By Cuffed Locked
If you missed it, click for Part 1
My arm was going numb. I had been cranking for what felt like hours. Thirty seconds of spinning to earn maybe ten seconds of light. Long enough to try two combinations, maybe three, on the padlock securing my chain to the solid bolt in Caleb’s floor before the bulb overhead sputtered out and I was swallowed in darkness again. I’d started at 0000. I was somewhere around 0042 now. Forty-two combinations. It felt like nothing. It was nothing. And yet every few attempts meant another round of burning my shoulder, feeding that sad little generator like I was shoveling coal into a dying furnace.
And the second I stopped moving, the silence came rushing back in.
I was trapped in my neighbor’s basement, in a custom escape room that he challenged me to escape from with no safe word, no early outs. And no phone. No clock. No sunlight. I didn’t know if it was 3 a.m. or 9 a.m. I didn’t know if Caleb was upstairs, asleep, watching, or not even home. And somehow, that made it worse. When the light blinked on again, I caught my reflection in the metal face of the lock. My jaw was clenched. Sweat trickled down my chest.
