Page 161 of The Most Dangerous Games

It doesn’t even sound like his own voice.

“Quit,” the guard says. “Easy to remember.”

“He’ll never hear me say that,” Jack says.

“If you say so,” the guard replies, like he’s heard that before.

When the guard closes the door behind him, it sounds like the door to a jail cell being slammed shut.

Jack starts to feel the tingling sensation he always feels in his hands and feet when he is in any sort of confined space and wants to move around but can’t. It’s the sensation he sometimes feels on an airplane when it encounters turbulence, his seat belt securely fastened, knowing he can’t get up and move around, as much as he’d rather do that than just . . . sit there and wait for it to be over.

He barely fights off the first real wave of nausea.

There is only a tiny lightbulb in an upper corner of the coffin.

Other than that, he is mostly in darkness.

It makes Jack feel even more trapped than ever.

It’s not just his heart racing now, it’s his mind. It’s the memories of other times when his claustrophobia has paralyzed him with fear this way, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

This is as bad as it has ever been.

Or could be.

In the next moment, though, it gets worse.

Much worse.

The smell hits.

It pours in convincingly physical and choking. Rot and garbage and sewage—wet, sour, thick. It fills the coffin, fills his lungs, fills his head. It’s so strong it feels like he can taste it.

Jack’s eyes water instantly.

He knows it’s a trick. Some system through vents, a gas line, a canister. A weapon that doesn’t leave bruises. What else could it be?

He tells himself these are only special effects. Illusions. Artificial whatever, designed to make him lose his freaking mind.

Or crawl out of his own skin.

Whatever it is, they’re succeeding like freaking champions. His body doesn’t care that it’s fake.

Jack feels he’s at the bottom of a sewer, not this coffin, the stench that terrible, and overwhelming.

And disgusting.

Now he’s certain he’s going to be sick.

They know.

Know that it’s not just claustrophobia with him.

It’s more than that, and something he dealt with in his normal life on a daily basis.

He hadn’t told the interviewer back in the red tent about being a germaphobe. He’d never told anybody with whom he’d played football, even getting down in the dirt the way you had to. He hadn’t told anybody with the Rangers. Especially not anybody with the Rangers. He never told anybody in the caves or the jungles in which he’d fought, sometimes crawling around on his belly. Or in the filthy rooms that served as temporary barracks.

He kept it to himself. Jack wore it. Got through it. The only person he’d ever told was the therapist he’d seen after he got out of the Army, when he was about to take the job on the oil rig.