Reflexively I slouch down in the seat, feeling completely shitty. Even though I want my parents to go to work—it’s part of my plan—I feel so alone right now. I clutch the plastic drugstore bag to my chest. “Yeah, all right.”
She turns around to face the windshield, and I can feel the pressure building inside me. I want to kick the back of her seat, throw myself from the moving car, anything to let out the pain and rage. But I’m not an angry teenager anymore.
I lean my head against the window and watch the world flash by. Once my parents are gone, I’ll prove to everyone that Ava’s perfectly fine. Glenn and my parents and Detective Davies will understand she’s the bad girl.
And I’ll go back to Texas and never see any of these assholes again.
CHAPTER
14
AVA
POISED FOR A second on that staircase, I inhale as if it might be my last breath. Then the woman gives me another push, and I have to move my feet to keep from plummeting to my death. Taking the stairs too quickly, almost tripping, I’m starting to realize where I am.
When I’m not actually writing or promoting my books, I do research for them—digging through archives, interviewing professionals, and scouting locations. Locations like this abandoned missile silo in West Virginia.
Even though I only saw it online, in person I recognize the inspiration for my most recently planned novel. I can picture the stairway that continues behind that vault door. I know it leads to a room built around a central concrete column. Beyond that is a tube-shaped metal hallway and the missile chamber, a drop of over one hundred fifty feet encircled by rusted-out metal walkways and scaffolding.
I’m light-headed with exhaustion and fear, unable to process the reality of stepping into the very nightmare I’d intended to use as a fictional backdrop. The man in the lab coat struggles to type in a code on a security pad, then wrenches the wheel to crank the door open. The sound cuts through the fog in my head. Even if this is a dream, I’m not going to stand here waiting to be forced to my death.
I lurch at the man wrestling with the door. Inside my slow, sluggish body, my heart is beating like a panicked bird in a cage. With all my strength, I slam my head into his.
The world explodes in colored lights as we stagger apart. Something slams into my side, and I fall under a heavy weight. My stomach churns with the pain in my head, and someone’s elbow is in my ribs. Beckett.
The woman’s hiking boots are in my peripheral vision as I struggle to untangle myself. She says, “That was stupid, Ava. I expected better.”
Beckett rolls away and lies gasping next to me.
She sets one foot gently upon my throat. I can feel my pulse trembling against the thick rubber of her sole. She speaks again. “Phil, pull it together and open the damn door.”
I hear Phil scrambling and the grating of metal and realize my eyes are closed tightly. My whole body is rigid, attuned to the single point where her full weight could crush my windpipe, but I’m not going to give this petty tyrant the satisfaction of seeing my fear. I open my eyes. Do it, I think, I dare you.
She’s staring right at me. Her lips twitch as though she’s amused or even proud that I’m looking her in the eye. Softly she whispers, “Just relax. This isn’t about you.”
But I’m the one on the ground, her foot on me filling my nostrils with the scent of mud and leather, unable to speak, barely able to blink.
There’s a rush of air and a scraping sound, and Phil says, “Cristina? It’s open.”
Cristina, that’s the name of this militant woodwitch, and as I look up the length of Cristina’s khaki-clad leg, all the way to her cold brown eyes, I stop breathing for a moment. No zip ties. No drugs. Not even a cattle prod. But I am still helpless.
“Cristina?” Phil asks again.
I could swear I see in her assessing gaze the same contempt Beckett inspires in me. But all she says is “Get the other one in first.”
I don’t move at all. I don’t look away, even as there are more sounds of scuffling and moaning. Beckett says, “My ankle. When she pushed me, my ankle got fucked.”
That’s what happened—I slammed into Phil, then Cristina pushed Beckett into me, and now Phil’s taking Beckett back into the bowels of the missile silo while I lie here helplessly, my body vibrating with my need to escape.
Cristina raises her foot a millimeter. She lets the hiking boot hover, and I can’t help it. I flinch.
“Remember this.” Her voice is soft. “Get up. Slowly. We have work to do.”
She steps back and watches as I awkwardly push myself to my feet, unsure if I can even stand anymore. It’s not only the dryness in my mouth that makes it hard to swallow. Defeat is bitter as a poisoned apple.
Through the door, there is another staircase, a narrow metal one, leading into the depths of a concrete shaft. At the bottom I can see another blast door, this one standing open, offering the only light. These steps are so steep that slipping now might kill me, but maybe that would be better than what we’re walking toward. The concrete walls swallow the sound of our feet on the metal. Somewhere I can hear small noises like pebbles or drops of water echoing, but I can’t tell if I’m just hallucinating them. Surely no sound could penetrate this far under the earth.
There is no going back. But when my feet reach the concrete floor, I balk again.
Cristina’s hand clamps down on my shoulder. “Keep going. You’re almost there.”
“Where?” Anything could be behind that door—a torture device, a slaughterhouse, Bluebeard’s bloody chamber—but my mouth is too dry and my spirits too low to form those words.
Footsteps approach from the room ahead of us, the sound dying almost as soon as it’s heard. Phil stands in the doorway. “Need any help?”
He has a bottle of water in his hand. I can’t stop looking at it. My brain is shutting down. That water is the only thing I can see. More than escape, more than life, I want it. It’s been a day since I had anything to drink, and I’d gone another day without water before that. I didn’t realize how much my exhaustion, my fear, was actually my body dying of thirst. In the distance, Cristina and Phil are talking, but all my attention is on that bottle.
“He’s already in place?”
“All set.”
Cristina gives me another little shove and I’m closer to the water, my hand reaching out for it. Phil pulls it back, then looks past me.
Cristina’s voice, almost amused, comes from behind my shoulder. “Go ahead and take her through. I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble. I’ll deal with the doors.”
I can tell Phil’s looking at me, but I can’t tear my gaze from the water. Now I know how cheaply I will sell myself—I will grovel, beg, whore myself for a few drops. Anything I might say or think is nothing next to this. I am just an animal after all.
With a step backward, Phil tells me, “You can have it if you follow me. Come on, now.”
So I do follow him through the door, even though I don’t want to, and into a room that opens around me in smooth curves around a central concrete column flared at the top like a giant funnel. But I can’t really look at it, can’t really see anything except that bottle of water, catching the light.