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JAN 08 |
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“It's About Time”
Blackgate Prison
Exactly Nine Years, Two Months, Four Days, Seven Hours and Forty-Four Seconds Ago…
He remembers as if it were yesterday even though it was nine years, two months, four days, seven hours and forty-four seconds ago. The letter had been delivered to his cell at nine minutes and two seconds past six in the morning. The contents of the letter, merely two short paragraphs in length, carried horrible news; one more terrible event in a long progression of unfortunate occurrences that brought Bill Tockman to where he was that day.
“You get a letter, Bill?” his cellmate asked, surprised that anyone ever received mail within the confines of Blackgate Prison’s fences. He certainly never got any letters, but that, he attributed to the fact that he had no friends. “Never seen anybody get mail here. You must be special or something. Maybe you got your walking papers. Maybe you’re gonna be a free man.”
Bill Tockman surveyed the envelope, tears banging to escape from their ducts within the corners of his eyes before he even began to read. He knew from the return address that his greatest fear had become a reality. He silently cursed his bad luck although deep inside he knew that his luck was not bad, his life was. He knew that after opening and reading the letter, all that was possibly good in his life was gone and all that would be left was the bad.
“I’ll be a free man, Putty,” Tockman finally answered his cellmate after an uncomfortable silence. “Once we break out of here, we’ll both be free men.”
“Whoa there, partner,” Putty backed up. His small pale white hands slapped the flesh of his perfectly bald head as he voiced his objections. “Nobody busts out of Blackgate. Nobody’d be stupid enough to try. I ain’t breaking out, I only got six months till I’m up for parole.”
“Six months, two weeks, one hour and nine minutes,” Tockman corrected. “You’ll be lucky to survive that long with all the talk going around the yard about you and Bivolo. Popular belief is that you and he have been sneaking out behind the oak tree for some private romancing.”
Putty’s face dropped in disgust and horror as he fought for a reply. “What the hell?!” he yelled. “Me and Rainbow Raider shacking up?!” His eyes darted around, struggling to come to grips with this terrible rumor. Panic set in as he realized that this horrific story could mean his end if it got to the right people; and by ‘right’, I mean ‘wrong.’
“But…” Putty stammered. “But…Rainbow Raider’s a man!!”
“I figured you’d have figured that out by now, what with the details I’ve heard about your secret rendezvous. Didn’t your momma teach you that boys have pee-pees and girls have boobies? A smart guy like you should know better than to learn the birds and bees while incarcerated in a high security prison,” Clock King declared as he stood from his cot. He stood for a moment in silence as he watched Putty’s demeanor crumble. Deep beneath his concealed sorrow was a smile a mile long relishing his cellmate’s discomfort.
“I’d tell you how long I think you’ve got until the Big Boyz hear about this and crack your ass up to your skull but I don’t think you’re in the mood for numerical analysis at the moment,” he said.
“But it ain’t true!” Putty demanded through the welling of fitful tears. “I ain’t like that! I got a wife on the outside! I got two little boys!”
“Bullshit,” Tockman stated as he looked down at his frail cellmate. “You stalked and killed some Hollywood starlet and raped her two sons! Why do you think you’re in here, you ridiculous piece of crap?”
Putty’s eyes widened at the realization that he indeed did not have a wife or kids but had stalked, killed and raped three individuals that he had been convinced belonged to him. He was a bad man, not a family man. He was a killer, not a lover and most certainly not a lover of men. With his realization came anger and with his anger came strength. His puny, nearly albino body began to pulsate with the rhythm of his heart’s pounding while his eyes glazed with milky discharge.
“I don’t like it in here anymore, Bill,” Putty grumbled as his arms began to inflate with solid muscle. The power inhibitor around his neck glitched with sparks as his torso and neck expanded to push the inhibitor’s capabilities to their maximum.
“You still want to wait for your parole hearing, Putty?” Clock King asked, already well aware of the answer.
Through the grunts and growls of Putty’s hulkish metamorphosis, cohesive words became incomprehensible, only actions were suitable substitutes for his answers. His upper body, now grown to immense size and imposing width, heaved itself to the wall that faced the prison yard with all of its formidable weight.
Tockman smirked as he watched, finding enormous amusement in seeing Putty in action at the height of his full metamorphosis. Putty’s powers grant him inhuman stature and strength only from the waist up, leaving his lower body at the same nigh anemic state as his unpowered frame. This, Tockman assured himself, was most likely what gave Putty his inadequacies with the ladies, able to lift and hurl a bus yet unable to hold himself up.
As Putty toppled to the floor, an unfortunate guard had finally arrived to quell the current disturbance with gun at his ready and macho guard talk on the tip of his tongue. Tockman saw the guard approach and face the bars of their cell and instantly shifted into character. He hurled himself at the bars and screamed for his life.
“Guard, thank goodness for you and your gun,” Tockman pleaded, hidden internal smile broadening as he convinced himself that he could make it on Broadway. “This pasty inflatable brute that I have to share space with is going nuts and I think he’s going to kill me!”
Putty used one of his huge meaty fists and pounded at the wall. Powdered rock and old mortar rained down from the point of impact as the guard ogled in dismay. Growing nervous and yet to warn the prisoner to calm himself, the guard instead raised his pistol and readied to empty its entire load into the white beast.
As the guard’s finger applied pressure to the trigger, Tockman jolted his arm through the bars with remarkable speed and latched himself to the guard’s forearm. Pulling with all of his might, Tockman smashed the mustached guard into the bars, dislodging several teeth from the man’s mouth as well as the gun from his unconscious hold. Scattering to retrieve the firearm from the floor, Tockman grabbed the unopened envelope and shoved it into his dirty prison shoe. Cocking the gun, he awaited the coming of further armed guards. It was but a matter of seconds, approximately twelve point eight of them, before Putty bashed through the wall and Tockman could make his escape.
Calamity had escalated within the prison around them as the other prisoners had heard the pounding on the walls and saw the lone guard rushing to investigate only to hear seconds later the slumping of his body to the floor. Putty’s pounding continued as he desperately attempted to gain freedom to avoid having his ass cracked at the hands and midsections of the treacherous Big Boyz. The wall was coming apart but would not fall before the arrival of more guards.
Tockman held the gun and waited, counting accurately to twelve and exacting the eight tenths of a second of his original estimation and found that he was incorrect. Thirteen seconds passed as he waited, subsequently followed a mere second later by fourteen seconds, which dragged out to fifteen seconds and the wall was still holding them prisoner. Sixteen seconds passed before Clock King heard the hinged metal doors at the end of the long hallway swing open and the numerous clomping of incoming guards.
At the rate it was progressing, with Putty assaulting the stone at one bash per two point one seconds and the disorganized clatter of footsteps covering approximated three and a half feet per running step, with the hallway spreading about ninety-eight feet from the door, Tockman was beginning to think he was going to run out of time. But Bill Tockman wouldn’t be the Clock King if he didn’t know a thing or two about time.
Reaching his arm and the gun within his hand through the bars, Tockman bent his elbow and pointed the pistol down the hall. Pulling the trigger blindly, he fired three shots at random. Twenty seconds and the damn wall was still there. One additional pull of the trigger brought an instant howl of pain from an approaching guard, immediately followed by the cacophony of the other guards tripping over his wounded body. Tockman smiled at his good fortune, finding that all of his luck was not truly bad.
He shook himself out of his momentary embrace with pride and knew he needed to do something else. He watched nervously as Putty pounded the wall once again, this time unsettling a generous portion of mortar from the base of the ceiling and the two adjacent walls. Tockman figured, from the look of things, that Putty’s next hit would be the last. The guards would arrive within the next two point one seconds, no doubt with guns blazing indiscriminately, whether he was innocent or not. His whole plot to drive Putty to an emotional breakdown had taken weeks and it now seemed to be falling apart. The wall would fall, then Putty would fall, and soon after, if not before or simultaneous to that, Clock King would fall.
Tockman counted to one point six and leapt across the cell. Putty’s fist smashed once again into the wall and this time, it collapsed. Bricks rained down upon him even as Bill Tockman shot past. Airborne and assaulted by falling rock, Tockman made his way into the daylight. Gunfire erupted as he made his exit but he was under too many other stresses to take them into account. The bricks hurt like hell and, as he would soon discover, he had a thirty foot drop below him. Once again, Tockman reverted to his luck of old.
It took Clock King three and seven tenths seconds to hit the ground. Counting the time made the fall tolerable, keeping his mind off the inevitable discomfort that would very soon come upon him.
With a squish, Tockman hit the earth and was driven eight inches into the mud underfoot. The yard had been in disrepair for several months now due to a sewage problem. Mud, dirt and prisoner feces and urine mingled into a giant mess into which he had imbedded himself. He pulled his leg with all of the strength that he had, half of him thankful that he had landed softly, the other half holding back the urge to constantly gag. Quickly exhausting himself, he barely yanked one leg free and started on the next.
He jumped in horror as Putty splattered into the ground behind him. The resultant splash of mud and the miniature tsunami of filth imbalanced the precarious Clock King as he pulled at his left. Losing his ability to stay upright, Tockman fell face first into the sludge.
Sputtering obscenities carefully so as to avoid getting junk in his mouth, Tockman turned to yell at Putty to his face but Putty had already sank into the mud. Bullet holes riddled the behemoth as he laid spread eagle on his face. He did not move and thus was not in a state to receive the brunt of Tockman’s displeasure.
Barely able to see through his soiled face, Tockman realized that Putty was most likely dead. Then he heard the gunshots start again and his momentary guilt over the loss of his cellmate was vanquished. That was not so bad, Clock King estimated; he would have felt bad for about six minutes and seventeen seconds under normal circumstances. This just sped up the process that would have wasted all of that time.
The shower of bullets, any of which could kill him dead, sped up Tockman’s efforts to pull himself free. With a mighty yank made possible by the influx of primal adrenaline, he got his leg out, unfortunately leaving his shoe and sock behind. With little time to contemplate his future moves, he sprinted straight away from the prison half barefoot.
The alarm claxon blared with an annoying honk, like that of a giant robot goose set to destroy the Empire State Building. The searchlight bolted back and forth through the yard, as if in search of the giant robot goose. The guns continued to fire at him and Tockman wished that the giant robot goose was indeed preparing to destroy the Empire State Building solely for the reason for the guards to shoot at something other than him.
He took seven bounding leaps that he considered as sprinting bounds before he remembered that he had stuffed his letter into his prison shoe, which was, unfortunately, lost in the mud. The bullets whirred past him as he stopped, stuck at an emotional crossroad. It had been so long since Bill Tockman had been at an emotional crossroad that he had forgotten what it was like. After a few seconds, he decided that he hated coming to emotional crossroads.
Dodging unseen bullets, attempting to time his darting and weaving back to where he had landed, Tockman dove to his belly in a desperate try to get the envelope from his buried shoe. He assumed that he would slide across the slick surface but was terribly wrong. He skidded to an immediate halt as mud and crap got into his pants and squirted into his face. As much as he had tried to avoid it previously, he got some in his mouth too.
A shot splatted into the earth directly in front of him as he lay flat on his belly, spitting out the grotesquery as best as he could. Hectically, he crawled toward the hole where he had left his shoe. Pulling himself along the ground, he was within four feet of his goal when something snagged a hold on his ankle. He looked behind him to his foot and saw the chain wrapped around it, constricting with each passing second.
He stopped crawling when he could crawl no more, the chain pulled tight from its source. He followed the length of the chain with his eyes to discover its source and knew instantly that he was screwed. All thoughts of possessing good luck drained from his person with such force that it would seem impossible for them ever to return as he saw the unmistakable guise of the Master Jailer.
The gray uniform worn by the master carried no hint of the muddy mess that Tockman was covered in, the white and black stripes were expertly laundered. Through the full face mask, the Master Jailer sported a master smile as he held the chain that kept Tockman in place.
“Do you seriously plan to escape from the Master Jailer?” the Master Jailer asked with a scoff of incredulity. Tockman hated it when costumed types referred to themselves in the third person. It was a habit that he was going to do his damnedest to avoid once he had attained his freedom.
“Black Gate Prison is under the eye of the Master Jailer and no one will escape as long as the Master Jailer has his eye on Black Gate Prison,” the Jailer exclaimed. His overabundance of self reference was making Tockman wish that he had been shot in the head earlier.
Tockman pulled himself with all of his might trying to get to the hole and retrieve his letter but could not budge from the hold that the Jailer had on the chain.
“Escaping is impossible for all criminals, especially the likes of the Clock King,” the Jailer yelled, exerting seemingly no effort to keep Tockman in place.
“The Clock King! Can there possibly be a more pitiful excuse for a villain? A more ridiculous name cannot be found! I stand here and watch the Clock King covered in filth and I laugh at both him and his deplorable attempt to escape from my prison!”
Clock King yanked one more time on the chain with his leg and it was becoming evident that his efforts were no use. Not only was he being humiliated but he was being humiliated by the Master Jailer, and the Clock King would have none of that.
Tockman screamed as he pulled one final time, hefting all of his strength, pulling his leg with both arms and ignorant to the pain of his exertion. He heard the snap of his ankle as he heaved but his leg moved. The chain gave just enough and he fell back a few feet. The Master Jailer, still holding the chain as Tockman pulled, flew forward as the chain slackened. Had Tockman not been so determined to disregard his ankle injury and so intent on his letter retrieval he would have laughed at the Jailer as he fell flat on his face into the mud, dirtying the cleanliness of the immaculate costume.
Tockman forced his hand into the hole and sloshed around for a fraction less than five seconds. With a smile, he pulled the soggy letter from the hole and clutched it to his chest. A smile crept to his face as he relaxed and waited to be recaptured.
Two hours, thirteen minutes and thirty-four seconds passed in which time Bill Tockman had been recaptured, cleaned, redressed and doctored. The sponge bath administered to him by the male nurse had been uncomfortable but the pain killers put into his system did their job too well. He had not a care in the world. His ankle was placed in a splint and he would spend a good portion of the remainder of his prison sentence in isolation due to his escape attempt.
When the drugs ran their course, perhaps he could blame the whole escapade on Putty. His pale former cellmate had, according to Tockman, gone completely out of his mind. Maybe he could convince the warden that he had only leapt from the hole on the cell in order to escape unavoidable harm from Putty’s misdirected rage. But that didn’t matter at this point. All that mattered was the pain killers. As soon as the pain killers stopped mattering so much, all that would matter would be the letter.
Convalescing from a serious injury would take a while especially within the unsanitary confines of the prison, but he hoped it would take long enough for him to come up with another escape plan, this time with a more adequate flunky to manipulate to his will.
As day turned into night, Bill Tockman rested in bed, alone and carefree. The carefree feelings were artificial and would pass with time, but he would always be alone. Or so he thought.
“Clock King,” an unfamiliar voice whispered more than once until Tockman was roused from his drug induced nap. “Clock King! Wake the hell up!”
Tockman was slow to awaken, the artificial sleepiness still blurring his senses. As he regained minimal consciousness, he was soon to realize he had a visitor within his cell. Upon four seconds of sluggish brain activity, he recalled that he was confined to solitary, thus making it improbable for him to receive guests.
“Who the what?” Clock King asked through a mouth full of dried saliva.
The man, a thirty-something unshaven redhead with thick amber-stained glasses and a dirty off-white trench coat, smiled as he tossed a clean pile of clothes onto the groggy criminal. Atop the clothes was the unmistakable mask that Tockman used for his outside activities as Clock King.
“Get up,” the stranger demanded as the nearby wall began to glow an eerie orange color. “Clock King has business elsewhere.”
The wall formed a door, opened to show the interior of a great engine that filled a room the size of a gymnasium. Terribly loud noises that would have surely woken everyone within the prison erupted from the entryway. The stranger walked the three steps to the doorway and turned to Tockman, who was still pondering the significance of the stranger’s, and the door’s, presence.
As he pondered, quickly growing more awake as the milliseconds clicked by in his head, he found that the questions did not matter. Neither did answers. All that mattered was the door. The door out.
He grabbed his new bundle of clothes quickly, grinning as he touched his clock faced mask. His leg gave out beneath him, having forgotten that his ankle was broken. He fell with a thump and a muted growl of intense discomfort. The stranger grabbed him by the arm and yanked him through the doorway.
The orange portal dissipated in less than one half second after they had passed through as Tockman realized that, in his hurry, he had forgotten something. Between the grogginess running through him from the pain killers and the pain he had recently rediscovered from his broken ankle, he could not actually recall what it was that he was forgetting.
He twisted around and sat up as he looked around the enormous engine room. Upon instant investigation, he saw that it was much bigger than a gymnasium, and not nearly as loud as it seemed from the prison cell. There were tubes and gears everywhere, as far to the left and right as he could see. There were moving parts and pistons reaching into the sky toward a ceiling that was too tall to be visible.
Tockman had to admit, he was confused.
“I’m Robby Reed,” the red haired stranger said as he observed Tockman’s perplexity. Tockman shook off the sense of insignificance he felt under the enormity of the engine thing long enough to address his situation with a clearer mind.
“Bill,” he replied, stating his name with a little bit of uncertainty. “Clock King,” he corrected himself. The name sounded better. Much more menacing. Maybe.
“Well, Clock King,” Reed said with a nefarious smile, “welcome to my house.”
“Where are we?” Tockman asked as he attempted to scratch beneath the cast on his broken ankle.
“We’re outside, Clock King,” Reed replied. “That’s how we work.”
“We, who?” Tockman asked, his confusion frustrating.
“The Outsiders.”
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To Be Continued...
Next: In Outsiders #2: Clock King meets the Outsiders…or does he?
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