Chapter 111.
The box into which the guard lowers Jack is smaller than a coffin. At first there’s room to breathe.
Then Jack hears a low whirring. The walls shift. Telescoping panels slide inward until his shoulders are pinned and his knees can’t rise. His arms are trapped at his sides, not quite crushed, but close enough that panic lights him up.
Even with Jack knowing he could call this off before the guard leaves the room if he wanted to.
He doesn’t want to, even if he already feels he’s suffocating. Even with no lid to the coffin.
Jack can look up, and out. He can see the ceiling. He can see the rim of the opening above his face.
He just can’t get out.
Can’t move either his arms or legs enough to climb out, even if he wanted to.
“The boss will be watching, and listening,” the guard says. “He told me to give you a safe word you can use. One word.”
Jack’s heart is already racing. He is starting to sweat, already feeling he’s about to be sick.
“What word?” he asks.
It doesn’t even sound like his own voice.
“Quit,” the guard says. “Easy to remember.”
“He’ll never hear me say that,” Jack says.
“If you say so,” the guard replies, like he’s heard that before.
When the guard closes the door behind him, it sounds like the door to a jail cell being slammed shut.
Jack starts to feel the tingling sensation he always feels in his hands and feet when he is in any sort of confined space and wants to move around but can’t.
It’s the sensation he sometimes feels on an airplane when it encounters turbulence, his seat belt securely fastened, knowing he can’t get up and move around, as much as he’d rather do that than just .
. . sit there and wait for it to be over.
He barely fights off the first real wave of nausea.
There is only a tiny lightbulb in an upper corner of the coffin.
Other than that, he is mostly in darkness.
It makes Jack feel even more trapped than ever.
It’s not just his heart racing now, it’s his mind. It’s the memories of other times when his claustrophobia has paralyzed him with fear this way, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
This is as bad as it has ever been.
Or could be.
In the next moment, though, it gets worse.
Much worse.
The smell hits.
It pours in convincingly physical and choking. Rot and garbage and sewage—wet, sour, thick. It fills the coffin, fills his lungs, fills his head. It’s so strong it feels like he can taste it.
Jack’s eyes water instantly.
He knows it’s a trick. Some system through vents, a gas line, a canister. A weapon that doesn’t leave bruises. What else could it be?
He tells himself these are only special effects. Illusions. Artificial whatever, designed to make him lose his freaking mind.
Or crawl out of his own skin.
Whatever it is, they’re succeeding like freaking champions. His body doesn’t care that it’s fake.
Jack feels he’s at the bottom of a sewer, not this coffin, the stench that terrible, and overwhelming.
And disgusting.
Now he’s certain he’s going to be sick.
They know.
Know that it’s not just claustrophobia with him.
It’s more than that, and something he dealt with in his normal life on a daily basis.
He hadn’t told the interviewer back in the red tent about being a germaphobe.
He’d never told anybody with whom he’d played football, even getting down in the dirt the way you had to.
He hadn’t told anybody with the Rangers.
Especially not anybody with the Rangers.
He never told anybody in the caves or the jungles in which he’d fought, sometimes crawling around on his belly.
Or in the filthy rooms that served as temporary barracks.
He kept it to himself. Jack wore it. Got through it. The only person he’d ever told was the therapist he’d seen after he got out of the Army, when he was about to take the job on the oil rig.
They must have gotten to her somehow.
Because they obviously know.
And then it gets worse, because the smell isn’t the only thing.
Something damp splatters against the side of the coffin near his cheek. Something soft brushes his forearm. He can’t see what it is, only feel it, and his brain does what it always does in the dark: It fills in the blanks with the worst version.
Jack clenches and unclenches his fists. It’s the only movement he has.
His nostrils are filled with a smell he’d only encountered a few times with the Rangers, when they’d discovered a decomposing body.
He has only been in here a few minutes, Jack’s certain of that. But it already feels like hours. Or days.
In so many ways, this is his ultimate nightmare:
The complete loss of control.
He can’t even control his breathing now. He’s afraid to breathe. That would mean taking in more of the stench.
Feeling he can taste it.
He thinks he’d rather suffocate than do that.
This is what hell must be like.
My hell.
This can’t be happening, he tells himself again.
But it is.
Jack feels he might black out.
But he’s not going to say the word, no matter what.
He’s not going to quit.
Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he hears his mother’s voice—an old prayer she taught him when he was small.
He reaches for it like it’s a rope.
But it’s not there.