Guards delivered food. They gave him books. They even set up a television for him. Other inmates were jealous of Golem, because they saw he was often given strange perks others had to work for, but these other inmates didn't realize that the perks weren't gifts or rewards. The warden and his men simply could not figure out what Golem did, sitting there alone in the dark, and so they looked for distractions, for entertainment, for anything that might shake him out of his fugue state, staring at the wall, yellowed eyes moving only to blink. Once a day someone would spray him down, not as torture, but because the heroes who brought him here said Golem's body required water to stay healthy and pliant, and this was part of their conditions for releasing him to the prison for captivity. He wasn't to be treated cruelly, because, as the heroes once told the warden, Golem was not at fault for what he was. A terrible man had made a terrible weapon and breathed life into it, and this is where the monster named Golem came from. He was an automaton, a living machine, and all he knew in this world was destruction and pain.
So they watered him, and they gave him gifts, and they tried to find some way to bring about a human reaction from the clay creature.
But for years, Golem waited, and dreamed. He waited for his release, and he dreamed of destroying his captors and returning to his master.
And then, one ordinary night, his door clicked open.
Golem rose to his full height and walked out into the hallway. His dreams had been answered.
* * *
No one liked guard duty on the Improviser's cell.
The main reason was the most obvious. He had been given, as a concession, a number of rubber balls to occupy himself with in solitary confinement. The Improviser would spend almost all of his waking hours bouncing the balls against his cell walls, more than a normal human mind should be able to keep track of, whipping the toys — an older generation might have called them Super Balls — against flat surfaces and either dodging them expertly to let the balls ricochet off a different surface or catching one and throwing it against another wall to build its momentum back up.
This went on all day, every day, the pock pock pock of bouncing balls, the soft hiss as the prisoner threw the balls with incredible dexterity and speed.
And when the insanity-inducing bouncing noises weren't happening, the Improviser would talk to his captors. He had a way of getting you caught up in a normal conversation, but then the man would start sneaking in probing questions, uncomfortable questions, queries designed to make you angry or self-conscious, or just to simply leave you squirming.
The Improviser had been waging a psychological war on the Labyrinth's staff for years. He ended up here after a normal prison failed to hold him more than once, and a high security prison became a killing zone as he tried to fight his way out using a broken dinner tray and a sharpened piece of tile.
And so he ended up here, nestled between science experiments and monstrous mutations, a man whose reputation for turning anything into a weapon simply wasn't sufficient enough to explain just how dangerous he was.
The Improviser was in the middle of one of his bouncing sessions when he heard his cell door unlock. He waited, listening for an approaching guard's footsteps. Many times his jailors had taken to sitting further down the hall, out of earshot of his taunts or his bouncing rubber balls. Hearing nothing, the Improviser scooped up two handfuls of rubber balls and went into the hallway, knowing in his hands, even a child's toy could be used for murder.
* * *
The woman meditating in her cell would have easily been mistaken for someone far less exotic, a school teacher, perhaps, someone with a wholesome job and a healthy family. This was part of her success as one of the world's most successful professional assassins, moving among ordinary folk, never standing out, never making a scene. The most common thing said about the woman, who was known professionally as the Knife, was that she reminded each person of their mother, or sister, or best friend from school, some coworker they remembered having nice conversations with but couldn't quite place.
The most common expression on her victims' faces was one of bewilderment as they lay dying, their last thought: how do I know her?
Ordinary prisons couldn't hold her, where she blended in, disappeared, became hard to track, even harder to control. Other inmates and guards would vanish and be found dead days later, no sign that they had ever encountered the Knife, often without any immediate sign there had been any reason to earn her wrath. Eventually something would come to light, a threat, a bribe, but by then the trail would have grown cold.
It took superhuman heroes to capture her and the Labyrinth to hold her. Each night she would run through the list of people she would enact revenge on for doing her wrong. Specific guards, specific heroes, and at the top of her list, the international criminal warlord who hired her for her last job, and abandoned her to a life of captivity. He would die last, she thought, and die slowest.
Her cell door clicked open, and the Knife walked out, calmly and smoothly, as if she had been expecting an invitation to go on a stroll the entire time.
* * *
The December Man's cell was slick with ice, the walls crusted like a neglected freezer. The Labyrinth pumped in excess heat through armored vents, a move made years ago when they realized the December Man's control over the cold could reach out through any opening in his cell, weakening doors, turning the hallway outside into an ice slick. The warden ordered cells on either side kept empty for fear that the December Man's impact on the adjoining rooms' temperatures would cause those inmates irreparable harm.
And so they kept the December man under control through forced hot hair and exceptional insulation.
He appeared from the outside to be made of nothing but ice, a crystalline man who had, in captivity, let himself go to seed. Long spiky tendrils of ice formed a beard and that spilled down his chest, and his hair had grown into sharp icicles running down his back. Sometimes he paced, but mostly, like his neighbor the Golem, the December Man sat still, sleeping deeply, his red, red eyes sometimes becoming dark slits in his face made of frostbite.
He wasn't always this empty. Once he had been a king among men, a small god. But like all fairy tales before they are cleansed and purified, his was a tragic story, when the Woman of May was taken from him, when his world was destroyed, when everything he loved was torn from his grasp.
All he had ever wanted was revenge. He never knew who he wanted revenge from, or who to enact it on, but when your world is shattered like a fallen icicle onto the hard ground, reason doesn't matter, rational thought is useless.
He just wanted to share his sadness with the world by making it as joyless as he had become.
But heroes of men had stood up against him, had stopped his rampage, stopped it more than once, and finally imprisoned him here. They called him a Shakespearean tragedy. But the December Man discovered nothing in the works of Shakespeare, nor any writer, which reached the depths of his despair. And so he sat in his cell, afloat on his own sadness, wondering if the powers that turned him into the December Man would grant him immortality, or if there was some final end on the horizon. He would have welcomed it, but with each passing year he grew more and more sure that he, like the winter, would always return. No oblivion awaited him at the end.
But when the door unlocked, the December Man decided it had been far too long since someone else felt the way he felt. He held out his hand and a shaft of ice began to take shape, branching into three points, becoming a razor-tipped trident.
He walked into the hall, leaving trails of ice and snow in his wake, looking for someone to vent his unhappiness upon.
* * *
The guards did their best not to look at the Vermin King. He knew this, and enjoyed it, waiting in the bronze, dim light of his cell, his strange face, skin stretched tight over needle-like teeth, eyes black and without pupils, his pitted ears sweeping back unnaturally from his head. He would smile broadly when they made eye contact, his mouth unnaturally wi
de, so misshapen you could see his molars when he grinned. If they refused to make eye contact, he would drag sharp claws across the floor, clitter clatter, scritch scratch.
This place was strangely clean, he thought, so sterile that he rarely saw bugs let alone mice or rats roaming the dark hallways. He wondered how they kept the place so clean. It didn't seem possible. Perhaps they believed the rumors that he could control infestations and kept him in a vacuum-sealed zone. Sadly, he thought, he had no magical ability over rats. He just thought they were good company.
He often spoke in riddles, and in the past few years had taken to scratching poetry and songs into the walls with his nails. Dark fairy tales, often based on his own experiences, the murders he committed, the crimes he planned. The dragon in those stories was always part hawk, an ugly, scarred beast roaming rooftops looking for prey. The hawk had always been his enemy, never rising to his bait, never going too far in retaliation.
No, rarely going too far. The Vermin King had pushed the Alley Hawk to the edge a few times over the years. He was not immune to The Vermin King's games, simply slower to rise to anger.
The Vermin King scratched at his pink, wrinkled skin and swished his prehensile tail around, trying to remember a song, a dirty little ditty he might sing to taunt the guards. It had been a few days since he'd been so overt, but the guards were distant tonight for some reason. It had been hours since anyone had come to check on him. He knew this was an odd occurrence, because they didn't trust him alone. He got into mischief too easily.
And then the alarm sounded, and the Vermin King's heart began to race. He'd been so bored for so very long.
His cell door unlocked.
Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity, he pushed the door open and headed out into the hallway, the tiles of the corridor cool and new beneath his bare, clawed feet. He looked left, he looked right, he took a deep breath.
A familiar smell in the air. An old enemy. The man who put him here.
"Have you come to visit?" the Vermin King said, to himself. "I've missed you so."
He took off down the hallway, back hunched like some hairless rat's, in search of a man he had wanted to kill for most of his life.
Chapter 41:
Winter's plan
Henry Winter was sitting in his own quarters, the pleasantly appointed three-room cell he'd been locked in for all these years, when the escape alarm went off. And when he heard it, he smiled.
Winter walked over to the desk where he'd labored at for so many projects for Prevention's group, squirreled away from everyone and everything, building them better mouse traps, enhanced weapons, more efficient methods of changing the world. He pulled out a wrist cuff constructed from two watches and a circuit board and strapped it on. He tapped a few buttons and waited until a small green LED light lit up.
Somewhere in another part of the building, an inert suit of battle armor started to hum, its systems coming online for the first time in ages.
Winter then picked up an undersized leather case, a small luxury that had been given to him so long ago he barely remembered the circumstances, just a modest gift to make him feel less like an inmate and more like a professional as they shuffled from meeting to meeting. Inside, he tucked an object roughly the size and shape of an electric shaver — which, amusingly, was how it began its life — a slim laptop, a compact hard drive, several nondescript circuit boards, and a soldering iron. He adjusted his tie, slid on the nicest suit coat his captors had allowed him to have, and stepped out into the hallway. They rarely locked him in anymore. He was not, in their eyes, a threat these days.
Which was exactly the image Winter had been cultivating for a very, very long time.
He hobbled down the hallway on his cane at a brisk pace, thought about taking the stairs for secrecy's sake, but instead entered the elevator. Two prison guards were inside when the doors open.
"Everything okay, Mr. Winter?" they said. Both were dressed in body armor and carrying heavier weapons than usual.
"Heading upstairs," Winter said. "I'd much rather help than barricade myself in my room and hope for the best."
"Understood. Agent Prevention is in the main office," one guard said.
"I'll find her." Guess I really am a good inmate, he thought.
They reached the level Winter had wanted and he put a reassuring hand on one of the guards' shoulders. These were just regular men, good soldiers, he thought. It wasn't their fault they were being used in a game between multiple powers who couldn't ensure their safety.
"Be careful," he told the guard. "There's some awful people trapped here."
"It's what we're trained to do," the guard said. "You be safe, Mr. Winter."
"I will."
He thought about heading right to the armory, where the Coldwall unit he'd been quietly refurbishing was warming up and prepping for battle, but there was only so much he could do as one man in a suit. Instead, he entered a server room, punched in a security code to allow access which he he'd planted for his own use long ago and locked himself inside, overriding ordinary digital pass codes. He found a chair and made himself at home, pulling out his laptop and running a USB cord from his computer to the physical server of the Labyrinth. He realized there were dozens of these rooms throughout the facility, backups after backups, but he also knew that if he could crack into the system here, he could make an impact across the entire prison.
He called up the status of the current prisoner population to see who had escaped, hoping it was Solar, Entropy Emily, and Straylight making their way to the surface.
Then he saw what was happening throughout the building and his stomach twisted into a knot.
"This is a disaster," he said out loud. "Let's see what I can do to turn things around."
And then he could see what was about to happen at the front gates, and understood exactly what he had to do.
Chapter 42:
Trading blows
Titus let the rain soak him, his hood landing low over his face to hide his identity. Water pooled on the cement ground in front of the Labyrinth, running through his toes. The sensation of earth beneath his feet, even this cold, dead pavement, made him feel more alive. He let the spear Gabriel had given him rest on his shoulder in that casual, deadly way his teacher usually held his, fingers loose around the shaft, the metal point rising just above his head.
Two sentries approached, encased in dark, high-tech armor, their faces obscured behind gleaming helmets. When one spoke, his voice had the modulated grain of a radio signal.
"Do we even have to ask who you are?" the man said. The other sentry was clearly female, and both looked poised for a fight.
"We're here to pick up our friends," Titus said. "We heard they needed a ride."
The male sentry laughed, but the female spoke with simple authority.
"I'm sorry. We need you to come with us, sir," she said. "You're to be detained for questioning."
"You really don't want to force us to make you release them," Titus said.
He could hear the beast roaming around in the back of his mind growling, spoiling for a confrontation. It had been too long. He was hungry. Titus calmed those thoughts and waited.
The female sentry raised her arm and pointed her wrist at Titus's companion, Kate's height, Kate's shape, hidden beneath that heavy hooded parka.
"Sorry," the sentry said. "It's easier if you're tranquilized. This won't hurt."
She fired a dart out of a wrist-mounted weapon. The male sentry, simultaneously, walked quickly toward Titus, saying "I'm sorry, you'll have to surrender your . . . spear."
The dart struck the female who was Kate's height and Kate's shape with a metallic "plink" noise and fell harmlessly to the ground. By then, the female sentry was close enough for Titus's hooded companion to lift her leg up and launch a horse-kick with her robotic foot dead center into the sentry's chest, knocking the armored woman back twenty feet. The shrouded girl yanked off her parka, revealing the neon-mohawk and vicious grin
of Bedlam, the cyborg already laughing as she prepared to charge her attacker again.
Titus, meanwhile, didn't give his sentry the time to fire a tranquilizer dart. He leapt, his spear clutched in one hand, soon his body fluidly transformed from human to monster, growing to almost twice his mass as his face elongated and turned into a toothy muzzle. He landed feet first on the sentry, pinning him to the ground with clawed feet, holding his spear point at the man's throat. Unnervingly, Titus watched as light glowed on the man's armor precisely where Titus had hit him and then it traced up his arms.
The sentry threw Titus halfway across the courtyard.
Titus hit the pavement rolling, instinct kicking in as he regained his feet and charged back at his opponent. He swung his weapon with the quick, easy movements he'd learned from Gabriel, using the breathing and mental exercises he'd practiced with Finnigan to help keep from going over the top into a rage. Every strike landed with the flat of the blade, and each time he could see the suit lighting up, registering hits. Meanwhile, the sentry fought back with hand-to-hand techniques that connected with more force than Titus was expecting, easily bruising his hulking frame. The blows grew more painful, and Titus watched the suit's glowing effect light up in his enemy's fists with every punch.
Across the courtyard, a different kind of battle was taking place. Bedlam was living up to her name, raining titanic punches down on her sentry, sending the woman rolling across the pavement with each strike. But the female sentry bounced back up faster with every punch, and she returned Bedlam blows with equal force. Titus peeked out of the corner of his eye as Bedlam crashed into a car, collapsing the roof in on itself. The female sentry's armor lit up like Christmas, glowing brighter with every attack Bedlam threw at her. The cyborg was a relentless brute force, tirelessly pressing her attacker, seemingly unable to register pain when she was tossed around like a doll by counterattacks.
The Indestructibles (Book 2): Breakout Page 18