Understandable.It isn’t easy to pry nails out of plywood without any tools, and of course the bad guys would check for something like that.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait until they come back, and overpower them.”There were twice as many of us as there were of them.We ought to be able to figure something out.
All three girls looked at me in disbelief.“They have guns,” Tatiana pointed out, as if I could have missed that.
“I know.But they can’t shoot all of us.At least not at the same time.”
There was a pause.“Are you volunteering?”Rachel wanted to know.
I guess I would, if it came to that.If there was no other choice.But we weren’t there quite yet.“What about the door?Any way out of that?”
They shook their heads.“There’s no lock on this side,” Tatiana said.“No knob, either.”
There wasn’t.But there was both outside.And when we came down here, the key had been in the lock.
Offhand, I couldn’t think of any way of getting it out of the lock, though.And anyway, without a lock to unlock on this side of the door, having the key wouldn’t do us any good.Although I supposed it would keep the bad guys out…
“They feed you, right?”
All three girls nodded.
So all they’d have to do would be to withhold food, and starve us into giving them the key back.And we’d be right back where we started.
“Can we take apart one of the beds and brain them with a piece of wood when they come down with breakfast in the morning?”
One of them would be carrying the tray, I assumed.If there was a tray.And the other one would be standing by with a gun, to make sure none of the girls made a break for it.
If I could knock the gun out of the second guy’s hand, while the first guy was still holding the tray, we might have a chance.
“We tried to take the beds apart,” Tatiana said.
And presumably they didn’t come apart, since they were in one piece at this point.A pity.Now that I looked at them more closely, they were made of metal.A nice metal pipe would be handy.
“Is there a bathroom?”
“They let us use it before we went to bed,” Tatiana said.“They take us, one by one, to shower in the morning.”
If there was a lid on the toilet tank, that might offer opportunities.Or the shower curtain rod, if there was one.
At any rate, it seemed that we’d get the chance to attack our captors.If only we had something to attack them with.
I looked around.There was nothing here but the two bunk beds and the dresser.The beds were a no-go, according to the girls.And they were probably right.It’s not easy to take apart metal without tools.
The dresser was made of wood, though.(Hard to find a dresser that isn’t, I guess.) Each drawer would be a little too unwieldy to lift, but perhaps we could take it apart…
I got to my feet and wandered over to the it.
It was tallish, but sort of squat and solid.Nothing elegant about it.The legs were fat little stubs of wood, to short to do any good.I wanted to be able to hit the Russians from at least a foot away.Once I got close enough to grab, I wouldn’t give much for my chances of success.But if I could hit the arm with the gun, and the gun went flying…
The three girls and Rachel watched me as I pulled out the top drawer and examined it.
It was full of clothes.Mostly skimpy underwear, plus some oversized T-shirts, like the girls were sleeping in.
I dumped the contents on the bed next to Tatiana and took a closer look at the drawer itself.
Like all drawers, it was made of four pieces of wood put together in a rectangle, with a bigger, thinner piece of wood nailed to the bottom.
If we could take it apart, there’d be a piece of wood for each of us.We’d give the big piece to Rachel, since I didn’t expect much help from her.I had a feeling she had a concussion.She’d been out cold a long time, and her pupils weren’t quite the same size.
