<– Back | Index | Next –>

Adam’s eyes fluttered open as a groan escaped his lips. His tongue ran along his teeth. A coppery taste stuck around, almost as if he had been sucking on a penny.

The light bulbs hanging from the ceiling were dancing around. Swaying this way and that. He knew that they weren’t moving. There probably wasn’t even more than one. It was his eyes that were having trouble focusing.

And that ringing in his ears was not helping.

He reached up to slam his hand down on his alarm clock only to nearly fall out of bed when his hand failed to hit anything. His sudden awareness brought on by the jolt of adrenaline woke him up enough to realize that the high-pitched whine was not his alarm. It was much closer to his ear.

Bringing a finger to the side of his head, he fished out a small ear bud. It must have been wireless. It wasn’t hooked up to anything, yet still made the noise.

He looked it over before flinging it across the room. More worrying were the metal bars he felt around his head. Like u-bend bicycle locks. There were two, one at the base of his neck and the other near the top of his head. Both were connected to a hard plastic mask over his face.

Feeling around, he couldn’t find any sort of latch or hinge that might be used to take off the mask.

What was I doing?

He could barely remember. Something about his sister. She had heard something. Something scary. Someone in trouble, crying for help.

Heart hammering at a million miles an hour and breath bordering on hyperventilation, steaming up the inside of his mask, he just about fell into a panic attack. A worse panic attack. He tried to crush it down. Freaking out wasn’t going to help anything.

Adam shook his head, pushing himself to a sitting position in the bed.

“Beth,” he called out. “Bethany!”

No response.

But with his eyes finally focusing, he got his first good look around the room.

Before the room, the first thing Adam noticed was his shirt.

A large number four had been painted across the front of an otherwise white tee-shirt in bright red. Not one of his shirts, at least not one that he could remember.

He was in a school classroom. On a bed. Obviously not an American classroom. Though there was really no standardization across America for school equipment—even a school half a mile away from another could have wildly different desks and shelves and such—no school he could think of had tiny wooden desks that looked as if merely touching them would cause slivers.

They were clearly built on the cheap. Just a few planks of wood haphazardly held together with nails. Nails that, in many cases, weren’t even hammered in properly.

The floorboards were broken up as well. Some merely cracked, others completely missing, almost as if the wood had gone into making the desks.

One side of the room had a series of metal plates along the wall. Perhaps windows? He could see a little light peeking out from some cracks along the bottoms. Large bolts held the metal sheets in place, each as big as his fist.

The chalkboard—not even a whiteboard—was covered in symbols that might as well have been out of one of his sister’s games for all he could read them.

Though he couldn’t read any of the words, they did bring back a memory.

He and his sister had been touring in Southeastern Europe. Greece for the most part, but they had branched out to the northern countries where safe to do so.

“Safe,” he scoffed, running his hand over the smooth plastic covering his face. Something had obviously gone horribly wrong.

The letterings for children, what the symbols most likely were, weren’t the only things on the chalkboard.

There was a large digital clock display. The kind that could be found on a high school football field, minus the home and away score indicators. Completely out of place against all the poverty of the rest of the room.

Just above the clock was another thing that didn’t fit in the room. A black plastic sphere very similar to ones that could be found in department stores across America. Usually they held a camera somewhere within.

Watching the digital display, Adam quickly realized that it was not a clock. It was slowly ticking down.

Thirty minutes remaining.

Or, more specifically, twenty-six minutes and a handful of seconds.

Every second that ticked by gave him a worse feeling than the last.

What was it counting down to? Something he should wait for? Or something he didn’t want to stick around for?

Likely the latter. Even without the timer, Adam didn’t want to stick around in this room.

He swung his legs out of bed and promptly froze.

Just half a foot away from his feet was a thin wire glinting in the sole light overhead, partially transparent like fishing line. Far enough away that it would be impossible to accidentally knock into yet close enough that he could easily have walked right into it were he not paying attention to the floor.

Carefully and watching out for any other wires, Adam got down on his hands and knees. The wire stretched from one of the desks scattered around the room to somewhere beneath the bed—more of a cot now that he got a better look at it.

Just under where his head would have been was a small plastic rectangle, lightly curved and about an inch thick. Embossed on the front were a few words.

FRONT

TOWARD ENEMY

Adam shuddered. He had seen enough movies to know exactly what that was. And it was facing upwards towards the bed.

A claymore mine. Technically, it had a bunch of model numbers attached to the ‘claymore’ part of its name, but he hadn’t seen that many movies.

To the side of the mine itself was a coil of rope. Or, rather, detonating wire. Probably. One end went into the mine itself. The other was attached to a much smaller rectangular box, one with a thin bit of metal on a hinge and a small brick on top of that bit of metal. The only thing keeping the metal from hitting the rest of the box was a thin pin.

A pin that was attached to the fishing wire.

Adam backed away slowly with shaky hands, making sure to give himself plenty of space between anything dangerous looking.

A mine. Given his mask, the copper taste in his mouth, the large timer, and the metal sheets over the windows, it was probably not a prop. A real mine that had been aimed at his head.

He didn’t know what happened to Bethany, but he desperately hoped she was not in a similar situation.

Still, it seemed like the mine was in an odd spot. Unless he got out of bed right where his head had been, he would have been a fair distance away from the mine itself. It would have been much more effective if it were upright and facing out towards where he was likely to have tripped over the wire.

It was almost as if whoever set it up had intended to scare him rather than kill him.

Probably. He didn’t know the effective range.

Just as Adam was considering better ways to kill himself, a distant thud shook dust from the rafters.

Adam jolted. His first instinct was to rush to the door to see what that noise had been.

A more rational part of his mind told him that there were more traps around the room. Ones that might be set up with a little more hostility in mind. Rushing to the door could kill him if he wasn’t careful.

But that had almost certainly been an explosion.

Again, Adam glanced down to his shirt and the large number four painted on.

He hoped it was paint.

Given that he had a number four—or a number at all—he was likely not the only person in this situation. There should be at least three others. Maybe more.

Actually, maybe less.

He was well aware of the prank seniors pulled in high school where they would release three pigs into a school numbered one, two, and four. The teachers would search fruitlessly for the third pig.

Or rather, he had heard of such a prank. He had never actually heard of it being done.

But that was beside the point.

A similar thing could be happening here. He had no way of knowing.

The only thing he knew was that an explosion had gone off. Someone else set it off.

And he was being watched. Adam narrowed his eyes as he glanced to the front of the room. The black bubble at the front of the room had to have a camera inside.

His eyes flicked down to the countdown timer.

Nineteen minutes.

Adam swore under his breath. He had wasted so much time and hadn’t even moved more than a step away from the bed.

He moved away from his bed, towards the wall with the doorway. He passed by two more tripwires. They grew insanely difficult to see the further he got from the light. Only through a serious bout of squinting could he see them at all.

One at waist height was connected to what looked like a shotgun and another that went into a hole in the wall. He didn’t bother investigating too closely. There simply wasn’t time.

The doorway to the room was blocked. Because of course it was. Rather than a simple wooden door—or a weathered wooden door that would fit with the rest of the room—the way was blocked with bars. They wouldn’t look out of place in a prison. In fact, they probably had been taken from a prison. An old one, given the amount of rust covering them.

Before even touching the door, Adam inspected the device attached just above the doorway. A metal cylinder was secured with shiny steel bolts. Having a temporary job in an electronics retail store, Adam knew exactly what it was.

Shutters. Metal shutters that would come down and keep people from getting inside and stealing the merchandise. Or, in this case, keep him from getting out. Keep him from getting out more than the bars already were.

With the electrical cable running from the shutters to the clock, it didn’t take a genius to guess what would happen when the timer reached zero.

He reached up, fingers brushing against the wire.

Pulling it might give him an endless amount of time.

Or it could drop the shutters immediately.

Or set off another bomb.

Or some shotgun hidden in the wall behind him.

Slowly, Adam let his arm drop to his side. Too risky. He wasn’t sure what was going on still. Not enough information. Pulling random things on a whim could easily get himself killed.

Adam shuddered just thinking that. His life had been perfectly ordinary a mere week ago. He was just graduating high school. His parents sent him and Beth off to Europe as a graduation present. He had to take a vacation from his job just to come.

Then everything had gone wrong. One brightly lit alley with a strange person in a strange mask, much like the one he currently had on, standing over a dead body.

That was it, wasn’t it, he thought, trying to clutch at his forehead. His hand smacked into his mask, jolting his face around.

Beth had heard a noise. A man being murdered. And they just had to stumble on the scene of the crime instead of running away like sensible people. Of course, they hadn’t realized he had been murdered at the time. It had just been a noise.

Adam grit his teeth. He had tried to buy time for Beth to escape and find help once that masked person started running towards them. He had no idea if she had made it or not.

Was she out there, not knowing what had happened to her brother, having to explain what had happened to their parents?

Or was she in here, hopping over claymores and scared out of her mind.

Fourteen minutes on the clock. If it hit less than one and he was still stuck in the room, he would try snapping the wire between the clock and the door shutters. Until then…

Adam brushed the back of his hand against the bars. No electrical shocks. He didn’t know why he would have expected that other than the place generally driving his paranoia up the wall.

There was no latch to the door on either side of the bars. Just a keyhole facing him. Out in the hallway was a wooden box, smooth and made of polished wood, on a table with a sign saying “OPEN ME”. Even if he wanted to, it was far too out of reach.

He turned his back to the door, looking for anything he might have missed in the room. The way the keyhole was facing him was suspicious. Did prison cells normally have keyholes on the inside? Adam honestly had no idea. He had never served time or even been to a penitentiary-turned-museum. In Adam’s mind, prisoners could collect stray paper clips or wire and pick the lock easily if the keyholes were on the inside.

If this is some show for the sick amusement of some sick people, he thought with a glare towards the camera, then there should be a way to escape alive.

He hoped.

The hole in the floorboards was the first thing that stood out to Adam as he gazed around the room. No keys hung off strings over pits of spikes or anything. With how large the keyhole was, he doubted that he would have trouble spotting an equally large key if it was dangling from the ceiling.

A key could be taped to the bottom of the desks where all manner of traps could also be taped, but the floorboards looked the most suspicious. It was a big hole and it was dark. He had no flashlight and the only light in the room had been over his bed. Too far away to cast a decent amount of light anywhere, let alone in the hole.

Reaching a hand inside might as well be suicide. There could be a bear trap just waiting to chomp his arm off or maybe just another claymore on a hair-trigger.

Or worse, spiders.

Deciding that putting any part of himself into the hole was definitely not the right choice, Adam went to the nearest desk that lacked any sort of traps. The flat board making up the seat was roughly twice as long as his arm and already missing several nails on one end.

Placing his foot against one of the supporting boards, he pried it up. It snapped apart almost instantly.

The opposite side, the one with a few decently hammered nails, wasn’t quite as easy. After a minute of working it back and forth, he managed to pull it free.

With a ginger touch, he carefully lowered the plank down into the hole. A bear trap would be the best case scenario. It would just chomp off the bottom of the board. Startling, yes, but not a bomb attached to another tripwire.

If it was a tripwire… he only hoped it would be quick.

Lowering the board so slowly, the timer ticking down, the sweat greasing his face between the mask… when the board finally hit the ground without any explosions going off, he just about collapsed from the sudden lack of tension in his muscles.

He couldn’t tell for sure, but it felt as if he had hit nothing more than solid ground. Moving it around might trip wires, or it might shove a key out of reach. He didn’t try.

Instead, he pulled the board out and set it down on the floor. Kneeling down, he stared into the pit of darkness.

Adam pinched his eyes shut. Just as slowly as he lowered the board, he reached his hand down into the hole. He leaned forward. And leaned some more, lowering his hand all the while.

He felt as if he might lose his balance and topple forward.

Just before he could pull back, his hand hit cool dirt, sinking into the loose ground ever so slightly.

Adam released a pent-up breath. No trap that his board had missed. Better yet, no crawling of spiders over his hand.

Of course, he wasn’t out of the woods yet. There was no key immediately beneath his hand. Nothing metal half buried in the cool dirt. And the timer was still ticking down. His sloth in investigating the hole had cost him a good four minutes on its own. He had just under nine minutes left.

He swept his hand through the dust. There had to be something.

It only took a few seconds to confirm his suspicions.

The dirt was cool. Chilly. While the ambient temperature was warm, his hand felt fairly comfortable despite the constant worry of spiders. But the thing it bumped into, something smooth and cold, sent a chill up his spine.

Cold steel leached the heat from his hand. Whatever he had touched was not a key as he had been hoping. It was round, a sphere that fit neatly in the palm of his hand. Though it wasn’t a perfect sphere. Something square came off the top with a long metal trail leading down the side of the sphere.

A small ring stuck out a decent ways from the top square, attached to another fishing line.

Adam gripped his arm, trying to stop the sudden shakes that started as he realized just what he was holding in the darkness beneath the floorboards.

A grenade. And its pin was half out.

It took all his willpower to suppress dropping it and running. Even if he got away from the blast radius, he had only been around a small portion of the room. There were obviously traps set up throughout the place. A grenade going off in the middle of the room could trigger any number of them, not to mention burn down the building.

Adam took two tries before he managed to slip his finger into the ring attached to the pin. Once in, he pressed the pin in as much as he could before pulling the entire grenade towards the opening.

The desk to his side shifted as soon as he started to pull. He quickly spotted the wire in the dim light.

That could have been bad. If he had bumped his shoulder into the desk while his eyes were closed, it could have knocked the pin completely out of the grenade.

He couldn’t break the fishing line with his bare hands. Maybe he could if he really tried, but there was a much simpler way to defuse the trap. The ring was much like the ring on a key chain. As such, just rotating it around a little let him unhook the ring.

Free of its tethers, Adam pulled the grenade out and ensured that the pin was fully in place.

To his dismay, there was no key taped to the bottom of the grenade.

There was still plenty of room to search beneath the floorboards, but not plenty of time.

However, the grenade gave him an idea.

Why do I even need a key?

A grenade probably wouldn’t work. Or, it would, but it would be dangerous. There was a much simpler solution.

Glancing back towards the bed he had woken up upon, Adam made his way over. Carefully setting the grenade on top of the bed—under the light, he could see a number of words printed on the sides, M67, Frag, Delay, Grenade, Hand, and what looked to be serial numbers—he ran his hands over the tops of his pants. Sweat soaked in along with a fair bit of dirt that had stuck to one hand.

Taking a deep breath, he got down on his hands and knees.

The first thing he did was reach out and grab hold of the brick over the detonator.

Despite having just wiped down his hands, they were already covered in sweat.

His hands shook as he lifted the brick. Without the weight-bearing down, the pin shifted. It didn’t come out, but Adam sucked in a breath and froze all the same. He didn’t move for far too long.

When he did, he moved the brick to the side and carefully set it down next to the detonator. Adam let out his held breath as soon as the biggest problem was out of the way. He wasn’t sure if the latch would be weighty enough to detonate the claymore. To alleviate that concern, he tried to tip it on its side.

Only to find it affixed to the floor with a brace.

Probably to keep him from tripping over the wire with such force that it knocked the whole detonator on its side before the brick could actually do its job.

Which wasn’t a problem. Not really. The claymore wasn’t fixed to the ground and that was the important part.

Carefully lifting both the claymore and the coil of wire, Adam walked back to the door. He made sure to slide the claymore beneath the tripwires to prevent the wire from tripping them on accident.

Once at the door, he balanced the claymore on the bars. The side that said to point it towards an enemy was less than an inch away from the keyhole, facing away from the bed.

Part of it pointed out into the hallway. He almost shouted out a warning before deciding against it.

Maybe he would catch whoever trapped him inside in the blast.

Actually balancing it in the bars wasn’t that difficult. The bars right around the lock were smaller. It was almost a tight fit.

Once satisfied that it wouldn’t be falling out, Adam made his way back to the bed.

Just in case the explosion caused shrapnel to ricochet, he didn’t want to take the unlikely chance that something would strike the grenade, set it off, and kill him. So he picked it up and held it to his chest, blocking most of it with his body. He could have tossed it back where he found it, but it could be a trump card against his captors if needed.

Curling up in a ball next to his bed, he took one arm and held it behind his head for protection.

He took a deep breath.

And let it out.

His other hand slammed down on the detonator.

Adam’s ears popped. A deafening boom rattled his backside. The smell of gunpowder filled the air.

And that was it. Aside from a ringing in his ears—not half as bad as the electronic ring he had woken up to—he felt fine. Nothing had hit him.

Nothing aside from the reality of the situation. That had been a real claymore. Which meant everything else was real as well.

Clamping down on his quickening breath, he pushed himself to his feet, making sure to pocket the grenade as he did so.

Four minutes left. Plenty of time.

So long as he didn’t start panicking.

<– Back | Index | Next –>