Hell and Gone (12 page)

“Eh?”

Hardie looked at Victor. “What did he do, to deserve being here?”

Victor took another swig of beer, stared off at the far wall of Hardie’s room. He swished the beer around in his mouth before he worked it down his throat.

“You know I can’t say anything. But think of the worst kind of betrayal, at the worst possible moment…and then multiply that by a thousand. The man’s a monster. He had been the whole time. And I’m ashamed it took me so long to recognize that.”

Victor seemed convinced that his former pal was a monster. But
monster
was a word that was thrown around a lot. What was he—a cold-blooded hit man? A secret serial killer who dressed up in a black leather gimp suit and sliced up entire families in suburban houses?

See, the thing that bothered Hardie the most was that he had no files on these “prisoners.” There was no rap sheet, no news accounts. They were just human beings, boxed up for someone’s convenience. But whose? And why? The Industry, as Mann called it, certainly had enemies.

Or was he simply allowing Prisoner Two to color his thinking? Maybe she was every bit as diabolical as Victor claimed she was. Wouldn’t be tough to dig up old newspaper articles about Hardie’s exploits in Philadelphia involving his good friend Nate Parish—and, by extension, FBI agent Deke Clark. She could be one of those savants who easily matches names to faces. She could be a brilliant actress, expressing surprise when Hardie popped out of that shower drain—and instantly knowing what to say to make him doubt everything.

There was, of course, a way to find out.

Before Victor left, Hardie gestured for him to come closer. “Now that I’ve cleared my name, I really need a favor.”

“That’s the last of the beer, I swear.”

“Two favors, actually.”

“Okay, let’s hear them.”

“I need a weapon.”

Victor stared at him for a moment, a smile almost breaking out on his face before he turned serious again. “A weapon? For what?”

“For the second favor, which you’ll hear about in a second.”

Victor gave it a moment to roll around in his mind. “I don’t know what to tell you, mate. Weapons are rationed out here. You’re given what you’re given, and that’s it. You’ll notice I don’t carry one of those electrified baton things. That’s because I broke mine during an altercation, and the Prisonmaster didn’t see fit to send me a replacement. You’re not going to find any other guards willing to give up their weapons, either. Even to you.”

“So I’ve got no options.”

“You’ve got your cane. Maybe that was intended to double as a weapon.”

“Sure. I can poke a prisoner to death.”

“And…oh, hell. What do you need a weapon for?”

“I’ve got to have
something,
” Hardie pleaded. “Come on. I feel defenseless down here. What if I get into a jam?”

Again Victor let Hardie’s words sink in, but this time he was looking at Hardie with a guilty expression. Finally Victor reached around, fished something out of his back pocket, handed it to Hardie. It looked like a black pen, complete with a pocket clip. Only the tip didn’t feature a rollerball or anything else that carried ink.

“What the hell’s this?” Hardie asked. “A pen?”

“No, sir. That’s a Smith & Wesson tactical pen. Police and military version, which is longer, and skips the screw-on cap.”

“This is your idea of a weapon?”

“Like I said, I lost my baton. Here. Let me show you.”

Victor took the pen back, holding it up as though he were a spokesmodel. “Made from aircraft aluminum. This end’s the fun end. Jam it into a nerve bundle, your opponent goes down. Jam it into an eye, no more 3-D movies.” He pulled off the cap on the other end, which took a bit of effort. “Other side, ballpoint pen. You can fill out your tax forms. Genius, isn’t it?”

“A pen?”

“Best I can do.”

Hardie took it anyway, slid it into his right trouser pocket. Great. Now he was fully prepared to cross a street and fill out a parking ticket. “Thanks.”

“What’s the second favor, for which you require a weapon?”

“I need you to sneak me into a cell.”

HARDIE CAME UP
with the plan: use Zero as a distraction. Victor could claim that some of Zero’s piss tubes were loose. Victor would summon X-Ray, leaving only Whiskey, who would be asleep—in turn leaving Hardie alone with Prisoner Two. For a few minutes, anyway.

He stood there now, waiting.

A soft voice spoke from behind the mask. “Come closer. I won’t bite.”

She was awake. She could see him. Outwardly, she gave no sign of being conscious or even alive, her body in some kind of ultrarelaxed yoga-style suspended animation, chest barely moving. Hardie stepped closer to her cell—cane, leg, cane, leg—until he was right up against the bars. He cleared his throat and told her he didn’t have much time.

“I want to hear everything, right now,” Hardie said. “Who you are, why Deke hired you, how you got here—”

“Help me take this off.”

With that, she stood up gracefully, made her way to the bars, and bowed her head.

Hardie paused momentarily, then put his right arm through the opening between two bars and reached around to the back of her head. She took his hand and guided it to the clasp in back, where it locked. Shit, the lock. All the masks were locked. Hardie started to tell her, “I don’t have a—” when she slipped her other hand into his pants pocket and removed a thin electronic key. She pressed it into Hardie’s left palm. Her fingertips were cold. Hardie had to lean against the bars for balance, but he managed to snap open the lock, then ease the mask—heavier than he thought—off the top of her head.

Prisoner Two touched her fingers to her lips, then puckered them. Pressed the fingers of both hands into her cheekbones. “Are you alone?” she murmured, her voice so quiet Hardie could barely hear it.

“Yeah, I’m alone.”

“No one else on the floor?”

Hardie shook his head and was about to say no when she turned, narrowed her eyes, then spit something hard and phlegmy into his face. Some of the wet blast was blocked by the bars, but not enough.

“Been saving that for you,” she said, louder.

“What? Seriously?”

Her expression changed slightly; some of the fury softened. “Hurt me,” she whispered. “Pull me in close to the bars.
Now, do it.
”

“What do you want?”

Under her breath: “Someone is probably watching or listening. You don’t hurt me, we’re all dead. Do it
now,
fucking
hurt me
.”

In his previous life Charlie Hardie would never have hit a woman, ever. Recent events, however, had caused him to abandon that code. He’d punched Mann in the eye and didn’t feel an ounce of guilt about it. So he reached inside the bars and pulled the prisoner forward, banging her head on the bars. She cried out, and seemed to lose her balance.

What the hell am I doing?
Hardie thought, his stomach suddenly sick.

The prisoner rolled her eyes up to glare at him, a sardonic smile on her face. “Is that all you’ve got?”

“Enough of this
hurt me
shit. Who are you, and how do you know me?”

She whispered,

“The name’s Eve Bell and I was hired to find you, you stupid asshole.”

This disappointed Hardie on at least three levels.

For starters, the name Eve Bell sounded about as made-up as you can get. What—were Modesty Blaise and Pussy Galore already taken?

Also, it was disappointing that she didn’t identify herself as a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That would have meant a battalion of Kansas farm boys with heavy artillery was waiting outside for a signal, a raid would ensue, and he’d be plucked out of this nightmare.

And finally—
stupid asshole?
Really? Was this Catholic grade school all over again?

“Well, you found me,” Hardie said. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah.”

“How did you get here?”

Eve smiled, then slammed a fist into Hardie’s right ear. A tiny explosion went off in his skull. The moment he lowered his head to recoil, Eve’s other hand was grabbing his shirt collar, yanking him closer, throwing him off balance. Hardie pulled Eve’s head forward, pressing it against the bars, pinning it there. Both of them slid down the bars until they were on the floor.

“One night I went to bed in a chain motel in Grand Island, Nebraska, and I woke up in this place.”

It took Hardie a minute to realize that Eve was answering his question.

“Why were you in Nebraska?”

“Looking for you.”

“Why did you think I was in Nebraska?”

Hardie had never been to Nebraska—at least, not that he knew of. And he’d never heard of Grand Island before. How could there be an island in the middle of a landlocked state? Briefly he considered the possibility that the prisoner here, this “Eve,” was making shit up off the top of her head.

But if so…how did she know Deke’s name?

“I was following a lead,” she whispered. “There was a rumor you were there. Turned out to be a trap, and it was a pretty good one, too. Usually I can detect a grab site from a hundred miles away.”

“And you say Deke Clark hired you.”

“Yeah. Which is why I was pretty shocked to find you popping up out of the drain in the shower room. Kind of thought I’d botched the case, being kidnapped and thrown into a secret prison and all. But with you standing here—gee whiz, I can finally call Deke and collect my final check.”

Hardie blinked. “You’re in contact with him?”

Eve gave him a squinty-eyed
duh
look, then said,

“Hit me again.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“Somebody’s
watching.
If you don’t brutalize the prisoners, it looks suspicious. Especially with you being so new. So hit me. Later you can explain it away as punishing me for the shower-room incident.”

“No.”

“I can take it, believe me.”

“No.”

“Charlie, it’s vital you stay the warden if we’re going to get out of this, and if you want to stay warden, you need to fucking hit me now.”

Hardie removed his hands from her head, slid backward, then searched for his cane.

Eve sighed. “Then we’re done talking. Come back when you find your balls and your brains. But whatever you do—stay the warden. It’s our only chance.”

“What do you mean, stay the warden?”

“Keep your fucking job,” she hissed. “The guards are the bad guys.
We’re the real guards, trapped in these cells.
”

Victor turned the corner and appeared at Hardie’s side, as if he’d materialized out of thin air. “What did she just say?”

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.