As Good as Dead: Part 1: Chapter 28

Faceless. Dark. Quiet. Too quiet. Pip could no longer hear the hiss of Jason’s breath, nor smell the metallic tang of his sweat as she breathed rattling breaths in and out of her nose. He must have moved away from her.
Pip stopped breathing, sounding out the room with her covered ears, feeling out the concrete around her with her doubled-up legs. She heard a scuffled footstep, far away from her, back towards the door he’d dragged her through.
She listened.
Metal clanging as a door opened. A shriek of old hinges. More footsteps, crunching on the gravel outside. Another shriek of the hinges and the door clicking shut. Silence, for a few in-and-out breaths, and then a much smaller sound: a key scraping against the lock. Another clunk.
Had he just left? He’d just left, hadn’t he?
Pip strained, listening for the faint sounds of shoes and cascading gravel. A familiar sound: a car door slamming. The growl of an awakening engine and the wheels reversing away from her.
He was leaving. He was gone.
He’d left her here, locked her in, but Jason was leaving. DT was gone.
She sniffed. Wait. Maybe he wasn’t gone. Maybe this was some kind of test, and he was sitting in the room with her still, watching her. Holding his breath so she couldn’t hear him. Waiting for her to make any kind of wrong move. Hiding there in the dark underside of her eyelids, taped down.
Pip made a sound in her throat, testing it out. Her voice vibrated against the duct tape, tickling her lips. She groaned again, louder, trying to make sense of the impenetrable darkness around her. But she couldn’t. She was helpless here, restrained to this tall metal shelving unit, her face disappeared, wrapped up in tape. Maybe he was still in the room with her, she couldn’t rule it out. But she had heard the car, hadn’t she? It couldn’t have been anyone but Jason. And another memory, shaking loose from her broken-down brain. The typed words of a transcript. DCI Nolan asking Billy Karras why he left his victims alone for a period of time, proved by wear and tear in the duct-tape restraints. The DT Killer did leave. This was part of it, his routine, his MO. Jason was gone. But he would be back and that’s when Pip would die.
OK, she was alone, Pip settled on that, but she couldn’t linger in that momentary relief. Now on to the next problem. The terror wasn’t locked up, like she was, in the back of her head. It was everywhere. It was in her taped-down eyes and her taped-up ears. In every beat of her overused heart. In the raw skin of her wrists and the uncomfortable bend of her shoulders. In the pit of her stomach and the deep of her soul. Pure and visceral; fear as she’d never known it before. Inevitable. The segue between being alive and not.
Her breaths were coming shorter, too short, panicked spurts in and out. Oh fuck. Her nose was blocking up, she could feel it, every breath rattling more than the last. She shouldn’t have cried, she shouldn’t have cried. The air was struggling, scraping its way through two tightening holes. Soon they would block up entirely and she would suffocate. That’s how it would all end. Dead girl walking. Dead girl not breathing. At least that way DT wouldn’t get to kill her, not his way at least, with a blue rope around her neck. Maybe it was better this way, something out of his control and closer to hers. But, oh god, she didn’t want to die. Pip forced the air in and out, feeling light-headed, though she no longer had a head, just two shrinking nostrils.
A new chorus in her mind. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
‘Hey, Sarge.’ Ravi was back, inside her head. Whispering into her taped-up ear.
‘I’m going to die,’ she told him.
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, and Pip knew he was saying it with the trace of a smile, a dimple carved into one cheek. ‘Just breathe. Slower than that, please.’
‘But look.’ She showed him the restraints: her ankles, her hands tied to a cold metal pole, the mask around her face.
Ravi already knew all that, he’d been there for it too. ‘I’m staying with you, until the very end,’ he promised, and Pip wanted to cry again but she couldn’t, her eyes were forced shut. ‘You won’t be alone, Pip.’
‘That helps,’ she told him.
‘That’s what I’m here for. Always. Team Ravi and Pip.’ He smiled behind her eyes. ‘And we made a good team, didn’t we?’
‘You did,’ she said.
‘And you did too.’ He took her hand, bound behind her back. ‘Of course, I supplied all the devilish good looks,’ he laughed at his own joke, or hers, she supposed. ‘But you were always the brave one. Meticulous, annoyingly so. Determined to the point of recklessness. You always had a plan, no matter what.’
‘I didn’t plan for this,’ Pip said. ‘I lost.’
‘That’s OK, Sarge.’ He gave her hand a squeeze, her fingers starting to fizz from the awkward angle. ‘You just need a new plan. That’s what you’re good at. You’re not going to die here. He’s gone, and now you have time. Use that time. Come up with a plan. Wouldn’t you like to see me again? See everyone you care about?’
‘Yes,’ she told him.
‘Then you better get started.’
Better get started.
She took a deep breath, her airway clearer now. Ravi was right; she’d been given time and she had to use it. Because as soon as Jason Bell walked back through that door with the shrieking hinges, there was no longer a chance. None. She was dead. But this Pip, left alone and bound here to these metal shelves, she was only very likely dead. Not much of a chance, but more than that near-future Pip had.
‘OK,’ she said to Ravi, but really to herself. ‘A plan.’
She couldn’t see, but she could still check her surroundings. There hadn’t been anything in her vicinity before DT taped over her sight, but maybe he’d left something nearby after the mask was done. Something she could use. Pip swiped her bound legs in an arc, to one side and the other, straining her arms to reach further out. No, there was nothing here, just concrete and the dipped-down channel running beneath the shelves.
That’s fine, she hadn’t expected there to be anything, don’t sink back down into despair. Ravi wouldn’t let her anyway. OK, so, she couldn’t move, she was stuck here to these shelves. Was there anything there that could help her? Vats of weedkiller and fertilizer that were useless to her, even if she could reach them. Fine, so what could she reach? Pip flexed her fingers, trying to bring the feeling back to them. Her arms were bent behind her back, pulled up higher than they should be. Her wrists were taped to the front metal pole of the shelving unit, just above the lowest shelf. She knew all that, had taken it in before her face was taken. Pip shifted her wrists against the tape and explored with two fingers. Yes, she felt the cold metal of the pole, and if she stretched her middle finger down, she could just feel the intersection of the shelf, where it attached to the pole.
That was it. All she could reach. All the help she had in the world.
‘Maybe it’s enough,’ Ravi said.
And maybe it was. Because somewhere, in that intersection between shelf and pole, there had to be a screw, to hold them together. And a screw could be freedom. Pip could use that screw. Pinch it between her thumb and finger and pierce holes in the tape at her wrists. Keep piercing and ripping until she could tear herself free.
OK, that was it. That was the plan. Get the screw from the shelf.
Pip had that feeling again, like there was a presence in the unknown around her. And not just the Ravi in her head. Something malignant and cold. But time didn’t wait for anybody and it definitely wouldn’t wait for her. So, how was she going to get the screw?
Pip could only just touch the top of the shelf with one finger; she needed to somehow move her wrists lower, so she could reach the underneath of the shelf. The duct tape was wrapped around her wrists, sticking them to this exact part of the pole. But if she shifted maybe, just maybe, she might get the tape to unstick from the metal. It was just on one side. Only an inch or two of contact. If she could unstick the tape there, then she could slide her hands up or down the pole. She’d struggled and she’d left herself a little room inside the tape, inside Jason’s grip. She could do it. Pip knew she could.
She walked her legs in so she could push her weight back against the tape. Shoved her hands further into the shelves, fingertips brushing the plastic edge of one of the vats. She pushed and she strained and she shifted and she could feel it give. Felt one side of the tape coming unstuck from the metal.
‘Yes, keep going, Sarge,’ Ravi urged her on.
She pushed harder, she strained harder, the tape cutting into her skin. And slowly, slowly, the tape came free from the pole.
‘Yes,’ she and Ravi hissed together.
They shouldn’t have, because she wasn’t free. Pip was still stuck to this pole, her wrists bound tight around it, still very likely dead. But she had gained something: movement up and down between two shelves, her restraints sliding against the pole.
Pip wasted no more time, dropping her wrists as far as they could go, resting just above that lower shelf. She felt her way around the corner of the shelf with her fingers and there on the inside, she felt something: small and hard and metal. It must be the nut, secured to the end of the screw. Pip pressed her finger hard against it. She could feel the end of the screw, emerging from the nut. It wasn’t as sharp as she’d like, but it would work. She could still use it to hack away at the duct tape.
Next step: remove the nut. It wasn’t going to be easy, Pip realized, as she shifted her hands again. There was no way she could get either of her thumbs around that side of the pole, they were stuck here on the outside. She would have to use two of her fingers instead. Her right hand, obviously. It was stronger. She positioned her middle and forefinger around the nut, clamped them together and tried to twist. Fuck, it was screwed on tight. And which was the right way to loosen it, anyway? Was it to the left, so her right?
‘Don’t panic, just try,’ Ravi told her. ‘Try until it gives.’
Pip did try. And she tried. It wasn’t working, it wouldn’t budge. She was dead again.
She shifted and tried the other way, struggling with the angle. This would never work. She needed her thumbs: how could anyone do this without their thumbs? She pushed her fingers together around the metal and twisted. It hurt, right into the bones, and if she broke the fingers… well, she had more of them. The nut shifted. Barely, but it had shifted.
Pip paused to stretch out her aching fingers, to tell Ravi about it.
‘Good, that’s good,’ he said to her. ‘But you’ve got to keep going, you don’t know how long he’ll be gone.’
It might have already been half an hour since Jason left, Pip had no way of knowing, and the terror moved time in strange ways. Lifetimes in seconds, and the other way. The nut had hardly loosened at all; this was going to take a while and she couldn’t lose focus.
She shifted her fingers again, clamped around the protruding metal nut and pulled it round. It was stubborn, moving only after she’d given it everything, and hardly moving at that. Every time it gave, she had to reposition her fingers around it.
Shift. Clamp. Turn.
Shift. Clamp. Turn.
It was only a tiny movement, in one hand, and yet Pip could feel the sweat running down the inside of her arms, into the fabric of her hoodie. Sliding against the tape at her temples and her upper lip. How long had it been now? Minutes. More than five? More than ten? The nut was loosening, giving a little more each turn.
Shift. Clamp. Turn.
It must have made a full turn by now, growing looser against the screw, against her fingers. She could turn it in quarter-circles now.
Half-circles.
A full turn.
Another.
The nut came free of the screw, resting on the ends of her fingers.
‘Yes,’ Ravi hissed in her head as Pip let the nut drop to the floor, a small tinkle of metal in the great, dark unknown.
Now to remove the screw and hack away the tape at her wrists. She was only likely dead now, not very. But she might live. She might just. Hope discolouring some of the terror’s dark edges.
‘Careful,’ Ravi said to her, as she felt for the end of the screw. Pip pushed it, driving it back through the hole. She had to push hard, the weight of the shelf and all those vats leaning down on the screw. She pushed again and the end disappeared inside the hole.
OK, breathe. She shifted her hands once more, reaching for the front side of the metal pole. This was better: she could use her thumb now. Pip felt for the protruding screw, found it with her finger and hooked on, holding it between her finger and thumb.
Don’t let go.
She tightened her grip and pulled out the screw, a grinding sound of metal on metal.
The shelf tilted forward, losing its front support. Something hard and heavy slid down it, knocking into her shoulder.
Pip flinched.
Her grip loosened, just for a second.
The screw fell from her hand.
A small clatter of metal on concrete, bouncing once, twice, rolling away.
Away into the dark unknown.