Imprisoned Read online

  Ari assumed that would be where he’d have to bite—the place where she was hurt. She’d never been a big fan of injections or needles and the idea of allowing the big Kindred to sink his deadly fangs into her flesh was frightening.

  Still…if the alternative was having her eye fall out…

  She reached up gingerly and patted around the base of her swollen left eye. Could he have been reading the X-ray wrong? Was she really in that much danger? She wasn’t having any of the symptoms he’d warned about but what if she started having double vision or getting blinding headaches or—the Goddess of Mercy forbid—what if her eye started sinking into its socket? What if—

  “No indeed, Laundry’s not nearly the worse job in the joint,” Wheezer said cheerfully, interrupting her frantic thoughts.

  “Oh?” Ari said, trying to drag her mind away from the morbid topic of possibly losing her eye. “What…what is the worst job then?”

  “Oh shower cleaner’s no fun. Lots of dirtiness and filth because so many of the inmates use the shower as their pleasure center-like,” the old man said matter-of-factly. He made a fist with one hand and jerked it back and forth near his groin to illustrate his point. “And pot cleaner’s no fun either,” he continued as Ari felt her face get red. “Nor is latrine cleaner—that’s for those as have to use the communal toilets because they aren’t trustees.” He flicked a speck of imaginary dust off the sleeve of his green and blue striped trustee uniform with elaborate care. “But the very worst job has got to be muck-raker—so it has.”

  “Muck-raker?” Ari shook her head. “Do I even want to know what that is?”

  “It’s a punishment assignment, so it is and no mistake.” Wheezer nodded knowingly. “It’s for when one of the toilets gets clogged up. You have to go down into the overflow yard where the pipes pour out their filth and get it unclogged. Like being in a big metal cage full of shit, so it is. No fun, that!”

  “No, it…doesn’t sound like it,” Ari said faintly. “So what do we do in the Laundry?”

  “Oh, I’ll show you, my lad. You’ll see…you’ll learn…”

  Laundry duty might not be the worst prison job but it certainly wasn’t the easiest either, Ari reflected after several back-breaking hours of labor. The huge industrial laundry room was in the bowls of the prison. It had seven huge washers but only three dryers. The constant heat the machinery generated meant that the metal walls were always sweating with condensation and the humidity had Ari’s prison jumpsuit sticking between her shoulder blades inside of fifteen minutes.

  The most laborious step in the process came between taking the clothes from the washers and feeding them into one of the huge industrial dryers. Since the material was soaking wet, it had to be wrung out or pressed before it could safely go into a dryer.

  “Or it could cause a short and fry us all! So it could, so it could,” Wheezer told her, cackling merrily at the thought.

  In order to get the excess moisture out, the sodden jumpsuits were fed into several small clothes presses—none of which could do more than a single jumpsuit at a time. The suits had to be fed in, one by one, and then hand-cracked through the press in a process that wrung out the water before they were thrown into a rolling bin of uniforms ready for the dryer.

  It was a backbreaking process that had Ari’s arms aching in no time since, as a newbie inmate, she was of course assigned the most difficult job. The inmates with more seniority loaded the washers and dryers or took turns on folding duty while Wheezer, as a trustee, only had to supervise.

  “Why don’t they have a bigger clothes press?” Ari asked after what felt like hours of cranking wet, sodden garments through one of the hand-operated presses. “Something that can do more than one uniform at a time?”

  “Oh, we do—we do.” He nodded vigorously, the dim overhead lights winking off his cracked oculars. “It’s just over there.”

  He pointed to a huge drum-like machine in the corner of the laundry, to one side of the row of washers.

  “But it’s broken, so it is. Stopped working more than a cycle ago and none of the lads who tried have had any luck fixing it. And of course the Yonnite Mistresses who own BleakHall ain’t going to buy us a new one—no they ‘ent! Why, what do they care if our arms break off cranking those presses?”

  Ari wanted to point out that it was her arms about to break off—Wheezer did nothing but go around the room gossiping as far as she could see. His tongue was the only part of him that got any exercise.

  But she was wise enough to hold her own tongue this time, remembering how her remarks to Tapper the day before had only made her situation worse. Maybe BleakHall was teaching her something about discretion—if so, it was certainly a hard way to learn that particular lesson.

  “Can I have a look at the big press?” she asked Wheezer. “Maybe I can fix it.”

  “Oh, handy with a tool-belt, are you, lad?” He gave her an interested look. “Sure, you can try, I suppose. But I’m afraid I mislike your chances, so I do. As I said, lots of lads had a crack at it back when it first broke and none could get it going again.”

  “Let me just try,” Ari said. She’d always been handy with mechanical things and even if she couldn’t fix the beast of a machine sitting in the corner gathering dust, at least poking around in its works was better than this eternal cranking.

  “Just as you please.” Wheezer nodded at her genially. “But if you need some tools, I’ll have to sign them out for you. Can’t have wrenches and hammers and the like just lying around in a Triple Max pen, don’t you know.”

  “I guess not,” Ari said. “Well, let me see what I can see.”

  She found the latch to open the side of the machine and began poking around inside. Wheezer helpfully held a glowstick over her head so she could see what she was doing. It took a little digging, but before long Ari found the problem.

  They must not have very mechanically-minded inmates here, she thought. It’s nothing but a slipped belt!

  Possibly none of the men who had tried to fix the machine had even seen the problem, though. It was far back in a corner behind the engine cover and Ari doubted any of their big hands would fit in such a tiny area.

  She got her own hands black to the elbows with grease getting the belt back in place but it was worth it the moment she flipped the switch and watched the machine begin to chug.

  “Well, I’m a nunky’s uncle, so I am!” Wheezer cried. “That’s a good job you did, lad. You’re a fix-it, so you are! A fix-it! I’ll be sure to tell Mukluk.”

  “Um, all right. Thank you, I guess,” Ari said uncertainly. The other inmates gathered around to pat her on the back and the second load of jumpsuits they’d put in the washers was done in no time.

  After her achievement, Ari was allowed to stand by Wheezer and talk instead of feeding the wet clothes into the machine she’d fixed. Since the old man seemed to know all about the prison and its inmates, she decided it was a good time to pick his brains.

  “Wheezer,” she said as he watched the industrial-sized press at work. “Do you know of an inmate called Jak? Jak Blackthorn?”

  “Heh?” Wheezer frowned at her. “Blackthorn?”

  “He’s about a head taller than me,” Ari said. “Black hair and blue eyes—a shade lighter than mine. He’s in his twenties.”

  “Oh, young fella with a little scar on the bridge of his nose just here?” Wheezer pointed to his own face to demonstrate and Ari nodded eagerly. Jak had gotten that scar playing tuk-ball with their father when he was just a kid and it had never really faded.

  “Yes, that’s him! Do you know where he is? I’ve been looking for him in the Mess Hall but I haven’t seen him.”

  “Were you in lock-up with him somewhere else?” Wheezer asked.

  “Yes, exactly. Do you know where he is?”

  “Well, now—I haven’t seen him in some time but we are on different floors. Last I heard he was assigned to the prison garden and that’s clear across the complex, so it is.”