Chapter 42 – Detention
Coronet base camp had been built as a military facility, and so its detention block was fairly simple. Little more than a landed brig consisting of several rows of barred cells – basically cages, really - they functioned more as an overnight holding tank for intoxicated or delirious troops rather than actual detainees.
In fact, it was a considered a rite of passage for new commandos to spend a night or several in lockup. Not being one to go against tradition, I'd ended up being thrown into the drunk tank after a - rather spectacular, if I may say so myself – brawl with several infantrymen down at the mess hall.
As soon as I was escorted through the detention block's door, though, I saw that some modifications had clearly been carried out since I'd been there.
The bars which had once been the only means of containment for the cells' occupants had been sandwiched between what appeared to be large sheets of glass. At a closer glance, the transparent sheets had clearly been riveted to the bars, and their true nature only became obvious to me when I saw one of the current detainees thumping her fists against them. From the sounds of the sheets rattling against the bars, it seemed that whoever had decided to remodel the detention block had taken the liberty of using transparisteel plates.
Only when I reached my own cell did it occur to me that transparisteel was extremely effective at blocking off sounds. I would be able to see all of my neighbours, but I wouldn't be able to say a word to any of them.
Sitting down on the slab of poured cement that was to be my bunk, I cast a furtive look at my surroundings, and saw more than a couple of familiar faces. There was Rosalind Wattson, muttering to herself as always, and just a few cells away was Karoly Topolov. Hell, I was quite sure that the emaciated looking woman just a few cells away from me was none other than Colonel Doctor Bean, who had risen to infamy due to her talents with biological weaponry.
What felt like several hours passed, and there were no signs of General Harding being escorted into the detention block. My mind started mulling over the possibilities: him being currently interrogated, he being detained elsewhere, or even having being implicated as a terrorist and all the niceties which would inevitably come with such implications…
After a while, though, I got bored with attempting to figure out where he was if he wasn't in the tank. With the transparisteel panels blocking all communications between cells, I did the best thing a guy could do when he was in solitary confinement.
I took a nap.
xxx
Chow time was shortly after I'd woken up, which meant that the impossibly long – and boring! – time I'd spent thus far in detention probably hadn't exceeded five hours yet.
As I chewed on the rubbery stuff they'd seen fit to keep us alive on, I looked about at the other cells. From what I could see, there were several new additions to the tank's residents. Most were unfamiliar, but a quick second glance revealed that yes, my former commanding officer had indeed been locked up at Coronet Base Camp.
I moved up to the corner of my cell, and tried to find the line of sight with the best view of his cell. There wasn't really one, in the end, and so I wound up sort of pressing the right side of my face against the transparisteel wall and looking at him at a slight angle.
He looked… bored, I suppose. As expected, he looked as scruffy as ever, and was sprawled out of his bunk. It felt strange, really, watching him like that.
Did he even know I was there?
xxx
A couple of days passed. I was bored out of my mind, and already I'd had three visits from Intelligence. Same questions, different agents, and a different psychic all the time; it got irritating after the second time, honestly.
"I told you already," I seethed, as the Intelligence operative took notes, her claydol hovering outside my cell, "I have no idea what you're talking about! You're asking me the same questions those two dumb fu-"
She held up a hand. "I believe you have expressed such an opinion on my colleagues. Repeatedly. Kindly keep yourself from sounding like a broken record and answer the questions."
"You're the broken record, you stupid cunt!" I snapped, causing the claydol to let out a low and surprisingly colourful growl. "Oh, can it, you oversized piece of pottery. It's hardly my fault your trainer's got the brains of a dunsparce."
"I'll have you know dunsparce are highly intelligent compared to your species," rumbled the claydol, its eyes glowing red.
"That will be all," said the operative as she got to her feet and shut her notepad with a snap. "Thank you for your co-operation."
With that, she left my cell, the claydol moving aside to let her past. After she was gone, though, it lingered for a bit, spinning about slowly like a massive top that had been molded out of living clay.
Its eyes flashed like a ring of cameras, and it moved away from my cell, with what sounded like 'interesting' echoing faintly after it.
As my cell door slid shut, I wondered what the psychic was going on about.
xxx
In the darkness, I heard what sounded like roaring, followed by what felt like an earthquake. There was shouting and a whole bunch of other sounds that wouldn't have been out of place at a construction site.
I sat up groggily, wondering if the claydol had done something to me, before I realised that the shouting sounded real enough.
Grabbing my glasses and putting them on hurriedly, I saw that the bars between me and the detention block's main corridor had been all but mangled, along with the transparisteel that had been fixed onto them. It looked as if something had exploded in the corridor, and the guy in the cell opposite mine was peering bewilderedly through the remains of his cell's door.
Wide awake, I stepped up to the wrecked wall, and took a closer look at it. The hole was large enough for me to escape, although it was about five feet off the ground and getting through it would have probably led to the broken transparisteel slicing me open. Through the hole, I could hear numerous voices – clearly, our cells weren't the only wrecked ones, and their inhabitants were all having a good ol' chinwag. A quick look around confirmed this.
"Any idea what did this?" the guy opposite called out through the hole in his cell.
I shrugged, running a hand through my hair to smooth out the bed hair I undoubtedly had. "Beats me. And the damage isn't close to the ground, either."
He nodded slowly. "Ah. Definitely not someone tunneling into this place to stage a breakout, then."
Before I could answer, a siren started wailing, and all of the detention block's lights flared to life, nearly blinding me. I backed away from the wall, practically stumbling over my own steps as the bright afterimages flashed before my eyes.
Heavy footsteps echoed down the corridor, and I struggled to make out the sight out of the six – or was it seven? – individuals making their way towards our end of the block. As they drew closer to my cell, though, I saw that there were seven of them, and that one of them was a familiar face.
Flanked by two digimon decked out in samurai oufits and four humans, none other than Commandant Fischer stopped to look into my cell. He nodded in my direction, and one of his human aides stepped forward to unlock my cell.
"Up against the wall, hands above your head!" he barked, brandishing a stun baton. "Do it, now!"
"I'm telling you right now, I didn't do anything," I rolled my still-sore eyes, as I complied with his instructions. "And hello, Commandant."
"Knock him out," came the Commandant's reply, and the next thing I knew, I was being jabbed between my shoulder blades with what felt too much like a stun baton to be comfortable.
And that was when the stun baton was switched on, and enough electricity sent coursing through my body to make the world around me go white with pain.
When I slowly oozed my way back into consciousness, feeling like I'd been run over by a furious rhyhorn and with the inside of my mouth tasting like the splashboard of a pub toilet during a stomach flu epidemic, I saw that I had been hooked up to an intravenous drip of some sort, and that I was chained to a chair. A quick glance at the drip stand confirmed that there were indeed two bags hung there, with their plastic outflow tubes meeting at a standard-issue diverter valve.
Fuck. That meant serious interrogation.
The scratching of a pen on paper made me aware that I wasn't alone, and when I turned to look straight ahead, there he was at a typical interrogator's table. A bald, stooped man whose dense facial hair made him look as though someone had stuck a swablu onto his shoulders. He was scribbling away on what looked like a standard-issue medical file, except that the cardboard cover was orange instead of the usual green.
Oddly enough, there were two bottles of water on the table, and also a bowl of peanuts.
"So, Number Eighteen," he suddenly said, his voice shaking a little. "Do you know why you are here?"
I felt queasy. "What?"
He looked up at me, and put his pen down. Reaching across the table, he grabbed a few peanuts, and popped them into his mouth. "Do you know why they sent you here, Number Eighteen?"
Eighteen? Oh, shit. "No, sir, I can't say that I do."
Chewing noisily, he let out what sounded like a muffled expletive, and spat to his left. "Enter!"
The room's door opened, and a nurse, of all people, stepped into the room. A second glance revealed that she was dressed in black instead of the usual white that nurses wore, or even the fatigues used by the field medics. Her facial features were mostly concealed by a surgical mask and the long, glossy hair that framed her surprisingly angular head.
"This," said the old man, as he unscrewed the cap on one of the water bottles, "is Nurse Batsu. Top of her class in nursing school, former theatre sister at several prominent hospitals prior to the Revolution, and the same person who was the center of attention during a legal case which set the precedent for murders committed by nurses in hospitals.
"Nurse Batsu will be assisting me today in your… interview. Think of her as a fact-checker, really. Of course, you can ignore the fact that she's not entirely sane, and that the short-term memory loss she experiences thanks to her medications make her hands just a little… unsteady," he finished with obvious relish, as he gulped down water like a magikarp.
She seemed to glide past me, her black outfit blending with an oily, unnerving grace into the dimness around me. Not long after that, there came the unmistakable sound of clasps being undone, and a case of some sort being opened.
Once again, my questioner offered me a blank stare. "Where is Zachary Harding?"
"I don't know!" I said, my attention more on the homicidal nurse as she tinkered with the intravenous drip I was hooked up to. "I was locked up when he got busted out, and you can ask the guards about that! They were there the whole-"
A deep, cold sensation coursing through my body cut me off right then. It felt like ice was running in my veins, and I could feel my entire body tensing up as whatever it was they had in the drip bag made its way around my body.
"Ten seconds, approximately," said Nurse Batsu, in a voice not unlike that of a timid schoolgirl.
"Good," nodded Crazy Geezer, as he spat the remnants of yet some more peanuts across the room in my direction. "Now, I don't think you're aware of the magnitude of the problem here, young man.
"Simply put, Zachary Harding not only broke out of detention, but also managed to free a few other detainees that we were… highly keen on questioning. Since we weren't that focused on picking his mind, frankly, him putting himself in our sights like he did is highly suspect at the very least."
The chains seemed to be growing heavier by the second. Hell, the chair I was sitting on was starting to the dig into my body as though it was contracting around me. "What-"
Before I could say anything more, a blinding burst of pain took over my left shoulder. A scream made its way out of me, leaving a burning rawness in my throat.
"Grade zero sandpaper!" chirped the sadistic bitch calling herself a nurse, as she held up a piece of the abrasive material. "Coupled with the pain-amplifying drugs we've got you dosed up on, you're in for a treat, bucko!"
Once again, she brushed the sheet of sandpaper over my skin, sending my vision swimming with white-hot agony.
"Tell me where Zachary Harding is, and this will all end," tutted Crazy Geezer, as he rhythmically thumped the table's edge with the now-empty water bottle. "Nurse Batsu might not even need to use her actual tools of the trade, then."
More sandpaper on my skin, and spots flashed before my eyes. "I don't know!"
"And here I was thinking you were at least not retarded," he sighed, gesturing casually to Batsu as she continued to drag the sandpaper across my skin. "And Nurse, do you smell that?"
Only then did the wetness in my pants make sense. "The subject appears to have temporarily lost control of his bladder! The drug delivery was clearly a success, sir!"
He nodded slowly, chewing slowly on his next mouthful of peanuts as he did so. "Sandpaper seems to be ineffective. Go for the pins."
Whipping my head around in an attempt to follow the insane nurse's movements, I saw that she was holding a container with shiny contents, which could have very well been sewing pins. Slowly, she opened up the container, and withdrew several of the pin-like objects.
Comprehension dawned on me like an oncoming freight train. "Oh, hell no!"
"This is for your own good, really," muttered Batsu, as she held up the little pieces of metal to the light. "This one should be fine for starters, I think."
Swiftly and smoothly, she slid the needle into my left forearm. The pinprick, tiny as it was, felt like an Ice Shard had just gone through my entire arm. I screamed.
Before I had managed to recover from the first needle, there were two more.
And two more.
And two more.
And one more.
The world around me flared up into one gigantic wall of flame, even as my eyesight blacked out completely.
"I DON'T KNOW!" I screamed, my voice hoarse with pain and confusion. "I DON'T KNOW!"
Crazy Geezer threw the remaining bottled water he had in my face, soaking me through and hitting my head with the empty bottle. "Batsu, you know what to do."
She nodded – almost imperceptibly so – and stepped back behind me to get to her case of tools.
Not five seconds later, my right shoulder felt as though a red-hot poker had been driven through it. My mouth opened to scream, but I'd already screamed myself out.
When Nurse Batsu's girlish giggling made it through the agonizing tornado that had swept me up, I felt the bile rising in my throat.
When she drew what was unmistakably a blade of some sort across my back like a gigantic oblique mark, everything went silent. Somehow, I could see my own back with the long slit running diagonally across it, blood slowly oozing out of the cut Nurse Batsu had inflicted on me. The bile in my throat decided to spew forth right then, and I lurched forward in my seat as a burning torrent of vomit surged out of my mouth and onto the table where Crazy Geezer was seated.
And then everything went dark.
xxx
"Good God! This is too much, I say! Too much!"
"Too late to suture! Seal them with the lasers- where's the goddamn lasers?"
In the midst of the blurry, pain-filled fog that was all I knew since Crazy Geezer and Nurse Batsu had worked their magic on me, what felt like two cold, deliciously soothing palms worked their way down my flayed back.
Cold. Cold was good.
xxx
When I had recovered enough from the sensory overload that Nurse Batsu had subjected me to as well as the physical injuries she'd inflicted on me, the powers that be foisted a psychic onto me. As it turned out, I hadn't exactly given them the answers they wanted, or even enough answers to begin with, anyway.
"This place is a mess!" Armando exclaimed in disgust. "Such a hovel-"
Ginger's head poked out from the head. "Say what? Sounded like a bloody commie saying that me barracks were a bleedin' sty!"
Looking as if he hadn't heard Ginger, or perhaps just like he wasn't bothered by my esteemed unit leader calling him a communist, of all things, Armando slowly stepped towards the middle of the barracks, and shook his head.
"A garbodor would be proud to live in such a dump," he declared haughtily. "Just the sight of those dust bunnies, small as they are, is enough to raise my blood pressure."
I let my gaze follow the accusatory finger he had pointed at Lizard's bunk – under it, to be specific – and saw… well, nothing. "Are you sure about them being there? Lizard's pretty tidy."
He let out a disdainful sniff, crossing his arms over the thicket of fur on his chest. "My poor, visually-impaired human, can you not tell that my eyesight is perfectly fine despite my lack of sleep? I was sent here to monitor the four filth-eaters occupying this barracks, not because I can't see!
"Of course, it didn't help that your friend here is somehow so mentally resistant to psychic probing that the interrogators let him off the hook when he almost died during a physical interrogation."
Balrog gave him a quick once-over, looking thoughtful as he did so. "And how long has it been since you last slept?"
"Sixteen years, three months, fourteen days, eighteen hours, fifty-nine minutes, and twenty-seven seconds," he replied without a second's hesitation.
Upon noticing our stares, he shrugged. "And counting, of course. Make that nineteen hours in T-minus eight seconds."
Lizard peeked out from under his bunk, where he had been checking for the dust bunnies Armando claimed to have seen. "I take it you're a big fan of coffee, then."
"Bah! Caffeine is for wussies and sodomites!" sniffed the hypno, making a shooing gesture in his direction. "Amphetamines, my good man, amphetamines are the key. Now smite those dust bunnies before I wring your necks. All four of you. Simultaneously."