“You’re out of food?” Hardie asked.
“No,” Yankee said. “We have plenty of food. But it’s the same food—breakfast all the freakin’ time. Muffins, white bread, orange juice, grits, oatmeal, and the most awful slab of gray meat you’ve ever tasted. We’ve had it. We need something else.”
Already Hardie’s mind was racing. Food. Prisons needed food, and the food had be delivered from somewhere. Garbage hauled away, too, right? There was no such thing as an escape-proof prison, because to sustain life inside a prison you need support from the outside. This was good.
“Okay,” Hardie said, trying to give the impression that he was actually giving a shit. “No breakfast. Got it.”
Victor smirked. “That was your predecessor’s big idea, too. He thought breakfast was comfort food.”
“Okay, heat and different food. Can I do anything else for you?”
An extremely awkward moment followed. All three guards stared at Hardie, as if trying to figure him out. And Hardie did the same. Were they putting him on with this bullshit about heat and breakfast?
Hardie decided, fuck it, and pushed past them. Cane, leg. Cane, leg.
Of course, he didn’t make it far.
Once Hardie crossed the next room—which also had a bed and sink—the door was locked.
“Wait,” Victor said, just catching up behind him. “Where are you going?”
“If I’m the warden, I should tour this place, shouldn’t I?”
“Of course. But you gotta put these on, mate.”
Victor pressed something into Hardie’s hand—the stupid goggles.
“No, thanks,” Hardie said.
“You don’t understand. It’s a rule. Besides, you don’t want them gazing into your eyes. Windows to the soul, and all that.”
Hardie could only imagine what he must look like in his suit, with his walking stick and the dorky spaceman goggles in his hand. Something out of a 1980s new-wave music video, most likely. Maybe Mann’s bosses didn’t want to work him to death. Maybe they just wanted to embarrass the living shit out of him.
Victor fitted his own goggles on his face, double-checked his belt and plastic restraint cuffs, then pulled a set of keys out of his pocket, which were attached by a short length of chain to a metal stud on his black leather belt.
“Besides, you’re not going to get very far without keys.”
“Don’t I get a set?”
“I’m sure they’ll send your set down soon. Anyway, they’re electronically coded. You slip a key in the door, the mechanism unlocks, and you’re good to go. There are door keys, cell keys, all kinds of keys.”
Victor hesitated.
“You sure you’re ready for this?”
“Just open the door.”
“All due respect, Warden, we’ve got the smartest monsters you’ll ever encounter. Our survival in this facility depends on following the rules. You show any of them weakness, they’ll exploit it. They will try to befriend you, crawl inside your mind with just a glance. But you cannot listen to them, any more than you’d listen to a rabid animal. Do you understand?”
“Sure.”
Victor laughed, shook his head. “I can tell you don’t believe me. That’s okay. When I first arrived, I didn’t believe the warden, either. But here’s something I’ve come to realize. As bad as the outside world might be, with nutty bastards blowing up day-care centers and terrorist technicians constantly trying to find the best way to hide liquid explosives up someone’s ass so they can fart and take out a jetliner…as bad as that is, it could be worse. Far worse. There could be more serial killers, more bin Ladens, more monsters roaming the planet…if not for facilities like these. We’re the first and last line of defense.”
Hardie said:
“Just open the door.”
13
Knowledge of the outside world is what we tell you.
—Patrick McGoohan, Escape from Alcatraz
AS HARDIE HOBBLED forward into the small, cramped room housing the control panel and looked through a dingy partition of thick, shatterproof plastic onto the rest of the facility, he finally got a sense of the place.
He’d seen prisons before. But none like this.
The entire site was one low-ceilinged room, about the size of a cafeteria in a shitty inner-city high school. This control room, like his own quarters, was one of a series of small rooms on the outer perimeter—like luxury boxes in a sporting arena, only minus the luxury. Cement floors with chipping paint, cement walls with chipping paint, steel supports with chipping paint.
And the prisoners? They were crammed into poorly lit rusty cages. They sat on metal floors and had metal masks strapped to their heads.
Two of them, in three cages.
“The hell…?” Hardie muttered, thinking: This is it?
“Told you,” Victor said.
None of it made sense. This was supposed to be the most secure prison facility in the world?
There had to be more to it than this. Something Hardie wasn’t seeing. Maybe force fields, or invisible electronic barriers, or some other high-tech sci-fi bullshit. Mann’s employers, whoever they were, seemed to have an unlimited budget. So what was with this cheap-ass prison?
“We mostly watch them from inside this control room,” Victor said. “There’s one on the opposite side, too, facing the other row of cells. Six cells, four prisoners on the floor. Of course, we do go in there to feed them and do roll call and drag them to the shower room when the smell gets too strong. But yeah, the idea is to minimize contact. These are clever fuckers. They’d crawl inside your skull and hot-wire your brain if they could.”
“Huh.”
“Like everyplace else, we’re tragically understaffed. We work in four shifts, six hours each, but you often end up watching someone else’s back.”
Hardie said, “Where exactly are we?”
“What do you mean? We’re in site number seven seven three four.”
“No, I mean geographically. The place we’re standing. Where is it?”
Victor squinted as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Where is it? Are you kidding? We don’t know. None of us knows. That’s the whole point of an escape-proof facility. Didn’t they explain any of this to you?”
“How did you get here?”
“Like everybody else. Like you did.”
Nobody, Hardie thought, got here like I did.
Yankee and Whiskey wordlessly slipped past both of them and unlocked a door that led out to the cages.
“Anyway, this is good timing,” Victor said. “You’ll get to see how we do roll call.”
“All right, lights…”
Victor reached for an ancient control panel and stabbed a dirty plastic button. An insanely bright light filled the three cells facing them.
“Cameras…”
Yankee and Whiskey unclipped little plastic devices the size of TV remotes from their belts.
“And action.”
Inside the first cage was a pale-skinned, lanky, yet muscular man whose head was hanging low. He was stark naked except for the metal mask that was strapped to his head like a welder’s helmet. There were breathing holes, but otherwise the mask was featureless. The prisoner sat with his back against the wall, feet flat on the floor, knees a good three feet apart so that you could see his limp cock and slightly larger-than-average balls just hanging there, gently resting on the cold concrete floor.
“Meet Prisoner Four,” Victor said.
After an awkward silence, Hardie asked, “Can’t you get him something to wear?”
“Wanker refuses to wear anything,” Victor explained. “He’s renounced all material possessions, or some such shit. We give him clothes, he rips them up into strips.”