He lifted a heavy T-shaped object, maybe ten inches long, that looked like it might have been a mallet in a parallel universe. He tested the weight of it in his hand and then looked up at the window. Tall and narrow, the windows opened by rocking in, like the windows in his old school, but the lock and the handle were eight or nine feet off the ground, way too high for him to reach. The bottom sill of the window started at chest level and rose from there nearly all the way to the ceiling.
He needed to work quickly. Teddy said he’d be back soon. Graham lifted the hammer to crash it through the glass, but paused. Remembering that nothing had gone his way since this ordeal had started, he decided to check first to see what was on the other side. He squeezed his soaked T-shirt to wet his hand, and then used the hand to swirl a viewport through the filthy windowpane. He saw nothing. Literally, nothing — just his own reflection staring back at him.
Screw it. I’m out of here.
He took a step back, closed his eyes, and delivered a full overhead blow to the left side of the pane. When he looked to check his damage, he saw that he’d left a wide, circular spiderweb fracture in the glass. It wasn’t a hole yet, but it was an indentation. And Jesus, was it loud! But at this point, loud didn’t matter. Getting caught didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting out of this hell house.
He swung the hammer again, aiming for the same spot. And again and again. Again. Each hammer blow to the glass reverberated through his arms and his shoulders. Bam! Bam! Bam!
Liquid spattered the glass and the concrete walls, whether from his soaked clothes or from his own sweat he didn’t know and he didn’t care. Finally, the head of his makeshift hammer broke all the way through. He had a hole!
It wasn’t yet big enough to climb through, but it was a goddamn hole!
He picked a new spot on the window adjacent to the first and he started pounding there. After God only knew how many strokes, there was another hole, and by pounding the spot, the two holes joined into one big one, but together they were only twelve or thirteen inches in diameter.
Pausing to throw a glance over his shoulder to see if they were coming for him yet, he turned and hammered some more. His arms were growing heavier with every additional blow, but what difference did that make? He had to keep going. He had to. To stop now was to guarantee his death. Teddy was not going to be happy when he found out that Graham had beaten up his torture chamber.
The word torture brought back a stab of the panic as it passed through his head. It meant everything that was awful, everything that hurt. It meant the end of hope.
Now that he could see the faint outlines of hope on the horizon, he realized that that was all he had left. He’d get out on his own or he would die at the hands of others. If he could just make a hole big enough—
A third hole appeared, and with a final blow, that one joined with the other two to form a kind of three-circle Venn diagram where the intersection of the subsets formed a hole.
One more and he should be good to go. For this one, he swung lower than the others so that it would be easier for him to access the opening when he was done. How stupid would he be — how worthy of the Darwin Award — if he made his escape hatch too high off the ground to reach?
Graham had no idea how many times he smashed away at the glass. Fifty? A hundred?
I won’t stop. Not till I’m outside and free.
The fourth collection of spiderwebs became a fourth hole, and with five more swings — the heaviest thing he’d ever wielded, as his shoulder and his neck screamed for relief — the connecting web broke through, and the resulting hole was worth trying. It reached nearly down to the sill. He finished it off by pounding out the space at the very bottom, where he’d be dragging his body as he made his way outside.
Graham didn’t know he was bleeding until he placed his hammer on the floor. He’d already placed it gently on the concrete — his effort not to make noise — when he realized how ridiculous a notion that was. He just wasn’t thinking right. And while he wasn’t bleeding badly, he was bleeding from about a million places on his hands and arms, no doubt from the shattering glass that he’d never felt cutting his flesh.
While that, too, didn’t matter, the cuts reminded him that he was surrounded by shards of glass and bits of wire, and that he was barefoot and that his clothes were so wet that everything would stick to them.
Picking up his hammer again, he used it as a broom to sweep off the sill to remove the big pieces. After two passes, he decided that he’d spent enough time being neat and careful and now it was time to climb. Using his forearms as leverage against the sill, he hoisted himself up until he was high enough to support his weight with his knee.
Headfirst or feetfirst?
If only because of the height, he decided to back out of the space feetfirst. There were lots of things that could go wrong with that plan — not the least of which involved dropping out onto a lot of broken glass — but all of the scenarios he could think of were better applied to his feet than his head. He didn’t have time to second-guess.
He took care when maneuvering on the narrow ledge not to overbalance and fall back into the room he was trying to leave. The angles here were tough. He maneuvered himself to a position where he was squatting in front of and with his back turned to his exit portal. His weight was evenly distributed between his fingertips and the balls of his feet, which were all aligned in the same plane.
Balance was key. Keeping his back straight and as erect as possible, he shifted his weight to his palms as he moved first one foot and then the other through the vertical hole. When his legs were through up to his thighs and dangling on the other side, he rocked forward and let his lower body slide through the hole up to his waist. The last eight or nine inches were the worst as his doodads passed over the ledge. He rocked his hips to the side to protect them as best he could, but the wire-stab in his ass cheek kept him from rocking over too far.
When his lower body was through, he pressed his belly against the flat sill and eased himself out.
He took one final look at the door through which Teddy had exited — and no doubt the one through which he would reenter — praying that this would not be the moment of the torturer’s return. At this juncture, the only way to stop Graham from all the way across the room would be to shoot him in the face.
He didn’t want to be shot in the face.
So he needed to keep going. Inching backward along his belly, he reached the tipping point where the weight of his dangling legs overcame his ability to hang on, and he allowed himself to drop.
The point of his chin clipped the far side of the sill as he tumbled a few feet to the floor. He landed hard on his heels — he felt the piece of glass that punctured his left foot in the middle of the arch — and his momentum carried him all the way over onto his back. When he came to rest, his feet were up in the air, and the back of his head was on concrete.
Graham rolled to his side, cleared the shard of glass from his foot with a swipe of his hand, and stood. Something was wrong here. It didn’t feel like outside air. The floor was concrete. It took him two seconds to process the obvious — he wasn’t outside after all. He’d wasted all that time and all that effort crashing through an interior window.
“Who the hell builds a window to the inside?” he whispered to no one. “Shit.”
It didn’t matter. There had to be an outside somewhere. He just needed to find it.
Beyond the wash of light through the windows from the room he’d just exited, the rest of the building was dark. As in cave dark, the absence of light. Graham was sure that sooner or later his eyes would adjust, but—