The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [11]
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.
chapter 6
17:50
The cocoon with Bastien inside maneuvered through a swarm of wires almost to the far edge of the room before turning and heading in Laurel’s direction, like a strange hive at the end of a sagging branch. The ceiling over the tank was a grid of metal rails and guides holding square plates, each fitted with two suspension wires and a greenish tube. Laurel watched the moving plate shunting past other squares, guided by a thick cylinder, probably a hydraulic arm. After more clicks and whines, the mess of jelly cords with Bastien inside traveled overhead along the platform surrounding the tank, leaking steady dribbles of clear fluid.
She waited—as one waits for the last strain of an organ note to die out before leaving church. A few paces beyond the heap of her discarded netting, the bundle slowed to arc in sluggish swings, as if buffeted by unseen winds. Glistening threads stretched to pool on the floor below. Then it lowered. Laurel gathered her legs and tried to stand, her eyes intent on Bastien’s upturned face, distorted by thick lips stretched around the green tube. Why doesn’t he yank his goggles off? Her toes gripped the textured floor.
With a loud click, clasps fastening the wires to Bastien’s harness snapped and his body sagged onto the floor. Rather than standing, Laurel edged toward Bastien on all fours, her arms and knees wobbly.
The green hose tightened, lifting Bastien’s head a few inches from the floor before sliding from his throat. As the tube contorted toward the machinery above, Bastien’s head thumped back onto the polymer floor.
Laurel lunged over to him, reaching behind his head for the fastener holding together his jelly net and tugging at his protective goggles. His eyes stared, fixed, unfocused, to a point somewhere over their heads.
Oh, no, you don’t. She yanked his neck ring and tore at the net, but she couldn’t remove it without lifting his slick body. “You bastard!” she screamed. He was too heavy to maneuver out of the jelly mess. With quick movements, she removed his nose plugs and lowered her ear to his gaping mouth. He wasn’t breathing. She rammed her fingers into his neck to check his carotid pulse; nothing. She pulled back one of Bastien’s eyelids, but his pupil didn’t react.
“You bastard,” she insisted. Chest compression is more important than ventilation. Laurel strained to remember the precise details from a first-aid course she’d attended several years before. Swinging a leg over his body, she straddled Bastien. One, two, three … She lowered her weight and rammed her stacked hands on his sternum. At least one hundred a minute. Ten, eleven, twelve … Laurel jerked her head, scanning the bare walls for a defibrillation station. Nothing. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three … At thirty, she stopped. He needed a shock to restart his heart.
Again, she glanced quickly around the