by Mark Jeffrey
Then later in the night, long after Ione left, Elspeth heard Card cursing up a storm.
“Goddamn! The record’s got a scratch on it now! How did that happen?”
SEVEN: SECOND ITERATION
IT WAS 3:00 AM.
Some kind of ruckus had broken out, Elspeth was clear on that immediately upon waking. As she squinted through the smoke from the nightly in-cell campfires and the light from the blaring projected films, she saw immediately that the Latin Kings were loose from their cells, as well as some other random prisoners. There were the two Africans that nobody could understand. There were the four Chinese men and their five Chinese wives (how that worked, Elspeth had no idea).
Even the old woman in the wheelchair was somehow out and about.
All in all, it was about a hundred people. This was basically a prison riot.
But the guards weren’t doing anything about it. The Panopticon remained shut and curiously silent, apparently having no comment on the matter.
It wasn’t long before Elspeth saw where they were going.
“James! James! Wake up!” Card muttered something at her about not being around at night anymore when he called out so why should he?
Milton’s cell.
“Come on out, dead man!” the Latin Kings howled. Somehow they’d gotten his cell door open. “This time, we’re going to make sure you stay dead!”
Milton did as he was told, defeat already plain on his face. But he was also laughing. “You think you’re badasses? You haven’t been killed even once yet — let alone killed by fire monsters. That’s a terrible way to go. But you guys? You guys are a walk in the park. You guys are cake and ice cream. C’mon! Do your worst!”
The Kings grabbed him. He raised his arms, exposed his vital organs, virtually saying, Please! I’m not kidding! Kill me painlessly before those things do!
And the Kings did. They stabbed him with shivs of all different kinds. Then, they tossed his body back into his cell and slammed the door shut.
The prisoners howled their approval.
Jesus, Elspeth thought. That was cold.
THAT MORNING, the mist was back.
And so was the earthquake. The entire prison rattled top to bottom, just as it had a little over a week ago. Card cursed like a sailor — but deep fear soaked every one of his little naughty words. He hated earthquakes.
But when he played his record after breakfast, he was surprised to find that the scratch was gone. Card replayed the same spot in the music several times to be sure.
“Well, if that ain’t the damnedest thing,” Card muttered.
“I WANT TO know what those goddamn things were,” Elspeth demanded of the Vizier. “Those fire monsters or whatever. The things that killed Milton before.”
This time, a guard had approached Elspeth and asked if she wanted a second visit. That turbanned sonofabitch, she breathed. Clearly, he was able to make the guards his bidding. He could even send them around as his errand boys, apparently. And the Vizier must have sensed that Elspeth wanted to talk. Damn him anyway.
She wondered if he was Al-Qaeda, and whether he was secretly the warden of the entire Prison. It would explain a lot.
The Vizier shrugged. “Everyone has their appointed time,” he said.
“What does that mean?’
“You are a physician. You know that no man can escape death.”
“Well, it sure seemed like he was trying to escape, getting himself locked him up like that. And what did he mean when he said, ‘you can’t throw me over the edge this time’? What was with the this time?”
The Vizier stifled a laugh. “A while ago, the guards decided that it would be amusing to drop Milton from the top of the Panopticon.” Elspeth stared at him in horror. In answer to her stare, he said. “Oh yes. They climbed the tower and tossed him off, sure as that.”
“Why did they do that?” The Vizier shrugged. “And that time — he lived then, also?”
“Evidently.” Elspeth pictured the fall in her mind. It would be like falling from a skyscraper. Nobody could survive that! “Don’t look so surprised. You’ve seen how things can come back in this Prison. Or have you forgotten your finger?” She looked down at it involuntarily and wiggled it. Impossible finger on her impossible hand in an impossible Prison …
Things can come back …
“So was he actually completely dead when the fire monsters came? Maybe he was just wounded.”
The Vizier nodded slowly. “Oh no. He was dead. My sources say they removed his body right after. Well. Shoveled and mopped him out, more accurately. Poor Milton was no more than a pile of pulp and mash.”
“Wow. Yeah, it seemed like even the guards were afraid of that fire thing,” Elspeth mused. “I don’t think they controlled it.”
The Vizier smiled. “You might be right.”
“Maybe we could make an alliance with it,” Elspeth said. “Maybe we could —”
But the Vizier shook his head. “One cannot make an alliance with the wind. Or the sea.”
“You know what this thing is, don’t you?” The Vizier remained silent, his dark, old, ancient eyes fixed on her with a stone gaze. “And you’re not going to tell me. For absolutely no reason at all. Just because you enjoy being annoying and mysterious.”
“No. It is because it is not in my interest to tell you,” he said finally. “That would work cross to my purpose.”
“And what is your purpose?”
“To get back on The Road.”
“Ah. So we’re back to that again. The Road.”
Silence.
“Okay. What is it you want from me?”
At that, he fixed her with new purpose in his gaze: “I want you to be serious. Here. This will help you.” The Vizier reached into a box nearby him on the floor. He brought out a golden brooch pin.
It was made of gold — and shaped into a hieroglyph of a honeybee, framed in a hexagon. It looked just like the one on her cell wall. Black stripes were carefully hand painted on the abdomen of the insect, and the hexagon was likewise lined in black.
“Wear it,” the Vizier commanded. “Don’t take it off.”
On the way back to her cell she fingered the brooch pin. Should she? Or shouldn’t she?
Oh hell!
She put it on.
Damn that leper. Why did he doubt that she wanted to escape? Or was he manipulating her somehow?
THAT NIGHT, when she slipped into the passageway behind her wall, she decided she would tell David about the Vizier.
But when she did, David reacted almost violently. “Why did you even go see him? Did you tell him about us?” David asked, apoplectic.
“What? No! Of course not!” Elspeth reacted like she’d been slapped. “And I’m a doctor, David. Even in here. And I don’t discriminate when it comes to helping my patients.”
David shook with barely contained rage. “You can’t tell him about us, you know. Not ever. He can’t know.”
“I know, I know. I made a promise to you. And you should know that I kept it. It’s just that … well, he wants to escape also. Shouldn’t that make him a friend?”
David become very intense, whirling her towards him by her elbows … which made him appear small and powerless, even to himself — which only fed his anger. “Look. Dr. Lune. Elspeth. We took a chance on you. We extended our trust. You cannot betray that trust. This man who calls himself a ‘Vizier’ is up to his own games.”
She couldn’t disagree with that.
“What else did he say?” David asked.
“He said I wasn’t serious enough about getting out of here.”
David snorted a laugh. “There. You see? He’s mad.” She couldn’t disagree with that. “Here. There’s something else I want to show you.” With that, David led her by torchlight through several of the rough-hewn tunnels. After fifteen minutes, they come to a new tunnel that Elspeth had not seen before. Unlike all the other tunnels, this one was immaculately cut and carved.
“W
hoa … what is this?” Elspeth asked. She ran her hands along the walls: they were wide at the bottom and narrower at the top, some twenty feet high. At several places, squarish, stylized carvings of snakes were laid into the wall.
“Mayan,” David said. “Those are Mayan hieroglyphs. Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god.”
Then she realized that this tunnel was curved. In fact, it seemed to run around the circumference of the very Prison itself. She snapped her head in both directions, trying to gauge the geometry. “Yes, it does,” David said, confirming her appraisal with a smile, raising his torch higher to illuminate the distance. “Goes all the way around. It seems to be part of the original construction.”
“Original construction …?”
“What, you didn’t think those morons in the Panopticon carved this place out, did you? No. Whoever imprisoned us is using a construction that was here long before they were. They just built on top of an older place they found. I mean, the Panopticon itself, that’s a modern addition. As are the bars and the locks. But the original Prison was already here.”
“So the Mayans built it?”
“Looks that way,” David nodded. “Oh, and we’ve had a look at the outside of this tunnel. It’s carved up as well. It’s made to look like a snake eating its own tail.”
Elspeth ignored this last detail. “We’re in South America?”
“Probably, yeah. Or Mexico or something.” That was a shock to her. David said it so casually. Up until that moment, she had had no idea where on earth she was. Now, should could imagine a map, a place, a geography where she was located. Something about even that little sliver of information comforted her.
“So a Mayan prison.”
David crinkled his nose a bit. “Well … I don’t think this was originally a prison.”
“No? Then what?”
“I think it used to be a city.”
A city? Elspeth had a hard time even imagining that. Her mind reeled at the thought. “You mean people lived here … voluntarily?”
“Yes,” David said. “I think all of our cells were originally apartments. I think whole families lived there. This whole place is an underground Mayan ruin.”
Elspeth whistled in amazement. But she had to admit it made a kind of sense — the Prison was clearly not a modern facility. It was not built from steel and glass, in the modern day and age. It was stone. Steel and other frameworks had simply been constructed atop what was already here.
“But who would want to live underground? That’s just depressing.”
David shrugged and lowered his torch. “Depressing to us, maybe. But the Mayans might have found it comforting, to be out of the view of the sky. The Mayans were scared of the heavens. They thought the world was on the edge of extinction, that the gods that lived in the black hole at the center of the galaxy were going to wipe them out. That is, unless the gods were appeased with massive numbers of human sacrifices. You’ve heard the stories, I’m sure, of how the Spanish came and found the Mayans and their blood-soaked pyramids. You know, where priests would tear the living, beating hearts out their human victims.”
“That’s cheery.”
“Yeah. Well. Anyway, they may have built this place to escape the end of the world.”
“Sort like a Noah’s Ark.”
“Yeah. Something like that. Anyway, look at the walls.” David held the torch up. “Definitely Mayan stonework and writing.”
“What’s this?” Elspeth pointed to a large round wheel carved into the stone.
“Ah. A Mayan calendar.”
“Calendar? Don’t you mean a clock?” It was round.
“No I mean a calendar. The Mayans thought time was cyclical. See, you and I think of time as always going forward — the past becomes the present, which becomes the future. We’re always headed towards something new. But the Mayans thought everything always came back to where it started — especially time. It was a big circle. That’s why their calendar is a circle. The Mayans were crazy about time — measuring it in the most precise ways possible. Did you know Mayan calendars have been found that are actually more accurate than anything that we even have today?”
Elspeth shook her head. “Well, that’s all very interesting. But what’s more interesting is whether this Mayan tunnel has an exit sign anywhere?”
David shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. We’ve been all the way around the circumference several times — there isn’t any door out. And yes, we’ve checked for secret doors, everything. This tunnel was just meant as a way to get around in the Mayan city. We’re still stuck with the fact that the only way out is the North Pole.”
He didn’t need to remind her that the only way to the North Pole was through the Panopticon.
“I take it the guards are oblivious to this Mayan tunnel?”
David nodded. “Seems so. They never come down here. Maybe they figure this place is so far underground that it’s solid rock in every direction. Or maybe they know about it and figure it doesn’t matter — we can’t get out anyway. They’re content to let us amuse ourselves. But that’s not why I brought you here.”
No? That caught her off guard. David’s revelation that the Prison had once been an underground Mayan city had been pretty impressive for one night. Abruptly, they came to a juncture where a rough-hewn tunnel had been burrowed through the rock, undoubtedly by prisoners. They left the Mayan tunnel and after several turns, entered a small room.
David shone his torch on a table against the back wall. “Here. This is what I came to show you.” The firelight licked the cold rock wall, illuminating a body.
But it wasn’t a body, Elspeth saw as she got closer to it. Rather, it was a black armored suit, just like the ones the guards wore. “Where did you get this? Did you —?”
“No,” David said with a small laugh. “Not that I wouldn’t. But no, we didn’t kill anyone. One of the guards had an injury that needed immediate attention, it couldn’t wait for him to get back to the Panopticon. So they took him to the prisoner infirmary. They took his suit off to treat him — and in all the confusion, we were able to steal it.
“Look. Ah. You’ve probably noticed that guy who wore this thing was rather tall — taller than any of us. So. If you were to … you know …”
“Wear the suit,” she finished warily. “You want me to put this on and go inside the Panopticon.”
“Only for a short time,” David said. “In and out.”
“David, how would I even do that? They’d know is was —”
“Nobody’s ever been inside the Panopticon! Well, not where the guards go, not deep inside, anyway!” David said. “Look. We’ve had the idea for a long time now, but we’ve never had someone tall enough to pull it off. You’re the first. You’d have to —”
Intuition snapped across her synapses. “So this is why you were all so quick to accept me into your little Black Dove Order. And that’s why you gave me that dinner the other night. Goddamn you, David!”
His face fell. “Look. You have every right to be angry with me. I know you do. You’re right. But —”
“No!” Elspeth exploded. “You didn’t ‘bet’ on me! You’re using me — for — for my height! You didn’t choose me because I passed some test or seemed trustworthy! In fact, it had nothing at all to do with who I am as a person. It’s not even because I was a doctor. At least that would have been better because then you would have respected something I’d done, something I’d accomplished. No. It was none of that. It was because I’m tall. Am I right?”
David nodded. “Yes. Are you happy? Yes it was. Because we’re practical. All of us. We want to get out of here. And the only way out is through the Panopticon. And the only way into the Panopticon is with this suit, with someone tall enough to wear it. That’s you. You’re it. You’re not our number one draft pick, you’re our only draft pick. There’s never been a prisoner tall enough. And there might not be again for years — or ever. So it’s you. Now. Or nobody ever.
“We
’re serious about escaping. We’re hardcore. So I’m going to ask you the same question your friend the Vizier asked you: are YOU serious? Because this is what it will take. And you’re the only one who can do it.” He fell silent, seemingly out of words.
She stood there, stunned. So that was it. She was a surgical tool, nothing more. Readjusting her understanding of their relationship, she understood that. She was the right surgical tool, no, more than that, the only surgical tool possible. David wasn’t her friend; he was an ally. That was it. She had been mistaken in feeling like he was a friend, but that had been her mistake.
This was a prison, not a summer camp. You did what you had to do to survive. So he had made a practical decision.
Are you serious?
She was. Slowly, she nodded. “Okay. I’ll do it.”
Goddamn you, David. If we ever get out of here, I’m going to rip your eyeballs out and play marbles with them.
EIGHT: INTO THE PANOPTICON
THE PLAN was simple.
After morning count, she’d return to her cell, put on the suit, and follow the other guards back into the Panopticon. The Order of the Black Dove called it Operation Flying Monkey, as this had been how the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion had gotten into the Wicked Witch’s castle.
“You people have goofy names for everything,” Elspeth said to David with an eye-roll.
But it had worked. She had the suit on in under five minutes. She stepped out of her cell door — and James Card stood bolt upright at attention as she walked past, startled by the sudden presence of a guard on their floor he had not noticed before.
Satisfied that even Card himself did not recognize her, she grinned beneath her helmet. Then, she stepped into line with the other guards and crossed the bridge. The Panopticon opened to her, and she stepped inside, eager to discover its secrets …
