Chapter 60
LX
Natasha closed her eyes and lay there, on the rough concrete floor.
‘Come on, you lazy bitch: get up.’
But she didn’t.
‘Please?’
No.
‘OK: count to ten, then up.’
Ten came and went. Then another ten. And she was halfway through the third before wriggling over onto her side – ready for the undignified struggle to get back on her feet.
Natasha froze, the hair crackling across the back of her neck.
Someone was looking at her.
. . .
But it wasn’t DS Davis.
A pair of dark eyes glittered in the gloom beneath the workbench. And now all the hair on her arms crackled too. Even her scalp fizzed inside the mask as Natasha’s stomach clenched and her heart doubled the beat. Jaw clamped shut to keep the scream inside.
A rat. It was a bloody rat. A nasty hairy-bastard rat.
Thick with diseases, dragging that disgusting naked tail behind it, shitting and pissing on everything. Creeping, whiskery, plague-carrying vermin.
She flinched. ‘Fuck off, you rodenty bastard!’
It stared back at her.
‘GO ON! GET OUT OF IT!’
Twitching its slimy pink nose.
Little shit was just waiting for her to croak – cos she must’ve looked pretty crook in this getup – so it could burrow into her flesh and eat her from the inside.
There was a stone, not much smaller than a champagne cork, sitting on the concrete, close enough that Natasha could wrap her toes around the thing and pick it up off the floor.
She bent her knee, bringing the rock closer, then snapped her leg out – hurling it away into the space beneath the workbench.
OK, so her aim wasn’t great, but the stone bounced off the ground, then up against the wood, then down again: clatter, bang, clatter. And the noise was enough to make the diseased creepy little bastard scurry away.
‘YEAH, YOU BETTER KEEP RUNNING, RUPERT FUCKIN’ RAT!’
The stone rattled to a halt against something metal, setting whatever-it-was ringing as it spun around a couple of times then wobbled to a halt.
She narrowed her eyes, then shuffled closer to the bench. Till the chain wouldn’t let her go any further.
That metal something was an old Stanley knife, long forgotten and coated in spider webs. You fucking beauty.
The gap beneath the bench had to be a good six, seven inches, and while she couldn’t exactly reach an arm in there, her legs still worked.
Yeah, but where there’s one rat bastard there’s always more – first lesson she learned in the newspaper world. Didn’t help though, did it: she still ended up marrying one.
Natasha gritted her teeth, cos she was having that bloody knife, rats or not.
Deep breath.
She reached her throwing leg into the void. Skiffing the side of her foot along the uneven concrete, through cobwebs and little pebbly lumps of what had to be rat shit, until her big toe brushed against the Stanley knife’s cool metal body. Setting it rocking.
Took four goes, and a lot of delicate manoeuvring, but eventually she got her foot hooked behind the thing and dragged it towards her.
The knife was ancient: the metal gone that kind of furry way that old metal did. And it was probably covered in rat piss. But she writhed and struggled and contorted herself till it was close enough to grab with her shackled hands, then thumbed the button anyway. Shoving the mechanism forward.
The blade didn’t exactly slide out: it grated and stuttered, the edge chipped and flecked with rust. Streaked with the memory of the last thing it cut through, before it was lost.
She could do those wrists now.
But first . . .
Natasha placed the blade’s tip against the edge of her mask’s mouth hole, wriggling it between the zip’s plastic teeth, twisting the knife so the jagged cutting edge pointed away from her face. Then sawed.
Nothing happened to start with, the thing just juddered back-and-forth and back-and-forth and then a sizzling ripping sound as the knife carved through leather.
She kept going – hacking away at the gimp mask, cutting up one cheek and around the top of her eyebrows. Didn’t matter about the sharp sting of metal slitting heat-swollen flesh, didn’t matter about the blood, as long as she got this bastarding thing off.
She sawed her way down the other side, and a big chunk of mask hinged forward to flap wide open.
What was left still covered her ears, and her chin, and most of her head, but for the first time since she woke up yesterday, her face was free.
Natasha wiped her other hand across it – wet and sticky, the fingers and palm covered in bright scarlet.
A laugh jangled free, followed by another one, and another until she was sitting on the floor, rocking, screeching it out. An angry, hysterical, unhealthy sound.
Eventually it passed, leaving her sagging against the workbench, breathing hard, ribs aching like she’d suffered another kicking.
She got to work with the blade again, sawing downwards from the side of her mouth. Hacking through to the bottom of the mask.
Soon as the knife ripped through the last bit of leather, she dropped it and pulled at the mask with both hands, hauling it off and flinging the bastard away.
The unwell laughter burbled away, just beneath the surface.
OK, so her hands weren’t free, and she was still chained to this bloody anchor, and she’d probably just given herself tetanus, septicaemia, and all manner of rat-borne diseases, but it was a start.
And now she had a weapon.