by Pat Connid
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.
I tugged again, weaker this time though, and pulled, twisting the ropes, trying to get them to crumble at the burned patches.
Then, I noticed something odd. My wrists moved a little in the binding. Sure, I had lubricant now. My skin had split and blood was drenching my hands, the ropes.
I pulled again, but instead of outward trying to break the ropes, one hand downward and the other up.
“Ha!” My left hand was moving! Pulling harder, I shooed away a thought in my head that I might be pulling the skin of my own hand off like a glove— I had to get out of the ropes.
Nearly there! I could feel the rope slipping and gave it one last hard, long yank.
Yes, there!
I fell forward, exhausted, my left arm springing above my head like a Roman catapult. There was indescribable relief in my shoulder, so much so I began laughing, finally able to move it. But, I hesitated to look down at my arm.
Next, I easily shook the other wrist free from the rope and put both hands above me like a victorious boxer, as I lay forward balancing on my forehead.
Wasting time, I thought.
Wobbling to my feet, I finally looked to see my wrists were torn, burnt red in some parts, but the gore I’d felt was actually blobs of the liquid Sterno that had stuck to my skin. Bits of flesh had scraped into my hands, but I’d fared far better than expected.
Most importantly, both hands were free.
Man on a mission now, I didn’t think twice about punching the television tube out with the heel of my left hand, and it made a satisfying thwop when I did. I grabbed a piece of the glass and worked quickly on the rope that lashed me to the wall.
Then, a moment away from freedom, I noticed the voices. Focused on breaking my bonds, I couldn’t tell if the voices on the other side of the wall had always been there or, now that I was nearly able to escape, they’d finally wiggled their way into my consciousness.
Sounds like more than three, I thought as I sawed
through the rope at my ankle. The glass was sharp and was cutting quickly, and I’d protected my tender palms with the rope that had been around my wrists. Even so, alas, my days as a hand model were now surely out the window.
More voices, they were gathering nearby. I envisioned other scary men with scary rifles were meeting up with the three paramilitary pricks holding me.
One voice was louder, angrier than the others. Or at least it sounded angry. Maybe the guy was just passionate. Passionate about his work: raping, pillaging, whatever. Passion or anger, I didn’t want him or his friends to find me on the verge of screwing up a perfectly good kidnapping.
The voices grew louder, not more angry or passionate, but moving closer to the door, and that thought made my hands tremble. Blood was making the glass in my fingers slippery, and my progress cutting away at the rope’s fibers was slowing. If they came in now—
Nearly there. I cut faster, my heart beating like a geeked-out rabbit, my eyes jumping from the rope to the door. At any moment, that knob could twist and, no question, bad things would happen from there.
Then, finally, the rope fell away and, naturally, as it did the door’s handle began to twist. I looked up to the window near me. I’d heard voices from there, but now none. Were they all gone? Were they the three who’d been in this room or if I were to jump out the window would my feet disrupt some West African dice game?
Across the room, the other window was still partially open, not tied down like the other. I saw nothing but bush through the gap.
I jumped up, my knees crackling like newly minted bubble wrap, and as the door began to swing open I leapt for the open window with all the strength left in my thighs, passing from the stifling darkness of the hut to the punishing burst of heat in the midday sun, then landed and rolled to the ground. Trying to stop my ass-over-head tumble, I put my hands out and they screamed at me, but I had to stop and get to my feet.
Seconds later I heard yelling—one voice, then several—from the other side of the window I’d leapt through.
Standing, to my left were garbage bins, a long row of the backside of tiny, one-room homes flush up to the bush, and that looked like a path to me, so I ran that way, full steam. As I took my first step, to my right, a ceramic pot exploded— someone was shooting at me from the window.
“Bet he’s pissed about the T.V.”
Weaving through shanty homes, fighting laundry lines and hungry dogs and black flies big as tabby cats and a half dozen kids who laughed merrily as they casually chased me, I tried to ditch the angry guys on my tail. But I couldn’t even outpace the kids running and dancing around me.
“Go… away!” I said through clenched teeth, pumping my arms harder. They just laughed and mimicked my arms, a small battalion of skinny toy soldiers stuck in high gear.
There were no roads, instead just winding paths through clusters of ramshackled homes, bunched together in no discernible pattern, as if this ground once held the element palate of some giant architect that had been commissioned to paint more fortunate neighborhoods beyond the horizon, taking bits and pieces, here and there, scraping off the blobs that didn’t quite work on the edge of this settlement, then had splattered the remnant material here as it cleaned off the brushes.
Dizzy in the heat, I took turns randomly, hoping to evade recapture but grew concerned that my random path might actually begin to take me back toward the thatch and wooden prison.
“Whoa!” I said, stumbling past the irregular wall of one small shack and nearly tumbling into a wide-eyed old woman who’d been clutching a black plastic bag to her chest. Off balance, I cut away from her, the kid satellites around me whooping and hollering, they matched me, step for step and when my bare shin banged hard against short cement wall, the world began to tilt awkwardly, but, unexpectedly, small hands righted me and prevented my fall.
The hole that served as window for one home was partially shuttered by a long, shiny metal sheet, its chipped resin lettering looked like advertising, and in a bare patch, my reflection briefly looked back at me.
Here was a corn-fed American (or, rather, grain-, barley-, and hop-fed) running around an African shanty town, encircled by a half-dozen giggling and cheering kids. My guess: I probably stuck out a little.
Half covered in dirt, mud and blood, I looked like a madman. White, black, brown you couldn’t exactly be sure at first glance. But loony? Absolutely. No question.
First mission accomplished: There was now some distance between me and my former captors.
Still, I was running full-tilt with no destination in mind. There had to be somewhere to hide.
If my merry band of militants caught me, they may or may not kill me. But, if they didn’t kill me, they’d probably shoot my legs or cut off my feet or do something that would have me later shopping at specialty apparel shops. And, despite my recent encounters with high levels of pain, it’s not something that doesn’t bother me. In fact, I’m terribly afraid of pain. No likey.
But I had begun to compartmentalize it, put it in a box and finger-tap it up to a high, mental shelf for a while. Sure, it’d come tumbling down at some point, but there were brief moments of escape from a constant, oppressive hurt.
A slight degree safer, I was sure, just beyond the yelping and giggling around me, was the sounds of pissed-off voices very close behind.
I needed to get out of the sun and get some water.
The sun was drying the mud to my skin and with my sweat trapped beneath it; I was quickly beginning to overheat.
Another cut through a group of homes, this next trail looking like every other one before. On either side of me were with shacks made from panels of wood, metal, plastic, whatever material there was available.
The path widened slightly, and here some residents were selling small items like matches, sardines, soap and candles, one after the other, makeshift tables so crammed together it was hard to tell where one seller’s space ended and another began. Something in my mind trilled, recognizing this image as familiar and over the next few moments, as I closed and opened my eyes, the long strip of Guinean street vendors changed—back and forth—into the cluster of cafes down Sunset in Los Angeles.
I crossed between two shacks and came to a skinny dirt roadway, no vehicles in sight but their tracks were there, and picked up my pace some although still far from running anymore. My group of kids had dwindled by half, probably bored of my ever-slowing trek through their village. To my right, there was an old man selling what looked like donut holes and my stomach put in a vote for pulling an Artful Dodger. Another makeshift table held tin cups full of pineapple— something that would cure both my hunger and my thirst.
A lone woman walking ahead of me was carrying a plate on her head, and, feeling awful about it, I reached in and pulled out a sack as I ran. The cold felt good in my hands and over the woman screaming at me, the one remaining kid running next to me said something and motioned with his hands to tear the sack open.
Inside was water and ice and my first gulp, so heavenly wet, but didn’t even seem to make it to my throat, just absorbed in my dry lips and tongue. The boy running next to me held out his hand just as I was awkwardly trying to tilt the bag toward my mouth, so I pulled the bag down in front of me, then scooped out a couple finger length strips of ice from the cold water and handed them over. His smile grew threefold and, strangely, that beautiful expression did more for me than the entire bag of water I sucked down.
Just above the roof-lines to my left, treetops began to peak out, so I cut between two shacks toward a strip of forest about twenty feet ahead of me.
There’d been some bush out the window of the hut I’d awoken in but this seemed to be thick and fuller. My destination clear, my brain started focusing on the next move. The bush was a quick hide but not a long term plan. There had to be a phone around somewhere. Maybe a police station or Red Cross camp.
“Is there a phone nearby?” I asked my skinny little friend but he only placed his hand over his mouth f
or a moment, gesturing, possibly that he didn’t understand what my words meant.
Looking back over my shoulder, I then asked him about a police station or medical building and got the same response.
“What about a bar? Do you have a bar?”
The kid looked at me strange and laughed. Then a thought: I tried again with, “Pub? You have a pub?”
“Pub?” he said, and his eyes lit up. Chattering wildly, he tore off parallel to the line of trees, toward the blazing sun, and I hesitated because the implied safety and coolness of the trees was so compelling, and instead, I turned and tried to keep up with my skinny little shaman. But, turning away from the promise of rest, exhaustion came down on me like a heavy, wool blanket and my legs felt filled with cement.
The kid ran like a wide receiver. Darting in and around homes. To him, this was probably all a game. For me, my life was in his hands.
Which is why when he banked around a corner, then another, and then out of my sight completely, I stumbled and stopped beside a pile of rotting garbage.
“No, no… where.?…”
I sucked in breaths that didn't cool the burning in my lungs then slumped to my knees, the dirt hard as stone.
Nothing left.
My hands fell to my sides, and I could feel tiny rivulets of blood trickling from my forearms, dripping then lapped up by the dry earth around me.
Trying to get a full breath, I tipped my head back and could actually feel the heat of the sun on the roof of my mouth. Filling my lungs again and again, deep breaths that rocked my entire body back and forth, still, the oxygen wasn’t coming fast enough, and I grew dizzy, my mind spinning, the world spinning, around and around, then end over end, I dropped to the dirt ground sideways, then flopped onto my back and faced the cloudless sky.
The sun was directly overhead and growing larger by the second.
Once again, like days earlier and thousands of miles away back in Pavan's uncle's garbage-filled back yard, it had singled me out. And, curious, it was coming down for a closer look.
