Hell and Gone

by Duane Swierczynski

  Hardie saw it happening. One by one, a message from the Prisonmaster, delivered individually to the guards’ earbuds. Heads turned quickly; hands went to ears. Yankee, then X-Ray, then finally Whiskey.

  “What is it?” Hardie asked.

  Yankee looked at him. “He said…good-bye?”

  Whiskey nodded. “Oui,” she said. “Au revoir.”

  * * *

  Next came the hissing from every air vent in the facility.

  To Hardie, it was precisely like that moment in a nightmare when you realize that everything is not going to be all right.

  That you are falling toward an unforgiving piece of concrete and you are not going to be rescued.

  Your body is going to hit the ground and your blood will explode out of your useless body.

  There is nothing you can do about it. There is no one to save you.

  Hardie and his fellow inmates—because surely they were all inmates now—scrambled out of the room. No thoughts of fighting now; it was time for flight.

  And the gas—visible as a fine, foglike mist—followed them.

  Hardie nearly tripped over his cane on the way out of the room. He grabbed it, figuring if things got really bad, maybe he could shock himself unconscious to avoid the choking and vomiting and dying.

  Stop it. Keep your head. There’s an escape out of this prison, right, Batman? You’ve just got to come up with it right now. In the next two seconds.

  Or you and everyone in this room will DIE.

  (No pressure.)

  The other inmates began to drop—that is, the ones who weren’t already knocked unconscious. Hardie felt something tug at the back of his jacket. Eve. Pulling him toward her.

  Hardie would have asked Eve what she was doing, but he didn’t dare open his mouth. Instead he stumbled behind her, leg-cane, leg-cane, trying to keep up, feeling like an asshole because she had to practically drag him along the row of cells. There was retching and coughing all around them. Hardie stumbled. Eve slipped her hands under his arms, pulled him back to his feet. He could hear her grunting. He screamed at his legs to work, already. Then they were moving again, across the cement floor. The gas was spreading. Hardie’s brain went woozy. Where was she leading him?

  When Hardie heard the squeaky creaking of the door, he finally got it. The showers.

  He felt the patter of hard water drops against his suit jacket, Eve’s hands over his back, his chest. Hardie did the same, brushing her back, her shoulders, her breasts, feeling strange for touching her, even in this situation.

  You couldn’t consider this adultery—not in a secret prison where you were desperately trying not to die…could you?

  Kendra, I can explain everything.

  Hardie’s head felt dizzy, as if someone were choking him and cutting off the supply of blood to his brain. He started to panic and stopped brushing Eve and started clutching at his chest, then pounding his breastbone, as if he could simply will his heart to continue to pump despite what the poison gas was telling it to do. He dropped to his knees, facing the drain, and some part of his brain that was still firing neurons—

  (Find the way out yet, Batman?)

  —thought it almost funny, staring into a drain as you are circling it…

  And then it happened.

  He thought of the way out.

  Fuck you, Batman, Boy Wonder, and the rest of Gotham City, because I finally figured it out.

  The drain.

  THE MOTHERFUCKING DRAIN!

  Hardie put his lips against her ear. “Help me.” But Eve didn’t understand until he guided her hands over to the drain.

  The drain, which led to the steel room containing Prisoner Zero.

  The grunting moron, who, Hardie now realized, was the mysterious Prisonmaster.

  They wormed through the passageway in silence. They didn’t dare breathe, not until they put enough distance between themselves and the poison. When they reached the steel anteroom where Hardie had been trapped (weeks? months ago?), Eve had to help up him to his feet. Hardie was proud, though. He’d managed to hang on to his cane.

  “So you’re thinking that Zero is the Prisonmaster,” Eve said.

  “There’s no poison gas back here,” Hardie said. “The Prisonmaster has to be someone who’s nearby at all times, who can gauge situations as they evolve. Who better than the guy right next door? Who conveniently doesn’t speak or move? Who has the guards take care of his every need?”

  “Can’t argue with your thinking. But…he’s missing limbs, for Christ’s sake. He does nothing but grunt.”

  “Ten bucks he’s got a phone under that mask and can speak just fine.”

  They both stared at the steel door.

  “Are you ready?” Hardie asked.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “We’re going to have to force this open somehow.”

  “Well, I didn’t think this would be easy.”

  Eve was stunned, then, to have the door slide open at first pull. Fluorescent lights now provided erratic bursts of illumination. Both Eve and Hardie could see the interior of the chamber in little half-second microbursts. They could see that Prisoner Zero was waiting for them.

  Even though he was blind, his head was twisted to the right, and he seemed to be staring right at them.

  * * *

  “How are ya, pal?” Hardie said.

  Zero, face still hidden by the mask, merely lay there on his rusty bed. Staring at them. Immobile.

  “Sure, keep playing the mute now.”

  Zero said nothing.

  “You know the way out of here,” Eve said.

  “Do you really think he’s going to tell us that?” Hardie asked.

  “We’re going to make him tell us.”

  “Guh-huh-huh-huh-huh.”

  “Okay, that’s it, take off his mask,” Hardie said to Eve, and then to the prone form of Prisoner Zero: “You try anything, I will light you up.”

  Eve reached around and unfastened the straps behind Prisoner Zero’s head. There was no lock. When the metal mask came loose it made a wet, peeling sound, then revealed a ghastly yet boyish face. Impossibly pale skin. Eyes sealed shut under a waxlike mass of scars.

  “Oh, God,” Eve said.

  Zero’s mouth opened slightly, revealed rotted teeth, lips curled into a parody of a smile.

  “Guh-huh-HUH. Guh-huh-HOOOO.”

  “Quit the act,” Hardie said, trying not to shudder. The man was an absolute mess. “I know you can speak. Pretending is not going to help you.”

  “Guh-huh-huhhhhhhh…”

  “Okay, asshole,” Hardie said, but actually only managed to speak the first syllable (maybe) before something hot and vicious jumped up through the soles of his feet and made impact in the general vicinity of his testicles.

  Hardie smelled burned hair and was already on the floor when he realized that someone was speaking to them. He rolled over and saw a beefy form hanging from the support beams overhead—a prisoner in a metal mask.

  Horsehead.

  25

  Please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on.

  —Instructions to participants in the July 1961 Milgram experiment

  HORSEHEAD TOLD THEM, in perfect English:

  “Prisoner Zero is not faking. He lost the ability to speak a few years ago. The words are all in his head, but they get lost on the way to his mouth. Not sure why. Could be the number of electric shocks he’s received. Or something else altogether.”

  Hardie realized that the metal floor was electrified in here, just like the floors of the cells. Wired for punishment. Nonlethal, of course. Nothing in this facility could actually kill you. Just make you wish you were dead.

  “Actually, I was the one who was faking this whole time.”

  Eve had been hit hard, too. Her body trembled as she pushed herself up to a sitting position. She squinted as she looked up at the man hanging from the
ceiling.

  “I don’t understand. Why would you pretend to be a prisoner if you were actually the one in charge?”

  “Boredom,” Horsehead said. “To control a facility, it’s important to see it from all sides, don’t you think? And I must admit, the beatings do help keep my thinking sharp.”

  “Why the fuck are you doing this to us?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Horsehead said. “What matters is what happens in the next sixty seconds. I’m giving you the chance to decide your own fate. One of you will be my guard, one of you will be my prisoner, and we’ll rewrite the rules of this facility from scratch once the others wake up from the knockout gas. Wonder who should play which role?”

  Knockout gas? Hardie thought. “You sadistic fucking assssss—” he said, but once again, his comment was cut off by a hideous

  WHITE

  HOT

  BURNING

  pain that shot through Hardie’s palms, spinning his body around until he landed on his chest, his nose inches from the metal floor, and all he could think was God help me if he presses that button again.

  Horsehead jumped down to the floor. He was now wearing rubber-​soled boots, Hardie noticed, so he could push that button all he wanted.

  “Eve, I think it’s better if you join me as a guard this time,” he said, then reached around to undo the straps of his mask easily, without the need for a key. Hardie realized there had been no mask malfunction. There had never been any malfunction. Horsehead, as the Prisonmaster, could choose when his mask worked and when it didn’t work. He could order doors open or shut at will, even as he was locked up in his cell. He could turn the communications system on or off. All he had to do was tell Prisoner Zero what to do, and Thy Will was done. That explained the wires, the isolation. The real controls to this place were somewhere in this room!

  Horsehead slid the mask off and rubbed his face. “It’ll be nice to not have to wear this thing for a while. It was fun at first, but…”

  “Bobby?”

  Hardie turned to look at Eve, who’d turned stark white.

  * * *

  Eve continued, her voice now an anguished wail:

  “Bobby Marchione?”

  Her mind tried to parse it; her mind couldn’t. Like when a person from one corner of your life collides with a completely separate corner of your life.

  How could Bobby Marchione be in this hole in the earth? How could he be in charge of it? She reached out. He instinctively flinched.

  “I’ve finally…” she said again, almost stammering. “I’ve found, I’ve finally found…”

  The shock smashed through Eve. All this time he’d been down here—one cell away from hers? All this time.

  Why hadn’t she sensed it, on some level?

  “…finally found you.”

  What the hell was she talking about? Hardie thought. And who the hell is Bobby? Then it came back to him. The story Eve had told him about her one professional failure. The missing person she couldn’t find. College student named Bobby.

  All the places in the world—he was here?

  Maybe that’s why they’d sent Eve here. Just another level of torment. Send her to a secret prison thinking she’d failed, only to have her quarry a matter of yards away. Somewhere, in some plush room, a bunch of cigar-smoking assholes were probably having a good laugh over it…

  “How do you know the name Bobby Marchione?” said Horsehead.

  “You disappeared from Leland University in California over twenty years ago. I was hired to find you.”

  “This is interesting. Who hired you?”

  “A woman named Julie Lippman.”

  “Ah, but I know you’re lying. I knew you were lying the moment you told your little story in the cell a few weeks ago. What I don’t know is why you would lie about something like that.”

  All the Zen-like control Eve seemed to possess disappeared. Her eyes were ablaze, the veins in her neck bulging.

  “I’m not lying. I’ve been looking for you for twenty years. You don’t know how hard I searched for you. How many years I spent racking my brain, following endless leads, dead ends, false trails…goddamn it, you owe me that much. Kill me if you want. I’ll help you do it. But you’d better fucking tell me where you’ve been all this time.”

  “I didn’t go anywhere. Bobby Marchione did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bobby Marchione just wanted to make some extra money over Christmas break.”

  Bobby’s roommate, Pags, handed him an ad that had been posted on a corkboard in the psych-department building.

  Psychological experiment, no drugs, no needles, just role-playing. For more info call…you know, one of those. Bobby Marchione wouldn’t normally have even looked twice at one of those things but he saw that it wasn’t some outside company. This was being run by Dr. Pritchard in the psychology department. Bobby had Pritchard freshman year, and she was an insanely dull lecturer, so he assumed this experiment would be more of the same. Boring, but not painful. And the money was too good to pass up. Twenty-five hundred dollars for a little less than two weeks. Marchione and his roommate, Chris Pagano (“Pags”), called and right away were sworn to secrecy. If they told a soul, they’d be bounced from the program. Bobby couldn’t even tell his parents—Pritchard was careful to sign up only adult subjects. Sounded a little weird to Bobby, but again it was the money that attracted him. The money was so, so good. And he figured if Pags was going to do it, then why not?

  The toughest part was not being able to tell Julie. Bobby knew she’d be pissed. But when he returned in the New Year with a gleaming engagement ring, he had a feeling she’d forgive him.

  That was the whole point. Joking at that party about the ring. Joking, but a hard little nugget of truth within the joke, like a piece of gravel in the middle of a snowball. Bobby loved Julie, wanted to buy her everything she could ever want, starting with an engagement ring. A real ring, and right now. To let her know that he was serious.

  Bobby joked with her a lot, all to make it seem like he was completely relaxed in her company. But it was a front. He was terrified she’d discover the truth.

  That he was poor, came from lousy genetic stock, and had to scrape up everything he had just to be able to afford college semester by semester.

  That sometimes picking up the check after their dates meant Bobby wouldn’t be eating much more than boiled ramen noodles over the next three days. (He’d opted out of the meal plan.)

  That really, Bobby was just spinning plates until they came crashing down…

  But a ring. Oh, a ring would be a bold move. A ring would tell her, yeah, I might be nothing now, but I’m resourceful, and better things are on the horizon.

  To get the ring, he had to take part in the experiment.

  (Pags? He came from money. He was in it for the CD-and-beer money.)

  So the night before Christmas break Bobby Marchione kissed his sweet sleeping girlfriend, Julie, on her forehead and dressed in the cold quiet dark. For a moment, he weakened and thought about writing her a note. Just a little something, so she wouldn’t worry.

  No.

  Couldn’t do that.

  Pags would kill him if word got out, and Pritchard would bump both of them from the program. So instead Bobby made his way across the empty frozen campus in the middle of the night back to the small dorm room he shared with Pags. The instructions were simple: just be in your rooms by 4:00 a.m. No preparation required, other than a small bag with a few changes of clothes. Do not leave any notes or indications of where you are going. All will be explained at the test site. Bobby sat at his desk, trying to fight the urge to fall asleep. Pags sat across the room, smoking a cigarette, flicking the ashes into an empty soda can, at perfect peace with the world. Bobby was not. Bobby was beginning to wonder if this was a giant mistake. He picked up a Bic pen, pulled out a piece of typing paper, looked over his shoulder. Pags didn’t seem to be paying much attention. Bobby wrote:

  Dear Jul
ie,

  This is going to be hard to explain, but

  At 4:19 a.m., they came for them.

  In the form of Pags. “Sorry, buddy,” he said, barely able to contain his chuckling, cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “What? What the…”

  Pags grabbed his roommate by the shirt, pulled him out of his chair, and forced his arms behind his back. Bobby felt cold steel on his wrists.

  “The hell are you doing?” he asked.

  “Shh,” Pags said. “It’ll all be fine. Just don’t…”

  Pags fell silent as he looked down at the desktop and saw the note Bobby was starting to compose. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” Pags said, then reached over, crumpled the paper up into a ball, and pitched it into the wastebasket in the middle of the room. Can’t have that. At that moment Bobby’s balls started to nestle up against the bottom of his lungs. What the hell had he gotten himself into?

  Soon enough he found out.

  The experiment: a prison scenario.

  The objective: to learn more about the psychology of imprisonment.

  The real objective: classified.

  What no one knew: Dr. Pritchard supplemented her meager teaching salary with consulting work for a secret quasi-governmental agency. This agency had access to an amazing array of resources, including a secret test facility, jokingly dubbed site 7734. A number that, when seen on a digital readout and turned upside down, spelled the word HELL.

  But Dr. Pritchard wasn’t an evil person; none of them were at first. Just ambitious. Excited to push the boundaries. Eager for funding.

  Student volunteers were immediately divided into two groups:

  Guards.

  And prisoners.

  Pags, a psychology major, was a guard, naturally. Not just a guard; he was chosen to play the role of the warden. He reported directly to the Prisonmaster—Dr. Pritchard—who observed from a separate room in the facility.

  Bobby was selected to be a prisoner.

  Day One: Bobby and the other prisoners were treated to a version of extraordinary rendition and were “arrested” quietly all over the campus. Having told their friends and family no details, a cover story was prepared—a volunteer mission to build homes for poor families. Many of the volunteers didn’t have much in the way of family, or they lived on their own. Bobby had a father who had remarried and didn’t really seem to care about his firstborn son all that much anymore. As he was led away to a van parked behind the dorm complex, Bobby knew that Julie would be the only person who’d miss him. He hoped she’d understand. He wished he could have left her that note. He hoped this would all be worth it…