She had pressed her ear against her door, hoping to hear what their intentions were. But the men had not come to her cell. Instead, she heard another door open down toward the main exit. Feet scuffled across the floor, then someone barked, “Get the fuck in there.”
This went on for over a minute. A struggle of some sort. That much was obvious. It ended with a smack and a grunt. Then the door slammed closed.
“Asshole!” someone yelled. The voice had come from inside the hallway.
“Chill,” a second voice said.
“You see this? I’m bleeding.”
“Just a scratch.”
“Fucking asshole!” the first voice yelled again. “When we get the word, I want to be the one who offs him.”
“Come on,” the second voice said.
The door at the end of the hallway opened, then shut. A second later, all was quiet again.
Another prisoner, she thought. Somebody else with a child? Some one who had been able to put up more of a fight than Marion had?
When they had taken her out earlier, she had counted two other doors, both on the same side of the hallway as the one to her cell, and behind them rooms she imagined were very much like her own. The door that had slammed shut hadn’t sounded close enough to be from the room next door. So whoever their new captive was, he or she had to be in the room nearest the exit.
If there was just some way she could communicate with him. She thought for a moment, her eyes searching the blackness for an answer. The idea that came to her wasn’t perfect, but it was something.
She removed her tennis shoes, then began tapping one against the metal door. Maybe the other person would be able to hear it.
Silence.
Still nothing.
She stopped. Had she heard something?
She waited, but the only thing she heard was her own breathing.
Marion almost cried. The other person had heard her.
For the next five minutes they tried to communicate with each other, tapping back and forth but with no more meaning than an acknowledgment that they knew the other was there, confirming that they were not alone, but little more.
The other prisoner’s responses began to lag, then finally stopped altogether. Marion continued tapping for several minutes, trying to get him to return her signal, but he had either lost interest, or worse, lost consciousness.
As a last resort, she found the crack between the door and the frame with her finger, then moved her mouth over.
“Can you hear me?” she yelled.
But she knew it was useless. Where the door had transmitted and amplified the tapping of her shoe, it also acted as an effective buffer, bouncing her voice back into the room and letting very little of it pass through.
She slumped to the floor, knowing that nothing had changed for her. In thirty minutes, in an hour, in a day—at some point they
When the hallway door opened again sometime later, she thought this time was it. Her turn to die. Only once again it was the door at the other end of the hallway that opened, not hers.
She could hear raised voices, but could not make out the words. She figured they were giving the new prisoner the same treatment they had given her.
Then a loud crack reverberated down the hall, and a few seconds later, another.
Gunshots. She had heard them in Africa, only more at a distance. Here the source of the sound was only a couple dozen feet away at most, and the metal hallway didn’t help, enhancing the noise instead of dampening it.
Marion scrambled into the corner, pulling her knees to her chest and pressing her hands against her ears. She didn’t want to hear the screams of pain, but they seeped through her fingers anyway.
When she thought it was over, a third gunshot rang out.
This time she was the one who screamed.
