“Custard! Custard! You there, mate?”
Ringo waited a few seconds and took the opportunity to grab a breath from the relatively fresher air away from the pipe. He was about to call out again when he heard Custard’s reply.
“’Course I’m still ‘ere. It’s fucking lovely. I’m thinking of making a booking for the Bank Holiday weekend.”
“I thought you might be in the meadow.”
“Nah. Norris's turn. They came for him about an hour ago.”
Norris occupied the cell opposite Custard. Being on the other side of the corridor he wasn’t on the shit-pipe telegraph, but he and Custard had managed to communicate through the little barred window in their cell doors. As comms networks went it was pretty rough, even considering their situation, but it worked and as the old saying went: if an idea is stupid, but works then it isn’t stupid.
“You all right?” Ringo asked down the pipe.
“Peachy,” Custard replied. “You?”
The advantage of the virtual torture was that after it was done you were still relatively intact. The agony was total, but temporary. Ringo was still nursing a broken tooth and some bruises that he’d caught during their capture, but apart from that he was relatively unscathed.
“I could murder a fry-up, but apart from that… yeah… peachy.”
He sat there for a while, resting against the cleaner side of the pipe talking about food. Ringo was from Liverpool. He had been brought up in the flat above his parent's restaurant in Chinatown. Custard’s tastes were simpler. He claimed the best meal he’d ever eaten was at the Welcome Break service station on the M4. He was, however, supremely knowledgeable about beer and could talk for hours about the relative merits of the various pubs in Hereford and other watering holes from Cyprus to Thailand to the Northern Territory of Australia.
Suddenly, Custard stopped talking. Ringo could hear the sound of a cell door opening and shouted voices in Chinese.
“All right, you cunts,” Custard said in a cheery voice. “Let’s go play some video games.”
The little luxuries mean the world in captivity so when Ringo woke alone in his cell he allowed himself to savour the moment. For the past weeks his waking had either been a sudden bursting from the catatonia that followed a session in the meadow or the equally violent wakefulness that came from his cell door bursting open in the middle of the night. He had no idea what time it was but his bladder was telling him it was morning. Eventually he rose from the nest he had made from rags and scraps of stained foam that might once have been a mattress and relieved himself into the pipe.
“You’re slipping, lads,” he said to the empty cell. “No discipline… that’s the problem with the modern soldier—“
His throat tightened. It was so unexpected he hadn’t seen it at first and he cursed himself for his lack of awareness. The door to his cell was hanging open. He quickly tied the drawstring on his dirty, prison-issue sweatpants and forced himself to wait for a full minute, doing nothing but listening for noises from outside. Was this a test? If he approached the door, would he be beaten or shot for trying to escape. The open door tugged at him as if it was a hole in the floor and all he had to do was let go and fall through it, but he forced himself to stop and think. Finally when he had stood for three hundred heartbeats without hearing so much as a breath or a scuffed boot from outside, he crept towards the opening.
The door was a heavy affair of thick planks and black iron bands but the lock was gleaming modern and magnetic. Outside the corridor flickered in red emergency lighting. Power failure? Surely their captors wouldn’t be dumb enough to let their batteries run down. Further down the corridor he could see more doors edged in darkness. He crept along in the direction of Custard’s cell. It was open and so was the cell opposite, which Ringo judged to be Norris’s.
He tried Custard’s cell first. The door hung open about a hand’s breadth away from its frame. Ringo didn’t know the state of the hinges and rather than risk the tell-tale squeak of old iron he crouched outside and whispered into the darkness.
“Custard! Holiday’s over. Stand to!”
Custard appeared in the opening. He’d been hiding behind the door jamb, just inches away. In one fist he held a shiv made from a shard of broken concrete wrapped in rags. It was a primitive weapon with no edge worth the name, but the point looked wicked. God knew how long it had taken him to grind it down.
“I’m with you, Sarge. This place was getting boring anyway. What’s the plan?”
“Get Norris, then get fucked off out of here.”
“Works for me.”
Custard crept out of his cell. Even on full rations Custard looked like a wire rope with knots in it. After weeks in captivity he looked like and extra from The Walking Dead, but when he moved it was with silent precision. Ringo noticed his right hand was missing the ring and little fingers along with a chunk of the blade of his palm. Ringo remembered the injury from their first contact, back when everything had turned to shit.
“How’s the hand?” Ringo asked
“Smaller,” Custard replied. “But it still does the job,” he said and made an obscene gesture with his deformed hand.
Custard’s vulgarity was legendary throughout the Regiment. This in itself was impressive. Soldiering was not a profession known for its delicacy. Custard took pride in living up to his nickname, which was a contraction of the two words most frequently used to describe him.
Ringo stayed on watch outside Norris’s door while Custard poked his head inside to wake their team-mate.
“Wake up, you nugget,” Custard hissed. “You’re going to sleep through your own escape!”
He crept inside and emerged a couple of seconds later. “Not home,” he said. “Must still be at the meadow.”
They had always been blindfolded when they had been taken for interrogation, but Ringo knew the route welclass="underline" along the corridor to the spiral stair, fifteen steps up then another corridor, a breath of cool air but not enough to be outside then another staircase, dog-leg this time not spiral and into an area that smelled of piss sluiced away with not quite enough antiseptic.
He needn't have bothered memorising the route. Every exit off the corridor was sealed with automatic doors that looked strong enough to hold off a tank. They made their way along the corridor and up the stair by the blood-red emergency lighting. The whole base seemed to be shut down by whatever emergency had triggered the lights and automatic doors, and yet their cells had sprung open and the route through the lab to the exit was unaffected.
Ringo had learned a healthy distrust of coincidence, especially when it was in his favour and he had the unpleasant feeling that they were being channelled towards something, but why? Anyway, there was no way it could be worse than another hour in the meadow.
He recognised the lab by its smell. It even looked like a urinal with white ceramic tiles covering the walls and floor. Computers on wheeled workstations trailed cables across the tiles and another thick black rope of zip-tied cables led to what looked like a dentist's chair at the centre of the room.
Norris lay strapped into the chair, thrashing against his restraints while two technicians fiddled with an intricate helmet that encased Norris's head. A wave or rage surged through Ringo. Despite the white lab coats, these men were still torturers.
Custard crossed the room in three strides and slammed his homemade shiv up under the ribcage of the first man.
Ringo slammed an elbow into the face of the second technician. He spun around behind the man, wrapped his forearms around a thin neck in a choke hold and rode him down to the ground, slamming his head into the tiles so hard they cracked.