I wake up with my lips stuck together. Amy is making a weird sound when she sleeps. It’s like she has a bad chest cold. I feel her moving against me, like she’s tapping her foot.
It’s her. She’s shivering that hard.
If I don’t find a way out of this, she’s going to die right in front of me.
I look up at the door. My hand still aches from banging on it after Mikey trapped me. That’s useless. How long have I been in here? Surely Mikey told whoever he’s working with that he trapped me. Why hasn’t anyone come?
Mark.
I stand and stretch, my fingers brushing against cobwebs. I don’t even flinch.
My mouth is so dry I start to cough. The candle is down to the final inch. The glow of light is low. I find my water bottle. Maybe two inches of water left. I need to save it for Amy. She needs it more than me. I let myself take a tiny sip just to wet the inside of my mouth.
I feel so guilty.
I can feel myself getting tired. So tired. It must have been many hours since Mikey put me in here. I’m dehydrated and my head starts to ache. I’m not hungry. Not yet. But it begins to occur to me that I will lose my strength soon. If I’m going to find a way out of here, it’s now or never.
I light another candle and go to the hatch door I opened. I ignore it, because I know what’s there. A pipe no bigger than me with a dead rat in it, and dangers unknown. I could try to escape—
The main door starts to open.
I open my mouth to cry out for help, but then I stop. The main door is open only an inch. It’s shining light on Amy.
Mikey knows what he did to me. They’re coming for us. They’re coming to kill us.
Or worse. I look at my hands. This may be the last time I get to use both.
Wrenching the hatch open, I blow out my candle, toss it into the corner, and wriggle into the pipe backwards, feet first. It’s like crawling into a tunnel filled with dirty jello. I start gagging. The thick muck slides along my cheek and a little bit gets in my mouth.
I gag some more.
I almost shut the hatch door but stop at the very last second. What if I can’t open it from in here? Instead, I almost close it and hope it doesn’t click.
Because I don’t close the door, I have about a millimeter of light that comes in.
And sound.
A man’s heavy boots click-clack down the stairs. The main door stays open. Whoever is here has someone else with him. I hear a woman’s voice.
Then I hear crying. Women crying and babbling in a language I don’t understand. It sounds like Spanish, though. Maybe Portuguese or French? I’m not sure.
Something moves against my foot. I pull my leg up and crack my knee so hard against the pipe I almost scream.
I can’t scream.
I can’t move or leave or anything.
Whatever’s behind me in this pipe gets to do whatever it wants to me.
I feel teeth nibbling at my ankles.
“Looks like the new girl gone and fixed the place up,” says a man’s voice.
Frenchie.
“It’s a regular Martha Stewart magazine spread in here,” says a very, very familiar woman’s voice.
Claudia, of course.
They had Amy all along. Oh, my God.
“Where are the rest?” he asks her. I feel a whoosh of air come in the tiny sliver of space where I’m holding the door open. Something sharp presses against my ankle bone. I try to push the image of a rat’s teeth out of my head.
“The rest?” Claudia asks, puzzled.
“The shipment?” His words are so venomous I inhale sharply.
“Oh. Oh,” she says in a small voice, like she’s a misbehaving child. “I don’t know. Papa said there’s been a complication.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Frenchie says. “I know he was busy getting that DEA agent arrested, but what the fuck? He couldn’t bother to let me know we weren’t meeting the new load now?”
Getting a DEA agent arrested? Mark.
Oh, Mark.
I start to gag again. My shoulder screams with pain from the position I’m in. I remind myself that at least I have two shoulders, unlike poor Amy.
“I got buyers who are screaming for that new shipment,” he growls at Claudia. “What the hell’s he want me to do?” The sound of freaked out women talking in languages I don’t understand fades. Someone screams in the distance, then I hear a thud.
No more screaming.
“I don’t know, Frenchie,” Claudia says in a defiant voice. “I’m not part of any of this.”
“You are now, Smart Mouth Bitch. You fucked up and your daddy’s gonna pay for what you did if you don’t make it right now.” He makes a nasty sound with his throat. “And look at her down there. What a waste.”
What did Claudia do?
“Huh,” he says. “This one’s gonna be dead before the next van load. Who the fuck cut her like that? You?” He cackles with laughter as I hear Claudia saying something in a defensive tone.
And then:
“Look, I don’t give a shit what your daddy says. We got a network and buyers. Money don’t grow on trees. You screwed up with your little doggy incident and—” His voice goes lower.
So Claudia was the one who hurt Wizard and set me up?
And Dean Landau has set up Mark?
“I just want to know where Eric is,” she says to Frenchie in a pleading tone.
“Because you wanna fuck him? You need a pole to ride, I got one,” he snaps at her.
Her voice sounds muffled, then pleading, and then angry.
“I’d fuck your brains out right here on the storage room floor but I got a place I need to be. Doesn’t mean I can’t get me a little sugar now—” he makes a lewd sound.
“Get your hands off me!” she shouts, and then the door slams shut, closing with a hiss that sounds like a dying person’s last breath.
A sharp pain pierces my calf. I scream. Something crawls up my leg and stops at my ass.
I shove the door open and fall out of the pipe in a slick mess that is like being reborn.
The rat that’s turned me into a snack tries to bite my foot as I crawl out. I’m in utter darkness again, too far from the candles to grab one fast. The rat makes an aggressive noise, then scampers back into the pipe.
And that’s the last thing I remember before I pass out again.