Chapter Text
The guard wasn’t exactly gentle with John as he escorted him away from the rec yard, but he didn’t punch, kick, or hit John with his baton to get him to move faster, so John considered that a win. John waited until he was alone in his cell and uncuffed before reaching to assess the damage to his face. Split lip, bruised cheek, bloodied nose, though fortunately not broken. Lots of bruises all over his body, but that was hardly anything to concern him. They’d all had prison-issued footwear, so no steel-toed boots to break the skin or cause excessive damage. Surprisingly, none of them had a shiv, either, which John thought they’d have.
All in all, a much better outcome than he’d expected when he saw the guards leaving the yard as the Aryans approached him with violence in their swagger.
The Aryan bastard who’d hit him first didn’t have the strongest punch. He talked a good game, but like most other Aryans John had encountered over the years, with the exception of this one’s boss, he was more proud than capable. Probably had a pencil-sized dick to go along with his boasting, John thought, chuckling to himself. Bear was much better off with him and Harold.
He leaned back against the wall, settling in to wait. He was concerned that Elias had called them off him. He hadn’t thought Elias would be so squeamish, and he surely knew that John could take a lot more damage than the other prisoners had been dishing out. Had Carter given them away by voicing concern and somehow letting Elias know to stop it?
Whether the order originated from Elias or Carter, the prisoners beating him had been called off too soon. To John, it felt like he’d been made, or was about to be made.
It had been difficult not to fight back. He’d wanted to show off, to kick their sorry racist Aryan asses as far as he could, but John Warren wouldn’t have been able to take down that many men, and he had to be John Warren for the time being, he reminded himself. He thought of the interrogation just now, how Donnelly had made Carter ask about his fake girlfriend’s birthdate, and how she’d tapped her fingers twice against her cheek and he’d been able to rattle off the date that Harold had already programmed into the file without missing a beat. He closed his eyes and thought of Harold, sitting at his desk in the library backfilling the details of Warren’s life as quickly as he could, how he’d given ‘Ally’ a birthdate exactly two days, two months, and two years after Jessica’s. It was one of the rare times that he was grateful that Harold knew his life as well as he did.
How would Harold have taken the incident in the yard? He’d have been furious, John knew, and scared. He never seemed to trust that John could take as much punishment as he could. He always worried about him whenever he was in the field. John had gotten used to it, though, used to Harold’s worried voice in his ear during a fistfight or a firefight. He’d gotten used to Harold’s concern. He’d gotten used to the way Harold occasionally called him ‘John’ when he was especially worried.
From inside his mattress the cell phone Harold left him started to buzz. John frowned. He was sure he’d turned it off after the brief, whispered conversation with Harold the night before when they confirmed how they were going to deal with Harold backfilling data during the interrogation and the tricks they’d use to match their answers if Harold had to put the data in before John said it. It seemed pointless now, because John would have added three days, months and years to Ally’s birthdate if Harold hadn’t told Carter to let him know that their number was two.
Trust Harold to change some detail at the last minute and make things more complicated.
Glancing around to make sure no one was lurking to watch him, John pulled out the phone. Definitely on, it buzzed incessantly. He flipped it open.
“Can. You. Hear. Me?” asked the now-familiar mechanized voices of the Machine.
“Yes,” John whispered.
“Admin Access temporarily granted to Primary Asset: Reese, John.” The Machine’s cadence became steadier, more fluid, though the flow of altering voices for each word remained unchanged.
“What does that mean?” John asked.
“Admin Access temporarily granted to Primary Asset: Reese, John,” the Machine repeated.
“Does Harold know about this?” John demanded, frustrated. Clearly, talking to the Machine wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. He wondered if this was why Harold stopped talking to it in the first place.
“No.”
“Why do I get access?”
“Admin Access required for Primary Asset: Reese, John to complete extraction of Admin.”
“Is Harold in trouble?”
“Probability of Admin requiring extraction: 83.675%,” the Machine answered.
“Where is he?”
Before the Machine could answer, an explosion rocked the prison complex, quickly followed by three more. Alarms blared and emergency lighting sprang to life. Prisoners in other cells began shouting and banging on the bars. He saw several guards run past his cell, guns already in their hands.
“Tap me into their frequency,” John demanded of the Machine, and suddenly he could hear all the radio chatter of the guards and the Machine turned on the speakerphone feature without his direction. Four explosions, in four separate buildings in the complex. The Electrical building, taking out the main generators. All cells would be in lock-down, electronically sealed when the power went out. The Communication building, crippling the phone lines, cell tower, wi-fi and fiber optics cables. The Armory, covering all the extra guns and ammunition in tons of rubble. Lastly, the opposite end of the building from where John’s cell was situated. Inmates in that part of the building were breaking free of their damaged cells and attacking the guards or trying to escape.
“Where’s Harold?” John asked again, and the Machine told him: The roof, four cells down from John’s, two floors up. More explosions rocked the building, and John was thrown to the floor. He scrambled to get the phone and keep it safe. It was his only connection to the Machine and information. The guards were shouting more loudly. An entire wall of the building collapsed, leaving six levels of inmates staring into their freedom. They started climbing down and jumping. The snipers started shooting.
“I need a weapon!”
“Eight o’clock,” the Machine answered. John turned, seeing a crack in the wall of his cell. He dislodged a large brick and hefted it.
“Not a gun, but it’ll do.”
“Twelve o’clock,” the Machine said. John frowned.
“There’s nothing there. It’s just a hole in the —“
“Twelve o’clock,” the Machine insisted.
Leaving caution to the wind, John reached into the hole… and touched smooth metal. It felt like aluminum, like a ventilation duct. He pounded his brick against the wall, trying to use the faults in the damaged part to widen the crack and make the hole deeper.
From down the hall, John heard gunfire. Guards and inmates were taking their battle closer to him. He increased his speed. With adrenaline fueling him, John managed to widen the hole enough so that he could crouch inside to get at the duct. Another burst of gunfire and a guard collapsed next to the bars of John’s cell. He jumped down, reached through the bars towards the body. The man in the next cell reached, too, getting ahold of the guard’s foot. John snagged the keys and tugged, pulling them free of the guard’s belt loop.
“Stay!” the Machine shouted at him as he was going through the keys to find the one to his cell. With any luck, the physical key could override the emergency lockdown. John glanced at the phone and dismissed it. Getting his cell open was a far better plan than a hole in the wall. He stood and faced the bars.
“He’s down this hall! Let’s kill the bastard while we have the chance!”
John recognized his Aryan friend’s voice. He counted six sets of footsteps. Three guns cocked. He had to assume the others were armed. He was a sitting duck in his cell, and getting it open would only help them.
“Six o’clock,” the Machine called, and John swung around to face his hole in the wall. “Cross,” the Machine said.
“Cross?” John asked himself. “What does —“
The Aryans were closing in on his location. Another gunshot against metal and the thanks of his neighbor. They were adding to their ranks, and he knew his neighbor had a shiv.
A shiv?
He looked at the ring of keys in his hands and noticed the Swiss army knife. A cross!
“Twelve o’clock,” the Machine said, and John finally understood. He opened the biggest blade on the knife — three inches, barely sharp — and tore a hole in the ventilation duct.
John had just crawled into the duct when an explosion right outside his cell sent the Aryans flying. He smelled teargas. He watched, holding himself in place with bare feet on the insides of the duct and his hands — wrapped in part of his orange jumpsuit — clinging to the bottom of the hole he’d carved. He blinked his eyes at the sting of the teargas, but clean air came rushing through the vent, giving him something clearer to breathe.
He heard another blast and watched a second teargas canister roll down the hall past his cell, directly into the group of Aryans who were struggling to their feet.
“Come on, he’s not worth this!” one of them shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”
John heard the scramble of them leaving, and beyond that, another set of footsteps back the way they’d come. Purposeful strides, yet strangely lopsided. He closed his eyes, hoping he was wrong.
“Where’s Harold?” he asked softly. The radio chatter cut out long enough for the Machine to answer, then resumed.
“John?” Harold’s voice was high and reedy, full of anxiety, but strangely free of pain.
“You shouldn’t have come, Harold,” John answered, pulling himself out of the duct and approaching the cell door as Harold arrived.
Harold, dressed in a three-piece suit, as usual, wore a bullet-proof vest loose over it. The damn thing wouldn’t be any help against bullets! Hadn’t he taught Harold anything about protecting himself? He also had an assault rifle over his shoulder, a teargas launcher in his hands, and several handguns strapped to his waist. At least he’d come prepared, even if he’d already pushed off the gas mask.
“I’d never leave you in a place like this, Mr. Reese,” Harold declared. He put down the teargas launcher, took off the assault rifle and shrugged out of the vest. “Detective Carter is in the middle of interrogating the unlucky Mr. James, buying us some time here. I hope the bombs gave us even more of a distraction. It’ll take a minute to override the lock, but I paid a guard $25,000 cash to get a set of keys, no questions asked,” he added.
John reached a hand through the bars. “I need an earwig,” he told him, deciding that having the Machine in his ear was more important than lecturing Harold about the proper use of a vest or his money. Harold reached in a pocket and handed him one, along with a new phone. Harold shoved the vest through the bars and tried to pass the rifle through, but it wouldn’t fit, so he offered the handguns instead. “Please tell me you have a vest of your own,” John said as he was tightening the straps on his.
“Do you think me naive, Mr. Reese? Of course I’m wearing one. I have several suits tailored just for that eventuality,” he said haughtily, as if he expected John to know that already. John kept his sigh to himself. He should’ve assumed. Harold would never be seen wearing army fatigues when he could have a bespoke suit tailored specifically for an assault on a maximum security prison. John slipped back into his shoes and checked the handguns, then switched one phone for the other and inserted the earwig. Silence. The radio chatter had shut off.
“Can you hear me?” John asked.
“What —“
“Yes,” the Machine answered, talking over Harold in John’s ear.
“You have an extraction route planned?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Harold was staring at him, even as his fingers flew over the screen of his phone to work on unlocking John’s cell. Harold’s phone beeped, and he glanced down, sighing in relief. He pulled out the keys he’d gotten from the guard he bribed and unlocked the door. John had the rifle in his hands instantly.
“Which way?” John asked, handing the teargas launcher to Harold. “Put your mask on and be ready to fire that when I tell you,” he ordered his boss.
Reluctantly, Harold followed his directions, moving behind him as they walked down the hall. At the end, John turned left.
“Mr. Reese, we need to go right to get to —“
“There are seventeen guards between us and the car,” John interrupted. “And once they know we’re going that way, there’ll be even more. We go this way.”
Harold gave him a hard look before speaking again. “The Machine's talking to you, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” John answered. Harold frowned. “It said it needed to so I could get you out of here,” John explained.
“It’s not supposed to be able to do that!” Harold hissed, even as he turned to follow John down the hall.
“Well, it is,” John answered. “Get back,” he ordered, throwing out an arm to stop Harold’s forward movement. Four guards turned the corner, and John disabled them with six quick shots to the knees. They continued on. “You’re moving better than usual,” John finally commented as they reached a stairwell and started climbing. “Faster, more range of motion…”
“The nerve block will last another hour,” Harold replied, grimacing as he hauled himself up the stairs. “An hour and a half if I’m lucky. I have morphine in the car for when it runs out, but…” he trailed off.
“There’s no morphine on the roof,” John finished for him. “You’re risking destroying your hip and your mobility for me? Harold —“
“I spent six months in a wheelchair after my accident,” Harold hissed. “Another six months to assure your safety is nothing compared to the alternative,” he declared firmly.
They stopped at the roof-access door so Harold could catch his breath and John could consult with the Machine about what to expect beyond the door. Most of the guards were still trying to keep the inmates under control, but there were dozens throughout the prison and at least some of them would be on the roof. John deliberately closed off his feelings. Now was not the time to consider Harold’s words or actions or desire to save lives. Now was not the time to worry about him. Now was not the time to think about what it meant that Harold would risk his mobility for John's life, or the potential feelings behind such a sacrifice.
He had a mission: get Harold safely away from Rikers.
“Stay behind me and keep low,” John said, loosening his limbs. “There’s a chopper 250 yards away. We get there, we’re gonna be fine.”
“I trust you, John,” Harold replied softly.
“On three."
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