Chapter 12 The Swap

T-Bag's room, St Agatha, around 6 am

Theodore Bagwell doesn't know where they are taking him. But it surely ain't be a good thing in the god forsaken lab for experimental rats where he brought himself by his own stupidity and desire for a little comfort in his miserable life of an inmate. So he screams like a madman he is one way or the other, and sinks his teeth greedily in the flesh of one of the (female) attendants when she is not careful enough. Her incoherent crying makes him somewhat happier about the situation, but than two men take over. They ain't gentle. Soon he's bruised, stored and left alone in a very peculiar hospital room. There is no window there and the old time equipment frightens him as if they had put him on an old fashioned plane and made him fly over the ocean.

In the middle of the room there is that odd thing looking like a primitive electric chair he had seen in a Muppet Show movie as a kid in his father's house. He's a big boy now but he still shivers when he remembers his father and the practices he had taught him. They wanted to fry the frog character in that kind of chair if he still remembers the movie correctly. He never thought that anything similar could still be in existence. T-Bag laughs incredulously yet he keeps away from it, wondering why he's in that strange room to start with. A huge square computer is attached to the chair with some odd looking colourful cables, which are the only modern pieces of the equipment in front of him, as far as he can tell. The computer casing and the keyboard are completely yellow. All in all, it's stuff no one uses any more. He heard that nowadays they ship such electronic garbage to Africa so that they wouldn't pollute the American soil. No one needs such machines in rich and developed countries..

Hours pass, and in the absence of a better thing to do, he presses a button on a computer casing and the screen illuminates, blindly obeying orders. Why isn't it that easy with women, he thinks, deprived of sex, consensual or not, since he ended up in St Agatha.

He hears steps outside the room, still reasonably far. He tries to switch off the damn thing in case he was not supposed to touch it. It doesn't work. The thing is asking for password he doesn't know. Afraid, for no reason, or for a very good reason, he can't really tell, he plugs out the electricity cable. But the damn thing has a battery of its own and the happy blue screen asking for password keeps on smiling at T-Bag who is tempted to growl at it like a beast. In the end he gives up and offers the machine his best look of a maniac. Inclined to break the screen to resolve his little prying problem, he finds there is no tool strong enough accessible in the room. He can break it loose only by his bare arms. The hospital doesn't want the prisoners to harm themselves or their property, no sir, the clinic will take care of any such try, he thinks cynically.

The steps are at the door.

Resigned, he sits in a chair like the frog from that movie. There is no other place to sit down anyway. The computer is lacking a chair. The surface he is sitting on is rough. Couldn't they make a plain chair in the old days, he thinks, scratching the wood under his buttocks. The good hand he has wonders under the chair, and finds a tiny flat thing inserted between two boards the seat is made off. Curious, he tries to pull it out. He manages to do it just when they come in, to take him away again. He successfully tucks the minuscule something in one of his pockets. Luckily, the patient (inmate, he thinks) attire in St Agatha does have pockets.

They come in and the fat man who kicked him in the guts and all over his head (after he bit that stupid cow) says: "There has been a mistake. Let's go back."

T-Bag wonders if they will now take him to some place where they summarily execute prisoners by shooting them in the head before burying them in the courtyard next to the stinky pruned rose bushes. Maybe that awaited the true psychopaths like himself.

Instead, he is only returned to his room. The daylight peeks shyly through the window, and judging by the time of the day, his breakfast should be brought in rather soon.

He gets the finding out of his pocket, but has the last minutes sense to keep it in the palms of his hands so that cameras in his room (he has seen them, he is crazy, but he is not that stupid) cannot record his finding. A disappointment, really, a thin little card such as they put in modern day cameras, to have more space for photos. (He hates family photos, he has to remember. ) At least he thinks the card is for that, never having had such a camera himself. It's not a bag with millions of dollars which had disappeared somewhere in South America, but it's the only thing he's got that someone bothered to hide in the clinic. So maybe it's worth something to someone. He closes his palms in a ball, pretending he is cold, and carefully places the little thing in the front pocket of his shirt, right above his sick heart.

Breakfast comes in and the coffee smell makes him happy. Whatever St Agatha does to people, they haven't done it to him yet. And he will get out if it's the last thing he does. He tries to imagine what Michael Scofield the genius would do in his situation. He closes his eyes thinking hard. When he opens them, his mind is equally empty as before he has ever tried to concentrate. He is not Scofield... Not in looks, not in brains. Angry with that knowledge he hits the mirror above the lavatory with his artificial hand and enjoys the blossoming of the broken glass, and the new damage to the horrible plastic limb he'll have to wear for the rest of his hopefully long life.

xxxxxxxx

Some hours later, special room in St Agatha, the same one T-Bag was in

"You're not afraid?" the fat man asks Ralph. "Some in your position, those who know what chances are for this to succeed, dirty their pants on the way here.

"Why should I be afraid of the known risks?" Roger asks back. "I'm only afraid of the unknown."

Roger finds the look of incomprehension on the face of the fat attendant extremely funny. He was just brought to the special room where Kelly prepares her patients for the experimental procedure of brain treatment, usually with small chance of any of them ever getting up on their feet. Davis should be there any moment, he reckons, hoping she'll wear a short skirt. Now that he's marked as a lunatic, he could just as well have her on the primitive chair she's using for the diagnostics.

Cheerful, he sits on the chair and looks forward to it. His hands, on the contrary, are searching for something else. Something that belongs to him.

Something that's not there.

Cold rage threatens to overtake him. He keeps it at bay. It's not the good time to get angry. Lincoln never got angry in those pitiful moments of his life. Only melancholic and religious from what Ralph has learned.

He looks for it again because it has to be there. And no one else had been brought to this room, because he was the only one scheduled for the procedure in the coming days, and the last time he was on the diagnostic chair, his memory card was still there.

They're gone... A job worth millions... A billion, maybe, if he is lucky to find a generous buyer.

Getting out of St Agatha is very important. But he has also invested too much time and effort in obtaining those plans and putting them to the missing memory card. Five years of my life. He doesn't think Kelly ever thought pushing her delicate hand of a surgeon between the two boards forming the seat of the chair. She wants her device to look old fashioned and untouched, to leave better impression on clients. He might find a way to download those plans again, but it would take too much time and he's out of memory cards to store data. He could use one of his attendant contacts to procure him a new card, but his helper might be wise enough to tip the Korean client that the things were not going smoothly, and it's the last thing Ralph wants to happen.

Kelly barges in around 9 am and to his disappointment she is wearing pants, black and classy, narrowing at her rounded butt. The view is gorgeous if somewhat inaccessible. When she dismisses her helpers as their superior and attaches his head to the chair, to start her calculus or whatever she has to pretend to be doing, he snaps. He's still stronger than her, so he pulls her in his lap until she involuntarily straddles him.

Wires are tied to his head, and the old computer is beeping, when he forces her out of her jeans. She wriggles and gets away from him, using her garment as an excuse. Playfully, she puts her head where he always imagined it instead of sitting on him as he intended. It's not as good as what he wanted to do, but she makes it up to him in a way that he asks himself, once she is done, if her part time job during school was not the oldest profession.

Professionally, she wipes her mouth and proceeds to look at the recorded computer data, as if she didn't do anything special just seconds ago.

"No one has been here between Mr Morris and me?" he asks, chest heaving, slowly getting his brains back to the place where they are supposed to be.

"No, why?" she asks back in all innocence, and he refuses to answer.

"Don't know," he says arrogantly, "I find the chair wobbly, that's all. I just thought it'd break while you were busy helping me relax. Take it as the doctor-patient confidence, I'd just like to know who else you were having here on it, those kind of things." He does his best that the last sentence sounds jealous, hoping it will provoke an answer.

"It's an old thing all right," she says, and asks a question of her own. "It's a bit shaky, that's all. Have you been here before?"

"Once or twice five years ago when they installed everything at this bloody place. They didn't know where to keep me and the three original patients at the time, may they all rest in peace now. It was before I learned that they employed you of all people, to supervise me against escaping, not knowing of our association."

"I wish there was a window here," she says matter of factly, "but then the recorded data would not be accurate."

"You should know best," he says and wants to pull her back on himself, this time not letting her get away without going all the way with him. He'll have to check with the attendant he pays if someone was there after all. If someone had stolen his plans. He doesn't trust Kelly to give him that information freely.

Cold rage possesses him from the inside, burning. If someone had been there, and took his plans, he's as good as dead. Even without an experimental brain surgery to ease his passing.

Xxxxxxxx

Sara's Office about the same time when T-Bag is taken to the special room

He stirs on the bed which doesn't feel like his. Not that the luxury hospital bed he has had in St Agatha, the only bed he can remember, ever felt his in any degree. He's stiff and uncomfortable, until he wants to move his right arm and feels a warm sleeping body and the waves of silky hair. Sara... Her name sounds like a blessing. A thin sheet is draped over both of them, and that is about the only textile present on the spot.

He adores it that way.

He stirs and nearly falls off the bed, too small for both of them. The clumsiness of his attempt to move wakes her up and she gives him a relaxed smile.

"What's the time?" she asks, not quite awake.

"I'd better go," he says, contradicted.

"I should go to," she replies, "drive back home, take my son to school..."

"Your son?" he asks, taken by a way of jealousy, imagining the child's father who's probably someone who can at least remember his name. He doesn't ask about him only because he doesn't need to know the truth. He wants to believe she will be there for him every time he crawls through the floor to see her. Until he gets Roger, and as many other patients as possible, out of the

St Agatha's wing where certain death is awaiting them, one at the time.

"Yes," she says and studies him as if she can see through his unease without seeing any cause for it.

"How old is he?" he forces himself to make an innocuous question.

"Five," she replies smiling at him as if he should be thrilled with the news.

"Five," he repeats. "Okay," he says, not knowing anything better.

"We'll talk about Mikey some other time, okay?" she says, getting more awake, disentangling herself from his arms. "I should really bring him to school. I don't have a babysitter or anything, I was mostly doing everything by myself since we moved here."

That is well, Michael thinks. Alone. It has to be enough. If she's alone now, maybe she will take him in. Even if he is a murderer and a psychopath and god knows what else.

"Will I see you later?" he asks, timidly.

"Not tonight," she says, regret palpable in her words. "There's some party after school, for the end of the school year. And I have to sleep some." She blushes at the last words. "I still have to work later today."

"Maybe at the end of your working hours then?" he blurts.

"Maybe," she says and lightens up. "If it's safe for you..."

"I'll see," he says and hobbles to the spoon in the wall. When he retrieves it, he wonders what disorder his little sabotage may have created in the meticulously round the clock work of St Agatha. He suspects that some routines, sub-routines and schedules may have been affected. Patients brought to places where they were not supposed to be.

He allows himself some gly feelings and hopes he interfered with the cleaning of Kelly's office, so that the first thing she finds is the pile of garbage instead of the fresh smell of the floor detergent. She looks like a kind of person who could be bothered by that, he concludes.

"Can they see us now?" Sara asks.

"Probably," he says, "if they bother to look. Then again, they have too much security tape to look at, so I guess that they will only view it if there's trouble in certain parts of building. Everything else will remain archived forever and not serve a single thing." He wonders how he knows all that, but he's certain he's telling her the truth.

"Oh," the mischief glowing in her eyes is clear, as she guides him back to the flat position on the cot they have been sharing. She is softer than anything he had ever known, and she gives herself away with an ease that frightens him. He is not the man she needs, he fears that he's not.

It's not very creative and it's the oldest way people do it, he guesses, the man is supposed to be strong one, the one on top. He doesn't feel strong at all; he is weak and he is lost. He drains the strength he lacks from her arms, and he really hopes her kid will not be late to school because of this, because of them. He's happy he doesn't remember any other woman in his life, so the only memory he has is of her, and he hopes it will be her until the end of his days.

When they are done, he cannot help but wonder what kind of man was able to leave her and his child. After having tasted her the way Michael had done in the past two days.

"I should go," it's her turn to announce, and she sounds like she doesn't want to be going.

When he closes the floor slab over his head, Michael lets the perceptions run over, enjoys the look of pipes, screws, and valves, of empty narrow tunnel he is crawling through, lucky that the place is relatively new. So that he doesn't meet a rat despite that the passage he is in would be perfect for a rat hole.

His mind is soon too full of useless information, but it serves the purpose of stopping to dwell on Sara. He has to, and he will focus on other things. Kelly's words ring in his mind, the last ones before she ran away from Sara's office for all practical purposes. So if I did something really horrible, I wouldn't be able to pass under the wall, she insinuated. What if Roger did something like that? Do they have something special to keep him between the walls? To know when he leaves?

If they do, he has to find what it is and disable it before any attempt to break out.

He doesn't get why Kelly would do anything to help him, why she would pass to him potentially useful information.

Brain full of questions, he's back to his room. In half an hour breakfast is served, and for the first time since he's in St Agatha he devours scrambled eggs instead of cereals. He could eat the tray from the hunger he has. He doesn't eat it, despite giving it a serious consideration. He looks through his window and instead of looking down, looking for her, his gaze moves up over the roof of the part of the clinic he is in. At places, the tall evergreen trees grow close to it, close enough that one could bridge the distance with a rope, cross it, and climb down.

There will be obstacles on that path as well, and he has no idea where they keep Roger or even if the man is still alive.

He doesn't know yet, but he will do his best to find out.

He doesn't even realize how tired he is, from everything.

When they come in later, to collect his dishes after breakfast, they find him asleep in bed, smiling, empty tray held in place by his bare bony knees.

Xxxxxx

Lunchtime, in front of St Agatha's

Kelly takes her lunch out in a paper bag and walks through the gates wishing to have her midday meal in nature. The car is left behind, and the idea of driving disgusts her. She needs freshness, and an open space. Somewhere where there are no people.

As soon as she starts walking among the trees, she knows it's a terribly bad idea. The soiled feeling she has ever since she serviced Roger as a common whore, to avoid having proper sex with the man, doesn't go away. It won't go away with lettuce and shrimps either.

It gets worse soon, because someone has followed her from the gates, and she doesn't even have to turn to know who the person is.

"What do you want, Paul," she says without looking back. "Share a salad?"

"I just wanted to talk," he tries his best to be civil.

"We were never good at that, remember?"

"I was not good at many things before," he admits. "I never thought I'd leave the job I had with Caroline Reynolds but I did. Maybe you could, too."

"It's late for that," she says, sitting on the grass, and leaning against a young fir tree. Its bark smells sweet in the sunlight. She unwraps the plastic fork and carefully spreads the dressing over the salad.

He sits several steps away from her, almost with respect. "There's just this one thing," he says, "before you get me all wrong again."

"And what would that be?" she interrupts before she allows him to say his piece. "I still haven't killed the late governor's daughter if that's what you're worried about."

"In part I am, and I won't deny it," Paul says very seriously. "Sara is the reason I came to Montana, not you."

Kelly had always known that, yet she hates the sinking feeling on the inside, the weakness she doesn't show to Paul, but which is nevertheless there. Like a bad TV show where the main female character swoons over a worthless male for roughly hundred episodes and the housewives cry about it between taking kids to school and filling up the dishwasher. She hates to be that way, she really does.

"But then," Paul continues even if there's nothing more he can say, nothing that can make her feel any better, "I know who you are, don't think that I don't. I know it better than anyone. I know what you're capable of, what you did to me, what you did to others. The level of cruelty you can have towards others, its higher than my own used to be. I know all that..."

Kelly stubbornly puts a shrimp and a portion of lettuce in her thin red mouth, wishing that the food would not taste like Roger, nor like bitter deception stemming from Paul's words.

"I know all that and yet I'm damn sorry I left you after you shot me."

The next portion of lettuce gets stuck in Kelly's throat.

"Yesterday I drove back here after Sara at knight, and I stayed parked in the woods until now, and I could only think about one single thing."

She almost chokes when he finishes his piece.

"I know all there is to know about you, yet all I have in my head since I came here is you."

When he says that, he stands up and goes away, abruptly, as if he's embarrassed about his admission.

"Just so that you know," he yells at her when he's many steps away form her as if she was not a woman, but a contagious disease.

Kelly remains seated in the sun and wonders if his words are just some new tactics to help Sara. She knows that they probably are but more than anything else in the world, she wishes to believe that they are not.

She forces herself not to believe Paul, eats her salad, and returns to St Agatha.

That is her life, for now.

xxxx

A/N Thank you to everyone who reviewed. The updates will come slower now because real life is having its demands. The story will continue.