He put his ear against the door and listened. Jamie had never stopped crying completely, alternating between moans and sobs. He looked like he was going to push the door open, his hand on the knob, but instead he backed up and returned to me.
With a skeptic look he said, “I gotta know.”
Bending over so that his backbone poked through his skin, he scooped up the dice, looked at me like I had a small animal sticking out of my ear and then dropped them straight down toward his feet. They bounced a few times and came up nine. He didn’t say anything, just glared and worked his jaw on some imaginary cud. It wasn’t just anger; I could see fear in his eye as well. He was afraid of me, or rather, what he thought I might be. And I was afraid too. It hadn’t been lost on me one bit the fact that my number had never come up, not once. Earlier, when I thought about the dice, I thought maybe there was a reason behind it, like maybe I had a purpose for being here. But even then deep down I feared it was luck or coincidence.
Now I was starting to believe it was something else. Why hadn’t my number come up yet? What was expected of me? How much credibility was there to an old drunk’s preachings? Destiny, purpose, fate. Who was I to the world? Just a stoned comic book lover who couldn’t get his dick wet. But the dice . . . . Wrong place, wrong time? Or was I supposed to be here?
It scared the shit out of me.
Skinny Man stormed off into the other room without so much as a grunt and slammed the door shut. I heard him yell at Jamie with renewed vigor. Jamie shrieked and called for God but then the shriek became a gurgling, choking soundtrack of hell. Oh man, I felt it once more, the terror of the moment. I got the shaking feeling, the loss of breath. I fought it harder than ever before because I now had this crazy idea that I was being chosen for something. I concentrated on me, on the collar I needed.
“Butch, come over here, boy.”
Jamie was gurgling, screaming, the repeated thumps most likely her body flailing from acid burns.
I rubbed my wrist again, drew more blood, and that got Butch real interested in me again. As soon as he got close enough I snatched the collar and looked at the small arm of the buckle and compared it to the keyhole.
They looked close.
Remembering Butch’s distaste for my spit, I coughed up a chunk of innard and spewed it at him. It hit him in the back, completely off target, but enough to send him away for a moment. Twisting my hand around I barely was able to get the buckle arm near the hole. My wrist bent forward like a cripple and the cuff threatened to rip it open further, but the “key” was getting closer. I wiggled the buckle until it poked into the hole.
It was too big.
I went flaccid, sort of hung by the chain around my neck and felt all hope ooze out of my body. It was over, I would never escape—I would die here. I would watch my friend and sister die bit by agonizing bit, then I would die too. Fate meant nothing; it was all a sick joke.
Skinny Man kicked open the door and hurled the empty jug at me. It hit my shoulder and rebounded toward the stove where it came to stay. My muscles locked as I waited for the burning liquid to eat through my skin, but it never came—the jug was completely empty. As I flinched, I put the collar behind me like I had done the spike, expecting him to come take it and go for my ears. But he didn’t see me hide it. Luck again, or fate?
From the open door, an inhuman wheeze meandered into the room. It was the sound of someone’s last breaths.
Skinny Man still looked afraid. There was no satisfaction on his face like before. Why didn’t he just have at me, forget this whole game he was playing with the dice? Clearly his mind was working overtime, he wasn’t in control anymore. What was the old saying? Making monsters out of shadows? His imagination was becoming his worst enemy; he was believing the lie. Motioning for Butch to follow, he turned off the bulb and went up the stairs without a word. A minute later he came back with his keys and locked the basement door. Once that was done, he returned to his home above, but not before he locked the door at the top of the stairs as well. He was afraid of something.
Alone in the pitch-black of my cell, while the flies gorged themselves on the littered remains of my late friend, I listened to the wet wheezes coming from the room behind me. He left that door open.
On purpose.
CHAPTER 21
The wheezes became more labored and further apart. Jamie was dying. I wanted to get the collar from behind me, get down to business, get the flying fuck out of here, but I stopped myself. Somehow I knew I only had a few minutes before she gave in, and no amount of struggling was going to get me out of the cuffs in time to save her. Either I made my peace with it or I’d go mad.
“Jamie,” I said into the void, “I’m right here. I’m right beside you. Listen to my voice.”
I didn’t know what to say, nothing in my past came close to anything of this magnitude. All I knew was I couldn’t let her die thinking she was alone. She had to know I was here. My last attempt to say goodbye was only a notch above sniveling. I wanted so much to take her place, to take her pain for her, and it was killing me both mentally and physically. My insides were a knotted mess of brambles, ripping apart and twisting about. I couldn’t let her die alone. I wanted her to know she was special.
“Jamie, oh God, Jamie. Do you remember the Christmas you gave me the Darth Vader model kit?” What a dumb thing to focus on, but I found myself unable to stop. “I thought Mom bought it and put your name on it, like always. Then a few weeks later I heard Mom and Dad talking in the kitchen and Dad was upset because I’d watched a horror film and had nightmares the night before, and he said he wished you hadn’t bought me the model because it looked so menacing in the dark, and he thought it was giving me bad dreams. But, Jamie, I had no idea you spent your own money on that. I never said it, but it was the perfect gift. I’m sorry I never told you.”
I wanted to tell her I still had the model, but the memory was too painful. Somewhere, probably in some dumb comic, I had read that a person’s last thoughts followed them into the after life, and true or not, I wanted Jamie to be happy wherever she was going so I said the first thing I could think of.
“Jamie, we’re at the park near home,” I said, “and there’re kids playing catch. Mom and Dad are sitting on a towel nearby, drinking iced-tea. There’s a good-looking guy over there checking you out. He looks just like Brad Pitt. You’re gonna get a burger with him later, and then someday he’ll marry you and you’ll be wealthy and happy. Do you see the kids? Watch them, Jamie. Look at them run.”
Suddenly, I was crying so hard the words were almost gibberish.
Though I’d been on a roller coaster ride of fear and exhaustion since my capture, it was the first time I realized—really realized—I was going to die, and die alone. Tooth had been my courage and Jamie my urgency, but now it was just me. And while I’d had moments of strength, it wasn’t until Jamie’s breath stopped a minute later that it really hit me no one was coming to save me.
No one knew where I was.
And perhaps that’s why it was easier to tell myself to be a man for once and fight, say fuck you to fear. I knew if I had any chance of escape, it was now, it was up to me, and it was going to take every ounce of muscle I had. Not just physical, but mental as well.
So I swallowed my sobs, said goodbye to Jamie, grabbed the dog collar and twisted it in my hand to locate the buckle. Unfortunately, in the darkness I couldn’t see the keyhole of the cuff, couldn’t get my fingers on it. I already knew the buckle arm was too big, but if it was thinner, then what? Could I really pick a lock?
The answer came from somewhere, maybe my mind, maybe an angel whispering in my ear—yes.
It wouldn’t be easy, though. I didn’t know how to do it; I had never seen anyone do it. But I’d read my share of stories and comics and thought that maybe, just maybe, I knew the mechanics of it. Same way I knew that if these were the newest police standard cuffs I was probably screwed. A new set of police handcuffs would never unlock without the actual
key, improvements in the last decade had made them virtually failsafe. But I didn’t think these were regulation, they looked out of date, ovoid in appearance. They must have come from the Internet or an army navy surplus store. At least I hoped.
Jamie is dead. The thought punched me in the brain, an unpleasant reminder of what just happened. No, I thought, don’t give in to it. Not yet. Get back to the cuffs.
And so I thought hard about everything I’d ever read that related to handcuffs or escapism.
Thanks to some brilliant comic book authors who had done their research, I knew that handcuffs had a bit on the inside that needed to be pressed back to trigger the release. I knew they had another pin on the outside that locked the cuffs in place so they wouldn’t tighten themselves. And I knew they could be picked, somehow, with a small thin object provided it was shaped properly.
A small sharp object. That’s what I needed. And it’s exactly what I didn’t have. What I had was a fat buckle on a dog collar.
With tears drying on my cheeks, I rested my head against the wall and racked my brain for a solution. Jamie is dead assaulted me again. I shook my head, slammed it back and let the physical pain push out the mental. The cold cement felt oddly refreshing on my scalp, like a compress. I was suddenly sleepy, sapped of energy, on the edge of forfeit. This was it, my last chance. How to make the buckle arm thinner? How to make it skinnier?
I played the mantra over and over in my mind, until it felt like it was eroding my skull. And that’s when it dawned on me—I needed to erode the buckle.
With a prayer, I placed the buckle arm against the concrete wall . . . and rubbed.
It scraped over the concrete, flaking off bits of cement like dandruff. I did it a few times and then touched the tip. It was hot. It hadn’t gotten any skinnier, but I felt certain it would.
With black all around me, and silence filling my ears, I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. I don’t know how much time passed. I don’t know how loud it actually was, though to me it sounded like a car engine. I just scraped that little piece of metal against the concrete until my biceps flared up, until I was gnashing my teeth like a child waiting for a tetanus shot. Little cold specks of cement tickled the backs of my legs as they flew up then drifted to the floor. After a long time, I stopped to check my progress and felt an incredible heat radiating off the metal. It had thinned ever so slightly, not enough, but it was enough to know this plan might work.
So I went back to work, and I rubbed and rubbed some more. My eyelids grew heavy; I had probably been up over forty hours by now. But sleep meant nothing to me; I had to keep rubbing.
Time was kept in relation to sounds from above. The television, a laugh track, Skinny Man talking, someone walking around, a voice I recognized, David Letterman, Skinny Man again. After awhile the television went silent. Maybe he was retiring for the night; maybe he was listening to them. Movies claimed the night was witching hour, and if so, shouldn’t he be on his way down? Maybe he thought the night was too quiet for screams, maybe he worked, maybe he was just tired. Who knew?
I didn’t stop again until my shoulder felt swollen, until the passing hours became a blur. Then I touched the small piece of metal and smiled. As I'd hoped, it had thinned into a pin. I couldn’t believe it, it had worked! Now all I had to do was pick the lock using the exact hand that was bound. Why, I thought vexingly, was every jumped hurdle met with an even larger one beyond it?
It was an issue of Chaos Legion, number twenty-one or twenty-two, if I remember correctly, where Stanley Horner—aka Greymatter, so named because he could steal your mind and leave you babbling like a retard—had to get out of handcuffs before a bomb turned him into what would be considered a delicacy in my present whereabouts. As a mental mutant with no elevated physical strength, he’d saved himself by pulling a nail out of a floorboard and using it as a key.
I sifted through the debris in my mind trying to remember the context of the comic. Bits and pieces started to come back to me like roaches to an open trash can, and soon I could visualize the page, the words, and the illustrations. Inside a handcuff was a sloped lever that allowed the cuff teeth to slide forward but not backward, so that the cuff tightened and wouldn’t slide open. Additionally, a tiny pin on the outside of the cuff, when pushed in, slid in over the sloped lever and blocked the cuff from sliding forward anymore, preventing the cuff from tightening itself further. But this pin could very easily be pushed out from the other side with something thin.
I decided to attack that challenge first. It took a few attempts, what with my hands all gimped up by the cuff, but by using my leg and the wall, I pushed the pin on the right cuff back out with the sharpened buckle. After I had done that, I swung the collar to my other hand and did the same thing over there. Now I had to be very careful; I could easily tighten the cuffs and snap my wrists.
Back inside my head, I reread Chaos Legion. What was Stanley telling me? Handcuff keys end in a small flag, like a P, which is turned to flatten the sloped lever and allow the cuff to slide back without the teeth hitting it. The flag is essential. Stanley had used the leg of his chair to bend the nail.
Using the wall and the cuff itself, I began bending the tip of the buckle arm at a ninety-degree angle. Despite still being hot and thin, the metal was as strong as the Hulk’s erection and I had to strain to get it shaped into a small hook. It wasn’t a flag but it was probably close enough, or so I hoped.
I put the buckle in my belt loop, the collar strap hanging down near my leg, leaving the buckle arm sticking straight out. Slowly, with grandma speed, I slid the cuff’s keyhole onto the “key” and pushed it in as a far as it could go. Then, using my wrist, I rotated the cuff.
The buckle arm fell out of the keyhole.
Shit, I mumbled, welcome to Dexterity 101. This wasn’t going to be easy.
CHAPTER 22
I repeated the process ad nauseam. Sticking the “key” out, pushing the cuff on it, turning my wrist. Hour after hour I kept at it, until I could faintly hear birds singing the ain’t-it-great-to-be-alive song in the trees outside. And then, as my eyes were sliding shut . . . the key flattened the lever, and the cuff opened just enough for me to slide my hand out.
And that was that. No fireworks, no dancing bears, no parade. Just me holding my hand in front of my face, straining to see it in the dark, and feeling my lips spread wide in an involuntary smile. I stood like that for who knows how long, motionless, sweat dripping down the nape of my neck, not believing what I’d just done. How long before I was able to get my head straight? It felt like it had been in a blender, shot into space and time-warped back.
I went to work on the other cuff, which was much easier to manipulate with my one hand free. Working furiously, I picked it the same as the last one, but for some reason it wouldn’t come open, the “key” felt wrong, like maybe I had bent it out of shape somehow. I tried to pull it out to check on it, but it was stuck inside the lock. FUCK! I nearly screamed. Instead, I jimmied it and prayed it would find the lever. My desperation to escape was now beyond need, like a drug, an impulse I couldn’t fight.
The whole while the voice in my head kept saying, Calm down, you can do it, don’t give up. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that voice sounded as if it came from somewhere else in the room as well. But I didn’t think on that too long. Besides, I was tired like a man forced to listen to a congressman’s speech, so I couldn’t be quite sure of what I was seeing or hearing. I just hoped it wasn’t a dream, because if I woke up and found myself still bound, well, I didn’t want to think on that either.
Maybe a half-hour passed, the faintest glow of light now seeping in under the door, when the cuff snapped back and the “key” dislodged.
I was free.
Soon as I rubbed my wrist to ease the pain I heard the voice again. Don’t stop, get free now.
Wasting no time, I went straight for the neck iron. Skinny Man was smarter than he let on, because the clamps around my neck prevented me from just leaning
forward and stretching out for one of the tools against the far wall. Skinny Man was also a sly man.
I felt for the keyhole and plunged the sharpened buckle inside and rooted around. The lock was a different type than the cuffs, bigger and older. It probably used a skeleton key with several teeth. Of course, I couldn’t be sure in the dark, but I had seen the one used on Tooth so I figured it was the same.
Out of nowhere a cool breeze ran across my face. It smelled like the trees in the mountains outside. It smelled like freedom. Where it came from I didn’t care, under the door, a crack in the foundation, it didn’t matter; it spurred me on despite my heavy fatigue. A fatigue that had me feeling like I was walking in a dream.
The makeshift lock pick was having about as much effect on this lock as a finger would have on a woman with ten kids. It was just too small for the hole. I ran the dog collar through my belt loops so it wouldn’t fall to the ground, and with both hands, grabbed the chain that connected the collar to the metal plate in the wall. It was stuck fast. Yanking only hurt my arms and back, and the metal plate had obviously been built into the wall somehow and wasn’t budging.
Spinning myself around, my legs in a painful X, I faced the wall and got my first real look at what was holding me. The chain from the collar was welded into a link in the wall plate. No way it was going to come loose no matter how hard I pulled. The back of the collar had a hinge, and unlike the front which was locked with a padlock, it was held tight by a long screw. The screw allowed the collar to open and close, but true to Skinny Man’s precautions, it had no crevice for a screwdriver; it was smooth and solid and held tight by a nut on the bottom. Years of rust had fused the nut to the screw and the top of the screw to the collar, and no matter how hard I twisted it wouldn’t come undone.
The Summer I Died: A Thriller Page 15