Hell and Gone

by Duane Swierczynski

  “Yeah, I could.”

  “Why don’t you tell Charlie the truth?”

  “Don’t want to give the wanker the satisfaction.”

  “Come on.”

  Cameron, the man known as Prisoner Three, sighed.

  “Victor’s real name is Ash. What he never tells anybody is that it’s actually Ashley. I know, right? He hates to be called that. Probably why he’s taken to his fake guard name. Anyway, we used to be partners. Two halves of a team back in Sydney. We solved problems for a living. He was the front man, the charmer, the talker, the snake; I was the guy in the background, on the fringes. Ashley would draw them out, I’d move in for the kill. We took the cases nobody else would take. We were a good team. Until we were sent here.”

  “Tell Charlie how you were brought here.”

  “Chasing a bunch of sex traffickers and we walked into a trap. Still don’t know how I didn’t see the signs.”

  “I didn’t, either.”

  “Yeah, well, none of us did, and the moment we woke up down here everything changed. Ash lost his mind, accusing me of shit. At first I thought he was just stir-crazy, then I realized something. All this time, our entire partnership, the whole joking-around thing? The charm? It was a mask. Took coming down here for me to finally see his true face. YOU HEAR ME, YOU FUCK? I KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID UP THERE.”

  Hardie said nothing.

  Still, Eve pressed on with her case.

  Namely, that the cards were stacked against Hardie from the beginning. That this prison was topsy-turvy, the good guys inside, and the bad guys out, and that was the special hell of it.

  He couldn’t have known.

  None of them did.

  Prisoner Four’s real name, Eve explained, was Archie. He was a former British military man who been betrayed by his superior. Disgusted, he’d left the U.K. and gone ping-ponging around the continental United States for the better part of a decade, helping people with their problems in return for a small fee. Nothing extravagant. Just enough to eat, buy a toothbrush, whatever. He wanted no earthly attachments.

  “Tell Charlie about X-Ray,” Eve urged.

  “You tell him,” Archie said.

  “You’re so modest.”

  “You know I’m not.”

  So Eve told the story.

  For years, Archie had been investigating a disturbing case—one in which people were found in hotel rooms all over the U.S. (and around the world, he learned later) with their organs missing or rearranged or barely functioning or replaced by handmade parts. The victims weren’t slaughtered. They were left alive…barely. As if some demented surgeon were experimenting with radical operations that tested the endurance of the flesh. This surgeon was also thought to be responsible for the death of Archie’s half brother, an American military man stationed in Berlin. Archie thought he was close to catching the surgeon when he ended up here, at site 7734.

  “The surgeon is the guard who calls himself X-Ray,” Archie told them. “I believe he’s keeping me alive to experiment on me. He has some of my brother’s organs in a jar. He’s just waiting until I’m healthy enough to undergo a transplant.”

  Hardie remained silent.

  Faint static.

  “Charlie, come on. Let me know you’re there. Look, I’ve got something cool to share. You should be happy for me.”

  Static.

  “Now that I’ve found you I’ve got a ninety-nine-percent success rate as a professional finder.”

  Static.

  “Yeah, there’s always one that got away, you know how it goes.”

  Static.

  “What’s that? You want to hear about that one time? Good. Anyway, this was my earliest case, when I was just starting out in the business. I was hired by a woman named Julie Lippman to find her college boyfriend. I know, sounds lame, right? This was a real case, though, and it’s dogged me my whole career. Now this Lippman girl’s a rich snot, and one night at a campus Christmas party she makes this joke about her boyfriend—this not-so-rich guy named Bobby—having to work for, like, an entire year before being able to afford an engagement ring. She knew she was being a snot, but meant it to be funny. She said her boy Bobby got this weird look on his face, then left not long after. She kept drinking. Didn’t think much of it. Bobby was kind of a brooder that way. Besides, they were supposed to be spending the Christmas break together. She wasn’t going home to her family. They were going to hang around campus and drink and fuck and give each other presents and basically avoid real life. She goes home, Bobby’s in bed, already asleep. Well, the next morning she gets up and…no Bobby. She has this dim memory of him kissing her on the forehead or something, but boom, splitsville. That’s when it dawns on Julie that wow, maybe he really is pissed. After a day of waiting, she knows it’s true. He’s super pissed. Which makes Julie super pissed. Since she assumes he went home to his parents’ house, she goes home to her family and does all kinds of stupid shit. Halfway through the holiday, though, she really starts feeling bad and missing him and vows to make it all right again when they’re back on campus. She gets in early and waits in his dorm room for him. Sunday, all day, waiting. Then comes the news. Twenty-four students, dead. She gets hold of a list of victims, and sure enough, her boy Bobby’s on the list. She’s like, Whaaaaaaat the fuck? Bobby didn’t have money to fly, Bobby was afraid to fly, where the hell would Bobby fly to, anyway, spur of the freakin’ moment? It made no sense to her. She refused to accept it. The more she looked into it, the more walls she hit. Finally she hired me—her parents are loaded. Well, the more I looked into it…the stranger the whole thing was. That was my first introduction to the world beneath the real world. A world I think you’re very familiar with, Charlie.”

  Static. A few pops and crackles on the line.

  “Charlie, you there?”

  Static.

  “Come on, tell me your story.”

  Static.

  “Très uncool, Charlie. Leave a girl hanging like that.”

  Static.

  Nothing.

  Barely a minute later Horsehead started going off in Italian. He must have heard the others’ stories and decided to jump in on the act. Which wasn’t all bad, because you could follow the emotion in his words. The sadness. The fury. The disgust. The loathing. The self-​incrimination. Again, fury. All-consuming fury. A reckoning. A final, lingering sadness.

  After that, no one spoke for a long, long time.

  Still, a few shifts later, Eve tried again.

  “Hey, Charlie.”

  Nothing.

  “Come on, Charlie. Say something. Even a little ‘fuck you.’ Our little communication system won’t last forever. They probably turn it on and off to screw with us, but so what? Doesn’t mean you can’t say hi or something. Let me know you’re still breathing.”

  After a long pause.

  (A long,

  long

  pause…)

  “Fuck you.”

  Eve exclaimed, “Hallelujah! There we go! At last. He’s alive, ladies and gentlemen. So go on. Tell us your story.”

  Tell us your story.

  Right.

  Eve persisted.

  “Hey, you know our deal. Tell us yours.”

  Hardie hesitated, then figured, What harm would it do, even if the guards were listening? It would be nice to know if he could still form words.

  “I was a house sitter. I tried to protect some people, but I screwed it up. They sent me here.”

  “They?”

  “The Accident People.”

  “Is that what you call them? The Accident People?”

  “What do you call them?”

  “They’re just one group in a field of many. There’s a Secret America, Hardie. Beneath the one you know. Beneath everything. Run by the people who really call the shots. They’re the ones who make things happen. The ones who never sleep. I’ve spent the past few years studying how they conceive and execute their goals. They run secret hospitals. Secre
t prisons. Secret airports. Secret factories. Anything you can think of in the aboveground world, there’s an equivalent in the shadow world. This is the real America, the shadow structure under the structure we think is real. And here’s the really weird thing, Charlie—the thing that’s going to drive you right out of your mind. The more I dug, the more I learned, the more I started piecing things together, the more the truth became clear: this isn’t a nefarious global plot. They espouse no particular ideology. They have no viewpoints or goals. They’re so massive, so vast, they’re like this big benign thug. They merely work for whoever signs the biggest check. Like Frank Zappa said—they’re only in it for the money.”

  Static.

  “Are you listening to me, Charlie?”

  Yeah, Charlie Hardie was listening.

  And thinking about the images they showed him inside the mask.

  Hearing the prisoners’ stories made Hardie realize:

  This “Secret America” would never, ever leave his family alone.

  Unless he forced them to stop.

  22

  You’re stripped down to the bare essentials of what you are, and who you are as a man.

  —Eddie Bunker

  HARDIE STARTED WITH something small: push-ups.

  One-armed, one-half push-ups, to be exact.

  His old man’s favorite exercise. The only exercise a man needed, he always said. And the old man’s favorite punishment was a half push-up. That’s when you started a traditional push-up, then stopped halfway through, with your arms nearly fully extended, back straight, knees locked, muscles working. And you stay that way for as long as you can take, or until the old man tells you to drop. Mouth off? Half push-up time. Forget to take out the trash? Half push-up time.

  Get your dumb ass thrown in a secret prison, causing you to have a complete mental breakdown and a resultant moment of clarity?

  Half push-up time.

  His body hated it at first. Absolutely hated it, because it had been softened by years of watching rich people’s homes and eating whatever and drinking whatever and reclining on whatever, confident that his years of strength training would still be there when he needed them. His body, of course, was full of shit. His body was weak and lazy and broken. But his head was in charge, and it ordered the body to do the half push-up. And there was nothing the body could do about it, because the head was safely ensconced in its cozy metal mask.

  You can’t make me do this.

  Watch me.

  You can’t.

  You will.

  I won’t.

  You have no choice.

  And the body, in fact, had no choice.

  (Hardie was aware that bifurcating himself like this would probably lead to mental problems down the road, but that didn’t matter, because this was the road now, and hey, you have to deal with the road as it comes.)

  The guards didn’t like the half push-ups, either. They would yell at him and tell him this wasn’t exercise time and give him an electric jolt through the metal floor of his cell. Which was fine, because at first, Hardie couldn’t do a half push-up for more than thirty, forty seconds. But he kept at it, got right back up after being thrown off by a shock. He knew there were limits. They couldn’t just keep shocking the snot out of him. So they had to try something else. They had to open the cell to get to him.

  Which they did, kicking him and punching him and spraying him with their wristbands full of mace and telling him to knock it off. Hardie ignored them, ignored the burning fury in his eyes, and went back to the half push-ups a few hours later anyway. After a while it became too much of a pain in the ass to open the cell. They ignored him, and only beat him every once in a while. By then, Hardie was up to three minutes. Then five.

  Soon Hardie was doing full push-ups and leg squats—which killed. He did them when no one was looking. When he was caught he was shocked and beaten. Which Hardie considered to be a workout on its own, toughening his skin, his muscles. He grew to welcome the intrusions, actually.

  Hardie knew that he was doing a slow-motion version of all of those insane get-back-in-shape, get-armed, build-weapons, plant-traps, don-the-body-armor, smear-war-paint-on-your-face montages from countless movies, the most egregious of which were, of course, from the Rocky movies, in which you could go from flabby palooka to mean lean hurting machine in as long as it took for the 1980s pop song to play itself out. What ordinarily took years could play out in a matter of verse-chorus, verse-chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus. Hardie started to imagine Rocky Balboa in the cell with him. Not to goad him on, but to be there when the monotony set in so that Hardie could turn around and call Rocky Balboa a pussy. You’re a pussy, Rock.

  Hey, whaddya mean?

  A pussy, Rock.

  Hey, I wouldn’t be talking like that if I were—

  A PUSSY, BALBOA, A BIG FAT PUSSY.

  Don’t get Hardie wrong; jail still sucked.

  But with the same self-awareness, he understood that he’d merely adapted to his surroundings. This was nothing special. This what people did; he’d seen Shawshank Redemption.

  And, like Tim Robbins, he had a plan.

  The next shower.

  Hardie knew one had to be coming at some point.

  The waiting was the worst part. No watch to check, no calendar pages to rip off the wall. Just the vague notion that at some point the guards would have to release him from his cell and place him in the shower room for a few minutes.

  But when?

  Or had they decided to revoke his shower privileges forever?

  Finally, at long last, during a long dull fuzzy moment when Hardie’s brain truly tuned out of reality, Victor appeared at Hardie’s cell door, with Whiskey in the backup position.

  Hardie had to pull it together. Reload the plan. He’d had a plan at some point. It had been a good one, too. Both guards had their batons ready, in case Hardie decided to try anything funny. Which he totally was going to! Only he couldn’t remember exactly what the hell it was…

  Snap out of it. Wake up. Come on, WAKE THE FUCK UP.

  “Back against the bars.”

  Hardie complied. Victor slid the key in hard, forcing Hardie’s head to bob forward. Something beeped. The binds loosened. Hardie reached up and slipped off his mask as Victor slipped another electronic key into the cell door.

  “Up.”

  Hardie crawled to his feet and they nudged him forward, around the block of cells and to the right, toward the shower room.

  “Take your smock off,” Victor said once they’d reached the door, which had a thick opaque glass panel.

  “Could you turn around? I’m shy.”

  Whiskey poked him in the ribs with her baton.

  “Lèves-toi!”

  As Hardie stripped and dropped the smock to the ground, he said, “Okay, okay. Want to join me, Whiskey? Wash my back, maybe? Squeeze my testicles again?”

  Whiskey’s reply was to shove him inside the shower room with both hands, causing Hardie to clumsily tumble forward and slide across the tile floor.

  “Guess that’s a no.”

  And the door slammed shut and locked behind him.

  Hardie climbed to his feet and waited for the water, as there were no handles on the tile wall. Just three rusted-out nozzles. And then without warning the cold water blasted him, almost knocking him down on his ass again. Once he recovered, Hardie started cleaning himself with his bare hands. No soap, but whatever. Even though the water was freezing, it felt good on his skin. More important, it cleared up his fuzzy mind. The plan came back to him. No time to psych himself up. He just had to be ready to do it NOW.

  When the water died, Hardie limped back over toward the door, dripping wet, and pressed his back up against the wall. Here we go. All or nothing, do-or-die time.

  The plan:

  Hardie would keep his back pressed up against the disgusting tile wall, out of sight. When they opened the door, one of them would have to go in, to see what was going on. Not both of them. For both
of them to go in would be stupid, and these guards were not stupid. The next move depended on speed. Hardie would grab whoever entered (probably Victor) and smash his head against the tile floor as hard as he could. It had to be done in one swift move, because one chance was all he’d have. If a fight broke out, the other guard (probably Whiskey) would jump into the shower room, and one carefully placed electric shock later the escape would be over. So the face-​pummeling had to be powerful and brutal.

  Next move: grabbing Victor’s electric baton.

  Then Hardie, if his legs would cooperate, would rush Whiskey and jam the business end of the baton into her chest and give her a jolt. Just enough to drop her to her knees, so that Hardie could snatch the keys from her belt and run over to Cameron’s cell. Once that was open, then they all officially had a prayer. Within seconds they could be up the hallway and opening Eve’s cell. Then it would be three against two, and the odds would only get better from there.

  Because when you got down to it—and this occurred to Hardie in his cell days and days ago—the prisoners outnumbered the guards right now, five to four.

  Okay, considering Hardie’s arm and leg, maybe it was more like four and a half to four. Still, those were odds Hardie would take.

  So he kept his bare back against the gross wall, waiting.

  The door had to open any minute now.

  Hardie played and replayed the move in his mind. Grabbing Victor’s head by the hair and just slamming it down, using his body weight to propel it along until bone smashed against tile…

  C’mon, door.

  What were they waiting for?

  Had to open. It just felt like forever because he was anticipating it, right?

  And then, finally, the door opened.

  Just not the door Hardie expected.