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Door. Locks. Another door. More locks.
What the fuck are we going to do?
Not waltz out of here and go to my dad’s place in Joshua Tree, that’s for fucking sure. Avery keeps talking about it, letting out high giggles that, frankly, scare the shit out of me. She’s never been the type to get excited over desert communes, but I’ve painted a pretty picture. Avery has swallowed it whole.
If I’m losing my grip on time, Avery’s losing her grip on life.
Sometimes, when she’s not tracing an invisible cloud pattern in the sky, her face falls into this wistful longing. It makes my heart pound, and my bullet wound throb. It’s a fucking nightmare.
And she said as much to me. Didn’t even bother to hide it. Avery’s thinking of an alternate exit. She’s thinking of death instead of life, of surrender instead of survival, of acceptance instead of hope.
What am I supposed to say to her? With every day that passes, surviving down here becomes less of alifeand more of a base biological function. Eventually, her heart will give out. Eventually, she’ll lose too much blood. But long before then, she’s going to lose her will to go on.
Which—fuck. I swore to her I’d get her out. I keep swearing it. I keep lying to her, and it’s the worst lie anyone could ever tell. Because it might seem merciful to keep promising I’ll save her, to spare her the truth of how impossible that promise will be to carry out - but there is no mercy in dragging out the torture of misplaced hope.
I keep trying to think my way out of this dungeon we’ve found ourselves in. I think so much that my head hurts. At night, I lie on the mattress and strain to hear the sounds of the people up above.What the hell is that woman doing? What are they all doing?I can’t relax. Time crawls by, every heartbeat taking a fucking eternity.
And then, suddenly, the eternity is over.
At first, I think I’m imagining the heavy door swinging open because I’ve been drifting. I don’t want to fall asleep. Fuck that. But we’ve been down here so long that it’s getting harder and harder to keep my focus.
Light slices into the dark of the room. Our eternal darkness is over, for now at least.Fuck. I sit upright as carefully as I can, pain lancing through my shoulder. That shit is not getting better. It never will—not until we get out. Not unless we get out.
Avery doesn’t seem to notice.
She’s got her head cocked to the side, staring up at the ceiling, her lips moving slightly. “Maybe we’ll take one of those old highway routes,” she whispers.
Highway routes. From a girl who demands nothing less than a private jet.
There’s a scuffle at the door, which has been open for longer than it usually is. I missed an opportunity. Guilt pins me like a spotlight.
“Avery.” I shake her shoulder. Can’t do it too hard, because she’s all beat up inside. The thought sends rage heaving into my throat. “Avery, get up. Get up.”
She frowns, a thoughtful little thing, then swings her head toward the door. “Oh, God.”
“That’s right,” says the masked man. He turns around and hauls something into the room.
Not something. Someone.
It’s a young woman, around twenty years old, her long, dark hair caked with blood. Our captor has her in a chokehold, the triangle his arm creates around her neck making her wheeze for air around the cloth gag in her mouth. She’s in her underwear, a plain white bra and panties both stained with blood, her wrists bound in front of her with zip-ties. She looks like she was pretty before - now her face is swollen and bruised and ten different shades of purple and red.
Her fingers are long and graceful, like a piano player’s might be. Her wrists are a mess of blood under the tight zip-ties - a testament to her struggles. Her eyes are green and filled with tears.
I wonder how long she’s been here. How long since she was snatched from her life. How long until she’ll be dead, or wishing she was.
She’s trying to fight the guy holding her—good for her—but it’s pointless. It’s pointless for me, and for Avery, and for her. Plus, with the way he’s got his arm around her neck, there’s nothing to be done.
My body tries to summon some adrenaline to help me get through this. It tries, and it fails. There’s nothing left to give. All I get is a horrifying numbness, like discovering you’re out of drugs after the high. The weight of life in this place drills me into the ground. I can’t cut another woman. If I have to cut Avery again, I might die.
He hasn’t given one of his fucked-up orders yet. I’m disgusted with myself that I wish he would. Then I would know what to expect. I would know what comes next. The silence is almost worse than the pain I know is coming.
Avery scrambles up and reaches for my hand. There’s no point in scrambling, since there’s nowhere to go, but she does it anyway. It breaks my fucking heart. Avery’s expression is blank, with only faint sparks of worry in her eyes. We back toward the table. That piece of shit, that inhuman monster, raped Avery on that table. The last thing I want to do is cuddle up with it. But he’s pushing us, dragging the woman—a young woman, very recently a girl—toward the king-size mattress.
She howls around the cloth gag in her mouth. It’s such a despairing sound that it just about sucks the life out of me right there. Maybe she thought we’d be here to help her, but I’m already doing the math on the single bottle of water we get. It’s not good math. It’s gonna be her or us...if she stays.
The guy in the mask shoves her onto the mattress face down and wedges his shoe underneath her hip. My gut churns. It’s pure revulsion. I thought I’d felt it before, but I haven’t. Not until I got here.
“Up. Up.”
