Hell and Gone

by Duane Swierczynski

  —Danny Trejo

  VICTOR’S EYES DARTED back and forth—prisoner, warden, prisoner, warden—waiting for someone to answer.

  “Nothing,” Hardie said. “She’s crazy.”

  “Okay, come on. Fun’s over. X-Ray’s coming back soon.” Then turning his attention to Eve: “And you—put that mask back on.”

  As they walked back toward the control room in silence, Hardie glanced over at Victor. Seemed like a perfectly nice man. But didn’t all the nice young psychopaths? Hardie tried to summon his inner Nate for some guidance. Nate told him: No idea, buddy. You’re on your own here.

  The situation boiled down to two possible realities, didn’t it? Either Eve was lying, in an attempt to worm her way into Hardie’s brain so that she could turn him against his own team. Or Victor was lying, along with the rest of them—and they were cunning psychopaths just toying with him before destroying them.

  Neither made sense—not really. That’s what bothered Hardie the most. There was a Sherlock Holmes line that Nate Parish was fond of quoting: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. But that was the problem. Which possibility was more improbable? Both were absurd. This whole facility—his whole life—was maddeningly absurd.

  Why couldn’t Mann have just put a bullet in his face and been done with it?

  “You get what you needed?” asked Victor.

  Hardie just nodded.

  “Hope it was worth it, because I had no other choice but to pull Zero’s real urine tubes. Got piss all over myself. So not only do I have that evil bastard’s waste products sinking into my skin, I’ve forever incurred his wrath.”

  They ascended the metal staircase up to the break room.

  “Well, I owe you one,” Hardie said.

  “I should say you do,” Victor said. “So what did she say?”

  “Nothing useful.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Great. All that effort for nothing useful?”

  They went back toward the control room. Hardie had been awake for what—three or four shifts straight? There was so much to process, to get straight in his own mind. If this prisoner, Eve Bell, was telling the truth, and the real bad guys were the guards, then what was he supposed to do? Incapacitate them one by one, then free the prisoners and restore order? He was a broken man who needed a cane to walk. And that’s if he trusted her. Big if.

  “Seriously?” Victor asked as he opened the door to the break room. “She didn’t tell you anything?”

  “No.”

  “She didn’t say, ‘Hurt me, stupid asshole’?”

  The blood in Hardie’s veins went frosty.

  “She didn’t say, ‘The guards are the bad guys. We’re the real guards, trapped in these cells’?”

  Inside Hardie’s room, X-Ray, Yankee, and Whiskey were waiting for him.

  “We heard the whole thing,” Yankee said.

  Whiskey added, rather unnecessarily:

  “You are fucked.”

  Hardie quickly pulled the tactical pen from his pocket—X-Ray slapped it away. The weapon flew out of Hardie’s hand, bounced off a wall, landed on the cement floor, and started spinning. Whiskey, who was closest, punched Hardie in the head, drawing blood. At almost the same time Yankee attacked from behind, kicking the cane out from beneath his hand. Hardie’s arms pinwheeled. He collapsed to the ground. Victor pinned Hardie to the floor with a meaty forearm.

  “Thought you’d be different,” he said, a childlike bitterness in every word. “I really did, mate.”

  “Listen to me, Victor…”

  “No, listen to this—”

  Upon that last syllable Whiskey smashed a boot into Hardie’s stomach, which immediately forced his body into a fetal position. Come on, breathe through it. Breathe. Breathe… Hardie stretched his fingers out, grasping at the floor as though he were trying to claw through the cement. Victor loosened his grip to let him respond to the pain; Hardie took the opportunity. He’d been hit in the stomach many times before; he knew how to contract the muscles to minimize the damage. And while Victor thought he was fighting for air and trying not to puke, Hardie marshaled all the strength he could into his right arm. And then he launched it up like a guided missile directly into the space between Victor’s testicles.

  Victor’s entire body seemed to float up in the air a moment, just a few millimeters in orbit above the surface of the floor. His mouth curled into an O shape.

  Hardie blinked the blood out of his eyes and saw that X-Ray and Yankee had their electrified batons out. The ends of them sparked and snapped, like portable Tesla coils.

  From the floor, Victor spoke in a quavering voice that—although not a full octave above normal, had definitely changed in pitch.

  “It was a test, you stupid bastard,” he spat. “After all that I told you, why couldn’t you believe me? You’ve chosen the wrong side. This is what she does. She gets inside your mind, twists everything around.”

  Behind them, one of the guards spoke in a harsh language that Hardie didn’t recognize. The meaning, however, was clear:

  We’re going to kick your ass unless you submit to us.

  The other three guards moved in closer with their snapping, electrified sticks. One touch, Hardie realized, would probably cause him to wet his pants and forget who he was for a half hour. The object, then, would be to avoid being touched with the business ends of those sticks. And what then? If by some miracle he were able to overpower the guards here, and maybe knock out the Aussie cocksucker on the floor, what then? Where do you go? What do you do? Take the elevator up, so everyone else down here dies? Good guys and bad?

  “Shit,” was all he could say.

  Because this was his last stand.

  The battle was brief yet violent. The electrified ends of the batons did touch Hardie, and more than once. He did not soil his pants, but he did scream, and punch and kick and try to repeat his trick with Victor—namely, aiming for private parts. This was not effective.

  Before long Hardie was pinned to the floor, and Victor picked up his walking stick. What, were they going to beat him with it? Didn’t that break all kinds of disability rights laws?

  Victor twisted the cane just so and removed a cover that Hardie never knew was there. At the end of the stick were two metal prongs. Victor pushed a button on the side of the cane. Electricity jumped from prong to prong and made a fat thick snapping sound. They had given him a weapon after all. Only they had forgotten to tell him.

  Hardie was about to curse at them but Victor was too fast—the prongs already slamming into his chest, his entire body seizing up for what felt like forever, to the point where he thought he smelled his own flesh burning.

  After they dragged him to an empty cell and began to beat him again and strip him out of his suit, Hardie realized that he probably had lost his job as warden.

  As Victor ran his knuckles under cold water in the slop sink, his earbud crackled to life, startling him a little.

  “You did the right thing,” the Prisonmaster said.

  The PM had a strange way of seeing and hearing everything down here. Victor had personally searched for hidden cameras and was never able to find a single one. Sometimes, Victor thought the Prisonmaster was the only voice of reason down here. The place had a way of making you doubt everything, even what you see with your own eyes.

  “Did I?” Victor asked.

  “Oh, yes. Rest assured. Now, you know I’m not supposed to divulge any details about the real-world activities of anyone sent down to site seven seven three four, but…”

  “Come on. Don’t be coy. Who the hell is he? Why was he sent down here?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that. But let’s just say you were right to be suspicious of the warden’s insistence on questioning Prisoner Two. He has a history with females, and the females don’t always come to a happy end.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up
, Victor. Like most sociopaths, the new warden is a gifted liar. You couldn’t have seen it coming.”

  Victor came to visit Hardie later in his cell. He stood outside the bars, arms crossed. “Very disappointed in you, buddy.”

  Hardie chose to not respond. He was still bleeding from his face and his tongue felt thick in his mouth, so it was probably best if he didn’t speak anyway.

  “I guess I’ve learned my lesson. You see, we never really know what they’re sending down. Could be another guard, could be another prisoner. That’s part of our job. To figure it all out.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Hardie said. “I’m supposed to be the warden.”

  “Everybody’s the fuckin’ warden when they come down here! That’s part of the test! It’s the only way to separate the heroes from the bloody villains. Eventually, your true colors emerge. Oh, yes they do. Didn’t take long with you now, did it?”

  “You’re insane. All of you.”

  “In fact, you might be the most diabolical one yet. You had a lot of us fooled. Oh, yes you did. Lie after lie after lie, all delivered in that deadpan style of yours. And to think I wasted one of my beers on you!”

  “That beer sucked,” Hardie said.

  “From now on, you’ll be known as Prisoner Five. You will not answer to any other name.”

  “Oh, fuck you. My name’s Charlie Hardie.”

  “Don’t want to hear it.”

  “CHARLIE—”

  Victor walked back to the control room across the hallway.

  “—HARDIE!”

  Slammed the door behind him.

  Some small part of Hardie still clung to the belief that this was another test, or maybe some high-spirited hazing, a taste of the so-called torture so Hardie’d be better informed in his role as warden.

  But when they all left and didn’t come back…

  ever…

  he knew the small part of him was full of shit.

  19

  Prison exists to serve one purpose: locking people away from life’s good things.

  —Sin Soracco, Low Bite

  Manhattan—Now

  “CARE FOR ANOTHER?”

  Mann realized all at once that was she awake and sitting at a bar. As promised, the Industry had deposited her into a very nice hotel. In front of her was a diamond-cut tumbler of Domaine de Canton, a ginger liqueur, that she did not remember ordering. This was not entirely strange, because she had been prepared to experience missing time. To keep the location of the prison absolutely secret, all its visitors were injected with a serum (allegedly harmless) that erased short-term memory, somewhere in the forty-to-fifty-hour range. The exact cutoff was imprecise; all at once you would snap “awake” and realize you couldn’t remember what had happened over the past two days—including where you had been and what route you had taken. When Mann rolled up her sleeve and looked at the crook of her left elbow, there was a piece of cotton taped there. She peeled it back. The injection site had been healing for a few hours. She must have been given the shot earlier in the day, rested for a while, wandered down for a cocktail, then “woken up.”

  Until Mann slid her hand into her pocket and pulled out the folded card that housed her room key, she didn’t know what city she was in. New York City, it turned out. A Hilton.

  “No, thank you,” Mann said, then signed the check, leaving a 20 percent tip. She then stepped outside for some air.

  The sun was beginning to set, and the air was muggy and hot. Mann realized she was standing directly across from Ground Zero. Construction continued on the so-called Freedom Tower. The last time Mann had been to lower Manhattan, the site was still just a big, depressing hole in the ground.

  She stepped back inside and took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, which, according to the folded card, was where she’d find her room. Mann always traveled light. Never take anything you’re not fully prepared to leave behind.

  At Penn Station she bought a ticket on an Acela bound for 30th Street Station, Philadelphia. Mann thought about Charlie Hardie for much of the ride down. Had he figured out the prison yet? Or had he been beaten to death upon his arrival? Of course not. Not her Charlie. The man was unkillable, right?

  She hadn’t thought about him in a long while. Not actively, anyway. Seeing him in the flesh, though, brought all those old bad feelings back. She tried not to show it, but he seemed to sense it anyway. The pure cold hate. Much as Mann tried to rationalize it away, the truth was…he had derailed her life. Utterly, completely. She thought that seeing him in that tiny little interrogation room, and knowing what fate had in store for him, would bring her some peace.

  It did not.

  In dreary, humid Philadelphia, Mann picked up the SUV she’d rented using her smartphone and followed 76 up to Route 611 and out to the suburbs of Montgomery County. The address had been written on the back of the folded hotel card.

  The house was modest for this neighborhood, which was good. Nobody would be driving by and gawking at it. A split-level. Some tree cover, bushes, a wooden fence in need of paint. Mann parked the SUV across the street and swept the area with her eyes. The family allegedly had some guardian angels in the FBI looking over them—but as far as Mann could tell, the house was utterly exposed. Nobody on the perimeter. No sophisticated alarm systems. No one even doing drive-bys.

  She removed the smartphone from her pocket and had her hand on the door handle when she heard a noise.

  Behind her—

  Then a form, stumbling out of the bushes.

  Mann’s body tensed up. Had she missed someone? Was the FBI out there? Not that it mattered, because she could flash any number of phony credentials that would ease her passage from the scene. But she would be highly disappointed in herself if she’d missed something like that.

  The form darted past the SUV and into the street, casting furtive glances to the left, then the right, before jogging toward the house.

  Mann squinted.

  It was Charlie Hardie.

  The junior version of him, anyway.

  What was a young man doing out at this hour, stumbling around in the darkness outside his own house?

  After a few more seconds of observation Mann had figured it out. The boy had been drinking. Look at him, how uneasy he is on his feet. He must have sneaked past Mom to go pound beers with his asshole friends somewhere in the wilds of Montgomery County. Absent father, single mother—textbook rebellion move.

  So tell me, boy—what would you be drinking if I told you that your father was in some secret prison right now? Would you upgrade to vodka, maybe some coke?

  She was half tempted to jump out of the SUV and tackle the boy, right there on his front lawn, put the tip of a pen under his chin and tell him it was a knife and that she was going to cut his head off. Would he act like his father and try to punch her in the eye? Would he have a wisecrack? Would she see any of the father in the son?

  It was tempting.

  So incredibly tempting.

  But she had other work to do. The night was just beginning.

  20

  Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

  —Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast

  THE MASK.

  It was much, much worse than Hardie could have imagined.

  Picture your head removed from its body and imprisoned elsewhere, some cramped little metal box where the air stinks like sour breath and nothing can touch the skin of your face, not even your own fingertips.

  This was a new low. Hardie’s new life was smaller and more pathetic than he ever thought possible.

  The first itch was a novelty. Hardie thought it wasn’t so bad; okay, he could take it, it was just an itch. He could just will it away. But the itch refused to quit. You take for granted how easy it is to cure something like an itch. You do it almost unconsciously. Your nose it
ches, your hand flies up to your face, you take care of it. Not inside the mask. The itch was free to last as long as it wanted, because nobody could stop it. The itch continued, and grew more powerful, emboldened by the lawless space inside the stinking, hot, confining mask. Even though he knew it would do no good, Hardie’s fingers scratched at the outside of the mask. He tried working his fingers under his mask, but they couldn’t reach up high enough to scratch the itch.

  Breathe, Hardie. Breathe.

  Don’t lose it just a day into this thing.

  (Was it a day?)

  (Two days, maybe?)

  (Please let it be at least two days.)

  Sleep was no escape. The moment you calmed your brain down enough to drift away, the sirens were blaring again, and the bright lights were flashing so you couldn’t see anything, let alone the guards, who were forcing your back against the bars so they could take off the mask and photograph your squinty, tired, itchy face. And by the time you remembered to scratch your face they were making you put the mask back on again. Then the screaming sirens faded and the lights were cut and you’d go back to not falling asleep.

  Twice a day the masks were temporarily removed for feeding. The first time, Hardie didn’t even eat. He scratched at his face furiously until he saw blood on the tips of his fingers. The second time, he noted that the same old breakfast was still being served, despite the Prisonmaster’s promise to do something about it. Dry, biscuitlike lumps and a thin, tasteless paste that was probably intended to be some sort of oatmeal substitute. Good to see his short tenure as warden had absolutely zero effect on prisoner conditions.

  Then the mask went back on again, and you started counting down the time until the next head count or meal, because anything was better than wearing this heavy, choking, soul-killing mask…