Free Placebo by Steven James Page B

fighter.
    I’ve been taking TaeKwonDo for three years, but I’m only a brown belt. Besides, I’m weaponless; he has a knife and a big size advantage. Still, I’ve spent a lot of time sparring and I can take care of myself pretty well in a fight.
    However, I’ve never fought an armed assailant.
    And I’ve never sparred in a space this small.
    Though mostly shadowed, the look on Charlene’s face tells me that she has noticed the knife as well. She is fingering the cross she wears around her neck.
    I rest my hand on her shoulder to try to reassure her, to tell her without words that things are going to be okay.
    A tiny nod, then her hand goes on top of mine.
    The intruder types for a few moments. The color of the monitor’s glow changes, becomes brighter and white, and I guess that he has moved past the desktop to some specific program or file.
    As the moments pass I’m caught up again thinking about the tight quarters, and I don’t know how long I can stand being in here.
    Based on what I’ve seen, people who’ve never experienced claustrophobia have no idea how desperate and frantic it makes you feel, when—
    It’s all about your breathing.
    Calm. Stay calm.
    I breathe, yes, I do, but it’s not calm breathing at all.
    Trying to distract myself, I think of the escapes I’ve done, all the closed-in spaces I’ve been in and how I’ve survived them—sealed tanks filled with icy water, the coffin I was buried alive in for two days, the controversial million-dollar bet I accepted from a TV psychic I’d debunked. He challenged me to an escape even I couldn’t have come up with on my own: I was put in a straitjacket, locked in a trunk with a parachute beside me, then dropped from a plane at 22,000 feet.
    To give the chute enough time to open, I only had ninety-one seconds to get out of the straitjacket, strapped into the chute, and out of the trunk. It hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea at the time, but free-falling made it a lot harder to get out of the jacket than I expected, and then when I popped open the trunk, I didn’t quite have the chute buckled and almost lost hold of it.
    But I made it down safely and took home the million dollars.
    And I had to admit that the adrenaline rush was something else.
    You did that, you can at least stand being in here for a few more minutes.
    But then the chair squeaks, alerting me again to where I am, and I see the saber of light from the flashlight swing around the room.
    Toward the chamber.
    The man’s footsteps follow it.
    My heart is beating.
    Beating.
    I grip my flashlight, which really is too small to serve as much of a weapon. “Get back,” I tell Charlene softly. She steps backward.
    The man aims his light at the crack.
    And then the door to the Faraday cage flies open.

Blood
    It happens all at once, in a swirl of light and shadow and movement, blurred and swift.
    I flick on my flashlight and shine it into the eyes of whoever opened the door, hoping to momentarily blind him, perhaps give us a chance to push past him and escape, but he’s quick and knocks it away. The flashlight goes spinning around the chamber, clattering to the floor.
    Whipping, twisting shafts of light.
    Dizzying in the darkness.
    Directing his own flashlight into my eyes, he slashes the knife toward me, and as I avoid the blade he swipes it at Charlene.
    She jerks backward but is too slow, and the knife slices through the sleeve of her shirt.
    She gasps.
    I see blood. The cut is deep. It’s in her left forearm.
    I go at the man, who’s now in the chamber with us, and instinct and three years of TaeKwonDo sparring take over. I use an inner forearm block to knock his knife hand to the side. Then, despite the close quarters, I’m able to land a fierce front kick to his thigh. I aim a punch at his throat, but he’s able to partially block it.
    He feints at me, then swishes the blade in a