Scratching at the wood around the metal assembly until her wrists, arms, and shoulders weakened, forcing her to pause again.
Her hope was to remove the hinges from the wall to loosen the door and force it open.
How long has it been now? Five or six days?
She was encouraged that her captor hadn’t realized one of the pail handles was missing. But her progress was disappointing. She’d gouged nearly a fraction of an inch deep into the wood that anchored the screws of the lower and upper hinge assemblies. She curved her fingertips around the metal edge of the upper hinge and pulled.
The screws held firm.
Gritting her teeth, she pulled again but they didn’t budge.
Jennifer then tried for the thousandth time, pushing with her tool at the end of the steel bolt holding the hinge together.
It didn’t move.
Again, she tried wedging her tool under the bolt’s head.
It didn’t work.
She groaned, releasing an exhausted sob.
Her notes in the bucket exchange pleading to her captor were futile or at best, the response was unsettling.
One day her captor wrote: “I NEED YOU TO UNDERSTAND WHO I AM BUT YOU ARE NOT READY.”
She wrote: “I am ready! I want to know! Please help me understand!”
A day later her captor wrote:
“SOON.”
It was hopeless.
She had to keep working. She had no choice.
I can’t sit here, waiting to die.
Taking a deep breath, she resumed, her arms throbbing as she dug into the wood. Tears rolling down her face, she worked through her pain.
Please God, help me get out of here.
BOOK TWO
ONE MONTH LATER
Forty-Eight
Cleveland, Ohio
She ran in the night.
Fear slamming in her chest like a frenzied bird in a cage.
Her pursuer’s vehicle was gaining on her, chasing her into a desolate realm of the metropolis.
No help in sight.
The woman fled through a vast wasteland of abandoned appliances, stumbling around cast-off tires, furniture fragments, and mounds of earth embedded with trash and weeds.
Close by, she saw the elevated multilane freeway, a webbed network of on-ramps, off-ramps, curving overpasses, humming with lighted streams of the traffic it carried. A near yet distant world of life flowing by.
A quarter-block away, brakes creaked.
She glanced back.
Her pursuer had stopped, got out of their vehicle, hurrying in her direction, forcing her deeper into the lot. Breathing hard, the woman navigated around pyramids of cinder blocks and twisted rebar clawing the night like skeletal fingers.
A sudden burst of brightness nearly captured her in a white halo as the hunter swept a flashlight, probing the terrain.
Her pursuer was closing in.
Moving around a chest-high heap of rubble and wood, the woman dropped to the ground. Inhaling the rotted earth, she crawled carefully under a torn mattress that reeked of urine.
The hunter was close.
The ground crunched with footfalls.
They slowed.
They stopped.
Trembling, the woman prayed.
Blazes of light filled the seam between the earth and mattress.
The woman pressed her hand over her mouth, feeling her face damp with sweat and tears.
She waited and prayed.
Oh God, help me! Help me, please!
No sound but the freeway’s hum, echoing.
One minute. Two minutes.
Please help me!
The light vanished.
Footfalls crunched on the ground then faded to nothing as her pursuer abandoned the pursuit.
The woman didn’t move.
Minutes passed.
Five. Ten.
Maybe twenty, before she slid slowly from under the mattress, relieved by the cool night air on her skin. Her pulse still throbbing, she weaved through the empty lot. Adrenaline pumping, she was nearly out when there was an abrupt snap and swish of air. A hand combed over her arm. In white-hot hysteria, she smashed her fist into her attacker’s stomach.
The attacker swayed.
The woman bolted, running toward the freeway.
The hunter staggered to the vehicle.
Running for her life, now with no escape, the woman entered an on-ramp, while a distance behind her, the vehicle’s door slammed, its motor turned.
Blood roared in the woman’s ears as she ascended the ramp.
Caught in the hunter’s headlights, she kept running.
Her throat raw, she reached the freeway, waving at cars and trucks, the air rushing, pummeling her, the deafening traffic racing by, headlights streaking like shooting stars.
“Help! Please! Somebody help!”
Her pursuer’s vehicle climbed the ramp.
The woman ran down the freeway’s shoulder toward the lines of oncoming traffic. Waving frantically, losing her mind to her fear, she looked back at the pursuing vehicle while at the same time, without realizing, she had run into the traffic lanes.
Horns blared; the woman turned her head and, in a heartbeat, the horrific ballet played.
Tires screeched, drivers swerved, missing her, setting off a chain of collisions. Twisting chunks of jagged metal and plastic burst into the air, spreading a debris field over all lanes. Hoods flew open, side panels crumpled, windshields fractured, vehicles were spinning, sliding.
A double tanker rig, hauling some ten thousand gallons of fuel charged through a gap. The tanker driver’s eyes widened at the woman standing on the freeway ahead.
She was paralyzed with fear.
In a millisecond, before his brain issued the order to brake, before his jaw opened, before his hand spasmed on the wheel, before he could form the cognitive command to act, he knew it was too late.
Still, he yanked the wheel, his rig began jackknifing, his mind flailed; his tanks had so many safety valves and rollover devices but nothing to prevent this horror of the woman he was going to kill.
His brakes screamed, rubber began thudding and shredding, the tanks shook, breaking free of the hitch, rolling over debris, puncturing sections, metal sparking on the asphalt, the guardrails, fuel spilling, igniting a tidal wave of fire. The woman held up her hands as she was engulfed in flames in the second before the truck’s rear axle assembly rolled over her.
On the shoulder, some distance down the freeway, after watching the tragedy, the hunter’s vehicle, which had New York State license plates, drove away, returning to Buffalo.