Page 10 of What We Become

Holden kills the siren before the driveway and pulls into the shadow of the hedge line.

No car out front. Garage closed.

He parks and draws his weapon.

I’m already out of the car.

THREE

SAGE

Ican’t see. I can’t move. I can only hear.

Hissssssssssssssssss.

Fuck.

“Help!”

I keep blinking, hoping if I do it hard enough or fast enough the dark will crack open and let some light in. But there’s nothing but blackness. No seam or faint glow—not even the soft gray of a room with the lights off. I’m bricked in.

A coffin.

“Someone! Help!”

Hissssssssssssssssss.

The foam is alive. I can feel it touching my calves, warm and thick, and it’s growing. Slowly. Inch by painstaking inch.

It’s the same tempo Stephen laid those bricks—methodical, unhurried.

When it started, I’d braced for a rush, a rapid smothering. But this . . . this is panic-inducing torture.

“Fuck! Please!”

I hack out a cough.

The chemical smell is so thick I can taste it—acrid and sweet, like burnt sugar dipped in turpentine. Every breath coats the inside of my mouth, my throat, my lungs. I cough and the cough turns into a gag and the gag turns into vomit. Margarita, salsa, and regret, splattering the wall, landing on my lap and in the foam, dripping down my chest. The taste sets off another round and now I’m breathing through slippery acid, bile burning fresh tracks down my throat. It changes nothing. The foam keeps coming, releasing more toxic gas into a space that’s shrinking around me one cubic inch at a time.

“HELP!”

The word rips out of me raw and ugly and bounces off plastic and brick. It dies two feet from my face. The sheeting absorbs it. The foam absorbs it. The sealed room eats sound the way it’s going to eat me—slowly, completely, leaving no trace.

“HELP! SOMEBODY—PLEASE!”

Nothing. The house is empty. Stephen left. The door locked. The nearest neighbor is probably a hundred yards away behind a hedge and a gate, and even if they heard a woman screaming from inside a wall inside a house on a bluff, what would they do? Call the police? File a noise complaint? Would they even get here in time?

I let out a sob. “Fuck. FUCK!”

I pull in a measured breath, trying to conserve my air, but the chemicals catch in my chest, and I have to let it go.

I try going back to my old coping skills—the count. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. But I can’t focus. I lose count before I reach three. My legs are locked down. The foam climbs, packing itself along my body, pressing into every gap around the chair.

I scream because it’s the only thing my body wants to do.

The air in here is finite. I learned that with a rope around my neck. Every scream wastes another breath I don’t get back.

I’m not there yet. But my fingers have started to tingle, and I know exactly what comes after that.