Chapter 19
PROCTOR SAT IN THE DARKNESS, breathing slowly and regularly.
He had now, he felt, familiarized himself with his surroundings to the greatest degree possible—a painstaking, but necessary, first step.
He had meticulously paced, again and again in the dark, the transit from front wall to back; between the side walls; and from various angles afforded by the corners.
He was now able to picture the room in his mind almost as clearly as he could have with his eyes, and was able to run—or at least, move as quickly as his hobbled legs allowed—between the various points, always stopping a handbreadth before reaching them.
He practiced moving from his usual sitting position to leaping up and running toward the door, again and again and again.
All this accomplished, he went on to practice calisthenics, push-ups, and sit-ups, increasing the number each day.
This would be a routine he would continue for as long as was necessary.
But this was not all he occupied himself with.
Roughly twelve hours before, while making use of the rudimentary toilet facilities, he’d managed to pry off a strip of the bonding cement surrounding the drain.
The adhesive that had been used was very hard, but—as Proctor knew and his captor apparently did not—it also dried in a stratified way that allowed someone with the proper skills to prize off a semicircular slice.
Proctor’s piece was thin—almost as thin as mica—but it fit nicely along the underside of his index finger, curved like the talon of an eagle.
He could conceal it easily between his fingers, and even if his jailer were to take the unlikely step of examining the drain, Proctor had permanently camouflaged the missing strip.
He had spent much of the night painstakingly rubbing this strip against the rough edge of a bolt in the many padding restraints, shaping it and sharpening the inner edge.
He had stopped before developing a callus.
But within another twenty-four hours, the business edge would be sharper than any scalpel.
It was short—perhaps two inches, extended to its maximum—but Proctor could easily inflict lethal damage with even that length of blade.
All he’d need was that one brief moment of distraction, and it would be lights-out… figuratively as well as literally.
His body remained frozen in position, but all his senses came to attention, seeking a change in the environment.
What had set off his hair-trigger instincts?
Mentally reviewing the last fifteen seconds, he realized it was a quiet sound—a slow, almost stealthy scraping—overhead.
He looked up in the darkness, but of course he could not see the heavy wire grille of the ceiling, which in any case was too high for him to reach.
Yet he was certain the sound—and, though the cell was now quiet, it was definitely a sound that had interrupted his calculations—had come from above.
He remained still, all senses at hypersensitivity.
Now, he thought, another sound came from above—this one even quieter.
It was unusual, and it lasted only a second or two before the cell lapsed into silence again.
Proctor went over possibilities in his head: a tiny peephole being opened for spying with active near-infrared or even military-grade image-intensifying NVGs; some adjustment or enhancement to the security systems his captor assured him were hidden all around; or perhaps—
Suddenly, Proctor realized that—even in the darkness, with nothing to focus on—he was experiencing a peculiar dizziness, almost a sense—in the deep black—of twirling around and around a drain, about to plunge into an unknown abyss.
He shook his head to clear it and began to stand, but his legs felt like rubber and he collapsed.
One additional attempt to rise—and then he sank prone onto the floor, the external darkness now matched by the internal darkness of unconsciousness.
… He was aware of a sensation of straining—ineffectual straining. After a moment, he realized that his body was, instinctively, trying to return to a sitting position. He stopped, falling back to the padded floor, and let his body relax as full consciousness slowly returned.
His head throbbed, but it was not the pain of blunt trauma: rather, it was more like the hollow ache of a hangover.
As control returned to his limbs, he quickly checked himself for injuries or other changes of any kind.
Finding nothing, he tried again—successfully this time—to push himself back to a sitting position.
Now it was time to determine what had happened.
He let his mind go back to his last conscious memory: sudden lightheadedness, dizziness, and disequilibrium.
After that, blackness. And yet he could sense teasing phantoms of what had happened within that blackness: shadow memories of an interrupted dream, or the anterograde amnesia of drugs like midazolam, where the user experiences blank periods of memory, with only filaments of sight and sound remaining as brief, half-remembered events.
Proctor knew that trying to force these fragments of memory to the surface was the surest way of eradicating them. Instead he consciously shifted his train of thought, considering what might have just happened to him while giving the subconscious memories time to reassemble themselves.
He was certain of one thing—he’d been drugged.
Now the faint sounds from overhead made sense: the scraping noise had been the opening of a small hatch or vent; and the second, even fainter sound, the opening of a gas cock.
Both had been done stealthily, with the aim of keeping him off guard until it was too late and he’d lapsed into unconsciousness.
But, quiet as the noises had been, now that he felt sure of what they were, he would be constantly on the alert should they ever recur.
And now, very gently, he turned back to the vestiges of memory left behind by the anesthetic.
As if through a haze of grogginess, he recalled bright lights—and then a blurry image of his captor, Taser in one hand, his head oddly out of proportion.
Perhaps he’d been wearing a gas mask. In any case, the man must have taken it off, because after this there was more blackness and, then, only one more memory, seconds or minutes later—of the man kneeling over him.
Proctor seemed to remember he’d been palpating or even stroking his arm—his right arm—and making low, cooing noises of approval. That was all.
That was all… but it was enough. The gas had been very fast acting, but it also seemed to have dissipated quickly enough for the man to remove his mask at some point; otherwise, Proctor would not have heard the unpleasant noises the man had made while touching his arm…
almost like a mother fussing over her baby.
Except that wasn’t the image that came most sharply to Proctor’s mind—not at all. The mental image that lingered most strongly was that of a butcher, patting the haunch of a prized pig.
He had not forgotten the salacious, almost hungry look in the man’s eyes when he looked over Proctor’s bare arms, lingering on the right, during their first and only face-to-face encounter.
Nor had he forgotten his captor’s obsessive interest in his health, the insistence that he eat everything given to him—or else.
He recalled reading somewhere that, in order to produce the tastiest foie gras, workers would shove tubes down the gullets of geese and pump up to four pounds of grain and fat into their bellies every day. The practice was known as “gavage.” Such a soft, French-infused word for such a barbaric act.
He, too, was being force-fed—the method was more subtle, but the result, Proctor now felt sure, would be the same. His captor was not only a psychopath—he was a cannibal.
Naturally, the thought had occurred to him already—but so had other possibilities: that he was to be stuffed and mounted, perhaps. But now, Proctor put those other possibilities aside.
He’d been gassed to make it easier for his captor to check on him.
The man had no doubt turned on the gas, stuffing a towel quietly under the door until he could safely enter the cell.
He wouldn’t have gone to this trouble unless he was satisfying himself—up close—that his special repast was nearly ready.
The next time Proctor heard those two stealthy sounds, he knew, would be the last. While he could not see into the madness of his tormentor, the vestigial memory of cooing approval assured Proctor that, as a meal, he was just about ripe.
When next the gas cock opened, it would be to remove him from the cell, kill him, and—
But Proctor did not need to imagine how such a scenario would play out. Earlier, while sitting in the dark amusing himself with bullet trajectories, he’d still been speculating about the man’s unhealthy appetite—and when, or how, he would be harvested.
Now he knew a great deal more. And in addition to keeping himself fit, sane, and prepared, he would begin assembling something else to occupy his time:
A plan.