Page 24 of The Player
She came over to me and I bent down, letting her climb onto my shoulders. Then I lifted her, bracing my arms on the wall in front of me to steady myself. But as I’d thought, it was hopeless. No amount of pounding on it was going to break through that glass.
“It’s reinforced,” she said as her attempts to smack it gave off a weak sounding bang that echoed throughout the room. “Even if I had something to use, I wouldn’t even chip this thing.”
She smacked her fist into it a few more times before realising how pointless it was, and then she tapped my head to let her down.
“Maybe there’s something in the bathroom,” she said, sounding optimistic as she stalked over to the narrow opening on the other side of the room.
I followed her, taking the few steps through into what she thought would be an adequate bathroom. It wasn’t. It was just a space adjoining the main cell, with a filthy toilet attached to the wall. No flush that we could see. No toilet seat. Nothing that could be pulled off or detached to be useful to us. It wasn’t even good enough to be given the name ‘toilet’. If it couldn’t flush, it was, for all intents and purposes, a toilet-shaped bucket with stale water at the bottom.
“He expects us to go there?” Her nose wrinkled in disgust as she took a step back, and then she cracked. “I can’t fucking do this. I can’t!” She ran her fingers through her hair, grabbing the roots and pulling as she spun around and charged away from me.
Marching back into the main room, she started screaming, “Let us out! Let us the fuck out! You can’t do this to us!” Over and over, she screamed into the void of our cell, and when her screams went unanswered, she moved closer to the TV, like she expected him to hear her and answer her cries. “Open the fucking door! Open it!” she howled, banging on the wall.
Then, she turned to face me.
“Aren’t you gonna help?”
The sheer panic on her face broke me.
“And do what, exactly?”
My fists clenched at my sides as I tried to hold myself back from overreacting. I wished I could do something, anything to help her. I wanted nothing more than to break through the walls with my bare hands and get her out of here. But that wasn’t going to work. I had to find another way to save her.
“Fight!” she snapped. “We can’t just stay here like sitting ducks, waiting for whatever the fuck he has planned. We have to make noise. Someone might hear us. We have to do something.”
“I am doing something,” I told her.
She scowled at me, clucking her tongue as she looked me up and down.
“From where I’m standing, it looks like you’re doing fuck all.”
“I’m thinking,” I hissed, tapping the side of my head and sinking down onto the mattress. “He said play smart, remember? Do you think it’s smart to lose your shit this early on? I know you’re pissed off, but shouting isn’t going to help. No one’s going to hear us. Even the TV is behind reinforced glass. The toilet’s a fucking bowl to shit in, there’s nothing here to help us. He’s thought of everything. This whole place will be sound proofed. Shouting for help is just fucking pointless.”
“How do you know?” she challenged, folding her arms over her chest and glaring at me.
“Because I’ve been in enough prison cells and torture chambers to know how this works. There’s no windows.” I pointed up at the TV. “He’s the only one who can see us, from whatever hidden cameras he’s got set up in here.” I glanced around, scrutinising the roof, guessing he’d probably fixed some surveillance equipment into the lights. Lights that were far too high for us to reach. “This place is sealed shut,” I went on. “The only way we’re getting out is if he opens up and lets us out. And then, maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll find something he’s overlooked. A crack in his armour. But for now, we have to sit tight. The only way things are going to change for us is if we think smart, like he said. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m thinking. It might not look like much to you, but trust me, getting us out of this alive is all I’m focused on right now. It’s all I fucking care about.”
She dipped her head, her arms dropping to her sides.
“I’m not saying don’t fight,” I carried on, hating the defeat in her eyes. “But just know, by screaming and shouting, all it’ll do is frustrate you and give you a sore throat. There’s more than one way to skin a snake.”
“Cat.” She sighed.
“What?”
“It’s cat,” she reiterated. “The saying. It’s ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat’.”
“I know.” I gave her a sad smile. “But I changed it to snake, ‘cos let’s face it, this has to be someone we know.”
I knew she agreed with me, and I could tell from the concentration on her face that she, like me, was trying to think who could be behind this.
“I’m trying to figure out who it could be, but I’m coming up blank.” I exhaled as my mind skated over every enemy we’d ever made. “There’s just too many possibilities to narrow it down to one,” I answered truthfully, because in reality, this could be anyone. The only certainty I had was they were a fucking maniac with a God complex. That really didn’t narrow things down. I’d met a lot of those in my time.
Slowly, she walked over to the mattress to sit on the edge of it, next to me.
“It could be anyone,” she replied. “Maybe he’s working for someone else? Maybe he’s a lone wolf? Who knows?”
At that moment, we heard the sound of a lock unbolting, and both of our heads swivelled to stare at the wall opposite. A small hatch, no bigger than a letterbox, opened at the bottom of the wall. Two water bottles were pushed through, rolling towards us into the middle of the room. They were followed by a paper plate sliding through the gap with two sandwiches on it. Then, the hatch snapped shut. No voice. No hands. Nothing to show that there was a person on the other side.
