29
Cold Shower
The guts of the mountain. Not so glitzy as the Hive. No natural light. Dim and cool and scary like a real underground lair ought to be. We were marched down a maze of gloomy corridors wide as roads. Pushed into separate cells behind solid steel doors that shut with an ear-shattering bang. My magnetic cuffs were removed and I was told to get undressed. I stripped down to my smalls, shivering in the dank cell.
“All of it,” said the female guard, like a snappy dog.
Reluctantly, I went full-frontal. I’d never felt so vulnerable.
“And the watch,” she said.
I slipped off the watch and tucked it inside one of my boots. I handed the whole caboodle over.
The guard folded the clothes in a neat pile and zipped them up with the boots in a clear plastic bag, quickly spirited away
