If Hell had apartments, they would look like the high-security cells in Arkham's basement.
Sorrow, numb with shock, had been marched down flights of creaky old stairs and through more locked doors than she cared to think about before they arrived at a solid steel door. Lights twinkled green as one of the brutes swiped his keycard in the slot. The door clanked open to reveal another door, barely six feet away from the first. The orderly slid his card again and shepherded Sorrow through into a bare concrete hallway lined with more heavy-looking metal doors. Her name was sloppily stenciled on the first door to the left. With one more swipe of the keycard, the pair of them opened the door and shoved her inside.
This couldn't be happening. She hadn't done anything to deserve this...this hole of a room! Okay, so she'd killed a few people, but...well, the Ventriloquist had killed more people than she ever had, by a long shot! Granted, he'd been working in this town for a lot longer than she had, and sure, he didn't tease the orderlies, but -
The door slammed behind her. "Hey," she protested, whirling around to try and stop them. The straitjacket's rough fabric scraped against the back of her neck. "Can't you get me out of this thing?"
"Not our job," one of them called back to her. Which one was hard to tell, given that the door and walls were totally solid from floor to ceiling. In fact, the only spot of safety glass was located in the corner, behind a grid of iron bars, protecting a small security camera that buzzed as it turned to focus on Sorrow.
She stepped to the left. The camera followed her. She backed up and darted to the right. The camera obediently tracked her movements like a dog watching someone eat a steak. Okay...that was annoying. She kicked the door, more out of habit than anything else, and turned around to survey her new home.
The bedframe was exactly the same as the one in her old cell - a series of heavy metal strips welded together and bolted to the floor, low enough to prevent any but the thinnest of prisoners hiding below it. The mattress, however, appeared to be a big nylon sack stuffed with - she prodded it experimentally with one foot - foam. Great. A thick nylon blanket, heavily quilted, stretched stiffly across the little bed. The one-piece steel sink and toilet combination was attached to the floor directly across from the bed. The room was empty of anything else, except another metal grid protecting the raised ceiling light.
Sorrow slouched against the wall and glared at the camera. Okay. She was in an underground room, with no windows, with a bunch of people who weren't particularly concerned about her well-being watching her every movement. Oh, that wasn't a familiar situation at all. Sweat began oozing down the back of her neck as she fought off memories of Teng and his exceedingly well-stocked basement.
Why the hell hadn't she tried to break out earlier? Why had she wasted precious time with teasing the orderlies when she could have been out the door and back into Gotham at any time? Now here she was, in this room that reeked of fresh construction and new fear, with no hope of even going upstairs for a full week...not that being upstairs was that much better, in the grand scheme of things, but at least it was something. Being down here was like being trapped in steerage rather than first class as the Titanic wallowed in the icy waters. It would have been nice to at least have a view as her world destroyed itself around her.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and rested the back of her head against the cold concrete of the wall. It would be okay. There was only one week until she saw Troy again, and she could easily behave herself until then. When they saw that she'd toe the line, they'd let her back upstairs. That was the plan. It would work. It had to.
Attics have a certain reputation. Generally, when people think of attics, they think of storage - boxes of seasonal decorations that will eventually be useful again, toys waiting for the next generation to grow into them, and invariably, boxes of junk that can't be thrown out but can't really be tolerated in the house.
Arkham's attic was crammed with all sorts of interesting stuff. The asylum had been operational for well over a hundred years, during which psychiatry had evolved through a number of fascinating methods regarding the extinction of psychosis. The inmates nowadays required very little in the realms of physical treatment, thanks to the Thorazine revolution in the early sixties. As a result, the dusty space between the top floor and the roof was stacked high with examples of nearly every archaic mental-health device imaginable: chairs, tubs, beds, and boxes, all outfitted with the very finest of leather straps suitable for the most discerning lunatic. Spiders spun their webs over the occasional dusty window, hoping to snare flies too dazzled by the light to bother looking where they were going.
They weren't the only living creatures up there, though. In his cramped, musty office, Troy Grey hunched resolutely over his desk and ran his Exacto knife down the borders of the next article to be filed. "JOKER KILLS DOZENS IN SUBWAY SPREE," the headline screamed. Troy barely even registered the carnage in the picture as he methodically smoothed the article onto a rubber-cement-smeared piece of card.
Some remote instinct twitched in the back of his head. He pawed at his shirtsleeve, revealing the cheap goldish watch wrapped around his wrist. Two o'clock! I'll be late for... He slumped back in his seat. No, he wouldn't be late. There was nothing to be late for anymore.
Troy sighed and lightly frisbeed the new Joker article onto the top of a file cabinet to dry. If this had been a normal day, he'd be heading downstairs now, to get ready for another session with Sorrow. It wasn't fair. He had liked being a real doctor for once. It was great to actually have a patient - and not one like Ivy or Quinn, either, he hurriedly amended, remembering his abortive attempt to treat the pair of them. No, Sorrow was...well, once he'd managed to get her thawed out a bit, she was fun. She listened to him and she liked his stories - okay, so it probably hadn't been the best idea in the world to tell them to her, since doing so could have gotten him in serious trouble with the management - but she was a lot friendlier than his fellow staff members ever were.
His drumming fingers landed on the blade of his Exacto knife. Pain sparked up his hand. A droplet of blood splattered on his blotter, leaving a permanent crimson reminder of his absentmindedness for anyone to see. He stuck his finger in his mouth, trying to simultaneously curse himself and suck on his injury without chewing himself to bits.
Why'd they have to put her in the stupid high-security wing, anyway? he sulked, leaning back in his creaky old chair. It's not like she'd actually hurt anyone. Not nowadays, anyway. The only one she'd wanted to kill had been Teng, for obvious reasons, and now he's dead, so no one else has anything to worry about! She was clearly just teasing them a little because she was bored. Anyone would be bored, locked in those cells all the time.
She was probably bored now. He could only imagine how boring it would be to be...well, to be wherever they'd put her. He didn't have the security clearance to go down there to investigate for himself.
He flicked the treacherous knife to the side of his desk and opted for the scissors to cut out the next article. As long as she behaves herself, he thought as he neatly scissored around a picture of a sleepy Riddler being handcuffed on a park bench, surely I can get them to let her out of there. He brightened at the thought. Yes, he'd go talk to Dr. Carlson about it at the staff meeting tomorrow and everything would turn out okay. It had to.
Troy traditionally didn't have a lot to say in staff meetings. As the official archivist, his opinion was generally only asked for when the doctors needed to know what the public were thinking - and since everyone already knew what the public thought about rogues and the asylum, Troy spent a lot of his time sketching pointless doodles in his notebook while the doctors took care of important business.
Today, though, would be different. He took his seat immediately, tapping his fingers impatiently on the table as he waited for the others to settle down for the meeting. One by one, the doctors slowly gravitated to their spots, carefully 'dropping' pencils and 'tying shoes' in order to glance beneath the table and make sure it was bomb-free. No one wanted to end up like Dr. Jackson had.
Finally, the table was fully ringed with professionals in white coats. Troy fidgeted through the first few minutes of the meeting, not paying too much attention to the usual list of eloped patients and injured staff. He bounced one knee under the table as he waited for Dr. Carlson to finish the round of announcements and news that seemed to take forever and a day.
At last, Dr. Carlson laid his papers down. "Are there any issues that haven't been mentioned yet?"
Troy shot to his feet and instantly regretted it as everyone looked curiously at him. "I, uh...I just wanted to ask...um..." he stammered, hot embarrassment boiling into his face, "well...why my sessions with, uh, Sorrow turned into weekly ones. Instead of daily. Um."
Dr. Carlson raised an eyebrow. "Because she was moved to the high-security wing," he explained patiently.
"I know that," Troy said. He could feel the blush staining his face an even darker red. "I mean, but, I don't see how taking away therapy is going to, um, help her. P-particularly since it's got to be...rough...down there."
"What's your point?" Dr. Lily asked, irritated.
"Well, we were making progress. Sort of. Um...she was getting close to telling me, you know, things. And now she's probably not going to," he said uncertainly. "I mean, does she really have to be there?"
"Does she..." Dr. Carlson trailed off, not quite believing what he'd just heard.
"She's a psychopath!" Dr. Lucas exploded. "Of course she belongs in there!"
"She's not!" Troy snapped. Sweat began trickling down his back as the doctors stared at him in shock. "I mean, she's not completely a...She wouldn't hurt any of us, anyway," he mumbled defiantly.
"No? I take it you don't remember Dr. Teng?" Dr. Lucas said icily.
"He was a monster!"
"And now he's dead. Who do you think she'll decide is a monster next?" Dr. Lucas asked. "You? Me?" He pointed an accusing thumb at Dr. Carlson. "Him?"
"Well, how is locking her in the basement supposed to help her figure out that we're not monsters?" Troy said, looking desperately for support among the other doctors. "We have to bring her back upstairs to show her that -"
"No," Dr. Carlson said flatly. "She stays in the high-security wing. End of discussion." He turned to Dr. Baldwin. "You were telling me yesterday that -"
"But it's not actually helping her much, is it?" Troy interrupted, bewildered. "I mean, she's not going to get any better down there. None of them are!"
Dr. Baldwin sighed. "They're not going to get better. Face facts, son, some people are so broken that they cannot be fixed." Dr. Carlson cleared his throat pointedly. "We have to try, of course," Dr. Baldwin continued hurriedly, aware that doctors who weren't able to fix their patients ended up losing their comfortable jobs, "but you should know by now that you cannot help people who don't want to be helped."
"They're happy to keep killing and stealing," Dr. Lucas pointed out, settling his bulk deeper into his padded chair, "and we have to do what we can to make sure that they aren't out there wrecking Gotham. If that means we have to lock a few of them in the basement, well, so be it. In fact, if it works for those two, we might start rotating the others down there to...calm them a bit when they get rambunctious."
Dr. Carlson cleared his throat again, emphatically, flicking his eyes open in a clear signal to Dr. Lucas to shut the hell up now. "It's simple, Grey," he said quietly. "She killed a doctor - "
"He was torturing her!" Troy interrupted.
Dr. Carlson held up a hand to silence him. Grudgingly, Troy settled back into his seat. "She's a danger to everyone: the doctors, the orderlies, and even the patients. You recall the incidents with the Joker, as well as Miss Isley, yes? For the safety of everyone in this building she's going to stay down there indefinitely."
"But we're not helping her!" Troy protested, slamming his hands down onto the table. "Are you just going to let her rot down there?"
"Yes," said Dr. Torres bluntly. "Idealism is a fine thing, Grey, but there's a time and a place for it - and inside Arkham's walls is not it. Understood?" Troy, tight-lipped, lowered his head in a reluctant nod and glared at his open notebook.
Dr. Torres nodded briskly, tucking a stray hair behind her ear. "Fine. Moving on - we need to replace the lock on the Riddler's door again..."
Contrary to popular opinion, Sorrow wasn't bored in the basement. Far from it. Boredom generally implies that there's nothing to do, and as Sorrow was discovering, there was plenty to do in the cell.
It had started with the mindless games. Bouncing her pillow one-handed over her head as if she was dribbling a basketball against the ceiling had been entertaining, until the guards had ordered her to stop. Trying to balance her shoe on its rounded, scuffed heel had been mildly amusing, but the guards had put a halt to that as well. Finally, she'd turned the faucet of her tiny sink on just enough to let it drip, and she'd improvised a percussive symphony in time with the dripping water with her gloved hands, her thighs, and anything else that she could smack to make a noise. The guards, unsurprisingly, had ordered her to knock it off almost immediately after she'd started. So, in order to be seen as a good little prisoner, she obligingly turned the faucet off.
But it hadn't gone off. At least, she thought it hadn't. She didn't see any water coming out of it, and the sink was clearly dry whenever she checked, but...she could swear that she heard it dripping.
Five days had passed since she'd been introduced to her new habitat. Five long, tedious days, in which the only outside entertainment had been the occasional meal break. The thickly walled cells prevented any sound from intruding into the cell - and while upstairs, this might have been a blessing, down there it was anything but. She would have given almost anything to hear other people again, even if it was only Jervis chanting lines from 'Alice' or Two-Face snoring.
In fact, the upstairs cells had had a lot of advantages over this one, something that she spent far too much time thinking about. There were people upstairs. Okay, so most of them would gladly try to rip your throat out rather than say 'hello', but they were still company of sorts. You could still sit on your bed and watch them parade by on their way to therapy. And when there weren't inmates to watch, there were guards on patrol, or janitors mopping the floor, or even orderlies running errands for the doctors. Best of all, her cell had had a window, and she could see the sun and the sky. Sometimes, there would even be a bird!
Inside these four walls, the only thing that moved was the camera - and the only time it moved was when she did. It was far too easy to think that the door wouldn't move again, either - that they had sealed her in forever, until she grew old and decrepit and died in the corner -
Stop that, she ordered herself furiously. She shoved herself up from the bed and paced determinedly back and forth across the little cell, her footsteps accompanied by the whir of the camera. She would get out of here. All she had to do was keep a civil tongue with the orderlies when they fed her - and she had, she'd even bit down her pride and apologized for teasing their upstairs counterparts. A rogue, apologizing. It was humiliating. Worst of all, though, they hadn't really cared! They'd just dropped off her food, grunted the same line they always said - "Don't make a mess" - and abandoned her to her little cup of soup and half a dry sandwich. No matter what she did, nothing changed. They didn't even turn off the lights at night!
Surprise is the essence of life as a rogue. Generally, the fun lies in surprising other people - like security guards and bank managers - but very few things in life could compare to the adrenaline rush when you step around a corner with your loot to see a carload of cops blocking your path.
Being locked in that quiet, dark little room was like replacing a drunkard's vodka with apple juice. There was no excitement, no drama, no fun to be had...and aside from all of that, Sorrow couldn't shake the nagging feeling that Teng was out there, getting ready to swoop in and make her life hell again.
It was ridiculous. He was dead. She'd seen him gut himself. He was dead and she was alive and she was safe, no matter how much that camera watched her. It wasn't his camera. But in the night, or at least, that period between dinner and breakfast, he invaded her dreams and sprang out from the walls to pin her down. Her screams of terror probably weren't endearing her to the guards - that is, if they could even hear her screaming from inside the cell.
Who could be bored with that kind of fun to look forward to? She settled back onto the bed and drew her knees up to her chin. Two more days. She could last two more days. She would. And then she'd get out of there for good.
Troy slouched dejectedly behind Dr. Palmer's desk, twirling a pencil between listless fingers as he waited for Sorrow to arrive. It slipped from his grasp and stabbed into the desktop, breaking the lead off with a quiet snap. Troy eyed the rebellious writing utensil and chucked it across the room to the garbage can. After all, it was useless now, just like him...
He ran a hand through his hair in frustration and turned around, glaring out of the little window as if everything he hated was lined up on the windowsill. It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. He was supposed to be helping her! How anyone could be expected to help any patient in these circumstances was beyond him.
The door swung open, revealing an absolutely massive orderly with his hands firmly on Sorrow's straitjacketed shoulders. He walked her inside, sat her roughly on the seat, and stepped back as she meekly huddled into herself. "I'll be back for her in fifteen minutes," he grunted, turning to leave.
"What do you mean, fifteen minutes?" Troy demanded. "Sessions are supposed to be a full hour! Well, most of one," he stammered as the orderly pinned him with a cross glare. "Fifty minutes, anyway," he corrected miserably as the orderly's glare shifted deeper into anger. "Um, most of the time."
"Not this one," the orderly shrugged. "I go off-shift in thirty, and I've gotta have her back home before I sign off."
Troy felt that distinct wibbly sensation in the knees that always showed up whenever he tried talking to someone that could rip his spine in half without effort. But no! He braced his shoulders and tried to look professional. He was the doctor, and this man was an orderly. An underling. He could do this. "But that's ridiculous!" he protested, ignoring the bit of his brain that was urgently begging him to shut up. "How are we supposed to talk about anything in only fifteen -"
"It's fine," Sorrow interrupted softly. Troy fought the urge to let his mouth drop open. He'd never heard her speak like that before. "Fifteen minutes is fine," she continued, not raising her gaze from the floor. "I don't want to be a bother."
"Good," the orderly sniffed, slamming the door as he left the conversation.
Troy slumped back into his seat. Failed again. Surprise, surprise. "Well...uh..." He picked up another pencil and twiddled it between his fingers. "How's it going?"
Sorrow raised her head. Her face was creased with anger. "I just spent a week in a tiny room with no windows and lousy room service," she snarled. "How do you think it's going?"
Well, at least she'd only been pretending to be all meek and broken earlier. Still, if that meant she was going to lash out at him...oh, this next fifteen minutes was not going to be pretty. "I'm sorry," he apologized softly.
"I just...it's not...I hate it down there," she said, arms shifting inside her jacket like cats under a blanket. Troy sighed, examined his pencil, and glanced up to see her looking at him with the kind of burning hope that only the near-hopeless can muster up. Dammit, he thought miserably.
"So...let's get me out of there," she hinted as he stared numbly at her.
He sighed and clicked the pencil down onto the desk. "It's not as easy as that," he said lamely. "Look...I mean...well, they don't listen to me," he mumbled, trying not to think about that roomful of doctors dismissing him like he was only there to bring them their lunch.
Sorrow shook her head, obviously aware that it would take more than a simple 'please' to get her out. "What's it going to take? I haven't killed anyone for...well, okay, it's only been three weeks, but I stopped threatening the orderlies," she pointed out desperately. "I apologized, and I do what they tell me now, and..." She caught sight of the look of futility on Troy's face. "I ate that goddamn tuna casserole, for heaven's sake. Get me out of there!"
"I can't," he wailed.
"Then what's it going to take? Money? Who wants a bribe?" She leaned closer to him. "Carlson? Lily? You?"
"I don't want a bribe!" he snapped, sick at the thought of being caught doing something illegal. "No one does!"
"Are you sure you're thinking of the right place?" Sorrow said. "This is Arkham. People take bribes here all the time!"
"You can't bribe the doctors," Troy said, one hundred percent inaccurately. "Maybe that works on the orderlies, but not anyone that can do anything about this."
He threw himself backward in his chair. This was impossible. How could he tempt her with the reward of rejoining the rogues upstairs when his bosses were making it quite clear that that was never going to happen? The carrot always worked better than the stick. Why couldn't they see that?
Well...maybe if he kept after them, they would see it. Maybe if he kept pestering them, and leaving them notes, and voicemail, and letters, and memos...maybe if they couldn't go ten minutes without a reminder that he was unhappy, they'd do something. No...no, they'd think he was some kind of brainwashed puppet and stop him seeing her at all. That would never do. Caring too much about your patients was a good way to be dismissed out of hand - a lesson that he wished he'd known before that staff meeting. He'd have to be subtle about it. In the meantime...the best way to make sure she'd get out of there eventually was for her to keep behaving herself. "The only one that can get you out of that cell is you," he said, hurrying to finish as he heard the door handle turning. "It's in your hands now. Can you do it?"
She looked heavily disappointed. "I'll try," she said quietly as the orderly squeezed into the room. Without looking at anything but her own feet, she silently stood up and allowed herself to be steered out of the little door. Their paired footsteps faded into the distance.
Troy stuck the pencil back into its jar and leaned back in the chair, blowing a sigh up his face until it jostled a stray hair loose from his forehead. Provided she kept her promise and remained well-behaved, maybe he'd have an easier time persuading Carlson to go along with him. It would take a long time, though. Anyone could be good in the short-term. Even the Joker had been known to play nice for up to two months at a time in order to pull off some elaborate joke or another.
He got up and trudged back to his little attic. Maybe he'd be able to think of a better plan by next week.
Sorrow trotted out of the office with the orderly's big, meaty hand wrapped around her shoulder. From the outside, she appeared to be nothing more than an obedient inmate, carefully matching speed with her guard and not daring to think of breaking the rules. Inside, though...inside was an almost entirely different matter.
Troy had said that it was up to her to get out of that cell. Now, he obviously didn't mean for her to break out...did he? He couldn't. It was ridiculous. After all, he didn't want to take a bribe, or offer one to the others, but...well, how else was she supposed to get out? Being a good little girl would just leave her down there, forgotten and alone.
Maybe he had meant for her to escape. He had said that it was 'in her hands'...and what else could he have possibly meant? In her hands. If that wasn't a subtle hint, she was the Queen of France - or maybe she'd just spent too much time with the Riddler. Not everyone communicated in phrases that meant six things at once, after all.
She stumbled as the guard pushed her into walking a little faster. It didn't really matter, anyway. If he couldn't get her out, she'd have to get herself out, because she seriously doubted if she could handle that little cell for much longer.
She slowly slouched her way down the stairs, trying to ignore the orderly's hand on her shoulder as she padded along. The winding, creaking stairwell opened directly into the lobby, a design flaw that had helped countless inmates along on the road to freedom. The orderly sped up, trotting Sorrow past the lure of the large, decorative windows, and shoved her roughly into the little hallway that led to the intake rooms and the hospital wing.
Scratches from nervous construction workers marred the wall around a brand-new steel door. Bars ran in a grid along it, snapping neatly into a series of holes that lined the doorframe. The handle looked as if it had most recently been used as the handle to the cage of a rabid elephant. This door, of all doors, was a door that was clearly not to be opened often, if at all. It wasn't labeled. Anyone who walked through a door like that in a place like this without knowing where it led deserved what they got. The orderly slipped his keycard through the reader.
K-chung. The bars retracted sullenly into the door. With one hand on her straitjacketed shoulder at all times, the orderly hustled her down the clanging, metal steps, through the little 'airlock' and into her cell. The door slammed shut behind her, almost catching her heels as she stumbled forward.
She turned and glared at the door. Right. Now, how to get back upstairs...
Some needs were hard-wired into the human brain. Obviously, if your mailing address featured the words 'Arkham Asylum', your wiring was a little faulty to begin with, but some things couldn't be changed even with the force of a class 5 hurricane of psychosis. People were designed to interact with other people up in the sunshine, even if they did think that they were interacting with giant green hedgehogs instead. Being locked away in the windowless basement was just about as far from ideal as anyone could get.
However, it did have one advantage over the upstairs cells. There were no distractions. There was nothing to distract yourself with, except the occasional hallucination, so it was an ideal spot to plan an escape. True, escaping from a self-proclaimed high security wing wasn't going to be easy, but then, what ever was?
Sorrow paced her cell in the same pattern that she'd followed for days. It had started with a simple loop around the cell, going round and round in the tiny bit of available floor space like a goldfish in a cereal bowl. Gradually, though, she'd picked up little flourishes, like kicking the toilet as she passed it and jumping onto the bed whenever it intersected her path.
She leaped lightly down from the bed and paced in front of the door, trailing her fingers along the wall. Unexpectedly, her pinky caught on something and protested as she jerked it free.
Hmm. She stared pensively at the door handle that had stopped her. It was merely a shallow dent in the door with a small ridge of metal lining one side, providing just enough leverage for a guard to let himself out if the door should happen to swing shut behind him without doing anything so foolish as to leave anything potentially dangerous poking out into the cell.
Then, with a dismissive shake of her bruised hand, she walked on, pretending to ignore the door handle and all of its delicious possibilities. A plan began to ooze into the back of her mind, like a flood rising underneath a loosely framed door. It was simple. It might work.
And if not, well, what was the worst that they could do to her?
Dinner in the high-security wing was never too exciting. While upstairs, the inmates might be allowed the privilege of silverware, napkins, or even hot food, the luckless downstairs crew would be lucky if their soup hadn't quite iced over by the time it slid into their cells.
Tonight's bill of fare included a grilled cheese sandwich, sliced in halves and dripping with grease, accompanied by a small cup of burned tomato soup and a limp, soggy pickle. Sorrow attacked her tray with gusto, slopping her sandwich into the soup so hard that little waves of red glop sprayed up onto her gloves. The faster she ate, the less she'd have to taste - and so the sandwich disappeared in a few huge bites, followed by one massive swallow that emptied the little cup of soup in record time. The pickle she saved for last, since not even Arkham's cooks could screw up opening a jar. The tangy, salty pickle at least cleared some of the grease off of her teeth.
Then, with a forced look of well-fed satisfaction on her face, she settled back onto her bed and licked her gloves clean like a cat bathing its paws. She sucked on her fingertips, slurping loudly as she encountered a spray of tomato soup between her fingers. Then, with a chorus of slurps and squelches that sounded vaguely like a man wandering through a muddy pasture, she caught a piece of the flimsy latex glove between her teeth and pulled. Her enthusiastic squnching noises covered the distinctive snap of broken latex as it slapped into her palms. She continued on as if nothing had happened, painstakingly cleaning the last of the horrid soup from the remains of the bright pink gloves.
The slot in her door banged open. "If you're done," an orderly sneered, "hand over your tray." Obediently, she got to her feet and shoved the tray through, smiling briefly as the hatch slammed back into place. She'd gotten away with it. So far, so good...
It was time for part two of the plan. She whirled on her heel and picked up her route around the cell once more. Around and around she walked, as time wore on and the evening turned to night. Six steps to the far wall, kick the toilet, four steps to the bed, jump on the mattress, tightrope-walk to the end of the bed, jump to the corner, two steps and slap the door handle, two more steps and start again. Pace, kick, stomp on the bed, slap the door. Pace, kick, stomp on the bed, slap the door. Pace, kick -
Stomp on the bed and jump up and down and dance like a maniac! She kicked the pillow, sent the blanket flying across the room and did her best to destroy the mattress like a two-year-old on a sugar high.
An orderly fumbled her food-hatch open. "Knock it off," he ordered in a sleepy, irritated voice.
She pointedly stamped on the mattress. "Make me."
"I said knock it off."
"I said make me!" She stuck her tongue out at him.
"If I have to come in there to stop you," he warned, sleepiness ebbing from his voice, "you're gonna regret it."
"Oh yeah?" She bounced on her mattress again, giggling as she heard a row of stitches pop. "Come and get me, tough guy."
The door swung open to reveal one very red-faced orderly stuffing his cardkey back into his pocket. "Right," he snarled. "You little - " He paused.
Sorrow, continuing her imitation of a little kid, dove behind her bed and huddled in on herself. "I'm sorry," she whimpered.
The orderly grunted his satisfaction and turned to leave. Bare, fat fingers slid into the little pocket of a handle on the door, preventing it from trapping him inside.
From Sorrow's perspective, it was rather like watching a melting glacier. The orderly froze, hardly seeming to breathe, and collapsed to the floor as if every joint in his body had turned to mush. She nearly applauded.
Instead, she wriggled out of her hiding spot and tackled the man, one hand jammed in his pocket to retrieve his key while the other smeared a hasty tear or two on the man's pale face. She'd come to the conclusion that killing him was probably a really bad idea. People really hated it when you killed their buddies. Look what had happened when she'd killed one lousy doctor! And so, to save herself some trouble later on, she let the man live.
She darted out of her cell, whipping her newly-acquired key through the slot of the exit door. The heavy metal door obediently clanked open. She bolted through, slamming the door hard behind her and frantically working the key in the next slot.
Thunk. The door unlocked, swinging open just wide enough for Sorrow to nip through. She shoved it closed and kicked upward, whipping her rubber-soled foot at the slot for the cardkey. Electronics exploded with a fizz that meant no one would be getting through that door for some time without the help of a master electrician.
She thundered up the stairs, barged through the heavy metal door with all the bars, and raced toward the intake hallway's exit. She'd run down the hall, duck into the storage room for just long enough to retrieve her coat, slip out of the exit and steal a random car from the parking lot. And that plan would have been great, had it not been for the pair of orderlies escorting a trussed-up Scarecrow that suddenly emerged from one of the intake rooms.
Sorrow scrambled backward and sprinted toward the lobby, swearing under her breath as she heard one of them calling an alert on his belt radio. Shitshitshitshitshit...The lobby! She'd heard that the doors were always locked, but the receptionist could open them with some kind of button at his desk.
She barreled into the lobby. The night receptionist was cowering under his desk, with nothing visible but the soles of his worn-out dress shoes. Well, that was just great. She didn't have time to haul him out and make him press the button for her. The sound of orderlies in hot pursuit thundered in the hallway.
There were no more options. With both arms flung over her face, she raced toward the windows and dove through. Shattered glass pinwheeled into the night sky, sparkling with all the flashing lights of Arkham on alert as the shards tumbled toward the ground. Sorrow hit the cold, frosty ground and rolled, with bits and pieces of glass slicing into her skin as they rained down on her. She staggered to her feet as the orderlies skidded to a halt in front of the broken window.
"Don't move," one ordered.
"You follow me and you're dead," she panted, tearing off her gloves. "You want to live? Stay there." She stumbled into the darkness, picking up the pace as she heard the sounds of a pair of men too stupid to live trying to make their way through a shattered window without slicing their favorite bits off.
The December air was bitingly cold. It slipped through the gashes in her filthy jumpsuit and stung as it hit all of her fresh, bleeding cuts. She was dirty, exhausted, and sweating with exertion. She had nowhere to go, no one to go to, and no idea what she was going to do next.
On the other hand, she was free - free from Arkham, free from the basement, and with some luck, free from the pair of numbskulls trying to track her across bare, frozen ground that accepted no footprints. And right now, that was enough.
(to be continued)
Author's Note: The high-security wing is roughly based on a cell inhabited by Tommy Silverstein for twenty years in Leavenworth and on general conditions at ADX Florence in Colorado.
I deeply apologize for the delay in posting this chapter. I spent three months sleeping, courtesy of my little fetus, and it's taken a long time to get back into the swing of things. Once again, sorry!