Part 3

The very second the room door clicked shut the target started to struggle. He stopped instantly as his struggling caused his bare back to touch a red hot iron that was balanced precariously on the back of his seat.

He had two choices, sit still and do nothing to keep away from the iron or try and wiggle the chair in such a way that the iron would fall off and not land on him allowing him to try and escape.

He felt he couldn’t do nothing so he opted to try and make the iron fall. He took a deep breath and carefully rocked the chair. Nothing happened. He rocked it a bit harder. The iron wobbled forward, he could feel the heat from it as it got millimetres from his back before wobbling back to its original position. He rocked the chair again; the iron tipped forward, touched his back briefly then tipped backwards and fell off the chair.

The pain in his back subsided after a second or two when he realised there should have been a thud as the iron hit the floor, but there had been no thud. He looked down at the iron. It had landed on a pile of crumpled up paper. The paper was already starting to smoulder.

In a panic he managed to wedge his hands under the chair and grip onto it, he tried to bounce the chair away from the iron and the impending fire. On the first bounce he heard a light thump, looking back to the iron he noticed a bottle of liquid had been hidden under the chair and his bouncing had knocked it over. A pungent odour filled the air and he realised that the liquid was petrol. The petrol was seeping across the floor towards the pile of smouldering papers. The instant the petrol hit the papers they burst into flame.

Wild with panic he started bouncing vigorously away from the fire. He had gotten 5 or 6 feet away from the fire when the legs of the chair caught on something and he fell over sideways.

Lying on his side on the floor still tied to the chair he could see just out of his reach a knife that had been stabbed into the floor, speared onto the knife was a photograph of him with his name written on it in red ink “Laurence Gordon”.

He struggled and struggled to get closer to the knife, hoping to use it to free himself from the chair, but he struggled in vain.