The only sound was the steady hum of water tapping against some kind of surface; too steady to be a leak, but also too light to be a faucet. Still, it was something to go on. Hardie paused every few feet to make sure he was headed toward the sound, not away from it. The air stank like mold and wet stone. Whoever had built this place hadn’t ever come back to clean it. Ever.
Come on, Hardie told himself, and pressed forward until he emerged into a small, cold, empty room, with a rusty metal ladder leading…up.
After the confinement of the tunnel, the room felt as vast and limitless as a sports arena.
You did it.
Breathe.
Breathe.
Hardie craned his neck around. There wasn’t much in the way of light up there, and the smell of mold and mildew made him want to puke. It wasn’t just a smell, actually. It seemed to float in the air like a living organism, a free-floating apparition made of grime.
But at least he could go up.
Hardie climbed the ladder with his good arm and one good leg, which required a series of half pull-ups that completely drained him. Halfway up the ladder Hardie began to realize the folly of his decision. There was another grate above his head and not much light; fat, greasy drops of water were dive-bombing him from the grate. In addition to the slime and phlegm and filth already covering his hands and clothes.
Either continue up, or admit defeat and go crawling back to that steel room with the grunting, spitting nutcase.
Wasn’t much of a choice, really. Hardie had been force-fed defeat for the past God knows how long, and he refused to take another teaspoon of it. Using his good arm (the right) and good leg (the left), Hardie continued up the ladder until he reached the grate. He wrapped his gimp arm around the ladder, then reached up with his right hand, slipping his fingers through the openings, grabbing hold, and pushing up.
The grate, to his delight and surprise, moved.
See, things were looking up already.
The grate was heavy as hell, though. He pushed it aside until his fingers reached the concrete edge of the opening, then he slipped them out and slid the grate fully out of the way before continuing his ascent. Once he climbed out of the passageway, Hardie had no choice but to roll on the damp floor until he could work himself up into a sitting position, and when he did he was more than a little stunned to see a naked woman not six feet away, showering in the gloom.
Prisoner Two rubbed the bar of soap across the top of her head. The mace had long since worked its way into her skin, and the soap and water didn’t help the burn one bit. The soap itself was a thick chunky white block that reeked of bad perfume. Better than nothing, though.
The shower was the other half of her victory.
She knew they wouldn’t let her stay in her cell with the chemicals soaking into her face. Too dangerous. You could actually die from something like that, and the prisoners were not permitted to die. So a shower almost always followed.
The ability to choose when you clean yourself was a big deal, especially when almost nothing else was under your control.
She only used the cloying soap on her hair during every other shower, which worked out to twice a month, if she was counting the days correctly. Holding back on the soap was a vain attempt to keep her hair from drying out too much after washing. Vanity; she still clung to a tiny shred of it. Though that was difficult when your shower room was a subterranean pit, the tile in which was caked with funk going back to the Middle Ages, and your three-minute shower was lorded over by a cunt in a Nazi uniform who loved to end your shower session with a small but perfectly horrible electric jolt from her magic Dong Juan Stun Wand.
Speaking of, she only had about a minute left, she guessed. Better finish up. Whiskey the guard loved to drag her out when she was still tacky.
But as she bent down to rinse the soap from her legs, she was stunned to see thick fingers reaching up out of the drain in the corner of the room.
Was this a hallucination? Was she still asleep in her cage and dreaming this?
If so, the vision persisted. The fingers pushed aside the grate and a rumpled, trembling man in a dirty suit came scrambling up out of the hole.
Prisoner Two’s first inclination was to scream. But then she remembered where she was and realized the absurdity of such an act. Whiskey would see him soon enough, and she’d come running over to probably shove her electrified dildo wand in his face. And probably hers, for good measure.
“Sorry,” he said, sitting on the edge of the hole. “Really…I didn’t know…”
What was the deal with the suit? Nobody wore a suit down here. Nobody except the warden.
God…this was the new warden, wasn’t it?
And when he looked up at her, and Prisoner Two had a chance to blink some of the chemical residue out of her eyes and focus on the details of his face, she realized something else. The hair was different, and the face definitely more wan and weary than the photo she’d been given.
But she knew this man.
The naked woman said,
“Charlie Hardie?”
Which blew Hardie’s mind so hard he thought his skull would shatter into tiny little bits and pieces. Never mind that nobody used real names down here; never mind that he’d never seen this woman before today—and, yes, Hardie would have remembered; never mind that the last thing he expected was to pop out into the shower room of this freaky secret prison.
But somehow, she knew his name.
How did she know his name?
“Who are you?” Hardie asked.
All at once a yell sounded from the other side of the shower. Though Hardie was no linguist, he would have guessed that the burst of words that followed was profanity, and that it was in French. He tore his eyes away from the mysterious naked lady who knew his name. Squinting in the gloom, he could see Whiskey running toward them.
The naked prisoner whispered: “You don’t know me, but I was sent to look for you.”
Before Hardie had a chance to respond, Whiskey had closed the distance and slammed Prisoner Two into the nearest available wall. The tremor of the blow seemed to spread throughout the tiles of the entire room. Water splattered; Two grunted; Whiskey cursed again, in French. A bar of soap ricocheted off the wall and spun to a stop in the middle of the floor. Whiskey spun her head around and started screaming:
“GO! GO NOW!”
“Let go of her,” Hardie said.
“GO NOW!”
“That’s enough!”
Prisoner Two stared at him, face pressed against the disgusting tile, and said, “Deke sent me.”
“SHUT UP!” the guard cried, then to Hardie: “GO NOW!”
The impasse was broken by a broad yell from the other end of the room. “Whoa ho ho!” Hardie turned to see Victor stepping in the doorway, back from wherever he had gone.
“What’s going on here? You’re not allowed in here. Especially during ladies’ shower time, mate. The fuck’s wrong with you?”
“Just help me up,” Hardie said.
The situation quickly defused. Whiskey dragged Prisoner Two back to her cell; Victor picked up Hardie by the arm and escorted him to the entrance of the shower cell. Hardie stole one last glance, though, and Prisoner Two caught it. She gave him a grim smile in return.
You don’t know me, but I was sent to look for you.
Deke sent me.
Deke Clark?
Hardie wanted to scream for joy. Goddamn it, he’d followed the bread crumbs after all. God bless that ugly stubborn bastard. God bless the FBI. God bless goddamn America.
15