(Author’s note: This actually is an excerpt from something larger that I’m writing under my occasional pen name. More on all this later! —-J)

                                            Unbreakable

                            By Jeff Baker (As by Michael J. Mayak)

            “He got out?” Herriman said.

            “He didn’t escape, he collapsed as soon as he broke out of the tube,” Smith said. “He was hardly at his full strength.”

            “That glass cylinder is supposed to be unbreakable,” Herriman spat out. “And he’s supposed to stay in suspended animation. What happens when word of this gets out?”

            “It won’t get out,” Smith said.

            “Well, he almost did,” Herriman said. He paused and looked around the room, at the other men in the liquid-filled cylinders. “Does McCay know yet?”

            “I sent him an e-mail an hour ago.” Smith said.

            There was silence for a few moments and the two men could hear each other breathing in front of the silent, illuminated tubes filled with green liquid.

            “Thank God it wasn’t Doctor Apocalypse,” Herriman said. “This facility’s reputation would have been destroyed.”

            Doctor Apocalypse would have destroyed a lot more than Nix Olympica’s reputation. The corporation had put a lot on the line constructing a supposedly inescapable super-max facility. Supposedly inescapable.

            “Good work. You and your team, I mean,” Herriman said. “Getting him back in his cylinder before he could come to.”

            They stared in silence again.

            “Well,” Herriman finally said. “This should keep him suspended for at least another decade unless the solution runs out.”

            “Four months, tops,” Smith said.

            “Four months?” Herriman said, startled.

            “It’s when his sentence expires,” Smith said.

                                    —end—