunned, then, to have the door slide open at first pull. Fluorescent lights now provided erratic bursts of illumination. Both Eve and Hardie could see the interior of the chamber in little half-second microbursts. They could see that Prisoner Zero was waiting for them.

Even though he was blind, his head was twisted to the right, and he seemed to be staring right at them.

* * *

“How are ya, pal?” Hardie said.

Zero, face still hidden by the mask, merely lay there on his rusty bed. Staring at them. Immobile.

“Sure, keep playing the mute now.”

Zero said nothing.

“You know the way out of here,” Eve said.

“Do you really think he’s going to tell us that?” Hardie asked.

“We’re going to make him tell us.”

“Guh-huh-huh-huh-huh.”

“Okay, that’s it, take off his mask,” Hardie said to Eve, and then to the prone form of Prisoner Zero: “You try anything, I will light you up.”

Eve reached around and unfastened the straps behind Prisoner Zero’s head. There was no lock. When the metal mask came loose it made a wet, peeling sound, then revealed a ghastly yet boyish face. Impossibly pale skin. Eyes sealed shut under a waxlike mass of scars.

“Oh, God,” Eve said.

Zero’s mouth opened slightly, revealed rotted teeth, lips curled into a parody of a smile.

“Guh-huh-HUH. Guh-huh-HOOOO.”

“Quit the act,” Hardie said, trying not to shudder. The man was an absolute mess. “I know you can speak. Pretending is not going to help you.”

“Guh-huh-huhhhhhhh…”

“Okay, asshole,” Hardie said, but actually only managed to speak the first syllable (maybe) before something hot and vicious jumped up through the soles of his feet and made impact in the general vicinity of his testicles.

Hardie smelled burned hair and was already on the floor when he realized that someone was speaking to them. He rolled over and saw a beefy form hanging from the support beams overhead—a prisoner in a metal mask.

Horsehead.