“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 waiclass="underline"
“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: