The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [3]
“Remain calm.”
Then the hoselike object rammed past her lips and slithered down her throat, sizzling, expanding, digging deep into her.
Then the lights went out, or she passed out, or died, and Laurel didn’t care anymore.
chapter 2
17:08
Impressive. His fears didn’t melt away—he was risking his neck—but the tension twisting Lukas Hurley’s gut into a painful knot relaxed a notch. He twiddled a joystick and zoomed a pin camera for a closer look at the woman’s expression. Yes, there was horror in the disfigured face, her mouth open wide to accept the long green cylinder into her throat. Horror, revulsion, and fear, but she’d done a good job of mostly masking all three. Donald Duck, the woman’s boss, had selected his people well. Lukas thought the moniker he’d chosen apt. His only contact had been a quacking voice on a phone.
Money could be a powerful enticement and Donald Duck had paid him a truckload already, with a second installment due before the end of the day. The problem was, if the Department of Homeland Security caught him, Lukas could look forward to a similar truncheon down his throat on his way to a tank. His hands felt clammy. He rubbed his palms over the front of his lab whites, then reached down to a drawer and removed three plastic envelopes. He rested them on top of a wastepaper basket he’d positioned to one side under his desk.
Flat on his work surface, a tablet PC displayed an inmate’s restricted file of a type he’d never seen before. Prisoners bound for hibernation in the central area of the tanks arrived at his station without personal records or names, only numbers—long numbers and a bar code. Lukas peered at a holograph of a serious-looking bald woman with a row of numbers superimposed on her chest. Laurel Cole, 26, 5’3”. Caucasian. Lawyer. 913. Center.
No term of sentence—not that Lukas expected to see one. Center inmates didn’t merit hope. Yet he knew the courts had sentenced the woman and her colleagues to only a two-year stretch. Someone had doctored their files with the Center tag. Someone from Donald Duck’s team, and that spelled clout.
The operators outside the fishbowl, as workers called his office, could follow inmates past the intubation room all the way to the hibernation tanks. But not all the inmates. Those earmarked with only a number and a bar code faded from their screens after intubation. There was a rumor that the inmates sent to occupy the center spaces in the tanks were test subjects, willing guinea pigs to improve hibernation technology in exchange for a lump sum paid to their families. But Hypnos, the corporation running the hibernation penal installations, had never confirmed that, and Lukas didn’t believe a word of it anyway. He’d never seen any testing involving center inmates, only oblivion. Supervisors like him were the only ones with clearance to escort these rare souls on their voyage—a task made more palatable by a modest bonus each time they donned the cloak of eternal ferryman. Lukas, a modern-day Charon with a Christian evangelist’s name—a supreme paradox.
During hibernation, inmates were suspended in concentric rows inside tanks measuring thirty feet square and nine deep. A cross-shaped, six-foot-wide empty area bisected each tank to simplify maneuvering the bodies in and out of their allotted positions and up to the maintenance labs above.
When engineers at the Department of Homeland Security had studied the layouts, they complained about the wasteful arrangement. Can’t we pack inmates closer? Why the empty corridors and centers? Eventually they had seen the sense in the corridors, because they were necessary for operation, but insisted Hypnos find a use for the center of the space and increase the tank capacity by four, from 136 to 140 inmates. Hypnos Inc. obliged and produced a design to populate the central areas. Yet the blueprints presented to Congress were the original ones: