[Icelander]

As the metal door slammed behind us, we were plunged into almost complete darkness. The air was unpleasant, dank and close, with a taint to it, rank from decay and neglect. Taylor could smell ammonia and excrement everywhere, a stronger smell than mere vermin should leave. There was also an undercurrent of other, darker things, the acrid fumes of fear; aluminum, ash, sweat and the coppery tang of blood. Old blood and new. Panic sweat stained into filthy fabric, day after day, night after night. The tunnels reeked of horror.

Taylor's eyes flickered strangely and he moved into the lead, without waiting for a light to be turned on. Dr. Anderson carried the flashlight from Reyes' belt, with Agent O'Toole and Sherilyn Bell walking close to him. Townsend and Col. Burr brought up the rear, carrying the unconscious Vicente Berrocal.

Sherilyn Bell seemed blithely unconcerned with her surroundings, though she had disclaimed any specific knowledge of the tunnels, stating she never went there as they were "dank and nasty and full of rats". Evidently, Ms. Bell was unhappy with Taylor for presuming to give her safety instructions and trying to impress upon her the seriousness of armed guards chasing them. She hung back while Taylor took the lead and instead hovered close to O'Toole and Dr. Anderson. She apparently took a shine to Dr. Anderson, calling him 'Mr. M'* and holding his hand in the darkness. After a while, he shook his hand free, turned to her and said calmly: "Ms. Bell, I'd appreciate it if you could stay out of my mind." Bell just giggled and acted all innocent, but she didn't try to touch him again.

At first, we simply moved along the first tunnel we found, moving away from the chasing guards, but once the other characters came to accept that they weren't following into the tunnels, we stopped to get our bearings and decide where to head next. We talked about how we could escape our situation. Dr. Anderson confirmed what the others suspected, that there was no boat on the island, as that would be a major escape risk, and the only way off it was for someone on the mainland to come pick us up. Cliff Island was less than a mile away to the west, but the sewers of Manhanock Asylum reached the sea on the east side of Jewell Island and a swim from there to Cliff Island would be around two and a half miles. The Atlantic in February would kill an ordinary person a lot faster than they could swim one mile, let alone more.

Taylor interrogated Dr. Anderson carefully about the equipment of the guard force when Dr. Anderson was there before the turn of the century, grimacing when he learned of the thermal imaging sensors and the heavy weapons that mounted them. As Taylor had spotted the barrel of an M2HB in one of the towers when driving up to Manhanock Asylum, he informed the others that it was a pretty safe bet that if the heavy machine gun had not been removed, neither had the thermal imagining sensors, which were actually useful to the guard force. This meant that we had to presume that showing ourselves in the open was more or less suicide. That left the tunnels, which seemed to connect all the wings of the main facility, as well as reaching several outlying buildings.

We took quick stock of our assets, which were limited. Cell phones had no signal and radios didn't seem to be working, which we decided might be because of our subterranean location. Col. Burr and Taylor both made the point that a baton and Mace were pretty limited weapons if we encountered guards with firearms. Dr. Anderson recalled that there were weapon lockers for the guards on the cellar levels when the facility was home to DARPA research in the 90s. As these tunnels had been abandoned for 17 years, however, and didn't look even a little bit maintained, we decided that even the worst guard force in the world wouldn't have left any useful weapons in those lockers and it would be a waste of time to look for them.

We did find a room which seemed to have been used for some medical purposes and there was still a hospital bed there and some basic hospital furniture. We scavenged an old wheelchair to haul Berrocal around in and Taylor removed a metal bar from the hospital bed to use as a baton. Unfortunately, there was nothing there that Dr. Anderson could use to treat Berrocal, as anything immediately useful seemed to have been removed when this part of the facility was abandoned. The sink didn't work, so we couldn't clean him up, and there were no bandages, sheets or gauze.

When we assembled again, Taylor laid out the options we had. Escape was most preferable, but appeared to be too risky at the moment. Calling for help and hiding until it arrived was our second most promising option, but so far, we had not been able to reach anyone. Col. Burr angrily interrupted Taylor at this point.

Col. Burr: "What about Agent Banks? Last we heard, he was with the Warden. Are you just going to leave him here?"
Taylor: "Lord willing, Agent Banks has been captured. If not, odds are that he's dead. I'm trying to prevent us joining him."
Col. Burr: "Typical felon, thinking of yourself. All we need is weapons and we can take these clowns!"
Taylor: "Do you have training in hostage rescue, Colonel? Even if you did, we lack the manpower and equipment to assault twenty guards head-on and rescue a hostage from them. Calling in a Special Response Team to rescue Agent Banks ain't leaving him behind; it's what I reckon' gives him the best chance of survival."
[Taylor looks around at his fellow survivors]
Taylor: "Unfortunately, there's no help coming unless we find a way to reach them. And while the radios might not be sending out of here, they ought to have done it upstairs. Two different radios ain't broke at the same time. It's jamming."
[Col. Burr and Agent O'Toole look thoughtful and nod]
Taylor: "Which leaves our third option. Like the Colonel said, we get weapons. But we're not fixin' to use them to fight a war, just to get to where that jammer is hid and take it out."
Col. Burr: "Yes!"
Taylor: "If'n they hunting us, keeping a watch in them towers and on places we likely to come out from, there ain't too many guards left idlin'. They can't guard a lot of fixed posts at the same time. Dr. Anderson, would there be an armoury of some sort in a wing that's still in use near us?"
Dr. Anderson: "As far as I know, there's one in the cellar of G Wing. We walked through G Wing on the way to J and it's still in use. It would make sense for the guards to be still using the armoury there to store their firearms in case a dangerous riot breaks out."
Taylor: "Good. If we're lucky, there's only one guard there. If they're any good, there'll be two. If they're dimwits, there might be no one, because everyone rushed off when the Warden squawked about us."
Col. Burr: "Even if there's two guards, we can take them, easy."
Taylor: "I dunno about easy. If we gonna do this, we need to be clear on something. I might could disable a guard holding a baton or Mace without killing him. I ain't a magician, though. We meet guards with guns, people are going to die and they are going to die because of our decision, now, to resort to violence. I don't want anyone claiming he didn't know the consequences or testifying to a US Attorney that I took it into my own hands to start killing guards. Is everyone here okay with deciding on a course of action that will probably kill people?"
Agent O'Toole: "We are not going to be killing guys just doing their jobs on your say so, Taylor. We don't know if every one of these guys is equally guilty. They deserve a fair trial, not extrajudicial killing."
Taylor: "Sure, we don't know what they deserve. But it ain't about that.** You can't wait for a man with a gun to take aim at you before deciding to attack him. That's a way to get into a race with a bullet, which you gonna lose. Any hostiles have weapons in their hands, ain't no choice that doesn't involve killing. Not in the real world. Not if we wanna live."
O'Toole: "If someone's a direct threat to you, I can't stop you from killing him. But only as a last resort, Taylor, do you hear me?"
Taylor: "Last resort, sure, O'Toole."
[Taylor is either a very poor liar or he simply didn't bother to mask the fact that he'll do exactly as he outlined, i.e. regard the presence of a weapon in the hand of a hostile as justifying killing that hostile]

Dr. Anderson describes the route that will lead us to the basement of G Wing and we start walking again, heading in that direction.

*Which is just an insult on so many levels. Dr. Michael Anderson is both an MD and a PhD, as well as being a stage magician who has used such monikers as 'The Magnificent Michael', 'Magic Mike' (until the movie) and 'Marvellous Mike'. He didn't graduate from Yale School of Medicine and then attend Evil Residency at the Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane to be called Mister by some moonstruck flibbertigibbet.
**Both Taylor and I, as his player, will eternally regret not quoting Clint Eastwood here: "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."