Isla.
The sounds of sloshing water and wooden legs scrape along the metal flooring as Mom attempts to scoot herself closer to me. When our knee’s finally bump against each other I hear her let out a heavy breath.
“Okay now turn around.”
“Yeah, sure, why don’t I do a backflip while I’m at it.” Her snarky comment makes me laugh as she jumps and bumps, twisting the chair around. A few minutes later and the water is over my ankles and rising.
“I’m going to have to lean the chair backward. You think you can hold my weight?”
I place my feet as firmly on the ground as I can and lean my weight as much forward as the ropes will allow.
“Go for it.”
I hear the chair legs rock once, twice, before the back of her chair hits me in the chest, her hair getting all up in my mouth as I splutter and spit it out. I lean back, allowing the chair to fall a little further down, but no matter how much we both strain against the ropes, we just can’t make to position work. I fucking new I should have put one of the knives in my bra. After pushing her chair back upright and she takes a second to regulate her breathing she says.,“Okay, turn your chair around, maybe we can work one of the knots free. The water is rising rapidly and I mauver myself around and Mom gets straight to work with her fingers feeling over the bindings in the dark. If this was some sort of trust exercise, I’d say we’re winning. The water is lapping just bellow my shoulders by the time I feel some slack on my wrists. We’ve remained relatively quiet and calm, only communicating about the task at hand. I start moving my arms violently, tugging and pulling at the ropes to loosen more and I’m just able to detangle one hand from the ropes. Immediately diving into my pants and pulling out the two knives.
“We should go on one of those survivors shows. Don’t you think?” I joke and Mom laughs.
“Yeah, if we survive.”
I make quick work of my other hand, pulling the ropes off as I shove one knife into my mouth and dunk my head under the water to get the bindings on my ankles. By the time I’m detangling the last of the ropes and pushing away from the chair in the water, I can feel that the level is just lapping over Mom’s mouth, but she stays calm, breathing through her nose normally as she waits. I do her hands first quickly, shoving one knife into her hand and holding the chair up further in the water as we both take in a deep breath and dive under to do one of her ankles each. I push off the bottom of the floor when I untangle the rope I was dealing with and I’m just now treading water to stay in the air pocket. Mom comes up a few seconds later, coughing out some water and breathing in deeply.
“Okay, what now?” I ask in the dark.
“There’s got to be a door we we’re brought in from the bottom, but it’s probably locked and the pressure from the water would be too much to push it open if it wasn’t. The water comes in from the top…so I’m assuming there has to be a latch of some sort up there too. We won’t be able to reach it until the water pushes us up though.” She thinks out loud.
“Okay, so we reserve our energy, float on our backs until we go up.”
And that’s exactly what we do. There’s no indication in the dark just how long we will have to wait to reach the top besides the difference in sound the water makes as the tank gets fuller and fuller. Every now and then I raise my hand or my leg to see if I can touch the roof and there’s only a second of a fleeting thought about what happens if we can’t get it open, or if there’s not even a hatch at all.
That all abruptly changes when I hear a loud metal sound vibrating through the space and then light floods in from above as Lola’s pretty face leans down inside.
“Are you guys alive in there?”
“Fuck yeah we are!” I fist bump the air.
“Thank god, cause we’re going to need some help up here.”
A rope drops down about four meters and lands in the water beside me.
“What, more help then we needed in here?” I try to pass the rope to Mom but she gives me a stern look that says ‘don’t you fucking dare‘ and I roll my eyes as I start to climb upwards. I use the side of the tank to walk my feet up as my hands pull me further and further until finally Lola’s hand and another is in reach and I’m pulled up and onto my feet. I brush some water off my face from my dripping hair as Lola shoves a gun into my hand and the big guy next to her looks down at me with an eyebrow raised.
“This is who we had to save? How the fuck is she going to help us get out of this mess?“”
“With my help of course.” Mom says pulling herself out and jumping down beside me on the landing. “Ariana Donatello.” She holds her hand out for him to shake but he pales and takes a step back, making me laugh.
“Don’t worry, if you’re on our side then you won’t die…probably.”
“Isla!” Mom scolds. “Don’t scare our new friends. Okay, now what’s going on? Someone tell me what’s happening.” She says taking guns from the guys pocket and snatching a shiny dagger from his boot.
“Pedro tried to leave for a safe house after he locked you guys in there. Those of us that don’t want to be here tried to stop him, because we all know that if he’s not here then he could blow this place up at any second. We got him trapped in the old cafeteria with some of the guys that actually support him, but he managed to take Adrian’s sister hostage in there with him when he saw we were against him. He’s saying he’s going to kill her if we don’t let him walk free.”
“Who’s Adrian?” I question.
“Me.” The big guy says.
“Oh. Okay. Sorry.“.
Mom looks up at Adrian, handing back one of his guns. “Great. So we get your sister…”
“Anna.”
“We get Anna out and kill Pedro and all of his men. Easy.”
