Chapter 2 - The Screwdriver and the Cold Iron
The heat inside the room rose like a living, suffocating beast. Within three hours of the door slamming, the humid Louisiana swamp air transformed the windowless utility room into an oven.
My fingers brushed against the cold object under the heavy washing machine. It wasn't a key. It was a rusted, flathead automotive screwdriver—left behind by some contractor years ago—and beside it, covered in lint and mouse droppings, was an ancient, black rectangular brick: my brother Jordan’s old iPhone 6, discarded when our stepfather bought him his first sports car at sixteen.
My heart hammered so violently I felt it in my teeth.
I dragged my useless legs across the rough concrete, ignoring the splinters and the sting of grime grinding into my raw knees. Every movement was agony; without my intravenous immunoglobulin, my peripheral nerves were firing false signals of fire and broken glass.
I grabbed the phone. The screen was cracked in a spiderweb pattern. I pressed the power button with a trembling thumb.
Nothing. Totally dead.
Tears of hot, bitter frustration spilled over my cheeks. I flung the dead plastic against the wall. It hit with a dull thud. For five minutes, I simply lay face-down on the cement, listening to the suffocating silence of the Barrett estate. My mother was already thirty thousand feet in the air, sipping champagne in first class, celebrating Jordan’s acceptance into an elite Parisian post-grad program—funded entirely, no doubt, by the disability trust fund my late biological father had established for me before he died of leukemia.
*Think, Una. Do not give her the satisfaction of dying quietly.*
I picked up the flathead screwdriver.
I inspected the door. It was solid oak, heavy and exterior-grade, reinforced by a deadbolt my mother had personally had installed the week before under the guise of "home security." But the wall to my left wasn't concrete; it was double-layered drywall separating the utility closet from the pantry.
More importantly, the washing machine’s cold-water intake hose was right above me. When Rosie turned off the main valve, she had turned the indoor shutoff handle located near the basement stairs—not the individual spigot behind the unit. There had to be residual water trapped in the copper lines.
Using every ounce of strength in my upper arms, I hauled my torso up against the metal drum of the washer. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. I wedged the rusted screwdriver against the brass collar of the water line and hammered it with the heel of my palm.
Pain lanced through my wrist, but I struck it again. And again.
On the fifth strike, the brass gave way with a hiss.
A sputtering trickle of stale, metallic water poured from the hose. I threw my head back beneath it, opening my mouth, swallowing every precious drop. It tasted like rust and zinc, but it was life. I caught the rest in an empty, dust-caked plastic detergent cap I scraped clean with my fingernails.
Then, my eyes drifted back to Jordan’s dead phone lying in the dust.
Beside the baseboard was the washer’s 220-volt outlet. Dead. But right above the floor molding, behind the dryer vent, was a small, white box: a backup auxiliary power strip plugged into the emergency circuit for the house’s perimeter alarm system—a circuit Tony never touched because he was paranoid about burglars.
A tiny, amber LED glowed faintly on its face.
Electricity.
My hands flew into my pockets. Nothing. I looked around the room frantically until I spotted an old plastic storage bin on the top shelf. Dragging down a stack of dusty laundry baskets, the bin tumbled down, showering me with old cables, seasonal decor, and—miraculously—an ancient, fraying white charging cord.
With trembling fingers, I plugged it into the wall. I plugged the lightning cable into the phone.
May you like
A glowing white apple appeared on the cracked screen.
***
