Exits
Infirior-1.3
By X
X0832001@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: I still own nothing, you can make your own assumptions about my financial compensation
Level 4 was isolation. Seamus was taken down below, to the pitch black, freezing dungeon. They'd retrieve him in 3 days and see if the complete lack of living contact had loosened his tongue a little.
They left him alone in a little 4x4 cube. It gave him time to think. They really shouldn't have let that happen. Seamus was a positively brilliant kid. If they had had schools where he was from he would've been head of the class. The last 23 days had kept him distracted. During what Seamus considered the day, Jerrick would beat him, cut him, yell at him, laugh at him, and then, usually beat him again. Then at night he wouldn't let him sleep. He'd give him stimulants and make sure he stated awake. If he drifted off, he got zapped with a current. So even when Jerrick had gone home to his damn Uber family, Seamus still was thinking about him as he focused on staying awake. Stimulants coursed through his blood and he decided druggies were crazy to want this feeling. He just yearned for the days they let him get the few hours that would help sustain life in his wretched body.
But now, alone in his cell, he had time to think. Small places were actually comforting to him. He liked being in places where an attacker would have a hard time getting to him. It probably steamed from all the times he'd escaped a storming Neitzchien ducking in a drainpipe or huddling, cowering, in a damp log as he his from the Maggog hoards. Isolation didn't get to him either, after they took his parents away from him- killed to save their son, Seamus had been living alone in his house. His family had worked hard to get that house and he was not going to let squatters come and take it away. So, he was quite used to being alone.
To keep from going stir crazy now though Seamus would need to keep his mind occupied. Seamus decided escape might be a nice distraction to pass the time. This was not the first time he had been in this building. True this was the first time he was being tortured here, but he knew enough of the general layout of the building from his raids for food and blankets. Looking around in the dank darkness as if he could see something he listened for noise. There was only silence. That meant he was in the West wing, away from the noisy generator in the East wing that he and the others had so often used to muffle their entrance into this plain, gray, 2 story building with basement. He knew a weapon storeroom was on the first floor, complete with a window he knew to be faulty. If he knew where he was, he could use that to his advantage. So Seamus sat in the dark for 3 days and plotted. He was going to escape. Jerrick would be humiliated (Seamus' revenge), and he- the dirty little mudfoot would have the last laugh.
When light finally spilled into his cell again it hurt Seamus' eyes. The blessed isolation was over. Pain was coming back in full force and he knew it. But he held on to the idea of escape. He was not just going to survive another day; he was going to get out of here and back to his home.
Mr. Unibrow gave Seamus a drink of water. Jerrick stayed on the other side of the room, eyeing his prisoner. Solitary had drained the last lingering color from his skin. His hair sprayed out in 17 different directions and his light colored eyes squinted in the light. Jerrick could smell him from here. He was thinner than ever. Yellow and green healing bruises painted his white skin and served to accent the deep red of infected cuts and dried blood. To be blunt, he was horrendous to look at. Jerrick liked that.
What Jerrick didn't like was the fact solitary had not improved the boy's attitude. They were still at the same point. Very rarely did someone come out of solitary as well as Seamus. Crossing the distance between them quickly he snatched the cup from his victim's lips. As usual Seamus didn't say anything. He did have the audacity to smile though. Without thinking Jerrick kicked the boy's knees out from under him.
"Bite me Uber" he said from the ground.
Jerrick snorted as Unibrow blindfolded the kid and led him back up the stairs, not being very careful about protecting the kluge's head from walls and other stationary objects that jumped out in front of him. Seamus didn't care because he was concentrating on the route. He learned the torture chamber he spent most of his time in was on the floor above the solitary cube. The top floor was all barracks; he knew that since he stole blankets from here. That meant it was the basement was where the solitary confinement happened and the weapons were on the same side and floor as he was now. Prisoners and weapons in the same place; who came up with this floor plan? Because it worked so well for the French with the Bastille.
Once Seamus was strapped down again Jerrick approached with the probe. He was getting more frustrated and going back to the classics. Seamus recognized this "classic" and winced, to Jerrick's amusement. Jerrick smiled. Maybe the boy was learning to fear him.
"What is your last name Seamus?"
"Bite me Uber." Jerrick poked Seamus' broken arm, it was seriously swollen and bent crookedly. The boy gasped and moaned a little. But Jerrick knew he was losing this battle of wills. This stupid little mudfoot Seamus Something-or-Another was closer to breaking him than he was to getting the information he wanted from him. "Bite me Uber was starting to ring in his ears.
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No other rebel had been this persistent. Seamus wouldn't talk and Jerrick's bosses were not happy about this. Unibrow was going to get his job. Jerrick always suspected Unibrow had his own agenda. Just hanging in the back, waiting for him to mess up. But maybe he was just being paranoid, or Neitzchien, most likely both. Jerrick sighed loudly. "You really leave me no choice do you?" He tightened all the straps and added them around his chest to keep him completely immobile. Then he slit Seamus' arm elbow to shoulder, half an inch deep. He turned out the lights. "You say 'O'Malley', 'Smith', 'Johnson', whatever your last name may be and I'll see you get all fixed up. If not; starve, bleed to death, dehydrate, succumb to exhaustion, I really don't care, die. You'll cooperate or die." Seamus smiled he had won.
Jerrick left Seamus alone in the dark. Seamus listened for an entire hour before he was sure Jerrick was gone. He mused how lame this torture method was. Jerrick hoped on the brink of death he would beg for life and tell him whatever he wanted. Seamus had already decided that was not for him and that continuing his escape plan would be a fine form of revenge. All he had to do was get off this bed, get out of this room, get to the weapon room- which according to his best guess was a few feet down the hall (potentially have to distract a guard or some such nonsense when he got there), then use the faulty window to escape the building and then make it across the yard and past the gaud posts and back to Boston. That would be not at all difficult for a person barely able to stand and currently losing blood by the cupful.
Jerrick checked on him before he left for the day to rejoin his family. To him, the boy was just mumbling the phrase "Bite me Uber" and moaning softly in the dark. When the door shut Seamus returned to wriggling, so far it had not been super effective. Jerrick had strapped him down tight. Not that that stopped the little mudfoot from trying. It was his shoulders that seemed to present the real problem. If he loosened that binding he would be able to get his arms free and then undo the rest. Seamus came to the conclusion he was going to have to dislocate his shoulder. His shoulder had really not suffered too badly during this ordeal, but it had to be done. Despite the pain moving brought, Seamus worked at slamming his shoulder against the bed as had as he could. Eventually it popped forward, free from its place. The pain was intense and it only hurt more as Seamus pushed his broken, unconnected arm forward and squished free of the upper bindings. If he hadn't experienced so much pain these last few weeks a move like that would never have been a viable option. But Seamus had learned he could take pain, more than even he thought he could. He was a survivor and as long as he hurt, he wasn't dead.
Jerrick looked in on him again in the morning, Seamus was still breathing. Jerrick closed the door again. He hadn't noticed the boy's torso now lay on top of the straps. Seamus could have gotten up right then and tried to fight Jerrick out of his way to make his escape. But Seamus wasn't stupid, he would wait until the night, until just a few night guards patrolled and the other men were thoroughly bored stations. He'd rest today, try and gain a little strength back, and make a run for it that night
The end of that day Seamus was just the same when Jerrick poked his head in. He was under the impression Seamus didn't know when he came to check on him, that the boy couldn't hear the door slide open just a crack and see him peering in. When Jerrick left for the day once more Seamus started listening. Eventually all seemed quiet and he extracted himself from the bed. He couldn't stop the beam that crossed his face. If he could have he would have shouted for joy. But this was not the time. He looked around the sparse room for supplies. On the floor by the bed he found tape and put the roll around his thin upper arm. Among Jerrick's ghastly surgical tools he found a marker. The monster outlined the cuts for his butchering. No use for a marker was there? He picked up one of the knives and crept to the door to listen. Someone was out there. He had a guard. He glanced around the ceiling and floor corners, he had an air vent. Figuring it worked in the movies Seamus crawled into the air vent, thrilled it was on the floor since he doubted in his current state he could get up into the ceiling.
He crawled for what felt like a very long time. He crawled straight, he crawled up an incline, and he crawled through a dizzying number of twists and turns. It occurred to him, this was not an air vent at all. This was a maintenance tunnel. He figured this because every so often he found a sprinkler head or circuit board behind a panel, labeled in the lower left hand corner. The sprinkler was his friend. In a room that stockpiled potential explosives, there were going to be a few sprinklers. If Sprinkler heads were on the sides of this tunnel, pipes would be below, or above. Seamus pried up a floor panel and found the water line. He followed this, diligently checking every sprinkler to see if it was in the weapon room.
It didn't take long to find the massive sprinkler system of the weapon room. He was closer to home than he had been in a long while. It had been a month since he'd seen the city of Boston, a horrible month of utter hell. The window was just under this service tunnel. He was going to have to be quick since quiet was not really going to be an option as he swung from the tunnel through the window to the ground. The window hinges were what made it faulty, if he hit it he could swing right through without even breaking the glass. But crawling out of this tunnel was going to alert those Neitzchiens with their superior hearing. They were going to come in, that was a given. What he had to do was get them to leave without really investigating.
His solution was to not avoid noise but make a lot of noise. He carefully removed the floor panel of his elevated tunnel. He was lucky absolutely every surface was the same shade of gray and most likely looked the same from the floor. A row of rifles were lined up against the wall. If they fell over that would make noise. Enough noise to compensate for whatever sounds he would make. Using the tape he made a decent sized ball. Knowing his plan hinged on speed; with his good arm he threw the ball at the guns, grabbed the edge of the hole and swung right through the window to land in a heap on the ground outside.
The outside portion of this escape he had done many times. While during his raids he was not in quite this much pain and he tended not to have quite so many broken bones and a useless left arm, he knew how to get out of here. It had been getting out of here that he'd gotten caught last time. They'd killed Henry; they were close behind the rest of them. So, in an unusual fit of poor self preservation he had let himself get caught. 30 days ago he had let himself get caught to save the others. They no doubt thought he was dead by now. But, this time he was not getting caught. Seamus was quieter than he had ever been as he made his way to the fence, crawled through the hole they had cut in the chain link, and crawled through. He was out of the Neitzchien compound.
Jerrick went in on the third day and all he found on the table was "SEAMUS ZEALAZNY HARPER WAS HERE" written in large, uneven letters on the table. No Seamus in sight. He had escaped. Some of the straps were still tied. The door was still locked. But, in short, an escape had been made. Jerrick's superiors were really not going to be happy about this
Seamus collapsed as he crossed the threshold into the Boston Clinic. It was a makeshift hospital Seamus frequented with his more serious medical problems. This clearly qualified. "Seamus?" Dr. Miller asked; hauling the boy's battered body to his feet and pulling him to the nearest bed.
Seamus raised his head wearily and looked Dr. Miller straight in the eyes with his own red rimmed, bruise framed, swollen eyes. "Harper, call me Harper, I don't want to be Seamus for a while." Then he was unconscious; a truly blessed state that would allow him to heal.