Prison of Souls (Science Fiction Thriller) Page 4

  Five officers in riot gear stepped in front of the door as the electronic lock buzzed and the door slid open in its track. The instant Gar stepped into the corridor, three of them cuffed him, seized him by the shoulders, and hauled him out of sight. The two remaining Tac officers kept their eyes fixed on me, batons ready.

  Slaven stepped into the cell and ordered me down. I obliged.

  He sat calmly on the desk and looked at me, rain shadows pooling on his brow and cheeks. “I see two possibilities. Either you’re working with them, or you don’t remember the experiments.”

  “I’m not working with anyone.” I backed into the cinderblock corner as thunder growled. I kept my fists low, ready.

  He pulled a knife from his pocket and plunged it into my gut.

  I had an instant of blank surprise. Then the puncture started throbbing—gently at first, then with increasing pressure—until every muscle in my core crushed me from inside. Blood blossomed on my shirt, dripping modern art onto the concrete.

  I landed on my back. Slaven towered overhead, blocking the fluorescent light, his face a shadow and his dim purple eyes chasing me down into the darkness.

  Chapter Twelve

  Helena Isaacson lay in a hospital bed wearing a blue medical gown, a sheet pooled at her waist, her pale hands bound to the safety rails with brightly colored wires, her eyes glowing purple. “Kill me again.”

  “What do you mean kill you again?” I backed into another bed and realized the room was full of sleeping boys and girls. They were bound to their beds with leather straps, motionless in the pulsing light. “I never killed you the first time.”

  Her bed rumbled toward me, leaving tracks on the dusty floor.

  She leaned over the safety rail, her blonde hair falling over her face, and snatched my wrist. “Communicating with you is difficult. The conditions have to be right. Don’t waste my time pretending you didn’t kill me when we both know you did.”

  When I pulled away, I slipped and spilled onto the floor.

  She climbed over the bed rail like a spider and clambered on top of me. “Do something honorable for once in your life, Joshua Briar. Turn them off!”

  “Turn what off?” I twisted away from her.

  “Turn the quantum servers off, every last one.”

  “What?”

  She pushed her face against mine. A cloud of purple smoke enveloped me.

  “You will eventually understand my request.” She slithered away from me, crouching in the dark. “And when you do, I’m counting on you.”

  The world shimmered out of focus.

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  My eyes snapped open. I lay on a hospital bed, shirtless and shivering, in a medical bay packed with stretchers, folding chairs, and operating tables. Beyond the tables, a vinyl curtain hung from the ceiling, separating the room from whatever lay beyond.

  The air smelled of decomposing paper and mildew. The floors were unfinished pine covered in dust, and the ceiling was barn-like, vaulted and bare. Spiderwebs glinted between the exposed rafters.

  Someone had strapped my arms to the bed rails. My ribs were throbbing where Slaven had stabbed me, but craning my neck, I saw the wound had been stitched cleanly.

  In the next bed, Gar lay unconscious. He wore an oxygen mask plugged into a monolithic breathing machine composed of the glowing cubes we'd seen earlier.

  The decaying walls, the cubes, the hospital beds: we were in the old death row building. Beyond the vinyl curtain I could expect to find the antechamber, and beyond the antechamber an exit leading onto the lot where Gar emptied the trash.

  A door creaked open in the dark. Slaven parted the curtain and stepped into the room. When he looked at me, his expression transitioned from glee to bewilderment. He strode to the bed and dropped a hand onto one nylon cuff. “You haven’t broken these. I wasn’t sure about you.”

  “May I speak to the doctor?”

  Slaven scowled. “Not happy with the care you’re receiving?”

  I did not respond.

  “I knew you were biological the instant I cut you, but I had no way of knowing what strength enhancers they jacked you with.”

  “What?” I followed his gaze to my wound. “You tried to kill me.”

  “Son, if I had wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.” He leaned in close, smelling of burnt rubber. “You’re playing through the options in your mind, wondering if I made a smart guess based on some TV exposé, wondering if I’m gaming you. Let me be clear. I know about your past because we share history.” He grabbed my jaw.

  I bucked on the mattress, my eyes welling.

  “I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m not taking chances.”

  This guy was seriously off his rocker. He released my chin, and I sucked air into my lungs. “I don’t pose any threat to you. You have all the power.”

  “I intend to keep it.” He walked into the shadowy borderland between the curtain and the beds and returned holding a silver box in one upturned palm.

  “What’s that?”I asked. Light pooled in the channels of the box’s intricately carved lid. A red button protruded from its side.

  “Are you ready for a magic trick?” He pressed the button, and the lid clicked open. A writhing, purple cloud rose out.

  My entire body stiffened in surprise.

  The cloud twisted through the air like a finger, reaching for me, until it boiled over my face, prying into my nose and mouth. I tasted copper and smelled oranges.

  Pain exploded in my sinuses. I thrashed, choking.

  Through the vortex of dust, I saw something shaped like a man sitting in the dark. It was featureless, smooth as porcelain, the non-color of a white crayon. Its face bore the vulgar suggestion of ridges where its features were missing. Ticking sounds radiated from its chest, and a blue light pulsed within its skull.

  It was real. It was here.

  The blank man. It was coming toward me.

  It plucked a black syringe from a table at the foot of my bed. The ticking stopped. The light within its skull changed from blue to red. With the efficiency of a battlefield surgeon, it slid the needle into the bend of my elbow and pushed black liquid into my veins.

  My body was a screaming network of nerves. I struggled against the restraints. Please let me move!

  Slaven said, “He’s rejecting the swarm. And his injection—look at his injection!”

  At the crook of my elbow, the black substance was seeping back out from the needle mark, like I had sprung a leak.

  “I could have scanned you with one of these.” Slaven waved a device slightly larger than a cell phone. “But this was more fun.”

  I coughed clouds of purple smoke. Slaven snapped a breathing mask onto my face.

  The world faded.

  #

  I woke as though I had been drowning: arms flailing, eyes wide, gasping for breath. My hands went to my face. The mask was gone.

  Now I was someplace outside. Sunlight beat my scalp and sweat stung my eyes. I saw the chain-link walls and realized I was in a kennel—a steel cage where SHU detainees were granted their daily hour of sunlight. In the connecting cage, Gar lay sleeping.

  I rattled the chain-link with both hands. “Wake up!”

  Gar looked around. “Where are we?”

  “The kennels.” Saying it out loud reminded me we were animals, trapped and helpless.

  He sat up, rubbing his head. “I don’t feel right.”

  I felt it too—pressure in my sinuses, a vortex in my head. And the place was too quiet. The other cages sat empty, and the surrounding yard was deserted. No rifle-wielding officers lumbered on the overhead catwalk.

  I noticed the kennel doors ajar and hurried over to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. I pushed my door open, and my heart skipped a beat. What was going on here?

  The squealing hinges caught Gar’s attention. He sprang to his feet, and soon the two of us were standing out on the sidewalk, alone in the concrete canyon of the prison complex.
Gar bolted toward a door on the exterior wall of the SHU and swung it open.

  I followed him into the cool shadows, waiting for a call from some officer, but it never came. Had the prison been abandoned?

  Gar leaned over the unoccupied security desk to inspect the monitors. “The cells are empty. That’s impossible.”

  I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered through the window in the GenPop door. Three stories of empty prison cells leaned over the atrium. “Was the prison evacuated while we were out?”

  “What do you mean 'while we were out?'”

  I opened the door. “I woke up in a makeshift hospital room. Slaven was there. You were too.”

  Gar still looked confused. “I don’t remember that.”

  “You were unconscious.” I slid my hand beneath my shirt and ran my fingers over my stitches, thinking I had been unconscious longer than I realized, but the wound was still fresh.

  “I’ve known guys on the inside my whole life.” Gar followed me through the doorway, into the cell block. “I never heard of a prison being evacuated.”

  I stopped in the middle of the atrium, staring up and listening. With so many men crammed into so little space, GenPop was usually loud. Even after lights out, someone was always yelling. But now the block was so quiet I could hear myself breathing.

  The cells on the first level were all stripped clean, their doors open like invitations. We checked the cafeteria with its rows of empty tables, and then mounted the stairs and walked along the second level. Silver paint flaked from banisters and bars. Motes of dust swirled in the sunlight. At the end of the second floor walkway stood the entrance to the massive shower room, an echo chamber of dripping faucets.

  On the third floor, I stopped at our cell, empty as the rest. “What happened to our stuff?”

  Gar grunted. “What happened to everyone?”

  We pushed through the double doors of the visitation wing. Outside a windowed wall to our left, beyond the rec yard, storm clouds stacked the horizon. The desertedness washed over me, the ridiculous yet compelling fear we were alone on Earth.

  The visitation rooms were unlocked, but the door to Administration was bolted, so we turned back. Finally, Gar entered one of the classrooms.

  He slashed out five blue rectangles on the whiteboard, labeling them SHU, Gen, Ed, Caf, and Vis. “If we’re really alone—no guards—I can get us out, no matter how buttoned the exterior doors are.”

  “Oh yeah?” Clearly he had moved beyond wondering why the prison was vacant and on to escaping.

  Gar pointed to his drawing. “The doors here in Visitation are standard commercial security. The doors beyond are heavy Trussbilts with corrugated steel backbones. They were locked.” He drew a square in the upper right corner of Visitation. “We can take an access panel to the roof, here. Then scale the fence around the vehicle inlet and climb onto the wall, and from there it’s a thirty foot drop.”

  “How do you know this?” I said.

  “Shit, I been here a long time,” he said, as if it were an answer. “The problem is, thirty feet is a long drop. We could break our legs.”

  My physics background kicked in. “We’d be moving thirty miles an hour or better when we hit the ground.”

  Gar stared at me. “And?”

  “That could kill us. With tools, we could dismantle the heavy doors and exit on ground level, or find bolt cutters, snip through the fence.”

  Gar shrugged, one corner of his mouth turning downward. “There are tools in the hobby room, but if it’s locked we’re not getting inside. I doubt anything in there would help anyway.” Thunder boomed, and he cast his eyes toward the ceiling. “You really think that fall would kill us?”

  “What kind of surface would we land on?”

  “Parking lot.”

  “I’d feel a whole lot better if we checked the hobby room for tools before we rolled the dice.”

  He nodded. “Alright.”

  #

  Night fell while Gar and I walked toward the hobby room. On a normal day the interior lights would have blazed on, but this was not a normal day, so the prison remained in shadow. Beyond the windows, the prison yard appeared whenever lightning flashed, blanketed in sheets of rain, then vanished into the abyss. For long stretches it was too dark to see, so we felt our way along the walls—creeping like thieves past the open cells.

  The back of my throat started tickling as we reached the moonlit medical junction. There was a pungent smell in the air, like sawdust and burning graphite.

  “That’s gunpowder,” Gar said. “This happened recently.”

  “How recently?”

  “For it to be this strong?” Gar pondered. “The last few minutes.”

  “Gun fight?”

  “I don’t know about a fight, but somebody discharged a firearm.” Another pause. “We should have heard it. I didn’t hear anything. Did you?”

  I shook my head, then realized he couldn't see me. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  Around a corner and past the stairs, we found the hobby door open.

  The lightning came every few seconds now, illuminating a menagerie of workbenches and floor-mounted saws. Among toolboxes on a long table at the back of the room, I located a can of kerosene, four wooden stakes, a bucket, and a lighter torch for melting metal. I took my shirt off before I realized I didn’t have any way to cut it into strips, then had to stumble through the dark looking for scissors. Gar understood what I was doing. When we made it back into the atrium, he removed his shirt while I dumped kerosene into the bucket, and then we secured the fabric of our shirts to the stakes and dropped the stakes into the fuel, and within ten minutes had two torches. Gar lit them with the lighter, bathing the corridor in orange light. I felt primeval: bare chest glistening in the torch light, the shadows of bars flickering around me.

  I noticed stitches on Gar’s abdomen. “Slaven must have gotten you too.”

  Gar ran his fingers over them. “I didn’t know.”

  Without warning, three shots rang out from above. Gar dropped to his knees and rolled beneath the stairs, panic on his face. I slid in alongside him as another volley peppered the floor, spraying chunks of ceramic where I'd just been standing.

  “Insurgents!” He pointed his torch skyward, as though wielding a rifle. “They’ve got the high ground. Can you see them?”

  I peered through the latticework of the stairs, but couldn't make out anything until the shots began again—tiny flashes sputtering in the blackness. Bullets rang like bells on the stairs near my head.

  “We’re sitting ducks with these torches.” Gar scrambled toward the medical hallway, torch guttering.

  “Gar!” I bolted after him, clutching my ribs, as bullets chewed up the floor behind me.

  My hands were shaking, my torch casting spastic ribbons of light onto the cinderblock walls. Dizzy, I braced against a pipe to keep from falling. “Something isn’t right.” But Gar was too far ahead, a flickering glow. I forced one foot in front of the other until I reached the foyer, gasping for breath.

  Someone had gouged a crater into the floor where the medical admission desk used to be. Huge wire baskets stood beyond the crater, loaded with chunks of concrete. Behind them sat a plywood bunker armored with sandbags.

  “That’s a Hesco.” Gar pointed his torch at the basket of concrete blocks. “It’s a military barricade. We used them during the war, to stop gunfire.”

  "What?" I had polished the tiles in this room yesterday. Now it was a different place. “Why is it here?”

  Gar faced me, fear dancing in his eyes. “We hid behind the Hescos when insurgents stormed our camp one night. They had AKs and were poorly trained, so they couldn’t hit shit, but we kept our heads down because sometimes they got lucky.”

  There was sand on the floor, blowing in from the hallway. “Gar, have a look at this.”

  He ignored me. “We called in air strikes, but we didn’t always know who we were shooting at. Our helicopters scorched the earth.”<
br />
  I sensed movement near the exam corridor. When I turned my head, I saw a little girl in the torch light, a multi-colored blanket draped over her shoulders.

  Finally, it clicked: I was hallucinating. It was the only explanation. But I was rarely able to question my visions until after I awoke, which meant this was an unusually long and powerful episode. Perhaps right now I was lying on the floor of my cell, twisting in spasm.

  The little girl backed down the hallway until she vanished into the darkness.

  Gar scrambled after her. “Wait!”

  A streak of light roared over my shoulder; an explosion rocked the corridor. Shrapnel tore into my chest.

  I stumbled through the smoke, torchlight diffusing, searching for Gar. I found him in one of the exam rooms, leaning over the body of the girl. Blood spread over the front of her green dress. Her body shook.

  My God. Her eyes were still alive. She couldn’t have been more than ten.

  “This is my fault.” Gar looked up at me, hands bloody.

  I felt like I was walking over a bottomless chasm, where nothing I said would help and nothing made sense.

  He shambled into the hallway. I went after him, but he had vanished, his bloody footprints degenerating to a sprinkling of dots beneath an emergency fire extinguisher. A quote from Plato, the remnant of a college philosophy course, rang in my mind.

  Shadows on a cave wall.

  #

  I rounded the corner into the doctor’s offices and saw Helena Isaacson. She sat in an egg-shaped chair, a beam of purple light shining from the bullet hole in her head. She leaned forward in the chair. “Why did you kill me?”

  I held the torch before me like a ward. “I did not kill you.”

  “It was an accident.” Her frilly dress appeared orange in the torch light, but I knew it was pink. When she spoke, purple smoke fluttered out from between her teeth. “You meant to kill the professor.”

  “I didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “You did!” She rose in the iridescent shadows, one arm limp. “Want me to tell you a secret?”