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coldresolve · 2 years ago

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Moneymakers, pt.xxxi // Prelude to Escape

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Renee is back to being his giddy, carefree self after the stream, and something about that is jarring. It’s as if he’s completely forgotten the events of the past couple of days, or as if they don’t faze him anymore. Maybe he’s just high again. Conrad wouldn’t be surprised.

They sit in the guest bedroom, all three of them for once. While Davin quietly works on stitching Conrad’s arm back together, Renee is waiting for his own turn. He’s drinking wine straight from the bottle, slouched on the bed, long legs swinging off the edge. His jacket lies discarded on the floor, t-shirt drenched in sweat down his chest. The wound on his broken arm looks bad, but it isn’t bleeding anymore.

“I got really into tagging culture for a while,” he drones on. “Always had spray paint on me. I’d spray out security cameras too, I fuckin’ hate security cameras. Seems every shoddy failing business needs ‘em these days.” He takes a swig of wine. “I spent a long time coming up with a good-looking tag, too. I still know it.”

“That so?” Davin says, not looking up from his work. His hands move swiftly as he ties off another stitch, cutting the thread close before he moves on to the next one.

The dispassionate response doesn’t seem to faze Renee. “Oh, yeah,” he says, tapping his fingernails against the glass bottle. “There’s an artistry to it, man.” He chuckles. “Should’ve stuck to it. But you know how it goes.”

In the brief silence that follows, Renee looks around the room as if scouring for anything to distract himself with, until his expression suddenly changes to something more devious, and he looks at Conrad. “Hey, Connie,” he says.

Conrad blinks slowly. For a while, he’s been so deeply dissociating, he forgot he still has a physical presence in the room.

“If you wanted to kill me, how would you do it?” Renee asks.

The question is enough to tear Conrad back to reality. He looks at Renee sharply, swallowing. “I w-…”

“Speak up,” Renee says with a smile.

Conrad can feel his breathing begin to come quicker, can hear his heartbeat in his ears. “I don’t want to… to kill anyone,” he says.

Renee snorts. “Oh, c’mon, drop the choir boy charade. I know you hate me.” He takes another swig of wine, looking at Conrad expectantly. “Would you make it quick or draw it out? Get some sweet revenge?”

Conrad swallows again, eyes drifting to Davin, who just looks very tired.

“I think there’s a good handful of viewers who wouldn’t mind if the tables were turned,” Renee says. “We saw that today, didn’t we?” He chuckles. “Imagine you had me tied down, Connie. No witnesses, no chance of being caught, just you, me and—”

“Quick,” Conrad mutters.

Renee raises a brow. “Really? How?” He leans forward on the bed, a genuinely excited glint in his eyes. “A gun or a knife, hm? Or something else…?”

Even Davin has paused what he’s doing now, looking curiously at Conrad as he thinks.

Conrad looks at his arm. At the new scars he will have to learn to bear, ugly and jagged to match how shaky his hands were during the stream. “Gun,” he says quietly.

“Where?”

Conrad’s breaths are shallow.

“Where would you shoot me?”

He grits his teeth, looks Renee in the eyes, and says, “Head.”

Renee’s smile only widens. “Would you want to look me in the eye, Conrad? Like now?”

Conrad doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t look away, either.

“Would you watch me as you pulled the trigger?” Renee keeps the eye contact for a while longer, but once it becomes clear that Conrad has no intention of responding, he leans back on the bed again, taking a swig of his wine. “Me, I think I’d smash your skull with a hammer.”

At that, Conrad stiffens, and although the defiance never quite leaves his expression, he can feel the blood rush from his face, and his chest sinks a little.

Renee suppresses another grin. “I’d have some fun with the rest of you first, though,” he continues casually. “See how many broken bones it’d take to cure your fidgeting.”

“Renee,” Davin says, giving him a look.

“What? He fidgets a lot, y’know.”

Davin just rolls his eyes.

💵

Long after Renee’s music has seized beating through the walls, long after the hallway light shining through the slit under the door has been turned off, long after the silence has spread its deafening presence like a blanket over the premises, Conrad sits awake in his bed, wondering exactly what he’s waiting for.

It feels impossibly daunting, like staring down the barrel of a gun, as if he’s holding his breath for the coming shot. But if all goes well, this night marks the end of his ordeal.

Conrad wonders, albeit briefly, if he hasn’t gotten attached in some strange way. Attached to his captors, attached to the rhythm of life here, to pain and healing and rebound pain. There’s a simplicity to it that doesn’t exist in everyday life, a clear divide between good and bad, implied guidelines for how to behave, emotions that aren’t ambiguous or muddled by complex circumstances. Here, his suffering has a clear reason behind it. It’s brutal, but unequivocally straightforward, which is strangely comforting.

There’s a new life he has to face when he comes back home, and he knows it. Knows that he will have to learn to relive his trauma, over and over, to face his family and friends again. Knows with every fiber of his being that even if he succeeds tonight, it’s not over, and it’s never going to be over. Whatever life he thought he’d live has been taken from him, it’s been ripped from his grasp, it’s been torn to shreds and he has watched it die. Is he supposed to act like thousands of people haven’t seen him at the lowest moments of his life? Is he supposed to act like he wants to live out the aftermath of that, like he wants to forever be seen as the same ruined, mangled husk of a person he has been in those streams? Even if he somehow recovers fully, physically and mentally; even if he makes a name for himself, lives out whatever potential he still has left – that image will never go away.

A twenty-three-year-old boy, covered in his own blood and sweat, begging at his wits end for mercy. That’s who he will always be seen as, no matter who he choses to become from this point forward. It’s a ghost he can never erase, never overcome, and never outrun.

Conrad DeWitt will never not be broken.

He will have to look Howard in the eye, knowing full well that they already know what he’s gone through. How is he supposed to do that? And that’s just day one.

Despite the clear threat to his life, there’s a thousand reasons for him to be reluctant to escape. To wait just a little longer than strictly necessary. To stave off his return, no matter how much he simultaneously yearns for it.

Thoughts cascading along the same trite lines, Conrad sits idle far beyond the point where he is certain that both Renee and Davin have gone to sleep.

If he had to guess, he’d say it’s around three in the morning when he finally pulls the screw from its hiding place. There’s a moment of uncertainty as he finds the keyhole by touch, but then the pin clicks, and the handcuffs loosen from his wrist. He sits rubbing the abrased skin for a minute, feeling out the quietness of the house, letting it wash over him.

Silently, Conrad eases his way off the bed, bare feet making no sound on the cold hardwood floor. The room is slightly illuminated by the moonlight pouring in through the window, but half the room is still shrouded in darkness.

It feels illegal, somehow, to be free. It feels wrong. If he’s caught at this stage, he’ll have to explain how he got out of the cuffs, and all his work will be for nothing. It seems every noise he makes, every rustle of his clothing, every exhale, every beat of his heart, is amplified in the silence.

He carefully wraps his hand around the handle of the door to his room, cringing as he pushes it down, hears the spring in the internal mechanism. He pulls the door open slowly, raises the handle again slowly, lets go of it slowly, as if any miniscule sound would trigger a blaring alarm somewhere.

It doesn’t.

The hallway, void of windows, is pitch black. Conrad tiptoes through it with one hand trailing the wall, eyes wide open in the dark, occasionally pausing to listen for any sign that his captors are awake. The muffled sound of snoring can be heard through the door to Renee’s room, but it’s completely quiet behind the door to Davin’s, which, oddly enough, is far more terrifying.

Conrad is almost relieved when he makes it to the open kitchen area, not least because the large floor-to-ceiling windows provide a relatively well-lit landscape to his eyes, long since adjusted to the dark. He stops in the entranceway, wondering briefly what his next step should be. He doesn’t have much of a plan, honestly.

Biting his lip, he tiptoes his way to the kitchen island. He opens a drawer, careful not to do it too quickly, lest its contents slide around too much. In the low light, he can barely make out the various cooking tools, but he spots the stark triangle of a herb knife, its blade still somehow shining in the low light.

Conrad picks up the knife, the old wound on the back of his hand aching as he adjusts his grip on the handle, slowly pushing the drawer closed. It’ll have to do for self-defense, he thinks grimly. The thought of stabbing someone with his own hands fills him with nausea, but this is life or death. He has to rise to the occasion. He has to at least be prepared.

Now he just needs to find a way out of the house.

As he tiptoes his way toward the living room area, Conrad bumps into a chair by the dining table, and winces deeply as the wooden legs scrape across the floor with a noise that seems to cut through the still air like a horn. Grabbing the chair to keep it steady, he stands absolutely frozen for a few seconds, clutching onto the knife, listening intently for the sound of rousing throughout the house, but no such sound is to be heard. It still takes a good minute for his heartbeat to settle after that.

He uncurls his hand from the back of the chair, and continues on past the couch group to the sliding glass doors, which Renee so often frequents on smoke breaks.

In his heightened state of anxiety, he all but forgot about the padlocks which don every door and window of the house, but there it is, brass surface shining in the moonlight. The chunk of metal standing between him and his freedom.

He tries to stick the knife into the keyhole and force it open, to no avail.

Careful not to make too much noise, he tries to open the sliding door despite the padlock, hoping in vain that the screws securing the hinges will easily tear from the frame. That, too, quickly proves fruitless.

With a sinking feeling in his gut, Conrad realizes he will have to break the window.

How do you do that soundlessly? Is that even possible?

He looks around his dark surroundings, desperately searching for any item that might prove useful in his quest, but nothing he sees gives much in the way of solace. It’s not like he can break the glass with the cushions scattered on the sofa.

He could almost cry with how close he is. As if there’s just one final code he has to break, one final step towards salvation. He sits down next to the sliding door, gritting his teeth against the unfairness of it all, trying to get his breathing back under control, trying to reignite his resolve.

Maybe, he thinks, if he cushioned the legs of one of the dining chairs with that one plaid draped across the arm of the sofa, the noise of it breaking the glass would be suppressed a little. Isn’t that worth a try?

Get up, he thinks to himself, Get up and do something about it.

His knees shake a little as he hauls his weight onto them, and he staggers up, mechanically grabbing the plaid as he walks past the sofa. His bare feet pat against the floor as he walks over to the dining area. Momentarily discarding the knife on the table, he grabs a chair by the back and turns it over in his hands, wrapping the plaid tightly around the two back legs.

He taps the cushioned legs against the glass pane of the nearest window.

Thunk.

Winces at the sound.

This isn’t going to be quiet. Not least when the glass finally shatters and scatters on the floor – it’s going to wake them up for sure.

Maybe he should just count on that. Count on rousing their attention – count on at least having a head start. His nerves are alight with the thought of running, but in the dark, there’ll be plenty of places to hide. If he could make it to the woods, if he could lose them there, find the nearest settlement and somehow contact the authorities – that’d be it. He would be free.

Conrad unwraps the legs from the plaid and discards it on the floor. He stands back, wielding the chair in both hands, giving one final glance at the knife on the table, reminding himself to grab it once the window breaks. His heart is starting to beat dizzyingly hard in his ears, breathing likewise quickening.

Once it happens, there’s no going back, is there?

Conrad throws the chair at the window as hard as he possibly can.

The sound of glass shattering erupts through the house, loud enough to almost be deafening, and shards rain down on the oak floor, but the window doesn’t break all the way; the glass is layered, Conrad realizes, there’s another pane still intact behind the one that just broke. As quickly as he can, he picks the chair back up and hurls it toward the remaining pane, which breaks, too, and the chair stops halfway out on the porch, and suddenly cold air rushes in, and then the light turns on in the hallway.

Conrad leaps for the knife, hands shaking so bad he cuts himself as he grasps it, but his adrenaline blocks it out, he doesn’t even feel it. Grabbing the plaid, he haphazardly throws it over the pile of glass shards on the floor to avoid cutting up his feet as he runs over it, and then he’s on the back porch running towards the fence in the pine grove, breath hissing in his throat.

“Renee!” Davin’s voice behind him. “Get the fuck up!”

And Conrad runs.

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#writing #conrad #renee #davin #i talked to jesus he said today was sunday #who am i to argue

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