The Prisoner (4 page)

17:34

Awareness didn’t return at once. At least, it didn’t feel like consciousness but rather the distant sensation of being in a long tunnel. Laurel shied away to slip back into nothingness, but beeps of increasing volume prevented her. It took her a few slow heartbeats to realize the sound was in her head.

She jerked awake. Rollers of panic pushed out from the corners of her mind. Her hands jerked to entangle in a web of slithering worms encasing her body. Cold slime, thick as snot. Her fingers drew back. The worms drew tighter, suffocating. They were everywhere. She felt them on her thighs. On her legs. On her back. The beep blaring in her head matched the erratic tattoo beating in her chest. She tried to scream, but her mouth was full of gunk.

Laurel kicked, but the worms held her fast. Darkness. She was blind; she couldn’t open her eyes. The worms gripped her feet, dug under her arms, and brushed her crotch to lift her through the slime. She fought, jerked, and kicked, but the worms held tight. Then, somewhere, a tiny light flickered. She reached for it, projected, streamed through the mass of worms to the light. She needed the light.
I’m Laurel Cole
, the light whispered,
and I’m alive
.

Shit, I’m in hibernation
.

Laurel sucked in greedily with a deep motion of her stomach.
Hyperventilate. I need to hyperventilate. I need to drag more air from the hose
. But she came up empty until the
machine delivered her next breath. She thrashed in panic.
I need more air
.

The sensation of weight increased. She was being hoisted from the tank.

The whirlwind of spinning details slowed to a stop. Laurel tried to relax as Shepherd’s voice echoed in her mind.
By the numbers. You must go by the numbers. Remove your eye protectors
.

The sensation on her skin had changed; her face tingled. In small stages, she hiked her right arm through the tangle of jellylike cords to stop at a thick lump wedged into her mouth. She explored the object. Higher up, the lump rounded and became a hose.
I’m still intubated
. She sucked greedily at the next delivery of air from the machine.

After you’re intubated, a machine will attach eye protectors. Remove them
.

Laurel’s fingers reached behind her left ear and found a strip of elastic material. She hooked a finger around it and pulled it up. Light flooded her eyes. She closed them as a sharp stinging sensation flared. Then she blinked repeatedly to clear them as her irises adjusted.

Your body will produce heat by chemically induced thermogenesis. For a while, blood vessels close to your skin will dilate to promote irrigation, but it will wear off soon
.

Laurel eyed her arm and flexed her fingers. Red like a boiled lobster. Fighting an insane urge to yank the coupler from her throat and breathe at a faster rhythm, she rolled her eyes sideways to get her bearings.

She was dangling in midair, in a forest of wires that disappeared into the gloom above her head. The wires attached to her harness shuddered, and her cocoon moved past scores of gleaming cables sinking in the fluid beneath her feet. Laurel knew it was a fluid, but it looked solid, its surface bright. A drop fell from her toes, and the surface distorted for an instant but didn’t ripple, like crude oil.

When her wires cleared the maze, unseen robotic arms veered her cocoon over a catwalk and slowed to a standstill above an empty platform clad in the institutional white polymer surrounding the tank. The robotic arms must have been
in need of fine-tuning or the programmer hadn’t given a damn, because the wires slackened a tad too fast. Laurel dropped the last foot unceremoniously onto a mess of jelly net, but the solid surface beneath her butt felt good.

The wires snapped free and disappeared into the heights as she felt a tremor in her throat.
Oh, shit!

Laurel’s stomach protested with involuntary contractions as the never-ending hose pulled from her throat. She tried to stand and follow the motion to arrest the overpowering movement, but she failed. With a wet slurp, the plug yanked free and vanished upward. At once, she rolled over, convulsing inside her slimy cocoon, and retched blobs of pink-tinged bile until her gag reflex calmed, leaving a thin thread of saliva dripping from her lip. Then she filled her lungs to capacity with air redolent of chemicals.

Her jaw ached.
Give head? Never again. Never
.

A few yards away and to her left, she eyed a square pool—an expanse of black glass, its unmoving surface pierced by pairs of wires and fat green tubes.

By the numbers, you must go by the numbers. Get out of the protective net and remove the plugs
.

When she could control her greedy gasps for air, Laurel reached to the back of her neck, explored the thick ring surrounding it, found the quick-release catch, and pressed it. The doughnut sprang open. Pulling with fingers and toes, she disentangled herself from the slippery net. When she was free, she pulled out her nose and earplugs, ran a sticky hand over the smooth dome of her head, and huddled on the floor to enjoy her recovered senses and peer at the mass of green cords, slowly flattening over the hard floor like a beached jellyfish. Laurel eyed her knees, stretched her legs, and wiggled her toes.
Like a boiled lobster
.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, shocked at the sudden euphoria shooting through her body. Laurel remembered hearing tales of how Napoleon, Caesar, and Alexander had each spent a night in the funerary chamber of the great pyramid at Giza—a large room, perhaps thirty by fifteen feet. Half the size of Hypnos’s standard tanks, and with a large sarcophagus dead center on the floor. They had experienced an
everlasting night, alone in complete darkness, where it soon became difficult to decide where fingers ended and air began. They claimed the pinnacle of the experience was not the entrance or even the stay but the exit. The return to the outside, walking along a narrow gallery in darkness and toward the light, was like a rebirth.

Everyone who had undergone such an experience was changed. Fear of death was forever lost. Laurel felt similarly reborn.

When she heard a high-pitched whine, she glanced upward but couldn’t find the source of the noise. Suddenly she spotted movement out of the corner of her eye. At the edge of the tank, the surface broke and another cocoon started to emerge.
Raul or Bastien
. She narrowed her eyes and smiled at the glossy ebony skin inside the net. Bastien.
Let’s see how you fare when they yank the plug from your mouth, buster
.

17:41

Nineteen minutes to computer shutdown.

Lukas held his breath as the wire harness pulled the woman clear from tank 913, dreading an explosion of blaring alarms, but nothing happened. The subroutine he’d slipped into the station’s computer when he started his shift had worked like a charm. Donald Duck had said it would and, so far, the quacking man had been true to his word. Obviously, only someone familiar with Hypnos’s internal procedures could have written the code. During the daily backup routine, when the machine connected with the mainframe at the corporation’s headquarters, engineers would probably detect the rogue program. Then all hell would break loose. But by then he hoped to be out of the reach of the DHS’s long arm.

With another ten inmates left, processing the new arrivals was only halfway done. At three minutes each, he and his team couldn’t deal with all the new guests before the computer would start its backup. After a moment’s hesitation, Lukas turned to a squat gray cordless box on his desk and blinked to bring it online. The box turned dull red.

“Instruction to all controllers,” Lukas said.

The chameleonic box changed to green.

“Please continue processing for twelve minutes, until seventeen fifty-three, then prepare to shut down until backup is complete. Secure all unprocessed inmates.” He paused. “Lukas Hurley, supervisor.”

The box seemed to shrink as it returned to its gray standby status.

He could have scheduled another inmate, or two, but he didn’t want to tempt fate. If any of the inmates struggling through the admission freaked out—and a few did—it would add minutes to the schedule. They would have to seal the room where the wretch happened to be at the time, then, after sedating the prisoner with gases, a security crew would have to carry him physically to the intubation bed. The procedure would add a good three minutes to the schedule. No. There was no need to risk cutting it too close.

A man’s image filled the center screen. Lukas frowned. The guy must be pushing seventy. Thin as a rake, he shook like a tree caught in the crosswinds. The nose plugs had slipped twice through his fingers. If he carried on, they would have to use the gas.
Damn!

Again he blinked toward his communications console. “Audio.”

“Relax. Bend over, let your arms hang loose, and breathe deeply. Relax. Breathe deeply once more. Good. Relax. Again, breathe deeply. Relax.” Lukas listened to Sandra Garcia’s soft voice issuing from the yellow box and nodded. She had overridden the computer and was coaxing the old man through the plugging.
Come on, Granddad. Stick the plugs up your nose. Piece of cake
.

The inmate straightened, reached for a plug, and rammed it up his nose.

“Attaboy! Now the other.”

After a short delay, the thin man staggered toward the intubation bed, both green balls dangling over his upper lip.

“Control Room.”

A pause.

“Line to controller Garcia.”

Lukas straightened his back and looked over his screens to a station where a young woman swiveled in her seat to look in his direction.

“Excellent job, Sandra.”

She gave him a thumbs-up.

The screen on his right zoomed in on the old man as he swallowed the coupling plug.
Douglas Stern, 72, 5’
2”. Caucasian, Retired executive. 50 years, 761
. Lukas scrolled down his pad to Douglas’s holograph. He remembered the face from the news. The little old man had drowned four cats, a Labrador dog, and his three grandchildren—aged six, three, and eighteen months—in the family’s bathtub.

He turned to the left screen. No wonder the man was nervous. Fifty years was a death sentence. Although Congress had abolished capital punishment in 2046, prisoners served their terms in full. With sentences often running to hundreds of years, the abolition was a farce. Many inmates entered hibernation knowing they would never walk again. At least not in this valley of woe.

Down by tank 913, the woman had discarded the protective net and, after a stint of heaves, was on all fours watching the black man pop up from the tank. Lukas zoomed in on the crawling figure. Red as a beetroot. Nice ass.

He darted a look at the clock: seventeen fifty.

Suddenly a white line at the bottom of the screen started to flash. Lukas jerked. “Holy mother—” He felt his gut clench. The line froze and changed to an angry red.