The Mentor (26 page)

Arching
the back.  That’s got to be the secret.  Lessen the distance from
shoulder blade to butt, bring the arms around.
 A moment later, on my side,
breathing in dirt floor, sweating profusely, the mud beginning to cake around
the right half of my face and neck, I curved back my spine and tried again.

I’d rounded
my back so much, it felt as though the bones were grinding into chalk dust,
little bits of the spine spitting into the surrounding muscle tissue.  The
brilliant idea was then to attempt to squeeze my butt through the loop, and I
actually got about halfway before getting stuck, knowing for certain if my back
were to tire and straighten even slightly, both wrists would break for certain.

Luckily, at
this point, my body was drenched in sweat.  

Sure, I was
out of shape and it was probably a hundred and fifteen in the mud shack, but
aside from looking like one side of my face had been dipped in coco, my body
was soaked as if I'd just come inside from a walk in a hurricane.

So with the
slick and slimy skin, I actually got my arms around my overstuffed rump.

“Cool,” I
squeaked out, my bound wrists pressing hard against the bottom of my knees,
which were still tender from a recent trip to the islands on the other side of
the planet.

Biggest
problem—aside from “deathblow by rifle stock” if Mike, Ike or their friend
walked back in—is that I hadn’t thought it through beyond the butt.
 Frankly, it had stunned me to even get this far.  But, now, I was
smashed into a ball like some sort of rolly-polly bug.  There would have
been peals of laughter coming from me if my lungs could take in any more than a
spoon of air, because it was completely ludicrous that it hadn’t occurred to me
that I’d have to get my legs through my arms.  As
if
I could thread
my ham hocks out between my hands!

If the three
stooges start rattling the door, I’m dead.  I’ve got to go way forward and
hell no if I could pull my hands back to where they were before.

I laid
back, wrists under my knees, and allowed myself to try to slow the heaving of
my chest, but there wasn’t a ton of time.  After a moment, unable to take
a full breath, I was a little dizzy from my blood’s drop in O2 saturation.

I tried to
turn back on my side but the other rope, the one around my foot like a leash,
caught my ankle and jerked me back.

My mind snapped
back for its oxygen-starved time out, but it had, thankfully, picked up an idea
on the return trek.  

Walking
with my butt, arms strapped tight to my thighs, I scuttled as quick as I could
to the rope at the wall.  The tip of the rope by my calf had been capped
with a metal sleeve like one of those things at the end of shoelaces, securing
it to my ankle.

But maybe
where the rope meets the wall… maybe that was the weak link.

I inched
closer, carving a rut in the dirt with my tailbone and got a good look at my
leash.  Upon closer inspection, it appeared the rope was fastened to an
iron spike in the shape of a sewing needle, three or four inches thick-- the
tip of which had been hammered deep enough into the ground to pierce the
Earth’s core.  Certainly, I wasn’t the first captive ever to be held in
this room.

Still, it
was worth a try, so I scuttled onto my back, my heels going up the wall and my
fingers flexed forward, groping for the rope, about six inches from the wall.
 I finally got a good grip and tried to push away from the wall with
everything my legs would give me.

Nothing.

So, I did
what any rational adult would do with the lower half of his body halfway up a
wall, wrists red-raw from rope, and nearly covered head to ass in mud.  I
yelled and thrashed my feet like an infant that had just shit itself.

My heart
jumped at the sound of the door latch disengaging behind me and, terrified, I
held perfectly still, waiting for the blow.  Or maybe if I didn’t move,
they wouldn’t see me trying to make an escape, just maybe doing my “special
exercises.”

Frozen in
place… Nothing.  No yelling and no smack to the noggin with the business
end of a Kalashnikov rifle

Craning my
neck around, I then saw the sound of the metal “latch.”  The Sterno tin
had bobbled and moved.  It seemed my childish tantrum had shifted the
wall, and this had bumped the tin closer to the edge of the flimsy counter top.

My eye this
time on the can, I rose up on my elbows and kicked again.  As the tin
inched forward, I kept at it, kicking and kicking.  Although that initial
effort likely took the better part of ten minutes, the sweat-soaked and fevered
concentration it required made it feel as though just seconds had slipped away
from me.

I had to
stop three times to rest, my entire body soaked in sweat, the dirt caked to
that sweat, so I looked like some panicked, captive, felonious Gingerbread Man
attempting prison break.

When the
tin began to teeter on the edge of the counter, I could hardly believe my eyes.
 Then,
success!
The can dropped, flipped a couple times and landed
face down in the dirt.

“Dammit!”

Stronger
through my anger, and fortified by my small victory with the tin, I pressed my
heels into the wall and yanked down on my arms, sliding them back to where they
started, behind me.  I then flipped onto my stomach and inched down the
wall, using my knees and my chin.

Within
reach of the Sterno can, I nabbed it with my brow and tugged it toward me with
my forehead, its contents leaving a dirty, blue snail-trail on the floor.
 That was my fuel.  That’s what I wanted.

A few
moments later, I’d moved the tin to where my fingers could grasp it, and spun
backwards, fumbling with it until I could drizzle the remainder of the contents
between my hands.  I felt the still-warm gel ooze down my bindings and
drip onto my wrists.  Then, I leaned up on my knees trying to get the fuel
sloshed onto the other side of the bindings, realizing somewhat darkly that
there’d be no way to
not
get the goop on my skin.

This was
really going to suck.

Scanning my
close proximity, I didn’t see a lighter, matches or even two convenient pieces
of flint to bang together.  The Laurel and Hardy movie on the television
was silent because either the sound was busted or just turned down, so
wordlessly, both men on the screen were laughing wildly, mocking my
half-success.  I felt a strong urge to kick the tube in.

Then the
thought came to me that if I did, I could use the glass to concentrate the sun…
except, with wooden shades dropped, there was no sun coming into the room.
 And even if there were, what were the odds I could hold up a good piece
of thick glass with my toes while focusing the sun’s rays onto my wrists?
 Yeah, not so good.

Only one
option.

Inching
toward the television, stretching the rope leash, then my leg to the very limit
of its length, I pushed the TV aside, exposing the wall of wires.  There
wasn’t an outlet—it looked as though they’d just stolen someone else’s power
and run cords to the back of the television.  So, these guys were not only
kidnappers and killers, they were also stealing cable.

“Is there
no end--,” I rasped, my breathing heavy and ragged, leaning down toward the
wires, “--to their treachery?”

I saw
electrical tape wrapped around the plug of the television and leaned down and
started gnawing at the tape with my teeth.

Spitting
out bits of black to the floor, it tasted like hell, all I could think of was
mom telling me as a kid that T.V. would rot my brain… and that if I bit a
little too deep, I’d only prove her point.  

I finally
got an end and tugged hard, the tape stubbornly unraveling in a gummy mess.
 I chewed the thick black strip into my mouth and pulled more, until
eventually, I had it all.  I spit out the wad and stared at my
destination.  Two bared wires twisted into the metal tines of the
television’s plug.

“This is
totally stupid,” I said.  But what was another choice?

Spinning
around, facing away from the bare wires, I lifted my hands, scooted back, my
stomach jumping as my adrenal gland squirted fear into my guts, until the
fuel-soaked ropes at my wrists were just above the plug.  I lifted my
body, balancing on the balls of my feet so that gravity would take care of
everything once my body started backward.

A quick
glance around the room.  Any other choices?  Down the wall, the dead
guy with the bullet-holed head offered no help, but he’d kept to himself since
I’d arrived, so this didn’t surprise me.

“Nope,” I
said and fell back, dropped my hands.

At first,
the juice flowing from the bare wires into my arms, my chest, my stomach, my
thighs made my entire body flinch into a two hundred and twenty pound fist—my
brain didn’t register much of it, having checked out the second before I’d
dropped my hands.  Then, the pain hit my skull and it felt like I’d jumped
fifty stories and connected with the pavement face first.  All my muscles
contracted, twisted violently alongside my bones, and burned from the inside
out as I was being electrocuted.

Something
in my head screamed to
pull away, roll forward
away from the terrible
pain, but I was muscle-locked into the excruciating pose, frozen mid-fall as if
sitting in an invisible electric chair, having lost motor control of every limb
in my body.   My neck, my jaw, my shoulders, everything down to the
insteps of my feet was constricted to the point of snapping in half.

Then, it
seemed like the world had begun to spin on its axis again, shaking off a brief,
rare moment of indecision, and I was tipping toward the floor.  My mind
began to reluctantly drift back, and I heard the thump of my body hitting the
dirt.  In the daze, I wondered dreamily if I’d even stopped halfway down
at all, or if instead time for me had simply frozen as my body had.

When I
began to smell the smoke of my bindings, burning rope and Sterno fuel, I
smiled, nearly drifting off to sleep, exhausted and electrocuted.

It was the
sudden, shrill pain at my wrists that slapped me awake.  I could feel the
skin at my wrists actually bubbling.

Fighting
back every urge to stop the burning, my teeth clamped down hard enough to chip
enamel, but I knew there’d be just one shot—I extinguish the flame at my back
too early, wrists are burnt but I’m still tied up.

Wait too
long, I’m free but my hands both look like pork strips, forgotten on the grill.
 

Necessity
insisted that the terrible pain be dropped into a small mental box, fastened
shut with some string and, just for a moment, be put upon a shelf somewhere
dark in my mind.

For some
reason, that thought took me back to the conversation I’d had with the tile
lady about the Kingsford family with their hundred million dollar Georgia home,
and I wished, at that moment, there had been a cool drink in my hand as I
lounged by their mansion’s pool, chatting with some pretty woman who would
laugh at all of my jokes.

“
Aaaaarrrrgggggghhh
.”
 

It had been
more growl than scream, as I tried to keep myself from calling out, the pain
was now unbearable.  To fight the urge to put out the flames on my wrists,
knowing that it could be extinguished, that I had the power to stop it, yet not
stop it, knowing that if my choice turned out wrong I could end up with a
bullet in my skull before the end of the day…  I just had to think about
other—

Can’t.
 Just can’t anymore.  Christ!  Too much pain.  

I drew in a
deep breath, again resisting the urge to scream.  

As the air
turned to smoke, my tongue rolled around a strange taste.

The strange
aroma I was now breathing in wasn’t just rope and fuel but also the microscopic
particulates of my own burning flesh.  I was breathing in the smoke from my own
burning flesh.

No more,
couldn’t take it, and I rolled over pressing my hands into the dirt below me.
 Grinding my wrists into the dirt floor, the pain so constant that it was
now beginning to morph into just some nuisance input— like the muffled sound of
the jukebox downstairs in
Lester’s
as I tried to sleep in my bed.
  I was thankful my hands were not visible at the moment, behind me,
because with the amount of gore there seemed to be squishing around back there,
it would be a sight that would likely make me faint.  

Then, the
test.  Had I waited long enough?  

I took a
huge breath, braced for a new wave of pain and tried to wrench my wrists apart.
 Pulling, pulling, pulling I yanked with everything but it wouldn’t budge.
 

“One more,”
I barked, exhausted.  And, again, I pulled against the binding as hard as
possible, my shoulders and triceps burning, but again nothing.  The rope
wouldn’t give.

Slumped
onto my side, I breathed heavily, exhausted.  My mind was defeated and depressed
and my body tired, hungry, in excruciating pain… I no longer cared if they came
through the door now.  I didn’t care if they saw me like this—

“NO,” I
said, gritting my teeth.  
No, don’t think like that
.  One more
time.