The Prisoner Read Online Free PDF Page B

sagged onto the floor. Rather than standing, Laurel edged toward Bastien on all fours, her arms and knees wobbly.
    The green hose tightened, lifting Bastien’s head a few inches from the floor before sliding from his throat. As the tube contorted toward the machinery above, Bastien’s head thumped back onto the polymer floor.
    Laurel lunged over to him, reaching behind his head forthe fastener holding together his jelly net and tugging at his protective goggles. His eyes stared, fixed, unfocused, to a point somewhere over their heads.
    Oh, no, you don’t
. She yanked his neck ring and tore at the net, but she couldn’t remove it without lifting his slick body. “You bastard!” she screamed. He was too heavy to maneuver out of the jelly mess. With quick movements, she removed his nose plugs and lowered her ear to his gaping mouth. He wasn’t breathing. She rammed her fingers into his neck to check his carotid pulse; nothing. She pulled back one of Bastien’s eyelids, but his pupil didn’t react.
    “You bastard,” she insisted.
Chest compression is more important than ventilation
. Laurel strained to remember the precise details from a first-aid course she’d attended several years before. Swinging a leg over his body, she straddled Bastien.
One, two, three …
She lowered her weight and rammed her stacked hands on his sternum.
At least one hundred a minute. Ten, eleven, twelve …
Laurel jerked her head, scanning the bare walls for a defibrillation station. Nothing.
Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three
… At thirty, she stopped. He needed a shock to restart his heart.
    Again, she glanced quickly around the room for anything electric, a service outlet she knew wouldn’t be there. Still nothing.
One, two three
… A whine and two sharp clicks. Something moved overhead.
Seven, eight, nine …
Time for Raul. Laurel pushed and counted, her stomach twisted into a painful knot. Stopping again at thirty, she peered into Bastien’s unseeing eyes and started over.
    Either Bastien had suffered a cardiac arrest or something had malfunctioned in the life-support equipment. She knew there was someone helping them out from the inside, though she didn’t know his identity. But their plan hinged on the helper’s ability to bypass a high-level program and insert a subroutine to slip in a few lines of code. Perhaps the rogue program had conflicted with other computer instructions. It was a miracle she was alive. She darted a glance to the center of the tank—the limbo of forgotten souls—and to the twin wires separated from the others. Their goal. Laurel shuddered, her mind torn with conflicting emotions. For more than eightyears, Eliot Russo had floated under those wires, kept in the perfect form of bondage by a sadist. Eliot Russo, a man she’d never met but had learned to hate the moment she discovered his existence. A man probably insane after his ordeal. Yet, insane or not, he was proof of the system’s criminal abuse by the government. Laurel had sworn to expose the corruption in the Federal Bureau of Hibernation, but doing so by springing out the man she knew only as Eliot Russo was the ultimate paradox. Resentment burned her stomach.
    There were more whines and clicks as the hydraulic arm moved to raise another sac of sinew and bone from hibernation. What if Raul was dead or unconscious? She might as well dive into the icy fluid and breathe deep—anything but hibernation for life.
Thirty
. Again, she leaned to peer into Bastien’s eyes and, grinding her teeth with rage, resumed the cardiac massage with renewed vigor.
    The clicks stopped and the fluid rippled before Raul’s head surfaced. Underneath, the liquid boiled and lazy wavelets radiated from Raul’s torso. His enmeshed arms thrashed at the net, and a hand snaked through to reach for his goggles.
    Laurel closed her eyes as a wave of relief washed over her. She paused and drew in a deep breath, looked once more at Raul’s writhing shape, then resumed the