Ryan Thomas - The Summer I Died

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.

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.