She didn’t look at me, and she didn’t have any response, which seemed like a small blessing. I closed my eyes and tried to will away the thumping anguish. It didn’t work, and after a minute Samantha interrupted again.
“I wish we hadn’t done that,” she said. I opened my eyes. She still looked away, over to a plain corner of the trailer. It was completely barren and blank, but apparently better to look at than me.
“Sorry,” I said.
She shrugged, still looking away. “It’s not your fault,” she said, which I thought very generous, though accurate. “I knew there was probably something in the water. They always put something in.” She shrugged again. “I never had ecstasy before, though.”
It took me a moment to realize she meant the drug. “Me either,” I said. “Is that what it was?”
“I’m pretty sure,” she said. “I mean, from what I heard. Tyler said—she takes it a lot—took it a lot.” She shook her head and then she actually started to blush. “Anyway. She said it makes you want to … I mean, touch everybody and … you know. Be touched.”
If that had indeed been ecstasy, I would have to agree. I would also have to say that either we had taken far too much, or it was a very powerful drug. I could nearly blush myself when I remembered what I had said and done. Trying to become a little more human was one thing—but this had been far over the edge into the sludge of dumb, yammer-headed personhood. Perhaps the stuff should be called excess-tasy. In retrospect, I was very glad there was a drug to blame. I did not like to think of myself as behaving like a cartoon.
“Anyway, I got to do it,” Samantha said, still blushing. “I won’t miss it much.” Another shrug. “It wasn’t that great.”
I don’t know an awful lot about what is popularly called “pillow talk,” but I rather thought that this kind of honesty was not considered proper form. From the little I did know, I was pretty sure you were supposed to make flattering remarks, even if you thought it was a mistake. You said things like, “It was wonderful—let’s not soil the memory by trying to equal that magic.” Or, “We’ll always have Paris.” In this case, “We’ll always have that horrible smelly trailer in the Everglades,” didn’t have quite the same ring, but at least she could have tried. Maybe Samantha was getting revenge for the massive discomfort she was feeling, or maybe it was true and she, as a callow youth, didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to say such things.
In any case, it combined with my headache and activated a mean streak I didn’t know I had. “No, it wasn’t that great,” I said. She looked at me now, with an expression that actually approached anger, but she didn’t say anything, and after a moment she looked away again, and I took a last stretch and rub at my neck muscles and stood up.
“There has to be a way out of here,” I said, more to myself than her, but of course she answered anyway.
“No, there doesn’t,” she said. “It’s secure. They keep people here all the time, and nobody ever gets out.”
“If they’re always drugged, did anyone ever try?”
She half closed her eyes and slowly shook her head to indicate that I was stupid, and looked away. And maybe I was stupid, but not enough to sit and wait for them to come and eat me—not without trying my best to get away.
I went once more through the trailer. There was nothing new to see, but I looked at everything a little more carefully. There was no furniture at all, but down at the far end there was one built-in bench that had obviously served as a bed. It had a thin strip of foam rubber on it, covered by a ratty gray sheet. I lifted the mattress onto the floor. Under it there was a square of plywood fitted into an opening. I pulled up the plywood. Underneath was something that was clearly a locker. There was a very flat pillow inside, covered with a case that matched the sheet. The locker seemed to run the whole width of the trailer, although I could not see into the darkness on either side.
I pulled out the pillow. There was nothing else inside except a short length of an old two-by-four, maybe a foot and a half long. One end of it was cut to a very dull, flat point and there was dirt all over the tapered part. At the other end there were notches cut into each side, and a groove worn into the wood, possibly by rope. The wood had been used as a stake for whatever arcane reason, hammered into the ground to hold something or other with rope tied to it. There was even an old and bent nail stuck in the top to tie off the rope. I took the stake out and laid it beside the pillow. I stuck my head into the locker as far as I could, but there was nothing else to see. I pushed on the bottom and felt a little bit of give, so I pushed harder and was rewarded with a whump-ah of flimsy metal bending.
Bingo. I pushed harder, and the metal visibly bent. I pulled my head out and stood up, stepping into the locker with both feet. I just barely fit into the opening, but it was enough, and I started to jump as hard as I could. It made a very loud booming sound, and after about the seventh boom! Samantha came to see what all the noise was.
“What are you doing?” she said, which struck me as silly as well as annoying.
“Escaping,” I said, and gave an extra hard jump. Boom!
She watched as I jumped several more times, and then shook her head and raised her voice, very thoughtfully, so I could hear her negativity over the noise. “I don’t think you can get out like that,” she said.
“The metal is thin here,” I said. “Not like the floor.”
“It’s the tensile strength,” she said in her loud voice. “Like surface cohesion in a cup of water. We did this in physics.”
I took a second to marvel at the kind of physics class that taught its students about the tensile strength of a trailer’s floor when one is escaping from a cannibal coven, and then I paused in midjump. Perhaps she was right—after all, Ransom Everglades was a very good school and they probably taught things that never made it into the public school curriculum. I stepped out of th
e locker and looked at what I had accomplished so far. It wasn’t much. There was a noticeable dent, but nothing that could really inspire hope.
“They’ll be here way before you get out like that,” she said, and somebody who lacked charity might have said she was gloating.
“Maybe so,” I said, and my eye fell on the two-by-four. I did not actually say, “Aha!” but I certainly had one of those moments when the lightbulb goes on. I picked up the chunk of wood and worried out the old nail. I wedged the head of it into a crack on the point of the stake, and placed the point in the center of the dent I had already made. Then, with a significant glance at Samantha, I pounded on the top of the stake as hard as I could.
It hurt. I counted three splinters in my hand.
“Ha,” Samantha said.
It has been said that behind every successful man there is a woman, and by extension we can say that behind every escaping Dexter is a really annoying Samantha, because her happiness at seeing me fail spurred me to new heights of inspiration. I took off my shoe and fitted it over the top of the stake and smacked it experimentally. It didn’t hurt nearly as much, and I was sure I could hammer it hard enough to make a hole in the locker’s floor.
“Ha yourself,” I said to Samantha.