Gwen was in and out of consciousness for hours. The world would begin to come back into focus, she would stir to life, and then the pain hit again. They were in some kind of car, driving through the night. If Bill noticed her waking up, he hit her again, smacking her head against the window, or he punched the side of her face. Eventually she learned not to move so much when she roused, as it meant that more pain would follow.
He’d put some kind of white cloth bag over her head, so she had no idea where they were, but she could see that it was still dark out for much of the ride. She might have dozed or possibly simply passed out, but still they drove on. Eventually, more sunlight began to filter through the bag over her head, and he cursed. Finally, the car slowed and stopped, and he shook her shoulder, roughly.
“Wake up, bitch.”
Shooting pain raced through her, and she had to bite down on her tongue to keep from screaming. She moaned and cringed away from him, waiting for him to punch her again.
“It’s getting light, and I’m running out of gas,” he said. “You got two choices here. I can take that thing off your head, and you can act like a good little girl for a few minutes, or you can go in the trunk. Which one do you want?”
Gwen’s mouth was parched and her tongue swollen from various abuses. She had to work up some moisture to do more than croak her response. “Not the trunk.”
The cloth was ripped off her head, pulling her hair for a second, and the light was suddenly blinding. She blinked, her vision still foggy for several more seconds. With the cloth off her head, she could smell him now, the dank, animal reek wafting from him and filling the car. His shirt was plastered to his body, drenched in his sweat.
“I’m giving you one chance, here,” Bill said. “You fuck it up, and you’re riding the rest of the way in the dark.” He glowered at her, and she realized with a shock of pleasure that his face showed some damage. His lip was cut, and he sported two huge bruises—one on his chin and a knobby lump on his forehead. She almost laughed in his face.
“I’ll be good,” she said, trying to sound frightened, cowed.
“You better be.”
He pulled back onto the road and starting driving again. Gwen took the opportunity to try to get her bearings. There were on a small, one-lane highway, somewhere in the desert prairie. It looked very much like the area around Roswell, but the highway she and Annie had used had been bigger and busier than this road. Given the amount of time that had passed, she and Bill should also be farther than that—already out of New Mexico, perhaps in Oklahoma. She watched for road signs, hoping for some indication of the area they were driving through, but saw nothing, not even mile markers. It was as if they’d driven into nowhere. Could be a farm road, she thought, but dismissed the idea almost at once. Even a farm road, if it was paved like this one, would have some kind of road markers, for authorities if nothing else.
The light and the effort to make sense of what she was seeing made her head ache worse than before. Her other pains were getting harder to ignore. Her broken wrist was duct-taped to her other hand behind her back, and her ankles were likewise trussed together. He’d belted her into the seat so that she had to sit at a strange angle to avoid crushing her aching hands. This position made the seat belt dig into her sore shoulder. The temptation to close her eyes and let all this pain fade away began to drag her eyelids closed. The hazy lure of sleep or unconsciousness promised an escape. She shook her head, hard, to rouse herself, and the movement must have caught the corner of his eye.
“What the hell are you doing over there? You look like a wet dog.”
“Sleepy,” she said, or tried to say. Her mouth wasn’t cooperating.
“Well, wake up and sit up straighter. We’re just coming to the highway now, and a gas station’s here. Don’t do anything but sit there.”
She saw the station a few minutes later. The side and back windows of the store were darkly tinted, so she had no hope that someone would see her and do something about it—not unless she tried to yell or bang on the door, and Bill would quickly put a stop to that. Still, she might have an opportunity to get someone’s attention when he was at the pump, or she might be able to open the door and get outside. It would make sense to try only if someone was there to see her and help her right away.
He was smart, pulling to the tanks farthest from the service station, her side of the car pointing toward the road and not the station. More cars were driving by on the highway that ran perpendicular to the road they’d been on, but she couldn’t be sure they would see her in time. If anything, the attendant inside might spot her hopping around if she got out, but by then it could be too late. Bill might shoot her on the spot and take off, or he might wrestle her back inside and take his vengeance later. Either way, her odds weren’t great. She did, however, learn one thing right away—they were in Texas again, according to the state lottery signs in the station.
“Back in goddamn Texas,” she muttered.
“What was that?” Bill asked. “You giving me lip again?”
“Nothing.”
“Good. See that it stays that way. I’ve got some dirty clothes in the trunk that would love to make your acquaintance.” He peered outside at the pumps and then cursed. “Motherfucker. I have to go inside to pay.”
Her hopes rose, and she had to turn her face away from him to hide her smile. He grabbed her shirt, yanking her toward him painfully. Gwen couldn’t help the little whimper that escaped her lips. His eyes were red, his face mottled and tired. Up close, his BO took a back seat to the horrible smell of his breath.
“I know what you’re thinking, bitch, and it ain’t gonna work. You try to get out, and I’ll shoot you like a dog—I don’t care who sees me. You think I’m lying? Give it a whirl. You’ll be dead before you know what happened to you.” He grinned, the joy in his eyes dark and sick. “In fact, I’d love to kill you. So by all means, try to escape.”
He let her go then, pushing her away from him with such violence that she slammed into her door. The back of her head smacked into the window, and the world starred and darkened for a moment. He was already out of the car before she came back to herself, and she watched as he disappeared inside to pay.
Now’s your chance, she told herself, but did nothing. He was right. Trying to escape would be a suicide mission. Still, she tried to turn around to get her hands on the handle of the car door. She didn’t know if he’d locked it, but she didn’t think she remembered hearing the click, so all she had to do was open the door, undo her seat belt, and she could get out of here. She might be able to make it to the highway, get someone’s attention, or at least be seen. Someone might stop and help her or call the police. Or, like he’d said, he’d come out of the gas station and shoot her before anyone noticed.
She’d told herself earlier that if she had to die, she wanted to do it on her own terms. The fact that he’d kept her alive must mean something. Most likely he intended to use her as leverage against Annie and would let her live until then. She wouldn’t let that happen, but she also didn’t want to die, and certainly not before she knew Annie was safe.
Her will to escape faded to nothing, and she stopped struggling, relaxing back into her seat. Annie was all that mattered. Judging by their location now, he was likely taking her to Susan. From what Annie had told her, Susan was the brains of the operation, and Bill the muscle. Susan would have plans for her. Gwen had to hope that Annie would know better than to negotiate with these people.
Bill reappeared, rushing back to the car. He opened his door again to check on her and then left it open while he filled the tank. The morning heat and the fumes did nothing for her headache, and she gagged a little and swallowed hard to keep from being sick. She’d read that concussions caused nausea and could now confirm that was true. She’d be lucky if she didn’t end up with some kind of brain damage.
Already, the world seemed strangely foggy and overly bright, and not from the weather. She needed medical attention for her head, if nothing else, and his frequent punches and smacks weren’t helping. No, she’d play the good girl the rest of the trip and hold her tongue. Goading him wasn’t helping her at all.
He climbed back in and slammed his door, sitting there for a while doing nothing. He stared out the front window, frowning, tapping the steering wheel. Then, as if he’d decided something, he put on his belt and started the car, wrenching the wheel hard enough for the tires to squeal. Instead of getting onto the highway, he turned back on the road they’d driven in on, the car surging ahead and racing back at high speed.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Quiet.” His voice was low but impassive. The question hadn’t bothered him. It clearly didn’t matter to him.
A one-story brick building appeared on the left-hand side of the road about a mile back. Gwen had seen it earlier but hadn’t thought much about it at the time. Bill turned into the lot in front of it, and Gwen saw now that whatever it had been, it was now abandoned—no windows or doors, splattered with bad graffiti. Bill drove around to the far side of the building, away from the empty road. Her stomach dropped with dread, and she stilled. He was going to kill her.
Bill turned the car off again. “We’re going to be on some busy roads for a while, and I can’t risk someone seeing you. In the trunk you go.”
“But you said—”
“I lied. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Which one do you want?”
She licked her lips. She had to find some way to dissuade him.
“Too slow,” he said, and the last thing she saw was his fist drawing back.
* * *
It was dark. Too dark. This wasn’t the same kind of dark she’d seen when the bag had been over her head. This was something else. This dark was full, weighted, as if it crouched above her, waiting for her to wake up. It took her a moment to realize that nothing was over her eyes—nothing blocking her vision. Either she was sitting in total darkness, or she’d gone completely blind. There was no telling which.
She panicked at the sensation of a cloth in her mouth, momentarily afraid she couldn’t breathe, but the sound of her whistling breath rattling in and out of her nose quelled some of her terror, and she tried to make herself calm down and assess the situation.
She had very little recent memory. She could remember him hitting her in the car and then coming to as he threw her roughly into the trunk. Seeing her awake, he’d disappeared again and then come back with something in his hand. He’d leaned down, and she’d felt a stinging sensation in her neck and nothing more. He must have drugged her. Who knew why he hadn’t done that to begin with—it didn’t matter, now. Her head felt stuffy, cloudy, the remnants of whatever he’d injected her with adding to her overall fogginess. It was hard to stay awake.
Now she was sitting upright, but it took her a few seconds to recognize this position and to understand where she was. She pulled each of her limbs, experimenting, wincing at the pain in her wrist and shoulders. Her arms and legs were strapped to the arms and legs of a chair, her waist and chest cinched to the back.
She tipped slightly to the right, but the chair didn’t move. It was either bolted to the floor or tied down somehow. The arms felt thin under her fingers—polished wood, like a dining-room chair. By contorting her middle finger, she could just touch the strap around one of her wrists. It was leather and thick, wider than a belt. Without seeing it, she couldn’t tell or see how it was fastened.
She tapped her foot on the ground, listening for an echo. The sound reverberated very near her, explaining the looming sense of something in front of her. A wall or large structure or object was likely a few feet away. The floor felt solid, smooth but almost sandy—probably concrete.
She froze at the sound of something slightly behind her and to her right—a rattling of some kind. She held her breath, straining her ears, and heard it again. This time it sounded more like a horse or dog harness, and, underneath that, she could hear something else: breathing. Something was here with her in the dark.
She flushed with terror and jerked in her chair, straining against the straps across her as far away from the sound as possible. She pinched her eyes shut, shaking her head. Stop it, she told herself. Don’t let the dark get to you. She scrambled for her anchor—the one her work-appointed therapist had taught her as a means of calming down.
The anchor, her therapist had explained, was meaningless except in the significance you gave it. The words could be anything, but if you taught yourself to react a certain way when you thought of the anchor or said it aloud, it could, with practice, have an almost magical effect on your reactions, including those of your body. She hadn’t taken her therapy very seriously at the time, but she nevertheless practiced using her anchor in times of stress, and, with time, it had begun to work. In her fright, however, she mentally continued to stumble over the words and images she associated with it and found herself more frightened the longer she sat there, scared in the dark.
That same rattling noise came from behind, louder this time, and she flinched again, moaning into her gag. The sound stopped, and then she heard something else. She had to fight the horror clouding her mind, but she finally heard it, clearly and without mistake.
Muffled screaming.
The effect of this recognition was instant. Relief swept through her like a cold wind, and her heartbeat began to slow. Something wasn’t down here with her; someone was, and that someone was like her—tied up to something and gagged. No threat to her, and no help, either. She drove the thought of this person from her mind and focused on herself again.
She made herself relax back into her chair, testing the bindings on her chest. With her back flat against the chair, the straps over her chest were almost loose, slipping down a couple of inches. She tilted forward and they inched up slightly, but not quite to the same place they’d been before. She’d already discovered that her arms and legs were tightly bound, but now, not straining, they too had a little give, likely to avoid cutting off her circulation. The idea that she had a few millimeters of space that belonged entirely to her worked like a balm on her spirit. Her courage surged back, and her fright finally began to ebb. It wasn’t much, but it would be enough. She could get out of this.
Again, despite the dark, she closed her eyes, breathing as deeply as she could through her nose. She needed a plan of action. Most obviously, getting one hand free would be enough. Her right wrist was throbbing, broken, so freeing her left from its binding was the best choice. Still, before she could try, she needed to get this gag out of her mouth. More than simply impeding her air supply, it was also distracting. For one thing, it made it obvious how dry her mouth was.
She had no idea how long she’d been here, or how long she and Bill had been driving, but her last memory of water was back in her own car, somewhere outside Santa Fe. The drug might have exacerbated her thirst, too. Underneath it, she could detect a kind of metallic tinge inside her mouth. Don’t think about water, she told herself, but the idea overwhelmed her in its intensity. She shook her head and almost moaned again, the pain from the various punches so intense she could almost see stars. Beyond her thirst, the gag pulled her jaw back slightly so that her whole face was aching with the strain. Yes, she thought. Gag first, hand second. If she could just get this damn thing out of her mouth, everything would be much better.
She tested the inside of the cloth with her tongue. Her mouth was entirely dry, but she discovered some residual moisture there and probed it with her tongue, trying to absorb some of it. The sensation of the cloth was familiar somehow—a light cotton, probably a handkerchief, or something very similar. The idea that some brightly colored, paisley thing in her mouth was causing this agony made her angry for the first time since she’d come awake. She tried biting it, pushing it with her tongue, moving her jaw down even farther to loosen it—all to no effect. The back of the chair rose behind her head, and by twisting from side to side, she could feel the individual rungs. She paused at one and moved her head back and forth with the knot of the gag pressed against it. For a moment, she thought she was on to something. The gag actually seemed to loosen in her mouth. Then the light turned on.
She had no warning, no sound that proceeded it—like a door opening or the sound of a switch. It was simply on and so blindingly bright, she had to close her eyes, the pain making them water. She tried to open them, but her vision was foggy, and the light still hurt. Gradually, squinting, she felt her eyes begin to adjust and sat upright in the chair, peering around her.
She was facing a nondescript, concrete wall, very much like she’d pictured in the dark. She was perhaps five feet from it, close enough to have sensed its presence. The face of the wall was unfinished and unbroken, no windows or marks, and stretched some fifteen feet in either direction. Looking down, she wasn’t surprised to see herself bound to a dining-room chair. By leaning as far as she could to the right, she could tell the chair was held in place with metal vises clamped onto beams that stretched the length of the floor in front and probably behind her. She’d seen this kind of thing before when she’d helped her brother put in hardwood floors. The beams were baseboard for a new floor—some kind of home-reno project in its earliest phases.
Her vision was finally beginning to clear, the pain and fog lifting, but she could see nothing beyond the wall and the floor—no doors, no windows, nothing. A sound behind her reminded her that she wasn’t alone down here, and she craned her head and neck around, painfully, to see the other person.
It was Annie.