Hell and Gone

by Duane Swierczynski

  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 Marc
hione,” 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!”

  26

  I haven’t the faintest idea whether this is a rack on which the lovers are tortured, or something with pegs to hold the shining cloak of romance.

  —James M. Cain, in conversation with screenwriter Vincent Lawrence

  TECHNICALLY, JULIE LIPPMAN was dead.

  When she couldn’t find her boyfriend, Bobby Marchione, Julie asked her father, one of the biggest political donors in Pennsylvania, to call in favors from all over. Every attempt—legal or otherwise—was deflected. Nothing sinister, nothing dramatic. Just a firm invisible hand pressing back against her shoulder, and a whisper in her ear: Oh, no you don’t. But Julie refused to give up.

  She had taken advantage of two male friends, offering booze and hinting at sexual favors…all in return for unearthing this one little casket in a California graveyard…

  And then they showed up.

  Men in suits, carrying guns, blasting a warning shot into the air, threatening to blow their heads off unless they dropped to their knees and knitted their hands behind their heads. This changed everything for Julie. Now the invisible hand had a face. What kind of graveyard employed men who wore suits and swarmed out among the tombstones like professional killers?

  But Julie kept such thoughts to herself even as she was charged with trespassing, a charge that caused her father great embarrassment and even more expense getting it quashed. In return she had to promise to enter a treatment facility to help deal with her grief. Julie, however, was not grieving. It was impossible to grieve over a person who was still alive. They…

  THEY

  …had her boyfriend somewhere, and he was being held against his will. She knew this in her heart, but she also knew it in her head. If Bobby was dead they would produce a body. And if Bobby’s body was in that casket, then they wouldn’t have stopped her from digging it up. No body meant that he was alive. And it was just a matter of time before she found him. On her own.

  There were attempts at normalcy. Julie was even briefly engaged to a cop whom she’d chatted up one night at a nightclub in Old City Philadelphia to learn what she could about finding missing people. Oh, the horror and scandal in the Lippman family during those few months!

  But Julie was too focused on her search for Bobby to focus on anybody, or much of anything, else. The cop went on his way; Julie continued her hunt. THEY were at the center of it all.

  THEY kept resisting her.

  Until finally…THEY took an interest in her.

  Strange people, following her as she came and went from her downtown apartment. Bizarre pops and clicks on her phone. Pieces of mail being delivered late, bent and wrinkled. Some mail not showing up at all. THEY were watching, all right.

  Which was exactly what Julie wanted.

  The only way to see their faces was to make THEM come after her.

  And then one night they did.

  Late one icy January night Julie was attacked as she was making her way back from her car. She always parked in the same lot, traveled the same one-block route back to her apartment on Arch Street, right near a massive I-95 retaining wall. The route was desolate and rarely traveled, which made it easy to spot her spotters. In this case, however, the isolation worked against her. The man with the needle came out of the shadows.

  Julie Lippman was dead.

  She screamed and he punched her in the face, cutting off the sound immediately. Then his hand was around her throat and he was pressing her against the retaining wall and then rudely turning her head and stabbing her in the side of the neck with the needle. She felt the needle slide into her skin. She snapped. It was something in that violation-by-steel that did it; perhaps the instant realization that the same people who stole her boyfriend weren’t playing games and they thought they could just show up and kill her and not lose a second of sleep over it. They shouldn’t be allowed to do this. They shouldn’t be allowed to DO THIS.

  Julie Lippman was dead.

  She didn’t remember how she escaped, only that she found herself down by an abandoned dock on the Delaware waterfront, heart pounding, fingers raw and covered in blood. She found a dirty Dumpster full of old clothes. She left her own in a bundle by the edge of the dock, like a killer stashing them before making a getaway. She disappeared.

  Julie Lippman was dead.

  Twenty years ago it was easier to establish a new identity. This was the pre-9/11 world, when certain simple scams, such as applying for a Social Security number using the identity of a dead child, still worked. Much of the first year was spent re-creating herself.

  Julie Lippman was dead.

  “Eve Bell” was born.

  The first part of her new identity came from a faded sign she glimpsed down by the dock—STEVEDORES ONLY, a notice from another era, when Philly had thriving ports. She would be Eve, and the name would always remind her of this moment of her birth.

  The surname came from Tim O’Brien’s “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” the story of a young soldier who manages to have his girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, shipped over to Vietnam.

  Bobby’s favorite story.

  Eve Bell was everything Julie Lippman couldn’t be. Eve Bell was a professional people finder who kept her own identity permanently buried—to protect her clients, protect herself. Eve Bell found dozens of people over her twenty-year career. Spouses, kids, grandparents, siblings, some of whom were happy to be found, others angry that they couldn’t stay hidden. Eve Bell was smarter than Julie Lippman. Eve Bell was tougher. Eve Bell could take a punch. Eve Bell knew that to wage war against the forces of Secret America you had to become like them. Ethereal. Existing on the fringes of the normal world.

  All the while she pursued her original case, hoping to find some trace of Bobby Marchione.

  Bobby was her one-armed man; her cure for gamma-radiation poisoning; her one true ring.

  The reason for all this.

  Then one day a year ago a former FBI agent named Deacon Clark hired her to find his missing friend Charlie Hardie. The case had all the hallmarks of a Secret America grab-and-disappear. She eagerly took the case, once again thinking it would bring her closer to Bobby.

  And she woke up here.

  Closer to Bobby than she ever would have dreamed.

  * * *

  Of course, she told Bobby none of this.

  She simply said,

  “I faked my own death so that I could find you. But it’s me. It’s your Julie.”


  “You’re not my Julie,” Bobby said. “You know a little about my life, and you are trying to confuse me. It’s not going to work.”

  “Goddamn it, it’s me, Bobby. Your sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. You used to make fun of me for liking Prince. I still know the combination to your dorm room. Want to hear it?”

  Bobby paused before replying, finger hovering on the button.

  “It’s twenty-four, three, fifteen, Bobby. Do you remember when you first gave me that combination, told me Pags was going away for the weekend?”

  Hardie watched from the ground, where he was still twitching slightly, imagining that little tendrils of black smoke were curling off his body. The underside of Zero’s gurney was full of wires and tricks. The pee tubes and all that medical stuff was a ruse; down here Bobby Whoever was at the center of this facility’s communications hub. Then he saw the grooves on the metal floor, directly beneath the gurney. It took Hardie a minute to realize what he was looking at it. But when he did, hope flooded his heart for the first time since he’d been banished to this place.

  “You could have found that information out from any number of sources,” Bobby said. “A simple phone call to a member of the Leland University English department, for instance.”

  “It’s me, Bobby. Touch me and you’ll know I’m telling the truth.”