Dean Koontz - Intensity

In one of the drawers on the big wheeled tool chest, she located an extensive collection of drill bits in three clear plastic boxes. She also found a pair of Plexiglas safety goggles.

A power strip with eight outlets was attached to the wall behind the workbench, but a duplex receptacle was also available low on the wall beside the bench. She needed the lower outlet, because it allowed her to sit on the floor.

Although the drill bits weren’t labeled except as to size, Chyna figured that they were all meant for woodworking and would not bore easily — if at all — through steel. She didn’t want to pierce the steel anyway; she wanted only to screw up the lock mechanisms on her leg irons enough to spring them open.

She chose a bit approximately the size of the leg-iron keyway, fitted it into the chuck, and tightened it. When she held the drill in both hands and squeezed the trigger, it issued a shrill whine. The spiral throat of the slender bit spun so fast that it blurred until it seemed as smooth and harmless as the shank.

Chyna released the trigger, set the silent drill aside on the floor, and put on the protective goggles. She was disconcerted by the thought that Vess had worn these goggles. Strangely, she expected that everything she saw through them would be distorted, as if the molecules of the lenses had been transformed by the magnetic power with which Vess drew all the sights of his world to his eyes.

But what she saw through the goggles was no different from what she saw without them, although her field of vision was circumscribed by the frames.

She picked up the drill with both hands again and inserted the tip of the bit into the keyway on the shackle that encircled her left ankle. When she pressed the trigger, steel spun against steel with a hellish shriek. The bit stuttered violently, jumped out of the keyway, and skipped across the two-inch-wide shackle, spitting tiny sparks. If her reflexes hadn’t been good, the whirling auger would have bored through her foot, but she released the trigger and jerked up on the drill just in time to avoid disaster.

The lock might have been damaged. She couldn’t be sure. But it was still engaged, and the shackle was secure.

She inserted the bit into the keyway again. She gripped the drill tighter than before and bore down with more effort to keep the bit from kicking out of the hole. Steel shrieked, shrieked, and blue wisps of foul-smelling smoke rose from the grinding point, and the vibrating shackle pressed painfully into her ankle in spite of the intervening sock. The drill shook in her hands, which were suddenly damp with cold sweat from the strain of controlling it. A spray of metal slivers swirled up from the keyway, spattered her face. The bit snapped, and the broken-off end zinged past her head, rang off the concrete-block wall hard enough to take a chip out of it, and clinked like a half-spent bullet across the cellar floor.

Her left cheek stung, and she found a splinter of steel embedded in her flesh. It was about a quarter of an inch long and as thin as a sliver of glass. She was able to grasp it between her fingernails and pluck it free. The tiny puncture was bleeding; she had blood on her fingertips and felt a thin warm trickle making its way down her face to the corner of her mouth.

She freed the shank of the broken bit from the drill and threw it aside. She selected a slightly larger bit and tightened it into the jaws of the chuck.

Again, she drilled the keyway. The shackle around her left ankle popped open. Not more than a minute later, the lock on the other shackle cracked too.

Chyna put the drill aside and rose shakily to her feet, every muscle in her legs trembling. She was shaky not because of her many pains, not because of her hunger and weakness, but because she had freed herself from the shackles after having been in despair only a couple of hours before. She had freed herself.

She was still handcuffed, however, and she could not hold the drill one-handed while she bored out the lock on each manacle. But she already had an idea about how she might extricate her hands.

Although other challenges faced her in addition to the manacles, although escape was by no means assured, jubilation swelled in Chyna as she climbed the cellar steps. She went tread over tread, not one step at a time as the shackles had required, bounding up the stairs in spite of her weakness and the tremors in her muscles, without even using the handrail, to the landing, into the laundry room, past the washer and dryer. And there she abruptly halted with her hands on the knob of the closed door, remembering how she had raced along this same route and into the kitchen this morning, reassured by the tatta-tatta-tatta of the vibrating water pipe in the wall, only to be blindsided by Vess.

She stood at the threshold until her breathing quieted, but she was unable to quiet her heart, which had been thundering with excitement and with the steepness of the stairs but now pounded with fear of Edgler Vess. She listened at the door for a while, heard nothing over the thudding in her breast, and turned the knob as stealthily as possible.

The hinges operated smoothly, soundlessly, and the door opened into the kitchen, which was as dark as she had left it. She found the light switch, hesitated, flipped it up — and Vess was not waiting for her.

As long as she lived, would she ever again be able to go through a doorway without flinching?

From a drawer where earlier Chyna had seen a set of cutlery, she extracted a butcher knife with a well-worn walnut handle. She put it on the counter near the sink.

She got a drinking glass from another cabinet, filled it from the cold-water tap, and drank the entire glassful in long swallows before lowering it from her lips. Nothing she had ever drunk had been half as delicious as those eight ounces.

In the refrigerator, she found an unopened coffeecake with white icing, cinnamon, walnuts. She ripped open the wrapper and tore off a chunk of the cake. She stood over the sink, eating voraciously, stuffing her mouth until her cheeks bulged, greedily licking icing from her lips, crumbs and chunks of walnuts dropping into the sink.

She was in an uncommon state of mind as she ate: now moaning with delight, now half choking with laughter, now gagging and on the verge of tears, now laughing again. In a storm of emotions. But that was okay. Storms always passed sooner or later, and they were cleansing.

She had come so far. Yet she had so far to go. That was the nature of the journey.

From the spice rack she removed the bottle of aspirin. She shook two tablets into the palm of her hand, but she didn’t chew them. She drew another glass of water and took the aspirin, then took two more.

She sang, “I did it my way,” from Sinatra’s standard, and then added, “took the fucking aspirin my way.” She laughed and ate more coffeecake, and for a moment she felt crazy with accomplishment.

Dogs out there in the night, she reminded herself, Dobermans in the darkness, rotten bastard Nazi dogs with big teeth and eyes black like sharks’ eyes.

At a key organizer next to the spice rack, the keys to the motor home hung from one of the four pegs; the other pegs were empty. Vess would be careful with the keys to the soundproofed cell and would no doubt keep them on him at all times.

She picked up the butcher knife and the half-eaten coffee cake and went to the cellar, turning off the kitchen lights behind her.

Pintle and gudgeon.

Chyna knew these two exotic words, as she knew so many others, because, as a girl, she had encountered them in books written by C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle and Robert Louis Stevenson and Kenneth Grahame. And every time that she’d come across a word she had not known, she’d looked it up in a tattered paperback dictionary, a prized possession that she took with her wherever her restless mother chose to drag her, year after year, until it was held together with so much age-brittled Scotch tape that she could barely read some of the definitions through the strips of yellowing cellophane.