She moved along the bars to her left, reached through them with her right hand, and felt around the corner. Her fingers encountered only the other side of her cell wall. So she was right about it being freestanding. Running her fingers carefully along the front edge of the wall, she could count the joints.
Three of them.
So the wall was four bricks thick.
Next she went along the wall, pounding on it with her fists and leaning on it with her shoulder and the side of her leg, testing its stability. Of course, it felt very solid. She returned to the bars and shook them. The door rattled a little, but with a heavy sound that indicated it was strong and well made.
She went back to the divider wall and got down on the floor. Bracing herself with her hands behind her, she kicked at the wall with both feet. But it was like kicking herself in the head, because each time her feet hit the bricks, a mushroom-shaped cloud exploded in her skull. Despite the pain of her headache, she tested the entire length of the wall for as high as her feet could reach and still have some force behind them. Finally, realizing that even a horse probably couldn’t kick this wall down, she got up, brushed herself off, and sat down in the chair to think.
A chrome kitchen chair . . .
Sitting in the dark . . .
Her mind took her back to Mrs. Lipinski’s closet, and her life suddenly seemed like it had all been a sham in which the chair and the darkness had seemed to grow more distant, but were actually approaching from a different direction, a journey in a circle. But at least Mrs. Lipinski always returned to release her. Now there was no one to open the door.
If Lenihan had known about this place, wherever it was, he’d probably have staked it out and grabbed Ash when he’d first showed up. And even if Michael figured out that Lenihan’s office hadn’t called her and that she was missing, what could he do? It all seemed preordained and utterly hopeless.
Then she got an idea.
She got out of the chair and carried it to the bars, where she tried to find a way she could use one of its legs to pry on the door. But there was no arrangement where she could get any leverage. She put the chair back on the floor and once again sat in it. Upstairs, she could hear the floor creaking as Ash moved around.
She sat there in the dark for nearly twenty minutes, her mind turning her situation over and over, examining every side of it, looking for a weakness she could exploit. But there was nothing. She’d been right the first time. It was hopeless.
It hurt to think, so she stopped doing it, closed her eyes, and once again let her mind drift.
A minute or so after she’d let her sails take her where they would, a single word popped into her head.
Mortar.
Eight months ago, Good Samaritan had to have the entire brick facade of the main building repointed because the mortar was failing. Everything looked and felt solid, but the mortar had lost its integrity.
She got up, stripped off her belt, and folded the buckle back so she could get the tongue between her fingers like a pen. Then she went to the wall about a foot back from the bars, felt for a joint between the bricks at chest level, and scraped at it hard with her makeshift gouge. But the gouge simply stuttered along the joint.
Did that mean the mortar was solid everywhere? Probably. But this was no time to make a mistake based on an untested assumption, especially since she had no other ideas. She moved to her left a couple of bricks and tried again . . . with the same result.
Damn it. With so much shoddy workmanship in the world, why did the person who built this wall have to be so competent? She scraped another joint and found it as impenetrable as the others. She let her arms fall to her side. She was just going to have to face the truth. There was no way out of this. In the morning, she was going to die. She went back to her chair and dropped into it.
Dead before lunch.
Dead . . . lunch . . . Had those two words ever been used before in the same sentence? She doubted it. Probably the most momentous word in the English language juxtaposed to one of the most trivial.
Dead.
But she wasn’t that way yet. And until she was, she wasn’t going to accept it as inevitable.
She shot to her feet and returned to the wall, where she once more set to work.
She’d been at it for perhaps another two minutes when she raked her gouge along a joint and felt the mortar crumble. Afraid to believe it was more than simply an air pocket, she pushed harder against the gouge and made a long sweep with it.
It was rotten.
The whole joint was weak.
And so was the one below it.
And the one to the left.
Invigorated, she began scraping at the wall with a feverish intensity. But the sound of the gouge against the mortar was quite loud in the otherwise silent basement, and as she worked, she feared Ash would be able to hear it.
No, he couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair. Her only chance, thwarted by the sound. There was a door at the top of the stairs, and it was closed. She’d heard it shut. He couldn’t hear the noise through that.
Then the basement light came on.
Chapter 43
THE BASEMENT DOOR opened, and Chris heard Ash on the stairs. She looked down and saw with horror a pile of gray mortar on the darker floor at her feet, a clear indicator of what she’d been doing. She knelt and scattered the mortar with her hand, then stuffed her belt in her pocket and made for the chair.
Because of the way the stairs were constructed, Ash had to descend facing away from Chris’s cell. For him to get a clear look at her, he had to turn to his right when he reached the bottom and take a few steps in that same direction. By the time he did that, Chris was in the chrome chair trying not to look as though she’d been up to anything.
Ash’s manner as he walked toward the cell, and the sandwich and Coke can in his hands, suggested that he hadn’t come down because of the sound.
“Oh, I see you’re still here,” he said. His face changed from a mocking expression to one of concern. “Why is your face so red?”
Chris’s heart lurched at the question, and she prayed he wouldn’t notice the scattered mortar on the floor behind her. “I’ve been out jogging,” she said. “How do I know why it’s red? Maybe it’s some aftereffect of being chloroformed.”
“Maybe . . .” He stared at her for what seemed like a long time, during which she stared back, trying to hold his eyes and not let them wander.
But his eyes did rove—to her feet, then across the floor to her left, then back along the wall where she’d been working. She could barely breathe now, and her face grew hot. Wedged tightly between her fear of death and the anticipation that Ash was about to discover her secret, time ceased to move, and the moment hung in the air like an insect trapped in amber.
Ash’s eyes returned to hers. “I thought you might be hungry or thirsty.” He held up the items he’d brought. “I’ll just leave these things here on this chair, and you can get them when you like.” He smiled mockingly, then he turned, walked to the stairs, and left without looking back.
He didn’t see the mortar, Chris thought in letters two stories high. He doesn’t know.
Eagerly, she returned to work.
In about forty minutes, she had the mortar in all the joints of the first brick excavated to where she couldn’t reach any deeper with her gouge. But the brick wouldn’t come loose. And there wasn’t any way to get a good grip on it.
How could this happen? She’d found the answer, and now it wasn’t going to work?
She thought about using the entire buckle, but it would only reach a tiny bit deeper into the joints than the tongue did.
Wait . . .
She went to the far rear corner of her cell and picked up the galvanized bucket Ash had given her to use as a toilet. Returning to the wall, she wedged the hand
le of the bucket into the joint she’d excavated below the first brick. When she exerted pressure on the handle, it rolled in the joint until it hit the bricks below. Using them for leverage, she pried up on the loosened brick.
Nothing gave.
She rolled the handle upward an eighth of an inch and slammed it down into the lower bricks. It made too much noise, and it hurt her hands, but she did it again . . . and again . . . and then miraculously, she felt the brick move. A couple more thrusts of the handle, and the brick came free. She put the bucket down and pulled the brick from the wall.
No Oscar, no Nobel Prize, no Pulitzer ever produced in its recipient more joy than Chris felt holding that lowly brick.
With the first brick removed, she had better access to the joints of the adjacent bricks, but it was hard to grip the buckle tongue hard enough to use it effectively, and occasionally she’d scrape her knuckles against a brick, making them raw and sore. Despite that, the progress she was making spurred her on. As she worked, however, she constantly worried that Ash might return before she could get out. If he did, there was no way she could hide the loose bricks on the floor and the hole in the wall.
By now, her fingers were aching from holding the gouge. Being right-handed, she wasn’t as efficient holding it in her left hand. And that was the hand the bullet had injured on Stone Mountain. So whenever she grasped anything in those fingers, it hurt. But in order to keep going, she had to switch hands.
She settled into a routine in which she alternated hands every ten or fifteen minutes. Even with this approach, by the time she’d removed seven bricks, the fingers on both hands hurt so badly she had to take a break.
What time was it? In the dark, it was impossible to read her watch. Was she proceeding at a reasonable rate? Was there time to finish? Afraid that it had taken far longer to remove those seven bricks than she thought, she forced herself back to work.
Stopping only when the pain in her fingers became unbearable, she labored into the night, and slowly the pile of bricks at her feet grew. To produce a hole large enough for her to crawl through required the removal of fifteen bricks. When she reached that number in the first layer of the wall, she stopped and tried kicking her way through the remaining layers. But they held firm.
Deeply disappointed and aware that she was once again faced with a first-brick-in-the-layer situation, she wrapped her sore and protesting fingers around the gouge and attacked.
The constant friction against the gouge was slowly wearing it away, and it was steadily growing shorter. By the time she’d removed the fifth brick in the second layer of the wall, it was no longer usable. So she switched to the buckle itself. Though not shaped as appropriately, it did work, but progress was slower.
Mind numbed by the repetitious labor, arms and fingers tortured by the demands she was placing on them, she pushed herself on through the night.
She’d heard no squeaking of the floor above for a long time, and she assumed it was because Ash was asleep. But suddenly, it started again. Did that mean it was morning? Without any windows in the basement, she had no way to tell.
Surely it couldn’t be dawn. She was still just working on the second opening. There was too much yet to do. It couldn’t be morning.
Afraid that it was, she kicked at the remaining parts of the wall through the holes she’d made in the first two layers. But the opening in the second layer was still so small she kept hitting protruding bricks, blunting the force she could exert and nearly destroying her foot.
She was so tired and frustrated she felt like screaming. But instead, she redirected that energy into her hands and returned to work.
A few minutes later, she heard an engine start outside. The sound grew louder as the vehicle got underway, then it faded—Ash off on an errand, presumably in the truck he’d used to damage her car. So it was morning.
Knowing she had very little time left, she somehow found the reserves to work faster.
All too soon, she heard the truck return. A door slam . . . an interval with no sound, then the floor above began to squeak. She sawed furiously at the brick that was interfering with her ability to deliver a good solid kick to the outer shell of the wall.
Come on . . . come on . . .
She grabbed the free edge of the brick that projected into the opening and pulled on it.
Let loose.
But it wouldn’t.
She rocked back on her left leg and gave the brick a kick.
No effect.
She kicked it again.
Still it wouldn’t come loose.
She bent forward and raked the buckle into the joint with the most remaining mortar, her heart hammering, her hair soggy from perspiring into it all night. The mortar of this brick was not as rotten as the others, so it resisted, consuming time she couldn’t afford.
Totally focused on the defiant brick, she sawed and pulled and kicked it. What was holding it in there?
Too much time was passing.
She heard Ash start the truck again. The sound grew louder as he gave it gas, then even louder—and closer.
He was backing it up to the hose he’d put through the foundation.
She kicked at the brick again and felt it move. Another kick distinctly loosened it. She could hear scraping sounds outside; Ash connecting the hose to the truck’s exhaust.
She grabbed the brick and wiggled it back and forth, yanking so hard the brick tore the skin of her hands. And then it came free and tumbled to the floor.
Outside, the truck’s engine rose above the idling sound it had been making and began a steady hum, which was surely the result of Ash rigging the gas so the engine wouldn’t stall. For the first time, Chris smelled the sickly sweet odor of exhaust fumes.
How long did it take for carbon monoxide to work? She didn’t know.
She shifted into a sideways kicking stance and delivered a trial blow in slow motion to get a feel for exactly where the target was. Then she lashed out with all the force she could generate.
Her foot struck the wall solidly in the right spot, but didn’t accomplish anything. She kicked it again, another solid well-placed blow—with all the effect of a cigarette butt hitting the sidewalk.
She wasn’t big enough . . . couldn’t get enough . . .
A thought flashed into her head. She grabbed the chrome chair and hauled it in front of the hole in the wall. Overhead, the floor was squeaking again.
She dropped into the chair, grabbed the seat with both hands, and drew her legs up and back. A trial run for aiming, then she kicked out with both feet, exploding with all the energy she had left in her body.
Both feet hit the wall solidly, and the chair went over backward, tossing her onto the rubble around her, which bruised her in so many places she was reincarnated in pain. But as she’d tumbled from the chair, she’d heard a new sound, a sliding, rumbling mixed with the clink of bricks striking each other.
Picking herself up, she went to the divider wall and pushed her hands forward . . . farther and farther . . .
She’d done it.
She was through.
She plunged into the opening she’d made, barely aware of the perimeter bricks that clawed at her legs, and the loose ones that shifted and rolled when she put her hands on them, scraping her palms and pinching her fingers. On the other side, she scrambled to her feet.
Before she had time to think, the light came on, and she heard the door at the top of the stairs open. On the floor she saw a small pile of iron reinforcing bars apparently left over from Ash’s work on her cell. She picked one up that was about four feet long and moved quickly to the stairs, taking up a position just under the point where they began their descent.
Ash’s feet came into view . . . then his legs.
Her timing needed to be perfect.
His waist a
ppeared.
He came down another step, and she could now see that he was carrying a bird cage.
His head cleared the floor above, but he was still a few steps too high for her to reach him. To see her or the damage to the wall, he’d have to stoop and turn to his right, which he didn’t.
When he reached the next to last step, Chris rushed forward, the rebar cocked in a batter’s stance. Before he could react, she swung the bar, aiming it high. It hit him in the throat, and he collapsed. With feathers flying and the canary in the cage squawking, Ash and the cage tumbled to the basement floor, where the bird continued to squawk and flap, but Ash lay still.
Chris dropped the metal bar and darted to the foot of the stairs. She skirted Ash’s body and ran up the steps, the joy of knowing she was going to live overwhelming every other sensation. At the top of the stairs, she grabbed the doorknob and turned it.
Locked.
The blasted door was locked.
The discovery that she was not free settled on her like a shroud. She looked down at Ash’s body, which was still in the same position. Reluctantly, she went halfway down the steps and paused.
The keys were probably in his pocket.
She watched him for a couple of seconds, looking for any sign of movement. Seeing none and realizing that with every breath she took more of her hemoglobin was combining with the carbon monoxide pouring into the basement, rendering her blood incapable of providing her with oxygen, she went down the remaining steps and knelt by Ash’s body.
He was lying on his left side, which made his right pocket the most accessible. She reached inside . . . and found it empty.
Surely, he had the keys. They couldn’t be upstairs. So they had to be in his other pocket.
She pushed on his right shoulder to roll him over, but he went much too easily. Having expected resistance, she fell across him. For an instant she didn’t know what was happening. Then she felt his arms close around her and tighten.
The Judas Virus Page 35
