5~
She barely felt the blow across her face, only the vague sensation of her head moving. Another impact on her cheek, her ears just hearing the drumbeat of the strike, her feet not feeling the ground.
The darkness of the deep sleep was slowly fleeing from her mind, and now there were sounds. Indistinct, as the blows still came, followed by a shaking, a thrashing that she couldn't understand.
She stirred and spoke in her sleep, " C'mon, Dad...ten minutes...promise..."
"C'mon, Marcie. Wake up," Daisy urged.
Marcie's head hung limply to one side, but her mind began to float back to the surface of consciousness. She slowly opened her eyes. Blurry shapes met her vision in the dimness of wherever she was.
Hot water heater...washing machine...dryer...cold floor...person...two people...
She seemed to remember that it was the same sensation she felt whenever she didn't wear her yellow-tinted glasses.
Her mind slowly determined to put these phantom things together, as if they were a grade school picture puzzle. What did these thing have in common?
With a stretch, Marcie rallied her senses and opened her eyes fully. The dim environs of a house's cellar met her confused gaze.
Jason nervously stood off to the side of the laundry room that Marcie gradually figured they were in. Daisy was standing near her, watching her with worry, which puzzled her. Something was off. There should be...three? Where was Red?
"Stop hitting her, Red," Daisy fretted. "I think she's coming around."
"You sure?" Red asked, suspending Marcie off her feet easily with one hand gripping her blouse, and giving her light, curative slaps to her cheek, or, at least, light for him.
"Okay, okay!" Marcie said, completely roused from her sleep with one more "light" slap that left her cheeks as pink as if she were blushing. "I'm up! Geez, I might never eat solid food again, and put me down, please."
Red sheepishly complied. Marcie settled back on her feet, but wobbled on unsteady legs. While she fought to regain her balance, he said, "I'm sorry, Marcie. You were the last to wake up and because we thought that you might have inhaled too much of the gas, I volunteered to wake you."
"Wake her, Red," Daisy chimed in. "Not knock her head off."
"Yeah, sorry again," Red apologized. "Don't know my own strength, sometimes."
Marcie gave her ahead a shake to clear the cobwebs, then said, "All is forgiven, if you promise to never be an EMT."
Red smiled and gave her a thumbs-up. "All right! What's an EMT?"
"Welcome back, Marcie," Jason said from his corner, then, he ventured a question, "Now, what are we doing here?"
"Obviously, Mr. Extinguisher decided to place here," Marcie pondered, trying to bring more of her mental faculties online. "It's a house. That much I get, but, why? Why is this place so special that he bothered to put us here?"
She walked out of the room, which was situated in the cellar's rear, and entered its center, deep in thought.
"How about we get out of here," Jason pressed her. "We're just in somebody's basement. Let's just get out and if we run into the owner of the house, we'll tell him or her that we're just as surprised that we wound up here as they are."
Marcie took Jason's words to heart and asked both Daisy and Red, "Did any of you check the door? Maybe we're not locked down here."
Both shook their heads and Daisy said, "We just woke up not too long ago. We wanted to make sure everybody was awake before we made any moves."
Marcie nodded. "Make sense to me. We'll, since we're all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, now, let's get up those stairs and open us a door."
She and the rest of the gang marched through the length of the basement, found the stairs and ascended.
Jason reached over and turned the doorknob, eager for freedom. The door opened, easily, then stopped short, leaving a space of about three inches between the door and its frame.
Confused, Jason reared the door closed and then tried to open it again. It stopped with three inches of open space for him to see past into a darkened, empty home. At least, he could see out through the door if he disregarded the curtain of brassy chains that laced the space from the top of the doorway to its bottom.
"What's this?" he asked, swinging the door against the chains once more, and trying to calm himself, knowing that it was beginning to look more like a prison than a house.
Red stepped past Jason after he backed down a few steps to let him by. He took a closer look at a few of the chains and the answer hit him with a clarity that made laugh, incredulously.
"That is wicked!" he said, more to himself that to any in attendance.
"What?" Marcie asked from a lower level of the stairs. "What do you see?"
"I'll give the guy this, when he wants us to stay put, he makes sure we stay put," Red chuckled.
Daisy, peering past Red's broad shoulders, saw the chains, and asked, "If you're finished admiring the guy you wanted to pound earlier, could you please tell us what is it that's keeping the door from opening?"
"Oh, yeah," he said, recovering. "They're door chains. A ton of them. I don't where we are, but we are definitely locked in here. Good looking steel, too."
"Then, that just begs another question," Marcie said. "Why lock us down here?" It was then that her up-turned nose suddenly caught something in the air.
"Is someone cooking something up there?" she asked, as she smelled more and more of it, coming from the doorway above. It was a soft, faint scent, warm and reminiscent of what? Cookies…with nuts?
"There's nobody up there. It's dark," Red reported. "But, I think I smell something, too."
"Me, too," said Daisy.
"So do I," added Jason.
No one was in the dark house, but this ghost of a scent became slightly stronger. It had to add up to something. If no one was cooking, what was that smell.
That nutty smell...
Her blood suddenly froze still in her veins and everything was answered with a clarity that bordered on divine.
They were trapped in Hell.
"Get away from that door!" she screamed, running back towards the laundry room as if her legs were on fire.
"What? What's going on, Marcie?" Daisy asked, coming down the stairs to follow her.
"Guys, close that door!" Marcie yelled again, and didn't feel even a modicum of security until she heard the door slam shut. "C'mon back here, where it's safe!"
The boys reached the foot of the stairs and soon caught up with the girls by the laundry room's arch.
"What do you mean, safe?" asked Jason, already nervous due to present events.
Marcie looked absolutely mad, as she gave them a wild-eyed look of fear, anger and helplessness. It didn't assure any of them of good things to come. "That smell. Don't you smell it?" she asked them in a terrified whisper.
"Yeah," Red said slowly, as if trying to calm Marcie down from having a psychotic break. "It smells like roast nuts, that's all."
For once, Marcie knew how Jason felt during his more cowardly moments, the fear creeping into her heart, set to rob her of her composure, and thus, her ability to think of a way out.
Marcie shook her head tightly, fearfully. "Almonds," she hissed, as if the word was the most vile, godless, and evil thing ever uttered in human linguistics.
Daisy shrugged and wondered what would make Marcie freak out like this. Maybe it was just the stress of worrying about not finding a way out, yet.
"Marcie. Hey, girl, what's wrong? Whatever it is, we can handle it, together," she attempted to coax, but to no avail.
"That's why The Extinguisher locked us down here," Marcie said through a dry throat. "Why this house is so special. This house is getting fumigated. What you smell is the fumigant. Hydrogen cyanide."
Red asked, not quite understanding Marcie's panic, "That's bad, somehow, right?"
She turned her crazed eyes towards him. "If that gas seeps down here, the next time you see yourself in a suit, it'll be at your funeral."
The rest of the gang silently stood where they were, digesting the chilling words that Marcie, a born chemist, just told them. It wouldn't be long before the gas did get through the door upstairs, and then, death. Permanent death.
At Jason's sudden, weeping cue, everyone chatted insanely, asking the other what to do, each panicked, screeching question overlapping the other.
Finally tired from manically asking questions and getting no concrete answers, Marcie, not wanting to crowd out Jason from his bit of corner, walked over to the other corner of the room, which was away from one side of the dryer, sat down, stared blankly ahead, and started quoting about all the joys of cyanide poisoning.
"A concentration in the range of one hundred to three hundred parts per million in air will kill a human within ten to sixty minutes," she droned to herself. "A hydrogen cyanide concentration of two thousand parts per million will kill a human in about one minute."
"We won't have to wait long, then," Daisy, overhearing, sadly quipped. The nervous breakdown had subsided when all present realized that this was an unfortunately effective deathtrap and wasting what air they had was simply counter-productive.
She went over to where Red had sat in front of the washing machine, sidled up next to him and put her head on his massive chest. She had the pleasure of listening to his heartbeat, even if it did race a little, thanks to adrenaline, but she didn't mind. It was a song all her own that she could hear to get her mind off the coming inevitability.
Red, for his part, luxuriated in his embrace of her. Against her jumpsuit, he realized that he was holding someone close and, in his mind, no one was as soft, supple, delicate, or as beautiful, as Daisy Blake. Even her name had an innocent, wholesome ring to it, as if she were too good for a grease monkey, like him. But he would never believe that, because she would never believe that, and that made him hold her a little tighter.
"Cyanide, if inhaled, causes comas. With seizures, apnea, and cardiac arrest, death will follow in a matter of seconds," Marcie continued with her one-girl lecture. "At lower doses, however, loss of consciousness may be preceded by general weakness, giddiness, headaches, vertigo, confusion, and difficulty in breathing."
Jason lifted his bowed head from his chest and said to Marcie, in an effort to stop listening to this frightening dissertation, "You know, I can hear you fine, but if you were trying to tell the lovebirds over there, you might have to speak a little louder to get their attention."
Marcie, never one from denying anyone an education, did stop and turn her head in Jason's direction like a dejected zombie, asking him, "Where are they, then?"
Jason pointed over to the direction of one the appliances in the room. "Over there, by the washing machine."
From Marcie's location, if she turned to their direction, all could see was the dryer's white, metallic side. And because she didn't feel like standing up and walking over to the duo, the washing machine was sitting dully on her sullen mind, like some unloved hat that she had been forced to wear.
'Washing machine,' she thought, blankly. Her mind couldn't help but word-associate that with, 'Water...'
Water...
Suddenly, Marcie laughed out loud from the thunderbolt that blasted through her emotionally thickened head.
"Water! That's it!" she screamed again, this time in joyous victory. "We can get out of this!"
The positive sound of Marcie forming a plan, possibly a scientific one, to allow them to escape had everyone else getting to their feet and surrounding the chemist-slash-amateur detective as she began to stand.
"How can we do it?" Daisy asked, her heart jumping at the prospect of living again.
Marcie noticed how dim the whole basement was, and proposed, "We need to turn the power back on so we can use the washing machine."
Looking around the room with the help of both Marcie and Daisy's penlights, it didn't take long for Jason to find the fuse box attached to the wall whose corner he was previously slumped in, only higher above.
Giving one of the penlights to him, Jason opened its door with authority and scanned the circuit breaker switches that designated each room and appliance of the house, looking for the one marked 'laundry.'
"Ah-ha!" he said, triumphantly, locating the switch. With a cavalier flick, he brought power back to the laundry room. Flicking another switch brought light to the basement proper.
"What now?" Red asked Marcie, wondering how a washing machine was going to get them out, but not bringing it up, for fear of jinxing things, so far.
Now that the lights were on, she could look into both machines to see if the family who lived there left some clothes in one of them.
A load was found in the dryer and Marcie sighed in relief, before taking them out and dumping them on the floor.
Now everyone was curious as to what Marcie was doing, but snapped out of the pondering when she pointed at the washing machine and said, "Whoever's closest, turn on the washer. Set it for cold water."
Red was closest and so he selected the cold water setting, then a cycle, and then he turned it on. Quickly, the tub began to fill with water.
"It's filling up," he said.
"Great!" Marcie said, next. "Now turn it off before the cycle starts. I just want the water."
She then kneeled in front of the clothes she piled on the floor and beckoned the others to join her.
"C'mon," she said. "We have to find something, like a shirt or a blouse, that we can tear into big strips. Both Daisy and Jason shrugged, but they did as they were told, singling out thin shirts and even thinner blouses.
Once they were done, Marcie looked around the room frantically.
Daisy noticed this. "What are looking for?"
Marcie stepped out of the laundry room, saying, "I need something sharp to cut the clothes with. Ah-ha!"
On a work table nearby, sat a circular saw. Marcie didn't think she would need the whole saw, but the spare blades that hung on a particleboard wall above it, would do, nicely.
Her joy was sidetracked horribly, however, by the scent of death growing more and more heavy, even down in the basement. She had hoped that by closing the cellar door, it would slow the gas's progress to them. It had, but nothing would truly keep it at bay, and now, it was coming.
She went over to the wall, took a circular blade from it, and ran back to the laundry room.
"Quick!" she told everyone. "Use this to poke a hole in the clothes and start tearing them into strips! I smell the gas coming!"
Everybody took frantic turns mutilating shirts and blouses and then turning them into the remnants that Marcie wanted.
"What now?" asked Red, reaching over to stop the washer before it could run its cycle.
"Put the strips in the water!" Marcie instructed. "Soak 'em all."
The gang grabbed the strips of cloth and tossed them into the machine, Marcie thrusting her hand into the tub and stirring the fabric around in the cold water to make sure they were thoroughly wet.
Then, she took out a shirt strip, gave it a little wring to get some of the water out and quickly tied it across her face. The rest of the gang's understanding immediately took root.
Each one reached into the washer and plucked out a ready-made, protective bandanna, which they also tied to their faces. When Marcie beckoned them to follow her back to the door upstairs, they did so with the confidence borne of knowing someone who would tax her brain to the limit to keep them safe.
Marcie stopped them at the foot of the stair and motioned for only Red to step forward. She pointed at the door, which was now almost obscured by white tendrils of cyanide curling through the spaces that the door could seal against.
"Red," she told him. "Smash that door!" Then, she stepped back.
Red turned to face the stairs, got into a football player's three-point stance, focused on shattering the door and The Extinguisher to pieces, and then flew up the staircase.
He knew he had to hit the door just right, with the right amount of force and momentum, and so, aimed his shoulder at the side of the door that was tied with the door chains. That was the weak spot.
With gritted teeth, he collided with the door, feeling himself bounce backwards slightly with the door's chains absorbing most of the impact, but in doing so, something had to give way, and that something was the wood surrounding the door, itself.
The top to middle level of chains remained intact where the shoulder struck, but their short screws, which anchored them to the door frame, were cleanly ripped out, causing the door to open that much wider.
Wider, but not wide enough to effect an escape.
Realizing this, Red ran back downstairs, caught his breath through the wet fabric of his makeshift gas mask and did it again, this time lowering his shoulder to tear away more chains from their anchors.
That helped to open the door to better degree, but the door was still sufficiently bound by the lower door chains and even Red couldn't bend down and create enough momentum to rip the lowest chain still attached. He turned and ran back downstairs to give them the unhappy news.
It was then that he remembered the saw blade that they used to help shred the clothing.
If the saw, itself, had a an extension cord...
He ran past a confused Marcie, Daisy and Jason on his way to the work table in the middle of the basement. There, the saw lay, and power was supplied to the cellar, but the tool was unplugged.
He desperately searched around the table for an extension cord. It wasn't until he looked up and saw the cord wrapped around a work light that hung from the particleboard wall, that he gladly uncoiled the cord, plugged one end of it to a nearby socket, plugged the other end into the saw's own cord and ran back up the stairs.
"What are you doing?" came Marcie's cloth-muffled question.
"Finishing what I started," came the reply followed by the screech of the saw's activation and its spark-flying devouring of the remaining lower chains.
With the last chain surrendering to the teeth of the saw, Red threw open the door and dropped the saw to the floor.
"C'mon, guys!" he yelled. The rest of the group scrambled up the stairs to follow him as he led the way, past spewing toxic canisters, towards the closer back door through the deadly fog that already filled most of the dinning room, living room, and kitchen
Red whipped the door open, and, with relief beyond measure, they ran outside and closed the door behind them. However, when they stopped to take off their bandannas and catch their breaths, they noticed a strange dimness to the outdoors of the backyard.
Although, they were finally out of the lethal house, there was still one more barrier to overcome, the reason why the house was so dark in the first place, considering that it was still daytime.
A rubber tent, like the one they saw when they first met Conrad, had been erected around the house, blocking out most of the sunlight.
"C'mon! Grab this!" Daisy shouted, running over to one end of the tent. She knelt down and clutched the bottom of the material. The others follow suit, grabbing their own bottom section of tent. Then, as one, they lifted, and crawled their way out onto the green grass and sunshine of freedom and life.
"That Extinguisher is starting to really get on my nerves, believe it or not," she joked, darkly, as she and the other lay on their backs, completely spend. Then, a thought struck her. "Guys, did we leave the power on?"
Jason managed to speak up between puffs of air. "Yeah, why?"
Marcie started to stand. "Because those bug bombs are pumping a lot of fumigant in there."
"So. That's what they're supposed to do, right?" Daisy asked, standing.
"Yeah," Marcie nervously said. "However, I think we better get going. Like, now, guys!"
Red and Jason stood up last, Red asking, "How come?"
"Just run!" Marcie yelled before sprinting from the tented house, hoping the others wouldn't waste time asking why and just did what she said. To her relief, she could hear the rapid footfalls of her friends behind and to the side of her.
They ran as far as the next block, before they started their winded Q&A session with her.
"What's the problem, Marcie?" Jason asked. "We we're out of the house."
"But not outta trouble," Marcie explained. "Hydrogen cyanide is flammable, and with that much poison in the house, all it'll take is one spark from something electrical and-"
The rest of her lecture was cut short by the rumble-blast of an explosion that spoke so loud and so close, the gang could feel the force of it within the centers of their bodies. All eyes looked to see a large, striped tent being lifted to the sky and consumed by a bright fireball that rose from the depths of the neighborhood.
The fireball cloud grew as tall as it could before its strength was exhausted, letting what was left of the tent float down, burning as it descended.
Imagining the weeks, if not years, in jail Sheriff Stone would keep them for this, Marcie decided. "Friends, I think we better make a discrete exit from here before Sheriff Stone buries us under the police station."
With everyone heartily agreeing with her, the gang left the now-chaotic neighborhood, double-time.