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There was a thick steel collar locked around her raw neck. The chain attached to it was stretched tight as she strained against her tether, trying to get as far into the mouth of the cave as she possibly could. She was naked. Someone had shaved her bald, and it looked as though they had done it with sheep shears. There were scraggly patches of dishwater blonde sticking out in pathetic strands that broke Kimberly’s heart almost as much as her other injuries, which were too many to count.
Kimberly approached the woman like she would a trapped and cornered animal. She’d backed her small and bony frame into the rocky wall at Kimberly’s approach and lifted her weak, trembling arms in defense. She looked both hopeful and frightened and somehow resigned to her fate. If Kimberly was going to hurt her, she knew she was powerless to stop it.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” Kimberly murmured as she reached for the collar and tried to find the latch. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to try and help. Let me see.” And she scooched forward and looked at the fastening. Her heart took its first happy leap when she saw the lock. It was an old fashioned one. The pickable kind.
Kimberly fumbled around in her messy hair as her breath hitched and tears stung her eyes. For a reason she couldn’t name, she was scared suddenly. “Did you know I had mono when I was fourteen?” She found and pulled a bobby pin from her hair. She walked around on her knees until she was behind the woman and bent the pin to the right shape, then gingerly fit it into place. “Yeah,” she continued though the woman hadn’t replied, “I had to spend that whole school year at home. Mostly in bed asleep. Boy, does that shit make you tired. But I spent a lot of time on YouTube that year.”
Kimberly twisted this way and that, tweaking the pin with just the right amount of force. “Yeah, it’s amazing the kind of things you can learn if you—just—take the time—to—do your—research!”
The lock sprang and the collar fell away.
With fingers that trembled and an expression of abject terror, the woman looked at Kimberly. “What—what are we going to do now?”
“Now…” Kimberly was hesitant to touch but couldn’t stand to see her crouched naked in the rocky dirt any longer, so she slid an arm around the shattered woman and urged her to her feet, grateful when she wasn’t alarmed and followed meekly. “We’re going to go check on Shawna. Get you into the sun and wait. The FBI is on the way. We’ll wait for them out there and then call your family, get you to a hospital. The worst is over, honey, you’re safe now.”
Tears flooded out, but the girl gulped them down and looked back along the endless neck of the cave and whispered, “But what about them?”
“Sammy,I swear to God, man, it feels like you’re driving backwards,” Dean said. It was a variation on the same thing he’d uttered over the last hour and a half. Sam couldn’t blame him. He felt it too. The car drove like it was passing through cold molasses. Somehow, they were still forty-five minutes away and the roads were getting more and more treacherous.
“Fuck!”
Sam almost swerved off the asphalt. “What?” he demanded. Why hadn’t he let Dean drive? Dean always drove. Always. Panic had rocketed them out of the building and into Dean’s Impala in sheer blind terror. When they’d both noticed who was in the passenger’s seat and who was in the driver’s, they’d been already on the road, and it’d been too small a detail to pull over and adjust. Both had looked at each other, however, as a weird sense of wrongness settled over the interior of the car. Dean had even shivered and grumbled, “Step on it, man. This feels weird as shit.”
“Them?”Kimberly looked to where the frightened girl had indicated and gulped. “Who’s them, sweetie?” Her voice was hardly more than a choked whisper.
“The two other girls,” she whispered back, even lower than before and she wilted so heavily against her that Kimberly had to take most of her weight.
“Okay, honey, okay.” Kimberly looked down that terrifying corridor and decided she’d face that after she got this girl safely out in the sun. “I’ll help them next. First, let’s get you to Shawna. She can look after you while I go back for them, all right?” And she half-carried the girl from the dank cave and into the blazing California sun.
As soon as they stumbled out, Shawna leaped to her feet and ran to help. “Sierra! Oh, Sierra! It’s you! I found you, I found you! Thank God, I found you!” She wrapped slender arms that still bore the scars of her own captivity around the naked woman as they fell to the ground in tears. Kimberly turned back to the cave and the other trapped women.
“God,” she prayed, “If you’re listening, I could sure use some help right about now.”
Shawna and Sierra were safe—two more to go. Kimberly grabbed her courage by the coattails and headed back into the darkness.
“Motherfucker!”Dean snarled.
“What?” Sam demanded.
“She was there for a second then went off the radar again.” Before either of them could do more than swear, Sam’s cell went off. Dean grabbed it and answered.
“Yeah, what’s goin’ on?”
“Dean?” It was Cas and he sounded confused. “Didn’t I call Sam?”
“Yeah, but he’s driving. You’re on speaker.”
“Sam’s driving?” Cas sounded incredulous. “Didn’t you guys bring the Impala?”
Dean scrubbed both hands over his face. Sam wisely kept both his on the wheel and kept his piehole shut.
“What the fuck is going on with Kimberly’s collar, Cas?” “Our signal keeps cutting in and out. This shit’s supposed to be infallible.”
They were both fuming, and the Impala was like a demon-hunting rage machine as it flew up the mountain after whomever had stolen Kimberly from them.
“That’s what I’m calling about,” Cas told them. There was an ominous tone to his voice that Sam didn’t like. At all. “The tech guys tell me that only happens if she gets surrounded by heavy metals. Like steel and iron.”
Forget cold, Sam’s blood just turned to ice in his veins.
