Hell and Gone

25

Please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on.

—Instructions to participants in the July 1961 Milgram experiment

HORSEHEAD TOLD THEM, in perfect English:

“Prisoner Zero is not faking. He lost the ability to speak a few years ago. The words are all in his head, but they get lost on the way to his mouth. Not sure why. Could be the number of electric shocks he’s received. Or something else altogether.”

Hardie realized that the metal floor was electrified in here, just like the floors of the cells. Wired for punishment. Nonlethal, of course. Nothing in this facility could actually kill you. Just make you wish you were dead.

“Actually, I was the one who was faking this whole time.”

Eve had been hit hard, too. Her body trembled as she pushed herself up to a sitting position. She squinted as she looked up at the man hanging from the ceiling.

“I don’t understand. Why would you pretend to be a prisoner if you were actually the one in charge?”

“Boredom,” Horsehead said. “To control a facility, it’s important to see it from all sides, don’t you think? And I must admit, the beatings do help keep my thinking sharp.”

“Why the fuck are you doing this to us?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Horsehead said. “What matters is what happens in the next sixty seconds. I’m giving you the chance to decide your own fate. One of you will be my guard, one of you will be my prisoner, and we’ll rewrite the rules of this facility from scratch once the others wake up from the knockout gas. Wonder who should play which role?”

Knockout gas? Hardie thought. “You sadistic fucking assssss—” he said, but once again, his comment was cut off by a hideous

WHITE

HOT

BURNING

pain that shot through Hardie’s palms, spinning his body around until he landed on his chest, his nose inches from the metal floor, and all he could think was God help me if he presses that button again.

Horsehead jumped down to the floor. He was now wearing rubber-soled boots, Hardie noticed, so he could push that button all he wanted.

“Eve, I think it’s better if you join me as a guard this time,” he said, then reached around to undo the straps of his mask easily, without the need for a key. Hardie realized there had been no mask malfunction. There had never been any malfunction. Horsehead, as the Prisonmaster, could choose when his mask worked and when it didn’t work. He could order doors open or shut at will, even as he was locked up in his cell. He could turn the communications system on or off. All he had to do was tell Prisoner Zero what to do, and Thy Will was done. That explained the wires, the isolation. The real controls to this place were somewhere in this room!

Horsehead slid the mask off and rubbed his face. “It’ll be nice to not have to wear this thing for a while. It was fun at first, but…”

“Bobby?”

Hardie turned to look at Eve, who’d turned stark white.

* * *

Eve continued, her voice now an anguished wail:

“Bobby Marchione?”

Her mind tried to parse it; her mind couldn’t. Like when a person from one corner of your life collides with a completely separate corner of your life.

How could Bobby Marchione be in this hole in the earth? How could he be in charge of it? She reached out. He instinctively flinched.

“I’ve finally…” she said again, almost stammering. “I’ve found, I’ve finally found…”

The shock smashed through Eve. All this time he’d been down here—one cell away from hers? All this time.

Why hadn’t she sensed it, on some level?

“…finally found you.”

What the hell was she talking about? Hardie thought. And who the hell is Bobby? Then it came back to him. The story Eve had told him about her one professional failure. The missing person she couldn’t find. College student named Bobby.

All the places in the world—he was here?

Maybe that’s why they’d sent Eve here. Just another level of torment. Send her to a secret prison thinking she’d failed, only to have her quarry a matter of yards away. Somewhere, in some plush room, a bunch of cigar-smoking assholes were probably having a good laugh over it…

“How do you know the name Bobby Marchione?” said Horsehead.

“You disappeared from Leland University in California over twenty years ago. I was hired to find you.”

“This is interesting. Who hired you?”

“A woman named Julie Lippman.”

“Ah, but I know you’re lying. I knew you were lying the moment you told your little story in the cell a few weeks ago. What I don’t know is why you would lie about something like that.”

All the Zen-like control Eve seemed to possess disappeared. Her eyes were ablaze, the veins in her neck bulging.

“I’m not lying. I’ve been looking for you for twenty years. You don’t know how hard I searched for you. How many years I spent racking my brain, following endless leads, dead ends, false trails…goddamn it, you owe me that much. Kill me if you want. I’ll help you do it. But you’d better fucking tell me where you’ve been all this time.”

“I didn’t go anywhere. Bobby Marchione did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bobby Marchione just wanted to make some extra money over Christmas break.”

Bobby’s roommate, Pags, handed him an ad that had been posted on a corkboard in the psych-department building.

Psychological experiment, no drugs, no needles, just role-playing. For more info call…you know, one of those. Bobby Marchione wouldn’t normally have even looked twice at one of those things but he saw that it wasn’t some outside company. This was being run by Dr. Pritchard in the psychology department. Bobby had Pritchard freshman year, and she was an insanely dull lecturer, so he assumed this experiment would be more of the same. Boring, but not painful. And the money was too good to pass up. Twenty-five hundred dollars for a little less than two weeks. Marchione and his roommate, Chris Pagano (“Pags”), called and right away were sworn to secrecy. If they told a soul, they’d be bounced from the program. Bobby couldn’t even tell his parents—Pritchard was careful to sign up only adult subjects. Sounded a little weird to Bobby, but again it was the money that attracted him. The money was so, so good. And he figured if Pags was going to do it, then why not?

The toughest part was not being able to tell Julie. Bobby knew she’d be pissed. But when he returned in the New Year with a gleaming engagement ring, he had a feeling she’d forgive him.

That was the whole point. Joking at that party about the ring. Joking, but a hard little nugget of truth within the joke, like a piece of gravel in the middle of a snowball. Bobby loved Julie, wanted to buy her everything she could ever want, starting with an engagement ring. A real ring, and right now. To let her know that he was serious.

Bobby joked with her a lot, all to make it seem like he was completely relaxed in her company. But it was a front. He was terrified she’d discover the truth.

That he was poor, came from lousy genetic stock, and had to scrape up everything he had just to be able to afford college semester by semester.

That sometimes picking up the check after their dates meant Bobby wouldn’t be eating much more than boiled ramen noodles over the next three days. (He’d opted out of the meal plan.)

That really, Bobby was just spinning plates until they came crashing down…

But a ring. Oh, a ring would be a bold move. A ring would tell her, yeah, I might be nothing now, but I’m resourceful, and better things are on the horizon.

To get the ring, he had to take part in the experiment.

(Pags? He came from money. He was in it for the CD-and-beer money.)

So the night before Christmas break Bobby Marchione kissed his sweet sleeping girlfriend, Julie, on her forehead and dressed in the cold quiet dark. For a moment, he weakened and thought about writing her a note. Just a little something, so she wouldn’t worry.

No.

Couldn’t do that.

Pags would kill him if word got out, and Pritchard would bump both of them from the program. So instead Bobby made his way across the empty frozen campus in the middle of the night back to the small dorm room he shared with Pags. The instructions were simple: just be in your rooms by 4:00 a.m. No preparation required, other than a small bag with a few changes of clothes. Do not leave any notes or indications of where you are going. All will be explained at the test site. Bobby sat at his desk, trying to fight the urge to fall asleep. Pags sat across the room, smoking a cigarette, flicking the ashes into an empty soda can, at perfect peace with the world. Bobby was not. Bobby was beginning to wonder if this was a giant mistake. He picked up a Bic pen, pulled out a piece of typing paper, looked over his shoulder. Pags didn’t seem to be paying much attention. Bobby wrote:

Dear Julie,

This is going to be hard to explain, but

At 4:19 a.m., they came for them.

In the form of Pags. “Sorry, buddy,” he said, barely able to contain his chuckling, cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“What? What the…”

Pags grabbed his roommate by the shirt, pulled him out of his chair, and forced his arms behind his back. Bobby felt cold steel on his wrists.

“The hell are you doing?” he asked.

“Shh,” Pags said. “It’ll all be fine. Just don’t…”

Pags fell silent as he looked down at the desktop and saw the note Bobby was starting to compose. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” Pags said, then reached over, crumpled the paper up into a ball, and pitched it into the wastebasket in the middle of the room. Can’t have that. At that moment Bobby’s balls started to nestle up against the bottom of his lungs. What the hell had he gotten himself into?

Soon enough he found out.

The experiment: a prison scenario.

The objective: to learn more about the psychology of imprisonment.

The real objective: classified.

What no one knew: Dr. Pritchard supplemented her meager teaching salary with consulting work for a secret quasi-governmental agency. This agency had access to an amazing array of resources, including a secret test facility, jokingly dubbed site 7734. A number that, when seen on a digital readout and turned upside down, spelled the word HELL.

But Dr. Pritchard wasn’t an evil person; none of them were at first. Just ambitious. Excited to push the boundaries. Eager for funding.

Student volunteers were immediately divided into two groups:

Guards.

And prisoners.

Pags, a psychology major, was a guard, naturally. Not just a guard; he was chosen to play the role of the warden. He reported directly to the Prisonmaster—Dr. Pritchard—who observed from a separate room in the facility.

Bobby was selected to be a prisoner.

Day One: Bobby and the other prisoners were treated to a version of extraordinary rendition and were “arrested” quietly all over the campus. Having told their friends and family no details, a cover story was prepared—a volunteer mission to build homes for poor families. Many of the volunteers didn’t have much in the way of family, or they lived on their own. Bobby had a father who had remarried and didn’t really seem to care about his firstborn son all that much anymore. As he was led away to a van parked behind the dorm complex, Bobby knew that Julie would be the only person who’d miss him. He hoped she’d understand. He wished he could have left her that note. He hoped this would all be worth it…

Blindfolded, Bobby asked:

“Where is this place, anyway?”

A voice assaulted him:

“PRISONERS DO NOT SPEAK! SPEAK AGAIN AND YOU WILL BE PUNISHED!”

The voice:

It sounded like Pags.

Oh, great, thought Bobby. His roommate was probably going to bust his balls this way for the rest of the school year.

Still, he wondered exactly where they were headed.

The van ride was followed by a forced march into some kind of larger vehicle—Bobby, making guesses, thought it might be a school bus. The trip was long. Excruciatingly boring. There was no landscape to gaze out upon, no conversations to strike up. Nothing to do but live inside your own head. The experience put Bobby in mind of soldiers—specifically, Vietnam-era soldiers, because he’d just written a long paper on Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried before the break. Bobby remembered feeling relieved (and a little ashamed) that his generation wouldn’t be drafted into a foreign war and have to deal with the senseless violence, the isolation, the loss.

Ha-ha, Bobby Marchione, joke’s on you! Hope you enjoy your Christmas break in prison!

Bobby knew the trip felt like forever because of the sensory deprivation and all that—but goddamn, this trip took forever. At one point the bus even appeared to have stopped moving. He heard metal doors clanging shut. And maybe it was the lack of sleep, but Bobby felt like he was floating a little, listing back and forth gently, as if they’d parked the bus on top of the world’s largest water bed.

A guard—probably Pags, that douche bag—pressed two pills into his palm.

“Swallow.”

“A little water, please?”

“SWALLOW ’EM DRY, PRISONER.”

Fucking Pags. Such an asshole.

So Bobby swallowed the pills. They scratched at his throat going down. After a few minutes Bobby felt his eyelids grow heavy and all conscious thought disappear into fuzzy gray.

He woke up in time for “processing.”

All prisoners were stripped.

Rudely searched, by guards, including Pags, all of whom were now wearing these brown Nazi-style uniforms and mirrored shades.

Yeah, enjoy your cheap little ball grab there.

All prisoners were deloused.

(Bobby thinking: What is this about? Like we’ve all got crab lice?)

All prisoners were forced into cold showers with powdered soap that smelled like it had been cut with dried vomit.

Which was insanely embarrassing because he recognized some of these guards—besides that rat bastard Pags—from a few of his classes. Including the girls. Oh, yeah, this was a coed experiment, apparently. Four female guards attended to the four female prisoners, and they were sort of separated from the guys, but not by much. Bobby stole a few glances, which earned him screaming from one of the guards. Ridiculous.

Afterward the prisoners received their garments:

Smocks.

Rubber shoes.

And…

…that was it.

So they were all going commando for this experiment. Interesting.

Remind me again, Bobby Marchione, why you passed up the opportunity to travel back east with your hot girlfriend, Julie Lippman, in favor of being humiliated and bored out of your freakin’ mind in a dank prison in the middle of nowhere.

Finally, all prisoners were given a number.

Bobby, first to be processed, was number 101.

Yay for him.

Bobby Marchione settled in for his first of fourteen nights of boredom.

Or so he thought.

The ten student volunteer guards—who quickly started giggling and referring to themselves as the “apostles of pain”—were broken up into three shifts of four guards each. Their sole objective was to control the prisoners in any manner they saw fit.

They decided to get busy right away.

Prisoner sleep should be erratic, they collectively decided. If the prisoners could be woken up at any moment with a bucket of water or a little jolt from the stun batons the guards were given (very low-wattage, of course), then maybe that would keep them off balance, easy to control.

So the first night there was much screaming and water-throwing…and some laughter, too. The prisoners knew this was all bullshit, so why get all worked up? Which left the guards feeling like idiots. Which, in turn, seriously pissed them off. Why the hell couldn’t the prisoners take this seriously? They were getting paid just the same as the guards. It wasn’t fair that they could just goof around while the guards did all the work.

So the guards got inventive.

Which was the real objective of the experiment: to see how far good, decent, ordinary people would go…

…when pushed.

By day three the experiment had devolved into bloody chaos. The more sadistic the punishments, the more the prisoners redoubled their efforts to revolt and strike back against the guards. By day four Dr. Pritchard decided to terminate the experiment. Later that same day a group of prisoners broke into her private observation room and held her hostage. By day five Dr. Pritchard was stabbed to death and a male prisoner had taken her place as Prisonmaster. The guards mounted a daring attack against the rebel prisoners, which ended in a two-day standoff. When outside observers from the quasi-governmental agency demanded that the rebel students come to their senses and surrender immediately, the students cut the communication lines. The same outside observers quickly discovered that another group of prisoners had destroyed the elevator leading down to the facility; the prisoners, apparently, had decided that no guards would be allowed to leave alive. By day six the guards had broken into the command center and retaken control of the facility. Martial law was enacted, torture. By day seven a new rebellion was formed.

Chris “Pags” Pagano became the new Prisonmaster of site 7734.

He spared his roommate’s life on the condition that he agree to be a prisoner informant.

Pags was the psychology major. He came equipped with a bagful of mental tricks. The one thing he knew was that if any of them were going to make it out of there alive, he would have to assert absolute authority over the survivors.

So he became absolute ruler of the facility.

With the help of his roommate, Bobby, who remained a prisoner out in the “general population.”

By the end of the first week everything had devolved into absolute savagery.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, after days of zero communication, the university held a top secret summit meeting with the quasi-governmental agency.

God knows what had happened down there in that former military installation. If word were to leak, it could destroy the university. A few people paid lip service to a rescue operation, but that was quickly ruled out in favor of containment. The quasi-governmental agency suggested a simple way to put a lid on the problem: pump cyanide down into the prison, seal it up forever, and come up with a cover story for grieving friends and family. The quasi-governmental agency, which some were referring to as the Industry even back then, said they had specialists for this sort of thing. Experts who could arrange an accident, deal with lawsuit control, deflect media inquiries. The Industry gave the university the illusion of choice; by the time it had agreed, containment plans were already in motion.

But shortly before it came time to destroy the facility and kill everyone inside, someone in the Industry thought it over. This truly was a unique opportunity, and could be useful down the road. The location was handy. Not far from the university, practically under the noses of everyone. The last place anyone would ever look. And the place could be kept running at minimal cost.

Almost self-sustaining, really.

Standing there in his secret chamber, Bobby didn’t deliver this saga to Eve and Hardie. He merely said,

“Bobby and his roommate, Pags, volunteered for an experiment, and it didn’t turn out the way they thought. They couldn’t come home.”

“You are Bobby Marchione,” Eve said.

“I used to be,” Horsehead said. “Not anymore. Just like the prisoner over there used to be Chris Pagano.”

“Guh-huh-HUH. HUH. HUH!”

“Oh, God,” Eve said. “Chris…?” She crawled over to the gurney and lifted herself up to look at Prisoner Zero. “I didn’t even recognize him…”

Hardie didn’t give two fucks about “Bobby” or “Chris” or anybody else. He needed to find a way to distract old Horsehead here and take that button away from him. Come on, Eve, look at me. It’s two against one here. If we team up we can knock old “Bobby” here on his ass.

But she was too preoccupied with Prisoner Zero on the gurney. Did she really recognize him? Or was this some kind of angle she was playing?

“Eve, step up onto that gurney with him,” Horsehead said. “The bottom is insulated. It will protect you from the shock.”

“Hey,” Hardie said. “No more shocks. I’ve had enough with the fuckin’ shocks already. In fact, why don’t we—”

Horsehead held up the shock trigger. “If you’re going to vomit, do it now before I push this again. Because this is going to knock you out, and I don’t want you to choke to death. Eve, get up on that gurney.”

“Bobby,” Eve said. “Please. There’s something I have to tell you.”

“No? Fine. We’ll sort it out later, when you wake up.”

“Listen to me, Bobby.”

“Good-bye.”

But before Horsehead could press the button, Eve yelled—

“It’s me, Julie!”