Day 9: My knees hurt... Fuck you, mister chair

He stood in his boxers, their fabric clinging unbidden to his legs, drawn by the saline-saturated liquid pouring from his skin. He weighed his options, dignity versus demise, and the former came up a distant second. The trunks, too, were doffed into the pile of clothes, completing them. Steam issued from it, the rapidly drying mass of fabric, but Jack was still sweating. He started toward the lights, hoping to shatter enough to lower the temperature, but even a few steps closer intensified their effect dramatically.

Defeated, he lay down and waited for his body to run out of liquid, for the steam to start rising from him and reduce him to a dried husk. The voice returned, still pleasant, but unintelligible, scrambled by the warmth and the state of his brain. Then it barked something and the lights shut off, the heat was sucked out through holes in the walls where there had been lights before, and Jack was able to catch his breath, sit up and start his brain working again.

“So, Mr. Penn, are we feeling a bit more… Forthcoming?”

Jack glared up at the camera, but there was little fire left in his eyes. He nodded, then blinked as a glass of clear liquid was inserted through one of the new-formed vents. It was cold, with ice cubes, and had little odor.

“It’s water, Mr. Penn. Tap water, I’m afraid, but still water.”

He drank it so fast that his teeth rang afterward, the jarring cold setting them alight with blissful agony.

“Now, our first question. Where are you from?”

“Stamford, Connecticut. I’d lived there with my parents my whole life.”

“And your sister?”

“… Yeah.”

“Don’t lie to us, Mr. Penn, and most definitely do not try to keep anything from us. This is merely the litmus test before we ask the really hard questions, just so we know how far we can trust you.”

Jack recoiled, but remained silent. Just who were these people? The government, they claimed, but that did little to single out anything from the alphabet soup of shady, federal organizations. He found himself thinking of Agent Mulder, of the X-Files, always trying to find his proof, repeating his mantra, “The truth is out there.” The thought brought a smirk to his face.

The person behind the camera didn’t notice or, if he did notice, didn’t care. Another glass of water was offered through the wall and Jack took it, sipping at it slowly this time.

“Where were you when the bomb hit?”

The image of the refrigerator’s shelves, so distant now, flashed into his mind as he closed his eyes, aided by the ghost forever burned into his vision.

“Home. In the kitchen.”

“Home is-“

“You know where my home is. Was.”

He could almost hear a sharp intake of breath. Good. Throw them a little off-balance. Keep them on their toes. Make them uncomfortable so they slip up and reveal something, something they shouldn’t.

“What did you see, Mr. Penn?”

“The fridge. I was getting food – a snack – and something threw me forward, I hit my head,” he felt the scar, “and blacked out.”

“How long were you unconscious?”

“Don’t know.”

They asked him some more questions, but it was unclear what their purpose was. It was all clerical stuff, just where he’d gone and what he’d done to survive after the bomb hit, who he’d met. He kept his answers curt and to the point, revealing the bare minimum of information. He wasn’t hiding anything, nor did he even think he had anything to hide, but he still felt uncomfortable giving them the impression that he would be “easy.” It was something in the way they were conducting this whole operation, something that stank.

“One final question, for today.”
He groaned at the prospect of more sessions like this, but waited patiently, gathering up his clothes as he did and slipping back into them.

“Before the bomb hit Stamford, did you notice anything unusual?”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Yeah. We were out of grape jelly.”

The lights buzzed, energy flickering along their filaments as they began to warm up.

“Do not play games with us, Mr. Penn. Once more: Did you see anything strange?”

“No. I was looking at the refrigerator the whole time.”

“Very well, then. Until tomorrow.”

The speaker clicked, a minor measure of feedback as they switched off the microphone. Jack was left alone in the silent, empty room as the lights dimmed. The darkness wasn’t so unnerving as the silence, but he stood stoic nonetheless. Best to look as comfortable in his skin as possible.

Something sweet hit his nostrils and he began to feel faint and dizzy. He fell forward, blacking out just before he struck the ground.

The cell he awoke in was not the interrogation room. This was a relief. It was, in contrast, dark, but… Maybe cell had been a misnomer. It was a comfortable room, with a twin bed and a chair, with arms no less, at a simple desk. Yes, simplicity was the name of the game and, though it was dimly lit at the moment, there was a switch that could only, he assumed, go to the ceiling lamp overhead. The existing light, then, must have come from elsewhere, he thought. His attention was drawn to the desk, where a small light had been left on, neck angled so that the bulb bounced its light off the back of the desk and into the wall. It drew Jack’s eyes to the wood grain surface of the desk. Buried within the surface, through the laminate, was a message scratched so thin that it was no wonder the overseers hadn’t noticed it:

T – 5D 1900

Well, he assumed it was a message, but it didn’t make much sense just then. It could have been a production code or a model number, but those weren’t typically carved into the surface of the item in question and, if it was one of those, why had someone taken such pains to draw his attention to it? Unless it was all just a coincidence that the light had been left at that angle? He puzzled over it idly as he lay in bed later that night, the lights off and the irradiated hands of the clock glowering at him from across the room, over the door. He watched them tick and, before long, felt sleep overtake him.

The next few days were tiresome repetition, many of the same questions intermingled with only a few new ones. They might have been checking him, making sure his answers held up day after day, trying to catch him in a lie. After a grueling session of question and answer, he was knocked out and awoke in his room, a hot plate of food on his desk. He would eat, turn out the lights, then think as he drifted off.

On the fifth such day, after a particularly grueling interrogation, he lay awake with the lights on, wanting to clear his head and think, try to figure out what they were after. He didn’t notice that anything was amiss, at first. It was only when his bed shifted and creaked that he felt the rumbling, heard the muffled voices – urgent tones – beyond the door. He stood up and started over to the wall, hoping he could catch something if he put his ear to it, when the door slid open and a guard rushed in, grabbed him by the wrist and jerked him around so that his arm was pinned to his back.

“Move!”

He started walking, glancing at the clock as they approached the doorway. Seven in the evening.

7:00 PM.

1900 hours.

Five days. T – 5D. T-minus five days, 1900 hours.

Before he even realized what he was doing, he had already moved. His weight flew back, slamming the back of his skull into the guard’s face with an audible crunch of snapping cartilage. He could smell blood, not just running from the broken nose, but stirring around in his own head from the impact, but he maintained enough of his composure to drop when he felt his arm go free, spun around and grabbed both of the padded legs by the shins near the ankles, jerked them back and out from under their owner, who tumbled down, head bouncing off the corner of the bed’s frame.

He had a gun. Jack took it and slipped it into his waistband, grabbed the guard’s baton, and ran out into the hallway just as the door — apparently on a timed mechanism — slid shut behind him.

The hall was well-lit by long, fluorescent tubes along the ceiling. It was devoid of activity and, for that reason alone, already sent a chill down his spine. Had no one else been given such a message? He strode up and down the hallway for a bit, trying each of the doors, but none of them would open. It seemed that the facility, or at least this section of it, was on lockdown. Not wanting to waste his chance, Jack chose a direction and ran off down the hall, turned right at the first intersection and found himself staring at another, identical hallway. Inwardly, he ground. Outwardly, he set his face and proceeded down the corridor, marking the corner of each intersection with a small scratch in the paint as he went.

It was five minutes and a lot of walking before he realized that the hallways all formed a square broken up by rows of connected cells. He smacked his forehead, broke off a bitter laugh before it could get any momentum and strode up to the exit, only to be denied access to the door. Cursing, he spun around and slumped down against the wall, breathing a dejected sigh.