Ducie by Chris Freeman

  Chapter 4. Time moves slowly from a distance

  The fall wasn’t smooth and Kate’s neck didn’t break. The toppled stool tangled in her feet and in her brief struggle to free herself, she broke her momentum further by catching the bottom bunk with the rubber grip of her right trainer. Too much noise. Not enough speed. It had all looked so much more polished when she had run the film of it through her head countless times the night before. She’d seen a blue flash when the rope had finally tensed, but she was painfully aware of her own consciousness, which sent a wave of panic through her body which she hadn’t planned for. The uneven contour of the makeshift rope had prevented the contraption from tightening as well as it should have. It wasn’t efficient, but it was slowly doing its job. Kate was barely aware of Adam’s frail body desperately trying to support her weight. The noise, the silence, the movement, the mayhem all blended into one frightening, chaotic fog. Kate began to watch herself dying from a distance, as her awareness slowly detached. It was all so fast, but seemed to have been going on for years. In reality, it was less than 30 seconds in total, before the room began to fill with people responding to Adam’s feeble cries for help.