12.

COOL HAND KIM

KIM TRIED TO WARN him. She really did. She avoided eye contact, she didn’t laugh at any of his jokes, she pulled her feet away when she felt him nudge them, and she broke two of his fingers when he tried stroking her hair. The guy just wasn’t picking up what she was putting down. It was for that reason she didn’t feel particularly guilty for putting him down, much as she probably should have.

Peters’s broken face lay attached to his broken body at her feet, staring aimlessly up into the ceiling with the same droopy scumbag look he wore in life. This probably could have been avoided if she didn’t smile and offer a sweet “sorry” after her initial assault. That was probably what made him think he’d had any kind of chance. It was a shame about his partner, though. While the fellow’s IQ had seemed about on par with the room temperature, he was at least able to comprehend the most basic of social queues. Shame he wasn’t as good at noticing the antisocial ones; a bit ironic, really, given his profession.

Satisfying as this little episode was, it severely cut short her time to prime an escape. Thankfully, none of their records or other identity-recognizing software gave them any reason to take extra precautions with her when she first arrived. However, soon as someone took a glance through the security camera and saw her holding a chair and standing over some mangled bodies, this was going to turn from a handicap match into a Royal Rumble. It was time to get creative.

Careful not to get blood on her shoes, she half-danced around her quarry and inspected his files on the table. They were not unlike the accounts she had already read during her hiring process. It was reassuring to see Whisper was every bit as vanilla as she claimed. It was also gratifying to see her suspicions about Donald not actually graduating from SIT confirmed. She chuckled. It was such a ridiculous claim to make in applying for what was essentially a secretary job for a garbage truck. And then there was Willy’s file. It seemed to fit the bill for what she had seen so far, with the abysmal psych evaluation noting such character flaws as poor critical-thinking skills and remarkable vulnerability to peer pressure. Apparently, he also rarely washed his hands after using the bathroom. Sounds like the kind of guy who gets accidentally left behind during a daring space jail rescue, Kim thought. Tragic, but happens. He used to work here. He’ll be fine.

Unless she got her act together, however, she wouldn’t be leaving either. The clock was still ticking. Having procured what little information she could, she tackled her next obstacle: the door. It was a real chore of a door, too; not simple steel or even titanium like pretty much every other door that’d been made in the last couple hundred years. It felt like being trapped inside a bank vault. Even if she’d had her infiltration gear from back in the day, it was highly doubtful she could bust through it. And then there were the locks themselves. Every entrance had a myriad of blinking apparatuses affixed alongside it, conveying the impression of sophistication. Each required a different form of data input. All together, they indeed would have made for quite a formidable barricade . . . if only the guards tried even a slight bit to hide the fact virtually none of them were functional. When they dropped her off at the cell they didn’t swipe a name card or scan their eye or any of the other high-tech crap. They didn’t even cover their hands when they punched in 1-2-3-4 on the key pad. They just opened it up and tossed her inside like some kind of criminal coat check. Sure, criminals—ones that get caught, anyway—weren’t exactly famous for being the most intellectual bunch, but to be kept under these conditions was almost insulting.

Regardless, when life gives you lemons, you might as well exploit their defects. Kim was in enough trouble as it was, so she didn’t hesitate for a moment to punch the code and add attempted escape to her offense tab. It worked like a charm doesn’t. The door slid aside with that inexplicable hissing noise they all had and revealed the wide-open cramped and dingy hallway that she had already seen and therefore found wholly unremarkable. The employee standing on the other side of it was new, though.

He was a younger man; had neat cropped hair and a clean shave. His teeth could have been whiter. But he had lovely dimples that showed on either side of his mouth when he gaped around the room in astonishment.

“Damn!” He announced, stepping past Kim and walking inside. “Looks like you went a little overboard, huh? It’s like an episode of Hannibal Reloaded in here.”

“Yup,” Kim agreed. “I was just about to . . . go get an orderly.”

“But why’s there two of them?” The guy continued, nudging the bodies with his foot. “One CO interviewing two detainees in one holding cell? I’ve never seen that before. It’s usually the other—oh . . . Oh jeez. You don’t work here, do you?”

“Nope.”

“This is really awkward . . . did I just walk in on you trying to break out?”

“Kind of,” Kim shrugged. “I was doing pretty good too.”

“You were, yeah. You were through the door and everything. That’s pretty good. But, uh, now I’m here, sooo . . .” He cleared his throat and cast a glance upward. “Hey, Siri, pacify all non-staff members in the cell, please.”

“Please state name of individual authorizing command.”

“Really? Ugh, it’s Private—”

Kim leapt from the floor and caught him on the jaw with her knee. He keeled backwards, stumbling over the bodies of his fallen coworkers. One of his hands caught a handhold on the wall and wrenched him back upright. With the other he snatched up a collapsible cudgel from his side belt and levied an uncoordinated swing with it. Co-Captain Cox ducked the wild side strike, coming up on the backswing and trapping his arm under one of her own.

“Private—OW!”

Once again he was cut off; this time by a quick sock to the nose. Kim jammed her whole hand into his mouth when it opened and leveraged him backward into the table like a kinky workplace romance.

“I am sorry. Individual does not exist in personnel registry.” She shrieked as he bit down on her hand. With no unoccupied arms to work with, she took to responding in kind by kneeing him in the groin repeatedly. The table groaned and shuddered backwards with each thud until they were laying against it closer to horizontally than vertically. Unable to hang on any longer, the private released the tension in his legs and crashed to the floor. Kim landed on top of him, unintentionally Heimlich Manoeuvring her hand out of his throat. Thankfully, there were no punctures in it.

“CALL ME SOME SECURITY, SIRI!”

“Okay. From now on I will call you ‘Some Security.’”

“OH, COME ON!”

The wily inmate reached for his mouth yet again. Unfortunately, she couldn’t quite reach with her grasping paws since the leg attached to the foot digging into her chest and narrowly holding her at bay was slightly longer than her arms. With all his remaining strength, the officer gave a mighty shove, launching her off of him. Kim tried to hang on, but the boot she grasped simply came along for the ride. She missed the door opening by mere inches, instead crashing into the wall and sliding down into a sitting position. Neither remained motionless for long. They both hopped to their feet; the woman still wielding the wearable weapon and the corrections agent adopting a bizarre fighting stance that resembled a man throwing up his arms in submission.

“Alright stop! Please stop!” He implored. Blood oozed out of his nose and his arms trembled in their outstretched position. “This was a bad idea. You’re obviously a bigger shot than I expected, and I’d really rather not be part of the trail of bodies you leave on your way out of here.”

Kim lowered the boot, still eyeing him with suspicion.

“I just work here,” he continued. “I tried to stop you, but I clearly can’t, and it’s probably just gonna get worse for me if I keep trying. . . . So how about you go off and do your escaping thing and I pretend to pass out on the floor from the intense beatdown you just laid on me.”

“That’s a great plan. Except the part where you sound the alarm thirty seconds after I leave.”

“Hey, cut me some slack. I’d give you at least a minute.”

“You’re a terrible negotiator.”

The nameless private reclined back into a sitting position. He let his neck go limp until his head bumped against the wall. “Ma’am, I don’t know if you’ve ever escaped from a prison. I feel like you have. But the alarm always gets sounded eventually. Now you can either head out, bump into somebody else, and let them do it . . . Or you can give me a couple minutes, let me do it, and be well away from the area everyone’s gonna come running to.”

“Or one of a million other possible outcomes happens.” Kim rolled her eyes. “Look, I’m gonna go now—not because I trust you or anything—but because I’m kind of on the clock at the moment, so . . . Sorry, not sorry, about your face and . . . do whatever you feel is right.”

Without so much as a goodbye, she scampered off into the hot territory. It was hard to tell if the rush she currently felt was endorphins or simply adrenaline. There was nothing quite like a nice high-risk situation to flush out the brain like a can of Drano and give her that lovely clear-headed feeling. Her objectives were apparent and her only limitation was her imagination. It felt . . . empowering. It had been so long. And boy, did she hate how much she missed it.

The first stop was cell number eighty-eight. With her current state of mind, it was easy for her to maintain that air of assurance that made people less likely to question her authorization to be there. Just as an extra precaution, she picked a person at random in the bustling hallway and spat in their face. It was the mental equivalent of wearing a hard hat and reflective vest. After all, drawing attention to yourself is the best way to avoid looking like someone who doesn’t want to draw attention to themselves.

She milled around for a little while. Locating anything in this place was quickly proving to be a massive headache. The eighty-eight might have implied some sort of sequential ordering to the cells, but after discovering her neighbouring cells were labelled with a Star of David and an ampersand, she stopped trying to make any kind of sense out of it all. But she was never one to need directions anyway. After enough shambling around, she eventually found a room labelled with two sideways infinity symbols and punched the code from before into the door. Behind it she found her adolescent space navigator huddled alone on a chair and whispering sweet nothings to her knees, by the looks of things.

“Sup,” Kim greeted her, curling her body halfway into the room. She gestured with a thumb out into the hallway. “This place is lame, wanna go to the mall?”

“Hey!” Whisper exclaimed as she leapt from her chair. “What are you doing here? Did you somehow convince them to let you go or something?”

“Uh . . . sort of. Just don’t mention it to anybody, and we’ll be fine.”

“Is that detective guy going to be coming back . . . ?”

“No, no. That I can promise you. Don’t worry.”

The pilot’s arms fell limp to her sides as her face gaped toward her savior with incredulity. The chair made a soft thud when her body slumped back into it.

“What the hell, Miss Cox! I was gonna marry him, and we were going to have adorable psychopath babies!”

“Oh for Christ’s sake . . .” Kim grumbled, rolling her eyes and snatching a dainty wrist.

Hand in hand, they exited the room. More specifically, Whisper’s shaking and not entirely committed hand was used by her boss to drag her outside. She stumbled slightly at first when Kim jerked her out of her chair, but after regaining composure, lurched along with that sunken-shouldered dog-who-just-broke-a-vase stance. It was not exactly the confidence required to fit in with the hyper humble and respon-sible-with-power-types who ran the place. Kim could feel every quizzical glance in their direction. As soon as she got a moment alone, she released her grip on Whisper’s wrist and instead snatched up a handful of hair instead.

“OW! Let go!”

“We’re trying something new,”she stated, dragging Whisper back out into the hall. “I’m a guard, you’re you. Act like you.”

“This plan is stupid!”

“Yeah like that. You’re a natural.”

They returned to the stage. Whisper walked out slightly in front, wincing each time she was steered one way or the other, her fuzzy black hair held like reins. This whole arrangement was so barbaric and dehumanizing that not only did it eliminate the glances of suspicion, but actually replaced many of them with chortles and smirks of approval. One passerby even stopped to high-five Kim. It got a little weird afterward, though, when he bent down to pat Whisper on the head and offer her a piece of his Pop-Tart. He had no right to be as surprised as he was when she bit him. By the time they reached the antiquated transport room known as the elevator, they had settled nicely into their roles.

“Oooh, nice take on the psychological angle,” the man sharing the ride with them commented. “Where’s this one going?”

“Shut up, Dave,” Kim grumbled. “You wanna ask questions so bad? Go ask Gerry why he’s sleeping with your wife.”

“I’m—I’m not Dave . . .”

“Oh. Well, next time you see Dave, it’s up to you whether or not you want to tell him.”

He didn’t say a word for the next couple seconds of the ride. When the doors opened at the next floor, he still regarded the master and slave looking combo with a bewildered leer. His day became spiced-up even further when the elevator was plunged into some mood lighting and the elevator music suddenly changed to house music. At least, Kim thought it was house music at first, but when the melody hadn’t changed by the time the elevator doors opened, she realized this was the alarm she had been warned about.

“You might wanna go check that out,” she suggested to not-Dave. The man couldn’t exactly just ignore a jailbreak alarm, so once the doors opened, he had no choice but to obediently oblige her suggestion. It was nice to have some more alone time, but Kim knew it was too much to hope he was stupid enough to not have even the slightest misgiving towards his brief former roommates. They would have to move as well.

It was sure lucky they happened to have their incarceration take place on casual Friday. Nobody had even the slightest semblance of matching clothing. In fact, looking at the dozens of coolly clad cogs that filled the hallway, Kim saw that they probably weren’t even in the bottom tier of best dressed. Not that it ultimately mattered; when they dared step out of the elevator into the running of the COs, they found themselves standing like rocks amid a river, the stream simply parting around them.

Rather than fight the flow, they drifted along with it. More of the same peculiarly marked holding cells flew by during this impromptour of the facility. As 3D renderings of past wardens passed them by and the occasional legitimate prisoner transfer was forced to sidestep the stampede, it became increasingly clear that they had not become part of some well-organized response team; some of the guards were armed with guns, while others were armed with forks. Murmurs echoed from high and low rank alike asking questions, sharing memories, and expressing hopes that they might finally get to be on an episode of COPS. The excitement was so contagious that Kim, for the briefest moment, forgot that they were en route to where she had come from in the first place.

So she stole away into the first open hall she found. Whisper flew along behind the hand that held her like a reluctant, person-shaped kite. A hitherto-unseen door slammed shut behind them seemingly without any prompting whatsoever, almost as if to tell them they were acting a little too free and should be reminded they were still in prison. But that probably wasn’t why it closed, as that was a little too much moral contrivance to be assumed of a door. (Though in the age of smartphones, smart cars, and smart potatoes, maybe it wasn’t.)

Whether or not inanimate objects could develop philosophical worldviews, there was no sense in stopping to assess the motives of a door. As the saying goes: If you’re going through Hell or Space Guantanamo, keep going. They jogged along at a squirrel’s pace. By this point they had stopped paying attention to door markings, instead focusing on finding hallways to explore. Surely one of them would eventually lead to either a docking bay or a map of some sort.

As closed door after closed door passed them by, Kim’s heart began to sink. Granted, she hadn’t tried any of them yet, but between the rave-like lighting and the way the first two notes of “Sound of Da Police” still hadn’t stopped playing over the speakers, she couldn’t help but suspect the building had gone into some kind of lockdown mode. She slowed her pace to a trot and moved over to the nearest door while Whisper took the opportunity to place her hands on her knees and wheeze away some dignity. As she suspected, the door rejected the code this time. It was likely for the best, since this prison was about the worst place in the universe to revive The Dating Game, but it came with the unfortunate caveat of confirming her theory. She slapped the door in exasperation.

“We’re stuck, aren’t we?” Whisper sighed.

“No,” Kim responded. She straightened up and faced her cohort, wearing her annoyance in the form of pursed lips. “We’re trapped. There’s a slight difference.”

“Are . . . are you just not gonna check down the rest of the hallway?”

“And what do you think I’m going to find down there?” She gestured down into the flashing red abyss. “You think they just locked all the, the things, but left the exit open for us?”

“Cool! The only person on the ship that ever knows what they’re doing now also has no clue what they’re doing!”

“Oh, I’m sorry! Since you’re yelling at me for not having a plan I assume you have one, then?”

“Yeah, it’s called ‘Let you handle it ‘cause I thought you had a plan.’”

“Spoken like a true damsel.”

Whisper rolled her eyes and made a noise somewhere between an “Ugh” and a retch.

“Well, come on! Who just goes around rescuing people all casually and stuff?”

“I hate to break this to you, Whisper, but there’s not always going to be time to come up with some elaborate heist with Rube Goldberg machines and shit. And there won’t always be someone to do it for you, either.”

A tall woman she was not, but she eked out an inch or two on Whisper and elevated herself figuratively further with some no-nonsense eye contact before continuing.

“Now, I’m not going to put you in a sink-or-swim situation like that right now, because this is a little bit too serious of a situation to try and wring some contrived parenting crap out of it. But mark my words; there will be a time when it’s gonna be all you. So when that time comes, you gotta be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get it done.”

At that, the pilot instantly scrunched up her face into one of those disgusted teenager expressions. However, after a moment’s consideration she changed her mind and instead opted for a more serene, plastic look, complete with a preppy voice tinged with cheerful condescension.

“Did you really just say pull myself up by my bootstraps? That phrase used to be an insult to make fun of dumb people who think they can do impossible things. Y’know why? ‘Cause it’s physically impossible!”

“Well, fun as that fact is, it’s been an idiom for pretty much ever. It means to—”

“‘Kay, I know the history of the stupid phrase; I obviously know what it means. That’s the cool part of being smart: I’m able to know things without having to be a moron first and then learning my lesson. Over and over. Like somebody else we know.”

“No one’s smart enough to never ever get into trouble, Whisper . . . and even if you are, sometimes trouble happens.” She looked around, then added: “As you can see from where we’re standing right now.”

“And that’s my fault how?! Maybe if you didn’t marry an idiot who messes things up all the time you wouldn’t need to be so good at rescuing yourself. Seriously! I don’t get it! He’s so stupid! He’s not even good looking! What else is there besides his money?! Are you just an idiot too?”

“Whether or not it’s your fault doesn’t matt—”

There was a beat. Kim blinked a couple times, digesting the words.

“Wait a minute. Screw you, ya little bitch! It’s one thing to get high and mighty with me while I’m dragging your lazy ass out of goddamned prison, but now is the wrong time to start taking swings at my husband! I mean, there’s never a good time for that . . . and frankly I’m getting pretty sick of it.”

She shook her head and stomped off down the hallway. After about eight steps or so, her huffy retreat came to a premature halt, and instead she circled around and came in for another pass.

“Where do you get off being so stuck-up, anyway? Criticizing my man, like you could get anyone better. What, you think you’re gonna bag the Dos Equis guy with your zero life experience and, and, your . . . irritating monotone voice? You’re like the celery of people. Maybe if you stopped acting like you’re better than everybody you’d have some friends.”

“Maybe if you’d found someone before you were old and gross then you wouldn’t be stuck with a loser and stuck in prison!”

“We have been together for fifteen years! The only loser I’m stuck in this prison with is y—My god, I’m actually taking time out of my escape to squabble with a teenager in the middle of a hallway. What the hell is happening to me?”

Without another word, she trotted off once again. It was a less-stormy departure, but more permanent in nature. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find, but anything would be better than standing around there any longer. One thing was for sure, though: the situation was not going to solve itself.

And just then, the alarm stopped. Space Guantanamo’s red-light district retreated back into the ceiling and walls, and a seemingly random door opened up on Kim’s left. She peered at it in quiet contemplation. Half of her held a justifiable suspicion regarding the nature of its appearance. The other half wanted to just accept and take it. All in all, it was like waking up in the morning and finding a strange puppy in your bed. Despite their spat, Whisper came over and assisted her silent staring with some silent staring of her own.

“We’re gonna end up going through the door,” Kim said. “We both know it’s fishy as hell, and we’re both gonna sit here and gape at it trying to convince ourselves it’s not, and we never will . . . but I just know we’re both gonna end up going on through anyway.”

“Whatever.” Whisper rolled her eyes. “Things have finally calmed down, but hey, being impulsive got us this far, right?”

“You’re welcome to sit here and ponder to your heart’s content, then. I just don’t care anymore. But know that turning off the sirens doesn’t mean lockdown is over. Maybe they just got sick of the noise and figured if we were going to have a seizure, it would have happened by now.”

“Then why would they open the door?”

“Probably trying to kettle us somewhere we can be contained. Maybe even right back to our cells.”

“Then why all the running people with the guns and the yelling?”

“Look, I don’t work here, alright?! I’m offering speculation, not reading the goddamn procedure tablet. Either their plan will work, or I’ll find a loophole and get us out.”

“Or we’ll die.”

“ . . . Or we’ll die.”

Kim nodded, then crossed the threshold. Nothing happened. With a smug shrug, she turned around and raised an eyebrow. She didn’t exactly know what she was gloating about, but it sure felt like a gloatable moment, so she just went with it. It seemed to have worked, too, because it was enough to prompt Whisper to reach a dainty food inside and test the waters. Her approach could have done with a slight bit more urgency, but after a painfully long trial period, she finally committed and allowed herself all the way inside.

The door immediately slammed shut behind her.

“I knew that would happen!” She whined.

“Yeah, yeah, you know everything.” Kim uttered amid a heavy exhalation.

“Now we’re stuck!”

“Yes. We’re stuck. Stuck in this huge gymnasium of a room with more doors to try than the Mormon training camp.”

Little did Kim know, the room actually didn’t have more doors than the Mormon training camp. The Mormon training camp in Sal Tlay Ka Siti, Uganda was a freaking huge compound that was far too large to contain within one room of a space station. But she was right that the room did indeed contain a concentration of doors that was much larger than average. What’s more, the walls were built in a sloping fashion to allow the installation of even more doors. In the days of locks and keys, this place would have been a janitor’s worst nightmare.

“Fine, we’ll try the doors then!” The teen declared in her first display of initiative. “I’ll take the right side, you take the left.”

“Well, we could try that, but I figured we’d start with that big double set at the far end there underneath that flashing ‘Exit’ sign.”

The aforementioned pair of doors could just be seen in the distance. They were embedded in the wall far on the other side of the empty expanse, the dingy exit sign above them blinking a silent siren song like the last vacancy sign in Bethlehem. Of all the hatches that pockmarked the walls, these were the only ones that had any kind of illuminated designation. All the rest were as dull as the room they were in: blank metal slabs with no unique features besides thin mail slot-type openings in the middles.

“And what if they’re locked?”

“Then we’ll try the other doors or we’ll try the vent or we’ll try to come up with other ideas. I dunno about you, but I don’t feel like freaking out until I know I have reason to.”

That wasn’t exactly a lie, but it certainly wasn’t as true as she’d have Whisper believe. Concealed beneath her flippant words and confident swagger was a mind rapidly trying every combination of expletive known to woman. She wasn’t sure which would be more worrisome: the door not opening for them, or the door opening for them. The prison was just in lockdown over her; and as far as she was aware, she hadn’t been caught yet. So when she did the math, she concluded that nothing could be more suspicious than this door opening when they tried it. However, Kim was never great at math.

As it turned out, the most suspicious circumstance was actually the door opening for them without them trying it . . . along with every other door in the sprawling Scooby Doo-hallway of a room.

Either some unseen force was trying to make their escape as cinematic as possible, or they had stepped on the right spot to trigger a boss fight. It was like standing in between two racehorse starting lines that faced each other. No bell sounded, but the gates lining the walls opened, and the inhabitants emerged from their dark stalls, blinking and shielding their eyes from the bright ceiling lights. Like most interplanetary people, they also wore space onesies; theirs all matching in a telling shade of pumpkin orange. When their eyes finally adjusted, they soon jumped to the two ladies within their midst. Within seconds, the inmates had closed ranks and the grins and nudges and murmurings began.

“Well, well, well,” a throaty voice from somewhere in the crowd growled. “Women.”

“I ain’t seen womens in forever.”

Kim sidled herself in front of Whisper as she glowered around at the amassing mob. Aside from that, there wasn’t much she could do. They were surrounded.

Yet surrounded was all they were. The gaggle of inmates, after forming their circle, just held fast. The nudges continued, but the grins began to wane and the comments . . . lost some lustre.

“Now’s your chance. Have at ’em.”

“Me?! I don’t wanna.”

“Just go talk to them.”

“You go talk to them!”

“I wouldn’t know what to say!”

“Well, me either!”

“Just ask their names or something, you idiots.”

“Oh, look at mister ladies’ man over here.”

“I bet he thinks he knows everything dames like.”

“Well, unlike some of us here, I do know they like it when you ask for consent.”

The response, while probably weak, was drowned out by a schoolyard chorus of “Oooooh”s. In a matter of seconds, the girls had gone from feeling like a pair of cats surrounded by dogs to a pair of mice surrounded by elephants. It churned up memories of school dances; those brief moments where the chaperone would duck out to the bathroom or drink themselves to sleep and the students could tear down the school board-mandated transparent gender-separation barrier. It always ended up a little something like this.

Kim began to pace forward. The reactions were subtle, yet readily visible from a bird’s-eye view. It was as though she was a shark swimming through a school of fish; no communication taking place, but everyone honouring the intangible, three-foot wide, estrogen-powered barrier she produced. Following this trend, the orange sea parted itself around her in a manner that was three parts convenient and one part pitiable. Whisper followed close behind, dark eyes aflutter with wonder as burly and weaselly internee alike would cast their gazes toward the floor or ceiling upon meeting hers.

They were nearing the perimeter when they found their path blocked by a lone man. A barrel-chested fellow, he was; tall, dark, and handsome, with wavy hair and embedded crows feet from his permanent smoldering expression. Unlike his imprisoned brethren, he felt no compulsion to move when approached. Instead he unfolded he arms and eyed Kim with a mixture of reverence and disbelief.

“Maddie? That you?”

Kim also stopped when she got a good look at him, causing Whisper to run into her back.

“Ahhh, Christ . . .” She sighed. Her eyes slowly traced the span of his body, finally coming to a stop at his face.

“Of all the cellblocks in all the space prisons in all the galaxy, I walk into yours.”