Chapter 10: The plank
The five minutes were a lie. It was maybe two. Just long enough for a few water bottles to be tossed near the girls, for the new people at the door to shuffle fully inside, closing in around the mats. The room felt smaller, the air hotter, tinged with a sour breathlessness.
Lilly pushed herself up on trembling elbows, the world swimming. Every organ felt displaced, floating in a jar of bruised liquid. She gulped water, most of it spilling down her chin. Across from her, Maya was being helped into a semi-sitting position by a participant who then quickly withdrew, as if touching her between rounds was against the rules. Maya sucked in air like she’d never tasted it before, her entire frame shaking with minute, uncontrollable tremors. Emely just stayed on her side, forehead against the cool rubber, spitting intermittently, her eyes fixed on Ben’s shoes.
Ben clapped his hands once, a sharp sound that cut through the low buzz. “Recovery’s over. New phase.” He gestured to a corner where a large, unfinished sheet of plywood leaned against the wall. It was about six feet long, its surface rough with splinters. “We’re increasing throughput. The sandwich technique. You three,” he said, pointing at the girls, “lie down. Head to toe, close. Torsos aligned.”
A fresh thrill went through the crowd. This was new.
Lilly’s mind, still humming with data, grasped the principle immediately. Distributed load. The board would act as a pressure plate, transferring weight across all three of them simultaneously. No individual focus. Total systemic stress. A strange, academic excitement cut through her pain. She dragged herself into position, lying on her back in the center.
Maya looked at her, eyes wide with a silent plea. “Just… just come here,” Lilly whispered, her voice raspy. “It’s… it’s just physics.” It was a pathetic comfort, but Maya obeyed, collapsing on Lilly’s left, her shoulder pressing into Lilly’s arm. Emely, after a final glare at Ben, took the position on the right, her body rigid with tension. Their hips and shoulders touched. A line of vulnerable flesh.
Ben and another man hauled the plywood over. It blotted out the LED lights overhead before it settled with a heavy, final thump across their abdomens and chests. The unvarnished wood was cool and gritty against their skin. It pressed down with its own dead weight, pinning them. Lilly felt the collective flinch of her friends through the board.
“Rules are simple,” Ben announced, stepping back and folding his arms. He addressed the twenty-plus people now crammed into the room. “The board is the platform. You decide how many go up. You decide how long you stay. No rotation clock. No coordination from me. If you want a turn, you get on. If it’s crowded, you wait. Or you don’t.”
It was an invitation to anarchy. A murmur of approval rippled through the room. The hunger was palpable.
The first person, a guy with a nervous smile, stepped up onto the board near their feet. The wood creaked. The pressure was immediate—a diffuse, shared burden. It was different. Less sharp, more encompassing. Lilly exhaled, adjusting her analysis. Weight distribution approximately 160 pounds, focused on lower quadrant, shared across three femurs and–
Then a second person climbed on, near their hips. The board groaned. The pressure multiplied, not added. It became a tight, sinking feeling. Maya made a small, trapped animal sound.
“Move over, make room,” someone said.
A third stepped up between the first two. The plywood bowed slightly in the middle. Now the pressure was a constant, heavy presence from thighs to ribcage. Emely let out a sharp curse, her hands coming up to push futilely at the rough wood above her.
“That’s it?” a woman’s voice challenged from the crowd. “Three? It’s a big board.”
A fourth person, then a fifth, climbed on. They stood awkwardly at first, then adjusted their stance, finding balance. The board was now fully occupied, feet shifting and scuffing just inches above the girls’ faces. Dust and splinters sifted down. The creaking was a constant, ominous soundtrack.
The air under the board grew hot and stale, thick with the smell of fear-sweat and plywood resin. The pressure was no longer a series of points; it was a blanket, a vice that compressed them all equally. Lilly felt Maya’s hand scramble and find hers, gripping it with crushing force. She squeezed back.
“Okay, that’s good,” a guy on the board said, his voice vibrating down through the wood. He was testing his balance.
“Nah, we can fit more,” argued the woman standing over Emely. “Scoot in. You, get up here.”
A sixth person, a large man, put a tentative foot on the edge. The board tipped, then settled as he brought his full weight up. A collective gasp was forced from the three girls beneath. The plywood was at capacity, bending under the combined mass. Every flinch, every shift from someone above was transmitted directly into their crushed torsos.
Lilly’s scientific detachment shattered. This wasn't data. This was saturation. Her lungs couldn’t expand. Each breath was a shallow, desperate sip of the hot, dusty air. The weight was everywhere, demanding total surrender. A moan built in her throat, low and continuous, mingling with Maya’s reedy whimpers and Emely’s choked grunts.
“How long we been on?” someone asked above.
“Dunno. A minute?”
“Feels longer. They’re really squished under there.”
“You can hear ‘em.”
There was no mercy in the observation, only a cool fascination.
Then someone on the board started to rock, shifting their weight from heels to toes. The movement translated into a rolling, crushing wave that traveled the length of the three pinned bodies. Maya screamed, a short, piercing sound that was instantly muffled by the overwhelming pressure. Emely bucked violently, a futile spasm that only made the wood dig harder into her flesh.
“Hey, stop moving, you’ll tip it!”
“I’m not moving, they’re moving!”
The argument above them was surreal, disembodied. The girls were just the substrate, the medium for their experiment.
Lilly’s world narrowed to the crush. Her vision spotted. The hard, technical thrill was gone, replaced by a primal, overwhelming sensation that bordered on obliteration. It was terrifying. It was everything she’d ever secretly wanted. Her body arched as much as it could, a final, instinctive rebellion before submitting completely. The scream that finally tore from her was one of pure, unadulterated release.
Ben watched from the edge of the mats, his expression unreadable. He made no move to intervene, to call time, to limit the numbers. He simply observed the system he’d set in motion running on its own logic. The crowd’s logic.
After an eternity, the first person hopped off. The relief was a minuscule, localized expansion. Then another climbed on, taking the vacated spot before the board could even fully rebound. The process became fluid, self-sustaining. People cycled on and off, but the weight never truly lifted. The board was never empty. It was a perpetual state of compression.
Maya stopped whimpering. She went quiet and still, her grip on Lilly’s hand going slack. Her eyes were open, staring up at the grain of the wood an inch from her nose, seeing nothing. She had gone somewhere deep inside, where the pressure was just a fact of the universe, like gravity.
Emely, conversely, grew more frantic. Her defiance had no outlet. Every heave of her chest, every tense of her muscles, was punished by the immovable force above. Her struggles grew weaker, devolving into tiny, twitching jerks. The rage in her eyes dulled into a hollow, exhausted confusion.
Lilly swam in and out of consciousness. The sounds from above—the murmurs, the laughs, the scuffling feet—blurred into a distant roar. The only real things were the crush, the heat, and the faint, electrifying jolt that ran through her each time someone new stepped onto their shared coffin lid.
Ben finally checked his watch. He didn’t speak. He just caught the eye of a few people near the edge and gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod.
The message spread through the crowd. A final push. A last chance.
Three more people, working together, crowded onto the already laden board. They stood in a tight cluster, balancing precariously. The plywood gave a loud, alarming crack. The bend became a pronounced sag, pressing directly down on the girls’ sternums.
For one lasting, infinite second, the weight reached its absolute peak. It was no longer people standing on a board. It was the room itself pressing down, demanding they become flat, part of the floor.
Then, as if by some silent consensus, they all began to step off. One by one. The board rose in increments, each fraction of an inch a revelation of agony returning to feeling.
When the last person stepped down, the board lay flat and heavy, but alone. The silence it revealed was profound, broken only by the ragged, wet, desperate sucking of air as three pairs of lungs fought to remember how to inflate.
Ben walked over and put his foot on the edge of the plywood, not on the girls. He leaned, tilting it just enough to slide it off them. It clattered to the floor.
They lay exposed, utterly spent. Their skin was cross-hatched with the imprint of the wood grain, their bellies visibly flattened, rising and falling in rapid, shallow flutters. No one moved to help them up. The crowd just looked, their own energy spent, waiting to see what was left.
Lilly turned her head, her cheek against the slick rubber. She looked at Maya’s vacant, peaceful face, then at Emely’s bruised and tear-streaked one. She tried to speak, but only a croak came out.
From the doorway, a new voice, unfamiliar, broke the quiet. “Is it still open? We heard there was no line now.”
Ben smiled, a thin, wide curve of his mouth. He gestured to the mats, to the three broken forms upon them.
“The floor,” he said, “is always open.”