Behind The Mask

Chapter 6

“Is it ready?"

“Almost. Just a little tinkering to do.”

“I don’t really know how to go about this.”

“Just do it, you know the way that a thief would.”

“Hey, you’re the thief.”

Viper laughed quietly. “Yeah, but I was never a very successful one.”

Lana waited patiently, tapping her toes to an imaginary drumbeat in her head. Sometimes when she was asleep in this stone slab cell, she would count sheep. Her high score was two thousand four hundred and sixty three. Needless to say, she did not sleep very well that night. All she recited were numbers. Counters, digits, and sheep. It was funny what solitude did to your mind. Screwed it right up. Lana just hoped she wasn’t that screwed up.

Viper fiddled with her green hair while she glared intently at the makeshift saw thing. It was more like a file than a saw, its body was a nail file that Viper had snuck in, but the file had been sharpened and the texture made rougher by scraping, there was a grip made of torn rubber, and there was a little clamp made of bobby pins and shirt buttons that allowed it to be attached to things. The end of it was sharpened, to look like a tiny dagger, because you never know when you might need to stab things. It had taken time because it had to be done inconspicuously, often through sleepless nights, testing and grinding, and grinding and testing until they were sure it would work. They had also noted the rotation of the shifts, how sometimes the bull man would watch for a while, and then the woman with the striped mask, and then the psychotic skull dude would sometimes sit down and have a smoke and play with his oversized gut and fiddle with his belt buckle. They looked like normal people, but as she had told Lana once, sometimes it’s the people who seen normal who hide the most secrets.

“Well, I guess it’s ready.”

She passed it through the pipe, and Lana grabbed it. She got to work, a bead of sweat trickled down her forehead and fell, and left a small wet stain on the concrete ground. They had not been let out of their cell not even once, Lana’s clothes stank, but at least she had been given some spare rags to wear, and she felt vulnerable using the showers because you never know when a guard might walk in. She had taken to washing herself with the clothes on, and it made her feel insecure and unsafe. That, she thought, was what ‘prison’ did to you. It didn’t screw you up, but it left you feeling screwed up, and for that matter, she supposed, it worked wonderfully. Because as far as she was concerned, Lana felt pretty screwed up.

Not that it mattered, what with the filing thing she had going on. She placed the rough edge against it, saw the file lines, and made sure she filed against them on the rusty iron bars to make the utility most effective. She began slowly, and in the silence of the cells, it made a scraping noise that was audible all around. Viper told her to keep it down. She tried applying less force, and then continued.

One of the bars began to wobble, and Lana hit it gently, knocking it out of place. She put it to one side, then decided ‘what the heck’ and passed it through the pipe to Viper as a means of communication that ‘hey at least one’s down, and that’s something’. Viper got the message, gave a thumbs up despite Lana not being able to see it, and then waited some more.

Another bar was dislodged, but Lana didn’t feel like passing it away. She felt like she was on a roll. Doing it. Soon, she was able to fit her hand through the small hole she had made, and she decided now was the time. She clipped a long cloth rope to the hook the two of them had prepared for the file, strung it around the bars and slotted it into the keyhole. She could probably file out the lock mechanism and open the door. Then she would do the same for Viper, and they would hightail it out of there before some hackneyed lunatic came barging in with a shotgun, despite the probability being very, very unlikely.