Poker Face

Prologue (pt 1)

"I'm telling you something's different, Aven," Cindy whispered with newfound urgency. Her pale, blood-stained hands shook as she gripped the bars, rattling the walls of her cage around her. It had been days since she'd lifted herself from the floor of the small cage. Aven would have thought she were dead if it weren't for the constant wheezing of her small breaths. Cindy seemed to have given up hope, going still and silent, completely catatonic. Aven was in a similar state, but spent most of her days sitting up straight, preparing for her next escape attempt.

The two had lost track of the days since Melanie had died- three or four days, it had to be less than a week. Her body lay in the cage behind theirs and was starting to smell and attract flies. Cindy cried about Melanie whenever she had a little bit of energy, but Aven was almost happy about the decomposition of the body. Their captor had left them starving for maybe a week, save for scraps from their last insubstantial meal. Aven figured he was ignoring them, unsure of where to go from there, not quite wanting to just kill them himself. But the smell of the body would make him come in. He couldn't let it stay there: he wouldn't be able to stand the smell himself, and even if he could, it would draw attention to the house.

In beginning, the lanky, greasy middle-aged man would come in once a day. Aven recognized him as someone she'd seen strolling through town, although she didn't recognize his other two victims. Sometimes he came down to the basement just to taunt them and drop pieces of raw meat or food scraps through the tops of their cages. Other times, it was much, much worse. As the months progressed, he'd skip some days. Before recently starting to completely ignore them though, he had increased his activity back to almost every day.

Cindy still had open wounds on her forehead where her oily brown hair stuck in the dried scabs. Aven hadn't had a period in two months and could only hope that it was just because of the physical stress. In any other situation, she might have been thankful. Her period had always been so rough that it was debilitating, but now she'd give anything just to know she wasn't pregnant with the child of a monster.

"You're right, Cindy," Aven said blankly, her eyes ever-fixed on the door, which was locked from the other side. "I haven't heard anything at all. No pots and pans, no Neil Young, nothing." Her jaw was clenched tightly and she could hear her teeth gritting together. "We need to get out of here before he comes back from wherever he's gone off to." Aven was shaking. She'd been the constant steady voice of the three prisoners, but waves of anger and exhaustion crashed violently in her mind.

"But how do we-" Cindy trailed off from her question when Aven jolted from her frozen position and began wildly kicking against her cage. It was something she'd done thousands of times over the previous months, but the man never let that slide. He'd come barrelling in and start kicking the cage himself before wrenching open the door and pulling Aven out by her hair. But without him there to stop her, the bars of the cage were slowly giving way to Aven's force. It was stupid of him to have put grown women in flimsy cages made for animals.

When Aven felt the spot she'd been berating start to bend easily, her kicking became faster and more feverish until she heard a loud snap, followed by the sound of a small piece of metal flying off and hitting the wall and the floor. She leaned back to take in a quick breath and admire her work: a thin piece of one of the bars, only a few inches long, had broken from the lattice, leaving a small but weak opening in the cage. She let out a crazed laugh of relief staring her escape in the face, but just then they heard a thump from somewhere in the house. Aven and Cindy locked eyes, holding a brief gaze of intense fear before Aven shoved her arm through the hole in the cage. The sharp metal tore a deep gash in the top of her forearm but she was too focused to notice. She reached her arm all the way through to the shoulder, widening the hole enough that she could pry it open with both hands.