Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

Inside, I can hear panicked breaths, and the scuffling of frostbitten heels on cold concrete.

‘Who’s there?’ someone whispers. Maybe the same woman as before.

I don’t answer. If I don’t succeed in getting the prisoners out, I can’t risk any of them exposing me to the Guards.

I get out the phone and use the flashlight app to take a look around. Five shivering people, dazzled by the light, unable to see me behind it. Even with the space heater, their clothes are barely warm enough to keep them alive on a night like this. Sunken cheeks and hollow eyes. Doesn’t look very sexy to me. But what would I know?

The time I donated sperm, a tired-looking nurse led me into a small, windowless room with a TV, a chair covered in a giant paper towel and every subcategory of porn movie. I didn’t like any of it, and the fact that the nurse knew what I was doing in there made it almost impossible to get the job done. Soon I understood why the law student who loaned me his ID hadn’t wanted to do it himself. If I hadn’t needed the money so badly, I would have just left.

When I finally gave the sample cup back to the nurse, she told me that prospective couples often asked for her opinion of the donors. The pause after she said this implied that I wasn’t going to get any biological children. Fine by me.

But someone else got the ID later. I heard he loved the sterile room, the paper-cocooned chair, the nurse waiting right outside. It was all a turn-on for him.

I guess it’s all about taste. The Guards know what their audience likes.

One of the prisoners, an elf-eared woman, her blonde hair falling out, her wrists worn and bleeding, says, ‘Who are you?’ She has a loud, confident voice that’s at odds with her frail, skinny frame.

I shine the light on her restraints. Earlier I got a good look at the cuffs and the chains, but not how they were connected to the walls.

Most of the chains are looped through steel rings embedded in the concrete, or around the beams which hold up the ceiling. The P-38 can cut through the walls, but not the chains and definitely not the beams. Even if I wanted to release the prisoners, I couldn’t.

I point the light upwards, looking at the cameras mounted on the ceiling. They look better than the ones outside. Not security—they’re for making the videos that the Guards sell. High frame rate, high resolution.

Without those cameras, the Guards have no motive to torture the prisoners.

There’s a folding chair next to a stack of bricks in one corner. Some of the bricks are spattered with old bloodstains. None of the prisoners here look like they have matching injuries—the blood must be from a previous prisoner.

Fred’s voice in my head: You don’t need all this stuff to hurt someone. You can just use an electric kettle, or a screwdriver, or a hockey stick. Or a brick, I guess.

I pick it up, grunting with pain and conspicuously favouring one arm, as though the other one is injured. If the prisoners are later interrogated about me, I want them to give the Guards misleading clues. I unfold the chair under the bundle of cameras. One of the prisoners starts sobbing.

‘What are you doing?’ the woman demands. ‘Tell us what you want!’

I climb up onto the chair. I’m no electrical engineer, so this won’t be subtle.

I use the can opener to saw through all the cables I can see. It’s surprisingly tough, once I get through the rubber to the copper. When I slice through the second cable, a little red power light goes dead. I keep chopping until everything is shredded. I want the damage to be obvious. I crack the camera lenses with the handle, just in case Fred has spare cables back at the house.

‘You’re not one of them,’ the woman says, ‘are you?’

‘Holy shit,’ someone else says. I can’t see him well in the shadows, but he looks young, maybe twenty. Dark skin, dressed in tan rags.

‘My name’s Hailey.’ The woman talks slowly, like I’m a special kid. ‘What’s yours?’

I climb down off the chair and put it back where I found it.

‘You have to get us out of here,’ Hailey says. ‘You hear me? Those guys are gonna kill us.’

‘Please,’ someone else says.

I know what will happen if I speak up. One of the prisoners will repeat everything I say to the captors, hoping for mercy.

So I head back to the hole in the wall.

‘You can’t just leave us here!’ Hailey shouts.

I slip out, and bend the metal back into place behind me, sealing them in.

CHAPTER 9

I am a card, a loan, a fish. Who am I?

Scientists used to think sharks didn’t sleep, because they swam all day and night. But it turns out they do, at least according to a guy who once sat next to me on a Greyhound bus to Austin. He said one side of their brain sleeps, while the other side swims and hunts and fucks. Then they swap. Left, then right, then left again.

In an unfamiliar environment, humans do something similar. On your first night in a new bed, only half your brain sleeps. The other half stays awake to monitor threats. That’s why the scratching of a rat or the compressor in the fridge wakes you up at someone else’s place but not at your own.

Several times in the night, I’m woken by more distant howling. Maybe it’s human after all—except that I would have thought the slaughterhouse was too far from my window for sound to carry. It’s wordless, mindless. I go back to sleep with goosebumps all over my body.

The third or fourth