Hell and Gone

by Duane Swierczynski

  Two of them, in three cages.

  “The hell…?” Hardie muttered, thinking: This is it?

  “Told you,” Victor said.

  None of it made sense. This was supposed to be the most secure prison facility in the world?

  There had to be more to it than this. Something Hardie wasn’t seeing. Maybe force fields, or invisible electronic barriers, or some other high-tech sci-fi bullshit. Mann’s employers, whoever they were, seemed to have an unlimited budget. So what was with this cheap-ass prison?

  “We mostly watch them from inside this control room,” Victor said. “There’s one on the opposite side, too, facing the other row of cells. Six cells, four prisoners on the floor. Of course, we do go in there to feed them and do roll call and drag them to the shower room when the smell gets too strong. But yeah, the idea is to minimize contact. These are clever fuckers. They’d crawl inside your skull and hot-wire your brain if they could.”

  “Huh.”

  “Like everyplace else, we’re tragically understaffed. We work in four shifts, six hours each, but you often end up watching someone else’s back.”

  Hardie said, “Where exactly are we?”

  “What do you mean? We’re in site number seven seven three four.”

  “No, I mean geographically. The place we’re standing. Where is it?”

  Victor squinted as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Where is it? Are you kidding? We don’t know. None of us knows. That’s the whole point of an escape-proof facility. Didn’t they explain any of this to you?”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Like everybody else. Like you did.”

  Nobody, Hardie thought, got here like I did.

  Yankee and Whiskey wordlessly slipped past both of them and unlocked a door that led out to the cages.

  “Anyway, this is good timing,” Victor said. “You’ll get to see how we do roll call.”

  “All right, lights…”

  Victor reached for an ancient control panel and stabbed a dirty plastic button. An insanely bright light filled the three cells facing them.

  “Cameras…”

  Yankee and Whiskey unclipped little plastic devices the size of TV remotes from their belts.

  “And action.”

  Inside the first cage was a pale-skinned, lanky, yet muscular man whose head was hanging low. He was stark naked except for the metal mask that was strapped to his head like a welder’s helmet. There were breathing holes, but otherwise the mask was featureless. The prisoner sat with his back against the wall, feet flat on the floor, knees a good three feet apart so that you could see his limp cock and slightly larger-than-average balls just hanging there, gently resting on the cold concrete floor.

  “Meet Prisoner Four,” Victor said.

  After an awkward silence, Hardie asked, “Can’t you get him something to wear?”

  “Wanker refuses to wear anything,” Victor explained. “He’s renounced all material possessions, or some such shit. We give him clothes, he rips them up into strips.”

  “Yeah. He’s just oozing honor there, isn’t he?”

  At which point the lanky man—Prisoner Four—lifted his head. He could sense the other two guards approaching. Yankee barked his orders at the prisoner, his voice sounding tinny through the small speaker in the control room.

  “Number Four, back against the bars.”

  “No names for these guys, either?”

  “Nope. Just numbers. But we do have nicknames, which relieves the tedium of the numbers. We sometimes call this one Bollock. As in ‘bollocks’?”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Sometimes Americans don’t.”

  Once the prisoner’s back was against the bars, Whiskey reached out and yanked Bollock’s head backward, pinning it to the bars and keeping it still. Yankee took a key from his ring and inserted it into a small lock that joined the straps on the back of the prisoner’s mask.

  “What’s the deal with the masks?”

  “They’re only allowed to remove the masks when they eat and when there’s roll call, which we do with digital photographs.”

  Yankee said, “Now turn around. Back against the wall.”

  Prisoner Four, aka Bollock, complied. With the mask off, he turned out to be a long-faced, grim man, with unruly, wispy blond hair. Yankee lifted his digital camera and snapped a photo just as Bollock hoisted a long, bony middle finger at them.

  “See what I mean?” Victor said inside the control room.

  Whiskey’s response was quick and brutal. The bird was flying for only two seconds before a baton jabbed Bollock in the stomach. As the prisoner doubled over, Whiskey removed the baton then jammed it into the hollow of his throat, choking him. Yankee snapped a new photo.

  “Say ‘cheese,’ scumbag,” Victor muttered.

  “Over on the left is Prisoner One. Also known as Horsehead.”

  The heavily muscled man inside the cell lazily rubbed the back of his head. Unlike Bollock, this prisoner wore a plain smock. But it didn’t cover the scars and puncture wounds that snaked up and down his arms and legs, and presumably his torso, upper thighs, and many of his major internal organs, too. He was a large, thick slab of scarred muscle.

  “Horsehead?” Hardie asked.

  As if on cue, Horsehead’s masked head whipped up to attention. Moved a fraction of an inch to the right, then the left, then the right again, as if his brain were a satellite trying to tune in to a signal. Then he began to jibber excitedly in Italian, the words almost sounding operatic as his voice rose and fell in pitch with every sentence.

  Victor rolled his eyes. “Talkative bastard. It’s so ironic.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, you know how the mob’s always sending enforcers to scare potential witnesses?” Victor leaned in. “Rumor has it old Horsehead here was the worst mob enforcer of all. When they wanted to frighten somebody into stone-cold silence, they’d send him. Forget severed animal heads in your bed. This guy would do the sickest, most twisted shit you can even imagine. Vile acts that you can never scrub out of your brain, not matter how hard you try. He wouldn’t say a word. He would just show you, and instantly, you’d get it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Now listen to him. Singing like a canary, ever since they put him down here. Or so I’ve been told.”

  Yankee and Whiskey stepped into the frame to repeat the routine. “Prisoner One, back against the bars,” Yankee said. Horsehead stopped jabbering and meekly complied with their demands. This time, Whiskey inserted the key.

  And nothing happened.

  Yankee shook his head sadly. “Shit. Let me try,” he said. He took the keys from Whiskey, jammed one into the slot in the back of the mask. Nothing. Jammed it in repeatedly, like he was trying to churn the world’s smallest batch of butter. Still nothing.

  In the control room, Victor shrugged. “Another wonderful bonus of this facility. Stuff breaks down all the time. And it’s not as if we can get a repair crew down here to fix anything—security being what it is. So usually, we have to make do with what we’ve got.”

  Hardie watched the guards struggle to open the mask for another few moments. How was this son of a bitch supposed to eat?

  “Come on. We’ve got to walk around to the other control room. Your leg doing okay? You want to go back?”

  “I’m fine,” Hardie lied. His leg was killing him. But the sooner he saw the rest of the place, the sooner he could figure out how to escape.

  The next door Victor opened revealed another guard’s living quarters—Yankee’s. Same spare furniture as Hardie’s and Victor’s rooms, only this space smelled like body odor and mold. Hardie couldn’t help but think that the guards’ rooms were not much better than the prisoners’ cells. Granted, you didn’t have to sit in your room with your balls touching a cold metal floor, but this wasn’t exactly easy living, either. For the past three years—right up until his run-in with Mann and her crew—Hardie had guarded fairly posh resid
ences, stuffed with wall-to-wall audio and video entertainment. It distracted him from the shambles of his own life. If Hardie had to sit in an empty room and just contemplate shit, he might lose his mind.

  Yankee’s cell led into a much bigger corner room lined with small metal doors, each of them a bit smaller than a cafeteria tray.

  “This is where we receive food and fresh clothes,” Victor explained. “And any trash goes down here.”

  “Who sends the stuff down?”

  “The Prisonmaster, like I said. Our only link to the outside world. Only he knows where we are.”

  “How do we talk to this Prisonmaster?”

  Victor tapped his ear. “You don’t call him. He calls you.”

  Hardie checked out the doors, which reminded him of both old-fashioned Automats and mausoleum crypts. Neither a very pleasant association.

  “Aren’t you worried about, uh, prisoners escaping and crawling up the supply path?”

  Translation: Maybe I could find a way to escape by crawling up the supply path?

  Victor shook his head. “Impossible. The pathways are lined with razor-sharp metal—kind of like those traffic spikes you see in parking lots. The packages are fine coming down. But try to go up one of those things and you’ll be cut to pieces.”

  Awesome.

  The next door led to the saddest break room Hardie had ever seen. And Hardie had spent countless hours in the sad, soul-draining break rooms of many Philadelphia police departments. The centerpiece was a long wooden table with metal legs that looked like it wobbled all the time. Hardie made his way over and pressed two fingertips down on its tacky surface. Yep. It wobbled.

  “We spend our leisure time in here,” Victor explained.

  “Leisure, huh?”

  “It’s actually nice to get out of your room every so often.”

  “I’m sure.”

  The door at the other end of the room led to the corner room that Hardie was already familiar with: the elevator vestibule, where he’d been shocked into unconsciousness. Good times, good times. Hardie looked at the elevator mechanism and once again wished he’d stayed in that stupid room upstairs. At least he could wither away in peace.

  Now Hardie and Victor were on the other side of the room, and once they made their way through Whiskey’s accommodations—just as spartan as the others—they stood inside a second control room, facing a row of three cells.

  Through the hard plastic window, Hardie could see a woman in the cage on the right.

  Victor said, “That’s Prisoner Two.”

  She wore a mask and a drab cotton smock, just as Prisoner One did, but she didn’t look particularly uncomfortable. She sat with her legs arranged in the lotus position, backs of her wrists resting on her knees, head perfectly straight, raven-dark hair touching her shoulders. She didn’t move. At all. From all outward appearances, she could have been a fiberglass mannequin, modeling the latest in prison attire.

  “Watch this,” Victor said, a mischievous little smile on his bearded face.

  He stabbed a button. There was a static pop and then—

  SQWEEEEEEEEEEEEE

  —a hideous siren filled the room, the sound from coming from a speaker directly above the cells. Even inside this control room it was loud enough to burst eardrums. Out there, Hardie thought, it must be unbearable.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “I SAID, DID YOU SEE THAT?”

  Hardie shook his head; Victor killed the siren.

  “She didn’t even twitch,” Victor said. “It’s like she zones out of this place entirely. Sometimes we think she’s playing dead—and of course, one of us has to go in there to check on her. Creepy, isn’t it?”

  Hardie watched the woman, who was utterly still. Not even a strand of her raven-black hair moved; everything was perfectly arranged, and she was somehow at peace with her surroundings.

  “Don’t let her fool you,” Victor said. “She’s been trying to screw her way out of this place for months now. When her mask is off she gives you these eyes—and for a minute, you’ll be thinking, wow, maybe I should just forget this job and go for it, right? Give her a go, who’s to know? Well, let me tell ya, brother—I hear that’s how we lost one of your predecessors. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “What’s she in for?”

  “What?”

  Hardie asked, “What did she do?”

  “What does it matter?”

  He wondered what her face looked like under the mask. Strangely, he found himself picturing his ex, Kendra, under the mask. His curiosity was soon satisfied as Whiskey and Yankee ordered her through the same drill as the others. Back against the bars, head kept still while they unlocked the mask. She slipped it off and turned around to face the guards.

  Prisoner Two was absolutely gorgeous.

  Prisoner Two was not in her cell.

  Instead, she was sitting in a beautiful, lush suburban garden on the warmest day of spring.

  Back in college, her philosophy professor had invited the entire class—seventeen freshmen—to his own backyard for a Friday afternoon barbecue. The professor and his wife lived in a beautiful little California oasis, complete with a koi pond and perfectly manicured hedges and stone gardens. At one point the entire class had gathered in the professor’s living room for dessert, but the woman now known as Prisoner Two had lingered in the yard for a short time. Not more than a few moments, nowhere as long as a minute. But enough time to permanently record the scene in her memory; she traveled back there now and relished every detail. The smell of the grass. The harsh, smoky scent of charcoal as it hung in the air. The late-spring sun on her forearms. The memory of a shy smile from a boy in her class, and the warm feeling in her stomach. The knowledge that the weekend was ahead of her, and she could do whatever she wanted. She was eighteen years old and healthy and people told her she was beautiful and had yet to experience all the good things that could happen to her.

  Barking commands jarred her back to cold reality.

  They were here to photograph her again.

  She took a deep breath and held it, trying to clear her mind. It was time for her little game. She both looked forward to it and dreaded it. The mechanics were simple—a matter of conjuring the right memory. But the aftereffect was painful.

  When they removed her mask, Prisoner Two broke out into the world’s silliest grin, like she didn’t have a care in the world.

  Boys had always told her she had a beautiful smile.

  And the trick to smiling like she meant it was traveling back in time two decades, back to when she was a teenager and truly didn’t have a care in the world, and she’d sit out in the backyard sipping screwdrivers while listening to her drunk friends crack crude jokes. She transported herself back there and smiled, almost feeling the slight chlorine burn in her nose and the warmth on her face and the sweet orange juice and bracing Absolut in her mouth…

  “The hell is she doing?” Hardie asked.

  “Absolutely mental, isn’t she?” Victor said. “I’m telling you. Keep your distance from that one. We call her Fatale, for obvious reasons.”

  The smile didn’t last long. Whiskey unclipped something from her belt and sprayed something into Prisoner Two’s face that made her recoil.

  The mace.

  Yeah, that was the painful part of her little game. It sealed her eyes instantly and went to work on the pores of her skin, burning little trails that felt like they bored all the way to her skull. She choked down a scream; she wouldn’t give them that satisfaction. They snapped her photo like that, her face a rictus of pain. That didn’t matter, though.

  Her mask was off. And it would stay off for a while. A half victory.

  The other half would come later.

  Just as there was on the other side, there was an empty cell between the two prisoners. While Two curled up into a ball, hands on her face, Whiskey and Yankee moved down to the last prisoner.

  “And there’s Prisoner Three. An absol
ute nightmare.”

  The figure in the cell was a fearsome-looking bruiser type, even with the mask on. Tattoos of black bones ran up his arms and legs, as if he were the Visible Man from biology class. He had biceps enough to easily snap a neck. Thighs, too, for that matter. The inked-up monster was sitting on the floor of his cell, arms crossed, feet flat on the floor, and his knees locked together.

  “Christ,” Hardie muttered. “What’s he in for?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? They don’t tell us. Doesn’t matter. This one’s been trouble from the beginning. We usually have to shock him into submission just to get him to do something simple, like take a dump.”

  “Shock him?”

  “The metal floors of the cells are electrified, and we carry these bad boys,” Victor said, tapping the baton strapped to his belt.

  “Doesn’t this guy have a cute nickname or anything?”

  Victor made a sour face. “The word cute doesn’t even apply.”

  Outside, Yankee and Whiskey prepared their routine. “Prisoner Three. Back against the bars.” Prisoner Three didn’t stir.

  “Come on,” Yankee said. “Let’s not do this again. It always ends the same way. You know this.”

  No response.

  “Oh, so wanker’s being stubborn again, is he?” Victor muttered. “Showing off for the new warden. Well, he wants to play it this way, fine.”

  Victor stabbed a blue button. Static popped. “Guards, stand clear.” His voice boomed throughout the facility. Yankee and Whiskey nodded and took three giant steps backward, as if playing a schoolyard game. Victor stabbed the next button in the row—a big red one.

  ZZZZZZZZZZAT.

  First you heard the shrieks, followed by the jerky movements of their bodies. Hardie could almost could smell the ozone and singed flesh. Prisoner Two had lost her Zen and was screaming in pain. Same with Prisoner Three. They seemed to want to do anything, anything at all, to avoid contact with the floor—which clearly was the source of the electrical shocks. Prisoner Three was shouting something—“All right! All right!”—but it was hard to tell over the screaming of the other prisoners.