Hopeless

223.

No surveillance is necessary on Mr. Big. He sits in a 10 x 10 square concrete room containing a mattress and a stainless steel toilet with a sink above the water tank at its rear. To pass the time he alternates push ups with doing crossword puzzles in his head. The lights are always on for the 23 hours he will spend every day in maximum security at the joint they call SuperMax.

The missing hour is for outdoor 'exercise' in the cold Colorado mountains. His physical health is as poor as his mental. As he walks outside in a cheap gray cotton coat, self-hugging arms wrapped around his shoulders, exhaling blasts of warm air into the frigid early evening sky, he considers the events leading to this day and trusts there soon to be news of a second take. He is frail, having followed the directions to lose twenty-seven pounds for the daring escape on a crash diet, one that he has maintained for eight months, calling it a hunger strike. White bread and water will eventually starve your soul of reasons to endure.  

Warden Daniels takes great delight in his suffering. His reasoning that anyone sentenced to his facility, it a virtual Who's Who of celebrity criminals, deserves as much penance for their crimes against humanity as he can legally inflict. The enlightened observer might consider this to be cruel and unusual punishment with the greater of the crimes committed by the keeper of the keys. This single thought has kept Mr Big dry on the paradoxical high moral ground for many months, it is the protein that sustains his diet of protest.

It has been eight months since his breakout was scrubbed. Infrequent rumors suggest that a mole somewhere ratted out the plan and three of the major players were killed in a spectacular Las Vegas firefight. Perhaps even more sensational is the hoosegow gossip that the girl who took his place as the CEO was herself captured in a coup and remains a prisoner of the terrorist rank and file on a island somewhere in the South Pacific. Fair, balanced and accurate news is hard to come by when the talking heads are felons doing life without parole.

Mr. Big paces deliberate circles in the yard, every boot-strike crunching frozen snow underfoot. A pair of sentries watch his every step with menacing eyes and leveled automatic weapons as he somberly searches for an eight letter word for despair ending in s.