“Feels good, doesn’t it?”
Ballard stared at him as she felt herself slipping away. Soon the tunnel collapsed and became a pinhole of light. And then even that was gone.
27
Ballard tasted blood. She opened her eyes but was disoriented. Then it all came back. The upside-down house. The chair. The bindings. Trent. The gag had torn both corners of her mouth when he had pulled it back into place. Her neck felt stiff and hard to move. Once again, her vision wobbled as she brought her chin up.
The room was dark. Trent had turned the light off when he left. She could see only the dim outline of light around the curtains across the room. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious or how long it would be before Trent came back.
She looked around and saw a dark image of herself in the mirror, still bound. She tensed her body and found the bindings as strong and unyielding as before. She tried to calm her thinking and lower the sense of panic she felt.
She started with Beatrice. Trent had gone to get her. She knew where the upside-down house was and where Beatrice lived and worked. It was a minimum twenty-five-minute drive each way in routine traffic. If it was the middle of the night, he would be much faster. If it was the middle of the day, much longer. Trent would also have to find a way to abduct and control Beatrice. If she was alone at the warehouse, that would be one thing. If she was in the midst of video production, there would be people around, and that would complicate matters considerably and cost Trent time.
There were too many variables and none mattered, because Ballard did not have the starting point of knowing how long she had been unconscious. The one thing she did know gave her an adrenaline shot of hope. She was now alone and Trent had made a mistake. Earlier, when she had looked at herself in the mirror, she had seen that her wrists and ankles were bound to the chair posts with black plastic zip ties. They looked like the kind bought at a hardware store. Thin and designed to bundle cables or for other industrial and household needs, not the kind carried by police and used for binding human beings.
Regardless of their purpose or strength, Ballard knew that all zip ties had one thing in common; they were totally susceptible to the laws of physics.
In law enforcement, zip ties, or flex cuffs, were officially considered temporary restraining devices. They were not in the same league as handcuffs for the simple reason that one was made of plastic and the other was made of steel. There were plenty of stories and warnings passed in official memoranda, roll-call rooms, and the back hallway chatter of station houses. The message was simple: always keep your eye on an arrestee in flex cuffs. It didn’t matter how strong they were. Plastic is subject to the laws of physics. Friction creates heat. Heat expands plastic.
Ballard tried to move her wrists, this time not pushing against the restraints but rather moving her hands up and down along the vertical chair posts. The bindings were so tight that she could not move them more than a half inch either way. But one half inch up and one half inch down was enough. She started moving her arms like pistons, up and down, up and down, as quickly as she could, creating friction between the plastic and the wood. The hard plastic straps almost immediately started cutting painfully into her skin. But soon she could also feel the heat she was creating, and that pressed her to move her arms faster and harder.
The pain grew almost intolerable and soon she could feel blood starting to drip from her wrists down across her hands. But Ballard didn’t stop. And soon the half inch of movement became an inch and then two inches as she felt the plastic start to loosen.
She bit down on the gag and tears streamed down her face, but she kept going, stopping every two minutes by her count to quickly check the circumference of the binding. She was giving the same effort on both sides but soon it became clear that the binding on her left wrist was reacting to the friction and heat more quickly. She stopped the effort on the right side and doubled down on the left, sending all her strength into the piston action of her arm.
Her arm ached all the way up to her shoulder and neck but she pressed on. Soon blood and sweat on her wrist and hand made them slick, and suddenly, on an upward pull, her hand came all the way through the binding, its edge scraping skin off the side of her palm.
She had one hand free and she screamed into the gag, a primordial cry of release. She brought her bloody hand up, her fingers still numb, and managed to pull the gag down over her chin.
“Motherfucker!” she yelled to the room.
She moved quickly after that. Trent had left the key on the table. Ballard could see it glinting in the light from the sliding door. She reached for the table but was a foot short. Using her free arm as a pendulum, she rocked the chair forward until it tipped. As it toppled, she made a grab for the key, but she missed and fell face forward in the chair.
But now on the floor she could easily reach the leg of the table. She pulled it over and tipped it forward. The key slid onto the floor within reach. She grabbed it but her thumb and finger were too numb to get a secure grip.
She tried to shake life back into her left hand while she went to work with her right, once again moving her arm up and down the chair post. Soon she had enough feeling in her left hand to grip the key, and she used its teeth like a saw on the softening plastic binding her right. In moments the second binding snapped and both of her hands were free.
Still lying sideways on the floor, she unbuckled the belt that was around her torso. Her ankles were still bound to the chair. She turned onto her left side and, bending sideways, was able to grab one of the cross struts between the front and back legs of the chair. She tried to jerk it loose from the legs but it was solidly in place. Using the heel of her already bleeding hand, she swung a blow down on the strut and again it was unmoved. She hit again and then again with similar result.
She put everything into the next swing and wasn’t sure if the crack she heard was the strut or a bone in her hand.
“Goddammit!”
She paused a moment, until the pain eased some, then grabbed the strut and pulled. The wood had split and by pulling it in the middle, she broke it loose. She then slid her plastic binding down along the leg and free of the chair.
With all but one limb free, Ballard was able to manipulate the chair and brace it against the room’s wall. She then kicked through the remaining strut with the heel of her free foot, not feeling much pain from the impact because her foot was completely numb.
Finally free, Ballard sat on the floor and tried to rub feeling back into her ankles and feet. As sensation returned, they began to pulse with a stabbing, burning pain. She tried to stand and walk but was unsteady and she pitched forward onto the floor. She crawled the rest of the way across the room to the pile of her clothes.
Her clothes had been cut in so many places, they were completely unusable. Her hope that her cell phone would be in the pile was dashed as she remembered leaving it charging in her bedroom when she had gone out to the garage.
She knew she would need to look elsewhere in the house for a phone and for clothes. She tried to get up again, putting her hand out and using the mirrored wall for support. She left a bloody handprint.
With her other hand she yanked back the curtain and saw that the light that leaked around the edges came from an overhead porch light. It was dark outside. It looked like the middle of the night.