‘Please?’
No.
‘OK: count to ten,thenup.’
Ten came and went. Then another ten. And she was halfway through the third before wriggling over onto her side – ready for the undignified struggle to get back on her feet.
Natasha froze, the haircracklingacross the back of her neck.
Someone was looking at her.
...
But it wasn’t DS Davis.
A pair of dark eyes glittered in the gloom beneath the workbench. And now all the hair on herarmscrackled too. Even her scalp fizzed inside the mask as Natasha’s stomach clenched and her heart doubled the beat. Jaw clamped shut to keep the scream inside.
A rat. It was a bloodyrat. A nasty hairy-bastard rat.
Thick with diseases, dragging that disgusting naked tail behind it, shitting and pissing on everything. Creeping, whiskery, plague-carryingvermin.
She flinched. ‘Fuck off, you rodenty bastard!’
It stared back at her.
‘GO ON! GET OUT OF IT!’
Twitching its slimy pink nose.
Little shit was just waiting for her to croak – cos she must’ve looked pretty crook in this getup – so it could burrow into her flesh and eat her from the inside.
There was a stone, not much smaller than a champagne cork, sitting on the concrete, close enough that Natasha could wrap her toes around the thing and pick it up off the floor. She bent her knee, bringing the rock closer, then snapped her leg out – hurling it away into the space beneath the workbench.
OK, so her aim wasn’t great, but the stone bounced off the ground, then up against the wood, then down again:clatter,bang,clatter. And the noise was enough to make the diseased creepy little bastard scurry away.
‘YEAH, YOU BETTER KEEP RUNNING, RUPERT FUCKIN’ RAT!’
The stone rattled to a halt against something metal, setting whatever-it-was ringing as it spun around a couple of times then wobbled to a halt.
She narrowed her eyes, then shuffled closer to the bench. Till the chain wouldn’t let her go any further.
That metal something was an old Stanley knife, long forgotten and coated in spider webs. You fuckingbeauty.
The gap beneath the bench had to be a good six, seven inches, and while she couldn’t exactly reach an arm in there, her legs still worked.
Yeah, but where there’s one rat bastard there’s always more – first lesson she learned in the newspaper world. Didn’t help though, did it: shestillended up marrying one.
Natasha gritted her teeth, cos she was having that bloody knife, rats or not.
Deep breath.
She reached her throwing leg into the void. Skiffing the side of her foot along the uneven concrete, through cobwebs and little pebbly lumps of whathadto be rat shit, until her big toe brushed against the Stanley knife’s cool metal body. Setting it rocking.
Took four goes, and a lot of delicate manoeuvring, but eventually she got her foot hooked behind the thing and dragged it towards her.
The knife wasancient: the metal gone that kind of furry way that old metal did. And it was probably covered in rat piss. But she writhed and struggled and contorted herself till it was close enough to grab with her shackled hands, then thumbed the button anyway. Shoving the mechanism forward.
The blade didn’t exactly slide out: it grated and stuttered, the edge chipped and flecked with rust. Streaked with the memory of the last thing it cut through, before it was lost.
