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The eight coffins on the ground were just tall enough that if you stood atop one, you could barely reach the locking mechanism of the ones still suspended above. Reaching like that though, there was no way to even try to pry at the lock.
So, Caleb and Daniel had hauled themselves up to hang from the same structure the coffins were bolted to. Even so, they were decently far off the ground trying to open steel boxes with no tools. Daniel’s arms were already killing him.
He was clutching to the side of one, bashing his shoe into the blocky contraption that covered the lid’s latch and handle. It wasn’t attached somehow. Rather, it seemed to be fused directly to the coffin. There wasn’t even a seam.
There had to be something they could do!
This was getting them nowhere. Daniel needed a new strategy. He dropped down the floor below and ran over to the coffins he and Caleb had been stuck in.
Caleb stayed up with the hanging coffins. He was banging his fist against the side of one of them.
They hadn’t been able to count how many of the coffins had audible captives. It was at least four, at first. But every second they were stuck in those coffins brought them closer to suffocating.
Daniel desperately inspected the door to his coffin. He couldn’t make sense of it. The sealed ones above had the handle fused directly into the body, like they’d been melted together but with impossible precision so it was just one whole piece of metal.
But their coffins were just… missing that fused part, like it had been melted away and sculpted carefully to remove any trace that the door was ever sealed.
Daniel thought back to the noises he’d heard from the inside of the coffin, just before he was released. They had sounded close, mere inches from him. Maybe even on the surface of the coffin itself.
Something or someone had opened the eight coffins on the ground.
“Caleb!” he shouted.
The other kid didn’t stop trying to elicit a response from anyone inside the coffins.
“Caleb!” he repeated. He heard Daniel and looked down, only to lose his grip and fall.
Daniel was close enough to break at least part of his fall and keep him from hitting his head. Caleb let out a muffled scream when his hand hit the hangar floor though. Caleb’s hand was bruised so badly blood was seeping out of his very pores.
“We’re not getting through that metal by hand. Help me look for something.”
“Look for what?” Caleb snapped, already getting to his feet to climb back up.
Daniel grabbed his shoulder and pulled him down from the shelving when he tried to climb. With only one hand even remotely usable, he wouldn’t be able to reach the hanging coffins again.
“Anything!” Daniel said. “A file or something, something heavier to bash it with, or some way to lower the coffins. But we’re wasting our time breaking our bones up there.”
“They’re suffocating in those things,” Caleb said coldly. “Every second is—”
“Wasted ,” Daniel finished for him, “as long as you’re turning your arm into hamburger.” He grabbed at Caleb’s battered hand, and squeezed his wrist to prove the point.
The other kid winced, started to get angry, and decided better one after the other. Caleb looked up at the hanging coffins, breathing carefully.
He nodded. “Alright. Let’s look.”
·····
The hangar was devoid of any useful tool. The shelving was affixed to the floor, the piping was similar. There was nothing that could even be repurposed into some kind of tool in any form.
Daniel was trying to wrack his brain. The metal holding the coffin lids in place wasn’t that thick, less than half an inch. The shape was different, but ultimately, it couldn’t be that different from breaking through a padlock. It was just a few dozen millimeters of metal.
His skin crawled looking at it. What could do this? If you wanted to pull metal into new shapes, it had to be molten! You couldn’t just sculpt metal cleanly like this. It wasn’t clay or putty.
Daniel’s own imagination haunted him.
But whatever had done this didn’t matter. If they even had a lever of some kind, they might not even have to break it off entirely. Just pry it away enough to get the lids open and air inside.
But that assumed that air was even the problem. Caleb and Daniel hadn’t suffocated, but the occupants of the other six open coffins had. And at least someone in the still sealed sets hadn’t run out of air through the same timeframe.
“Fuck,” Daniel said, uselessly combing over the barren shelves again. There was nothing.
“You mentioned a hatch,” Caleb said. “Where?”
“There.” Daniel pointed toward the water valve and walked toward the ladder that was next to the pipes. A square hatch was set in the ceiling.
“Let’s check it out. You’re right, there’s nothing here that can help, so we look up there.”
Caleb started up the ladder, favoring his less battered hand, but he climbed up the rungs to the ceiling. Daniel saw him visibly brace himself for disappointment when he put his hand on the hatch’s lever.
But Caleb gave it a wrench and the mechanism disengaged, sliding into the ceiling.
Ascending the ladder delivered them to a much smaller room, barely ten feet across with two doors on opposite sides. Both sealed.
But the ladder continued upward toward another hatch, which, unlike the first, was already open.
Since there was nothing useful here, and there was further up to go, they both climbed up another level to a new room, not quite as wide as the hangar below with a much lower ceiling.
“What the shit…?” Daniel asked as he stepped up.
Lights flickered on in the room as Caleb climbed up ahead of Daniel, illuminating several tables and stools in the middle of the floor. There were latched cabinets scattered on two walls, similar to the ones on airplanes. Those same walls had a counter and two oddly shaped sinks at either end.
The walls were paneled irregularly, with the gaps between each segment forming a disjointed line across the wall. Some parts were sunken into the wall to make shallow alcoves.
Daniel experimentally turned one of the taps, and just like the larger nozzle in the hangar, water flowed.
It… was some kind of cafeteria , or meal hall.
“What in the actual shit? ” Daniel repeated as he turned around, looking at the room. He felt like he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“What kind of people kidnap us and bother to make something like this?” Daniel asked.
“Let’s keep looking,” Caleb said. “There could be something useful in the cabinets.”
There was, in fact. But not for Daniel, he already had a water bottle.
But Caleb took one of the several dozen flexible plastic bottles inside one of the cabinets and filled it. The rest of the cabinets were similarly unhelpful. More than half of them were totally empty, while the rest held a few rags.
Daniel grabbed the rags anyway.
“Where are we?” Caleb asked. “This building is totally screwed. It just has a ladder between the floors?”
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“Two ladders,” Daniel observed, finding another open hatch on the other side of the room. It too went down to a small room with two doors, in reverse orientation of the other room. Daniel hauled this hatch open and the two of them found themselves back in the hangar, but on the far end from where they’d left.
Okay, each level had two ladders at either end. They could be in some kind of tower. But what kind of building had a huge hangar like this? It was like a miniature warehouse with a quaint kitchen and mess two floors above.
Daniel frowned, recalling the shape of some of the wall panels above.
“Fuck,” he said, climbing back up the ladder. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“What?” Caleb called up to him.
Something had been bothering Daniel the whole time, ever since he’d felt himself yanked off his feet and stuffed into a metal box. He hadn’t even been able to put it into words until this very moment.
Where were they?
A thousand answers were possible, but thinking about the shape of the building had reminded him of what exactly had been bothering him for those long hours in the coffin.
He’d been yanked clean off the ground, but only now, nearly a whole day later did he realize he never felt like he’d ever set foot down on the ground again.
Caleb followed him up the ladder to the cafeteria room asking, “What are you doing?”
Daniel walked over to one of the wall alcoves apprehensively and his stomach sank. The shallow alcove of a few inches wasn’t an alcove at all. Instead of empty space, it was filled with a solid slab of glass, or something else transparent and heavy. The thick pane was more than a meter wide, but not quite a foot tall, and it was placed just off eye level.
It was a window.
And Daniel’s gut told him there was only one kind of window that needed to be this thick: the kind that kept air in.
Daniel looked to the side of the transparently filled alcove and found a pair of mechanical square buttons.
He clicked one, and when nothing happened, the other.
The panel on the far side of the glass slid upward slowly, revealing the beyond.
Stars. Endless, countless, infinite stars gazed back at them.
Daniel’s eyes widened. It tipped him over, literally. He stumbled back, dropping onto one of the stools and clutching his head in disbelief.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he muttered.
Caleb didn’t move an inch.
Daniel had been using the wrong word. They were in space. This wasn’t a building, it was a spaceship, a rocket .
They hadn’t been kidnapped. That wasn’t what you called this .
They were abductees.
·····
Later, too much later, they’d made no progress freeing anyone.
Even if anyone was still alive, how much time did they have left? It was supposed to be three minutes without air and three days without water. But when would they run out of the first? It was still impossible to tell how the other six had suffocated.
Had it been from being sealed in the coffin, or the opposite? What if, when whatever took them spirited them into the sky, they hadn’t been sealed in? They would have passed out from the thin atmosphere in seconds.
How long had it actually been? How many hours? Had it been more than a day? Two?
There weren’t any clocks. Their phones were both dead.
The sixteen coffins in the hangar were all still sealed. Daniel had tried using the wet rags to twist some of the metal, even just to make it budge. But he hadn’t even managed to get the rag between the sliding lid and the lock. There wasn’t a ‘between’ at all. The two were fused into one solid piece.
Whatever sadistic assholes had designed this had been meticulous.
It didn’t strike Daniel as coincidence that there was nothing they could use to heavily damage this rocket in any way.
It was the doors that really gave away what kind of a prison the rocket was. The pair of doors on the level between the mess area and hangar were conspicuously locked, even sealed like the coffins.
There were things they weren’t supposed to have, places they weren’t supposed to go.
Daniel sat on the hangar floor under the coffins. For literally countless hours, he’d been trying to help the people still trapped, and all he had to show for it was a few torn damp rags.
Caleb poked his head down through one of the hatches.
“Hey,” he said, “come here. I found something.”
Daniel looked up at who might be the only other living human on this rocket. “Something to help them?”
Caleb’s jaw clenched. “No,” he replied. “Come on anyway.”
“Fuck.” Daniel cursed. This was a million kinds of twisted. He’d thought something similar when he was first grabbed. Long black hours inside a coffin had worn him down, and isolated like that he’d allowed himself to think that the only way it could possibly get any worse is if he died.
The gut-wrenchingly horribly funny part about that was Daniel hadn’t been hurt.
At all. Every single scrape and bruise on his body was self-inflicted. Whoever was behind this, they hadn’t harmed him at all, and he had the gall to think it couldn’t get any worse?
“Fuck,” Daniel repeated as he climbed the ladder to see what Caleb had found.
He climbed up toward the mess level, and saw what Caleb was talking about.
They’d been distracted by the fact that the mess level’s hatches had already been open, and by the appearance of the strange room in general. But the ladders actually continued upward, and Caleb had opened one of the hatches and started investigating.
Daniel followed him up to a corridor that extended toward the other ladder hatch. Attached to the corridor were two or three doors on each side.
To his surprise, one of them was open, and Caleb was inside.
It was a dormitory. Three pairs of bunks were recessed into each wall. Caleb nodded toward another open door with a lavatory behind it.
“You asked who would bother making all this?” Caleb said. “Someone who knows we’re going to be here a long time.”
Caleb wearily collapsed onto one of the bunks and didn’t move a muscle. Daniel saw that his hair was damp. He must have wetted it in the lavatory sink.
Anger flashed in him. How could Caleb wash his hair when the other abductees were still stuck?
He opened his mouth to yell, but he was so tired that his breath failed him. Or maybe he was too mad to make a coherent sentence.
“How—” he began. “W-what—”
But he couldn’t muster any energy for more than a second or two. The look on Caleb’s face didn’t make it any easier. The other kid’s face was still like a mask, wrenched into grief that couldn’t help him.
Daniel’s eyes found Caleb’s hand, bloody and bruised from the hours he’d tried to break open the coffins. Daniel’s own hands weren’t looking any better now.
He wanted to be furious. He was furious. Why? Why was any of this happening?
“Why shouldn’t we keep trying?!” he hissed.
Caleb didn’t treat the question like it had been aimed at him. Daniel didn’t either, really.
“Because I think it’s been at least thirty hours,” Caleb said.
“Can’t have been that long.” Daniel muttered, “We’re just tired. Can’t have been more than twelve.” Why was Caleb saying any of this? He wouldn’t be swayed. They could rescue the rest of them. Once they were all free, they could figure out who’d done this to them and—
“Daniel,” the younger kid interrupted, “…they’re dead.”
The words crushed him. He didn’t know any of them. He never even saw their faces. But he’d known they were alive, stuck in a dark metal coffin, just like he had been. Terrified. Alone.
And they’d died not a few feet away from them.
He wanted to scream at Caleb for giving up, for even thinking of rest when there were others just like them dying just a few dozen feet away. It made him wonder if Caleb was like them.
But then he saw how the other kid was holding his hand. It was bruised purple and swollen. Caleb had been ready to break his body to help them live.
Daniel's own body wasn't faring much better. If it had really been thirty hours... He wanted to deny it, but when he tried to storm out of the bunk room, his joints failed to hold him up. He only barely managed to avoid crumpling to the floor.
Daniel fell onto the bunk opposite Caleb’s and felt just how weak his body was. A hot burning shame settled in his belly while he lay there, but he physically couldn't bring himself to persevere another moment. He fell asleep clenching his jaw and fighting off tears.
“Fuck.”