A Place Where There Is No Darkness

Three

I spent day one and two preparing, planning, clearing up last details. I spent them blending in, acting innocent, doing everything I normally did with an added enthusiasm and care. I smiled at the guards, let them annoy me, I even made it easier for them – when they came into my cell, I was already waiting with my hands on my back; when they guided me out, I didn't resist. I didn't ask questions, not if it wasn't necessary; I didn't expect any answers. As always.

I spent night one unscrewing a screw from the sink in my cell. It was tricky work, especially with no light and no screwdriver. My nails were all broken and bloody by the time morning came, but at three a.m. I was holding a long, straight screw in my filthy hand. I put it under my pillow and went to sleep for a grand total of three hours.

I spent night two unscrewing all the other screws with the one I already had and then trying to locate the pipes behind the sink as precisely as possible in the solid darkness. I did. At two thirty-five a.m. I placed the sink back where it belonged and hoped no one would notice the lack of twelve screws in the already rusty frame that should keep it neatly in place. Though even as I had the thought, I already knew nobody would.

I went to bed at two thirty-seven for a total of three hours and twenty-three minutes of sleep.

When the big day arrived, I was almost dead on my feet. Luckily, the lack of sleep didn't show under my eyes – it never had, for that matter –, so the guards didn't notice much. But it was increasingly hard not to yawn continuously and give it all away.

After breakfast, I decided that I could get a small nap in before lunch. The only thing I still needed was a ruler – a precise one, at that –, but that could wait. I could still get it in time.

However, when the guard woke me, it was already eleven twenty-eight. Time for lunch. And I had to get started with my plan directly after.

"Why did you let me sleep?" I complained while officer Lungley fastened the cuffs. I knew my hair was dishevelled and maybe my face was even covered in spittle from my little snooze, but looks were hardly of a concern to me right then. I was about to pull off an escape and I had one of the essential ingredients missing.

"Why shouldn't I?" he asked, confused. And really, why shouldn't he? I sighed, knowing perfectly well how strange I was acting.

Even so, I couldn't let it go. "I don't know, you could have woken me," I grumbled softly, mentally trying to keep the comment to myself but in the end unable to spill the words into the room quietly enough for Lungley not to hear. "You could have told me to get up. You could have taken me for a walk or something."

His brow was now scrunched up, his eyebrows almost touching each other. I knew it even without looking at his face. "And why on earth would I have done that?"

And he was right. Of course he was. Damn police. I was acting weird, so very weird. Probably the nerves. Or not. I wasn't nervous. I wasn't. Because it wasn't like my and Willy's whole future was on the line here. It wasn't like Willy's life was on the line here.

So totally not nervous.

Just totally freaking out.

"Sorry, you're right," I mumbled and cleared my throat. I pointed to the stack of papers on my desk – carefully placed there only hours before – and looked at the officer who was staring at me suspiciously. Great job.

"I was just – I was working on something. Sorry. I'm pretty tired because of it. Maybe that's why I'm a bit grumpy today."

His expression cleared, replaced by one of understanding. Lungley was good in that sense. He was caring and sympathetic, even towards prisoners. He was just and treated everyone more or less the same. His problem, though, was that he was awfully weak. Not just physically, also mentally. He took every threat to heart and would do just about anything you told him as long as you had a weapon and he didn't. We all knew it; we'd all witnessed it. He'd almost helped an inmate escape once and he would have if it hadn't been for Droidner who had shown up and ended the party with only one flick of his gun and a very well-placed punch, which had left the prisoner unarmed and at the mercy of the guards once more. The next day the poor bastard had been shipped off to another facility where he would have to wait until he turned eighteen, before he could be placed into an adult prison. At least that's what we'd been told.

Officer Lungley, on the other hand, had stayed and how very grateful I was now for that! He would be perfect. Apparently, the gods were sending me a sign that I'd picked the right day.

„That's fine," he waved off. "You're by far not the rudest person in here."

"Why, that's a relief," I stated, smiling hesitantly. "You know, while we're talking about work, I – I kind of need a ruler. Or a metric stick. Or anything to measure length with, really."

"Oh. And why would you need something like that?"

I smiled again. I aimed for a shy grin but I had no idea how it came over, if it was even plausible. "I'm … well, I'm planning a house," I whispered, as if giving away a well-guarded secret. It was a good trick to get others to believe you, to get them onto your side. You just had to look uncertain, put an unconfident smile on top and start acting all secretive, as if you were entrusting your listener with something very personal. Not many people could resist that.

"What sort of house?" the guard asked, remembering his task and gently guiding me out of the cell. He steered in the direction of the dining hall but he didn't stay behind me – he stepped forward and strolled beside me, like a friend, an equal. Definitely not like a prison guard.

I had to suppress a smile. Time to wake his conscience.

"Well, once I get out of here – and I will get out of here, mister Lungley, trust me – once I do, I want to find my brother and start a new life. Far away from here. Somewhere in the countryside. Somewhere I can leave all my mistakes behind." I sighed as deeply as I still thought credible and looked him in the eyes. "You know, prison has changed me. I want to be better now. I want to change, be the best I can be. Life doesn't give us all the same privileges. Some, like me, are born without most of them, but I still don't think that's a reason to do bad. I still don't think that's a reason to be bad. And I finally see that now."

He watched me, his eyes fixed on mine, obviously fazed in admiration or astonishment. Which one was hard to tell. It lasted for three to four seconds. Then he shook his head, looked to the ground and cleared his throat. "Good for you, miss Donovan," he whispered in a broken voice. "Good for you. What did you say you needed again?"

The grin I felt creeping onto my face would be impossible to swallow, I knew that, so I turned away and pretended to wipe away some tears. I hoped it wouldn’t seem too over the top. When I spun back, Lungley was still looking at the ground and I knew I had him right where I wanted him.

"A ruler," I whispered, probably a bit too happy for the given circumstances, but nobody seemed to care, least of all Lungley.

"I'll see what I can do," he promised.

"That's all I ask," I agreed.

It wasn't half an hour later that I had the ruler safely tucked away in the pocket of my prison suit.

***

The water was at knee-height. At knee-height! And I only had ten minutes left before Lungley came by to check up on me. This wasn't enough. It wasn't happening fast enough.

How in the world had I miscalculated this? I was supposed to be good with numbers!

I waded over to the other side of my cell and struggled to get to the sink that was pushed away from the wall, exposing exactly two separate water pipes. Though too slow, the current of the water storming out of the pipes was still impressive. It was enough to make my job of getting near pretty hard. But I managed and positioned myself directly in front of the sink, on a spot where I could stand fairly steadily and reach the pipes at the same time.

"What's going on here?" I mumbled. "It's been an hour and there's only this much water in here – what's going on?"

I reached into the bigger pipe, squeezed my arm as deep in as it would go until I felt something hard under my fingers.

"What the – you're blocked?" I asked the pipe, confused.

To my unveiled surprise, it didn't answer. But what I was feeling was answer enough. I tried to close my fingers around the foreign object with only moderate success due to the water flowing around my fist and making every movement agony. I squeezed my eyes shut, concentrating solely on the blockade under my hand, and tugged.

It budged, but stayed in place. As far as I could tell, it had moved maybe a few millimetres, not more.

I tugged again.

It budged.

"Third one's the charm," I chimed. And then I jerked the thing forcefully, putting as much strength into the movement as I could possibly gather. It hurt, but as I did it, I immediately felt something shift – not just the object, something more, something bigger. I thought oh-oh for the fraction of a second before my hand was tossed out of the pipe and I was buried under a stream of water.

I'd broken the pipe. Or something else. I'd broken something and now I was about to drown because there was just no way this colossus of a stream would need more than eight minutes and twenty-two seconds to fill up my cell right to the brink with water, which meant that the guard that was coming to check on me would only find a corpse, dead from lack of oxygen, probably floating right under the ceiling, having had desperately fought for one more breath of air before succumbing to the darkness.

"Help!" I screamed, horrified by the little show that had taken place in my mind. More panicky than I cared to admit, I pounded on the small window of my door before the current dragged me away and to the other side of the cell – in the direction of the emergency phone. I exhaled, trying to grasp the phone and dial the emergency number, but the water had other ideas. It pulled me away and threw me against the wall. I banged my head, saw black spots for two seconds, cleared my vision and focused back on what I had to do to survive this.

It was a special kind of focus. The kind that only comes when your life is at stake. The kind that has no more than one job – to keep you breathing. It’s almost inhuman, pointed just at one thing and one thing only. And while you’re busy concentrating, your brain doesn’t have much choice but to go along, and so it ends up tunnelling, blocking out the world, until you are the only thing that exists. You and your survival.

So here it was. The phone. The only purpose for me to keep fighting. The only thing that still existed. Everything else dimmed, even the water, which didn't feel as forceful or threatening or deadly as it had before. I made a mad dash forward.

I grabbed the phone, held it against my ear and started to type.

I was at the third digit when a wave climbed up to my shoulder and gently tickled my neck.

I only had a moment to jump away, a moment so short it couldn't even be called a fraction of a second.

Then the water reached the phone and it exploded into thousands of little sparks, leaving me behind with no hope at all.

"Help!" I shouted hoarsely, knowing that no one would answer. Because there was no one there. The guard would come in five minutes and seventeen seconds and I probably didn't have more than two minutes of oxygen left.

Was it possible to survive three minutes under water?

***

I knew I had to do something. It would be plain ridiculous to drown in my own prison cell at my own hands. And then the sheriff and the young guy from the FBI would come and see my body and shake their heads, maybe even smile, crack a joke about how vain and clumsy I was. And then they’d leave the penitentiary, probably never waste another thought on me again, forget all about Willy and let him die or even worse …

What a pathetic future that would be.

Besides, dying right now would suck. Dying would suck, period. No matter how hard things got, no matter what was happening, how much I was scared or hurting – to stop existing completely was a concept my brain was unable to grasp. And I didn’t even want it to, because to not exist anymore, to not be, to just stop – I didn’t want that. I couldn’t want that. I still had things I wished to do. I had ambitions; I couldn’t be just ripped away from everything.

So. There. A minute and fifty-five seconds. That was about the time I had left to figure something out. If not, that was about the time I had left to live.

The water pulled me along and propelled me around the room in a circular motion. I was getting dizzy. It was getting hard to think and it was getting harder to breathe.

I found myself wishing for a lesser flow because then I could at least-

I could what? Think clearer? Hardly. The panic was there to stay. My brain was going crazy and there was nothing to do about that.

What else? If there were no current – well, things would definitely be easier. Better. Not that much water streaming in, for one. More time. More oxygen.

So I had to do something about the flow. The pipes were the logical place to start – the thing in the absolute centre of the source of currently my biggest problem. And there was really only one thing I could possibly think of.

I took off my shirt. It was wet and ugly and I felt a weird disgust upon holding it in my hand. Its dark blue colour seemed to tease me, its moist material tangled itself around my wrist. But I quickly pushed the feeling away, reminding myself that there were more important matters at hand. Much more important.

I looked up. The surface of the water was maybe one meter below the ceiling, no more.

One metre of free room left. One metre of air.

A minute and a half? Maximally?

I had to act quickly, then. I squeezed the shirt into as small a ball as possible, took a deep breath and dove under. The water wasn’t deep – with two powerful swings I was already at the floor. But now came the hard part. Now I had to swim against the current.

It was almost impossible. For every metre I moved forward I was pushed back two. It was hard to even stay in the same spot, let alone make any progress. I had soon run out of air and had to return to the surface.

Eighty-five centimetres. This was going down fast. Or up, depending on how you looked at it.

Another breath, another try, another fail once I’d reached the bottom. The water was just too powerful. I couldn’t fight against it.

Two breaths. Sixty-eight centimetres.

“Third one’s the charm,” I whispered. But this time, it wasn’t. It was just as much a waste of time and breath as the previous two. I returned to the surface, desperate. I wanted to scream and to cry and to punch something, but I didn’t because it wouldn’t have helped me. I had to stay concentrated and the only way I could do that was by controlling my feelings. There would be time to rage later – that is, if I survived this.

I had to.

Three breaths. The air was becoming thin, or at least that’s what it felt like. Fifty-seven centimetres.

But again, it was for naught. And again and again and again. Forty-three, twenty-nine, nineteen, eight centimetres.

Another breath. Another try. Another fail.

Until there was just … no surface to return to.

No air to inhale anymore.

No breath to take.

I stared up at the spot where I knew the ceiling to be. I must have looked quite dumb, as if I couldn’t believe what was happening, even though I had been expecting it for the past six minutes and twenty-two seconds. I stretched out a hand and touched the hard surface and-

Yes.

NO.

There was nothing there except for the ceiling.

So this was it.

Now I had to hold my breath for three minutes.

Yeah, right. Like I could manage that. I was already running out of air and it hadn’t even been twenty seconds.

Maybe I could at least go down swinging. As bad an idea as moving probably was, considering my predicament, the thought had a certain appeal to it.

The current was now much smaller, weakening by the second, almost non-existent. It wasn’t hard to beat it anymore. It took me only a few kicks – and a lot of breath I didn’t have to spare, but who was keeping count, anyway? – to reach the pipes. I stuffed the shirt into the bigger one, effectively preventing any more water from entering the cell.

Then I stopped short and thought about it really hard.

If there had still been water coming in, it meant that the room couldn’t be completely full yet. After all, the water had to go somewhere. Which meant that somewhere there was still a place to go. Somewhere there was still a place without water, probably filled with blissful air. Beckoning. Challenging me to find it.

Only, I had no idea where that somewhere might be. I didn’t have the strength to find out either. It was becoming hard to determine where up and down was, never mind inspecting the room.

Until it hit me – the ventilation shaft.

It was so simple, so basic, so cliché that I just wondered how I hadn’t thought of it sooner. What had I been doing all this time?

I quickly hurried in the direction I believed to be up – now everything was spinning so it was hard to tell if I was right –, trying to prevent my mouth from expelling my last air supply in a group of bubbles which would incline my body to take a breath.

The last, fatal, gruesome breath.

I’d heard of that one.

It was when your body’s need for oxygen became greater than your body’s need for life. When your lungs were so starved that all your instincts gave way to the most basic one – breathing. When your brain didn’t care anymore that you weren’t surrounded by air and just screamed at your body to inhale. And of course your body would obey because in the end, a person doesn’t have any control over instincts. In the end, you’re always powerless and all you can do is watch your body try to keep itself alive and fail. You’re a bystander that can’t interfere. So in the end, you would inhale a load of water, which would swamp your lungs and grant you a slow, painful death.

You would literally drown from the inside out.

Quite needless to say, I wanted to prevent that.

And thankfully, thankfully it didn’t get that far. I was about five centimetres away from the shaft when my vision blurred. I heard a noise, something tugged at me and then everything was dark.

***

What time is it?

I didn’t know. And wasn’t that one of the scariest things I’d ever experienced. Not knowing what time it was was even worse than not knowing where I was – which was also the case –, worse than it would have been if I didn’t know my name or age. Not knowing what time it was took every sense of orientation away from me and I felt lost and I was falling, falling and something inside me was burning, but that was irrelevant in the face of the fact that I was nowhere.

Besides, wasn’t there somewhere I had to be? Would anyone find me in time? Would I be a nothing in a big place of nowhere forever?

Scary.

I felt water trickle down my face, I felt a pressure against my front, somewhere in the back of my mind I felt it all, I even heard the voice, someone calling my name, someone murmuring something into my ear, and I knew something important was happening, that I should probably pay attention, that this was something I had to know, but I couldn’t gather the energy, because I was lost and lost forever.

Until I started coughing and my throat lit up like a candle and everything hurt and everything burned and I was actually puking water.

“Good. Let it out,” I heard someone whisper.

And I did. Not because I trusted that someone, not because I wanted to, it just happened and I couldn’t stop it even if I’d wanted to. I puked and puked and maybe there was someone rubbing my back, I couldn’t be sure.

Once I was done, I lay back and enjoyed breathing. Every breath hurt, every in and out was painful, it scratched my throat and probably scraped it bloody, probably grazed it to the point where there was no more skin left, but I loved it, loved it more than I had loved anything in a long time. I knew I couldn’t stay like this forever, but for a few moments I pretended that I could. That I would.

I was safe.

I was happy.

That was until a face showed up in my line of vision and burst the fragile bubble I had carefully formed around myself. It was Lunlgey. He smiled at me sadly and arched his eyebrows. His lips moved. I couldn’t hear anything but I could read his question pretty clearly.

“What the hell happened?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I tried to answer, not quite sure how much of that actually came across. “There was just suddenly water streaming into the cell.”

In the long run, no one would believe that story. But for now, it was enough if Lungley did. I just had to get out of here.

“Do you know what time it is?” I inquired.

His eyebrows, if possible, flew even higher, but he didn’t comment further on my question. Instead, he quietly glanced at his watch. “It’s two past four.”

Two past four.

That meant I had exactly twenty-one minutes left. Assuming that Lungley’s watch was precise. That wasn’t a lot. I would have to hurry.

Two past four.

I was already two minutes behind schedule. Two minutes would be hard to make up.

But I really had to get moving. Now.

I glanced around the hallway, searching for guards and not finding any. That was surprisingly encouraging. Although Lungley had probably called backup, just in case, so additional men were most likely on their way. It was probably just a matter of minutes before this place would be crawling with police.

Looking down at my hands, I noticed the absence of the all-too-known cuffs. Lungley hadn’t got around to placing them on my wrists yet. Good. This was exactly the position I wanted to be in. This was exactly the position I’d been planning for. Outside of my cell without cuffs and only one guard to deal with, at least for now.

This was almost too easy.

I turned to Lungley, looked him in the eyes and whispered, “Sorry.”

Then I delivered a kick to his head that left him unconscious, took his gun and ran, the shouts of approaching guards echoing in the distance.