The tape came off easily, one hand slipping out of the space left by the pole, then freeing the other.
Her face. Her face next.
Blindly, she felt around her duct tape mask, searching for the end DT had left. There it was, by her temple. She pulled it, the tape undoing with a loud rip. It pulled at her skin, pulled out eyelashes and eyebrows, but Pip tore it off, hard and quick, and she opened her eyes. Blinked in the cold storeroom and the destruction of the shelves behind her. She kept going, pulling and tearing, and the pain was agonizing, her skin raw, but it was a good pain, because she was going to live. She held on to her hair to try to stop it pulling out from the root, but small clumps of it came away with the tape.
Unwinding and unwinding.
Up her head, and down her nose. Her mouth came free and she breathed through it and breathed hard. Her chin. One ear. Then the other.
Pip dropped her unravelled mask to the floor. The duct tape long and meandering, scattered with hair and small spots of blood it had claimed from her.
DT had taken her face, but she had taken it back.
Pip leaned over and unravelled the tape still binding her ankles, then she stood up, her legs shaking, almost buckling under her weight.
Now the room. Now she just had to get out of the room and she would be alive, as good as. She skittered over to the door, treading on something on the way. She glanced down; it was the screw she’d dropped. It had rolled almost all the way to the door through the unknown. Pip rammed the door handle down, knowing it was useless. She’d heard Jason lock her in. But there was a door at the other end of the storeroom. It wouldn’t lead outside, but it would lead somewhere.
Pip sprinted to it. She lost control as her trainers scuffed on the concrete, skidding into a workbench beside the door. The workbench jumped, with a sound of colliding metal from a large toolbox on top. Pip righted herself and tried the door handle. It was also locked. Fuck. OK.
She returned to the other side, to her vat of weedkiller, the dark liquid draining into the gutter like a cursed river. A bright line was reflected in the liquid, but it wasn’t from the overhead lights. It was from the window, high up in front of her, letting in the last of the evening light. Or the first of it. Pip didn’t know the time. And her tipped-back shelves, they reached right up to the window, almost like a ladder.
The window was small, and it didn’t look like it opened. But Pip could fit through it, she was sure she could. And if she couldn’t, she would make herself fit. Climb through and drop down on the outside. She just needed something to break it with.
She checked around. Jason had left the roll of duct tape on the floor by the door. Beside it was a coiled length of blue rope. The blue rope, she realized with a shiver. The rope DT was going to use to kill her. Was. But would still, if he came back right now.
What else was in the room? Just her and lots of weedkiller and fertilizer. Oh wait, her mind jumped back to the other side of the storeroom. There was a toolbox down there.
She ran to the other side again, an ache in her ribs and a pain in her chest. There was a Post-it note stuck to the top of the toolbox. In slanting scribbles, it said, J – Red team keep taking tools assigned to Blue team. So I’m leaving this in here for Rob to find. – L
Pip undid the clips and pulled open the lid. Inside was a jumble of screwdrivers and screws, a tape measure, pliers, a small drill, some kind of wrench. Pip dug her hand inside. And underneath it all, was a hammer. A large one.
‘Sorry, Blue team,’ she muttered, tightening her grip around the hammer, pulling it out.
Pip stood before the tipped-over shelves, her shelves, and looked back once more at the room where she’d known she would die. Where the others had died, all five of them. And then she climbed, balancing her feet on the lowest shelf like a rung, pulling herself up to the next level. There was still strength left in her legs, moving adrenaline-fast.
Feet planted on the top shelf, she crouched, balancing herself in front of the window. A hammer in her hand, and an unbroken window in front of her; Pip had been here before. Her arm knew what to do, it remembered, arching back to pick up momentum. Pip swung at the window and it cracked, a spiderweb splintering through the reinforced glass. She swung again, and the hammer went through, glass shattering around it. Shards still clung to the frame, but she knocked them out one by one, so she wouldn’t cut herself open. How far was it to the ground? Pip dropped the hammer through and watched it tumble to the gravel below. Not far. She should be fine if she bent her legs.
And now it was just her and a hole in the wall, and something was waiting on the other side. Not something. Everything. Life, normal life, and Team Ravi and Pip and her parents and Josh and Cara and everyone. They might even be looking for her now, though she hadn’t disappeared for long. Some parts of her might be gone, parts she might never get back, but she was still here. And she was coming home.