Her instincts were to get out, fast, and she managed to claw her way free of the truck, somehow, and rolled into the cold snow. It burned on her face, but it felt good, too. So did the relatively clear air.
The stunning effects of the flash-bangs faded, but not before she felt the bite of handcuffs on her wrists, and zip-ties binding her booted ankles. She twisted and writhed, trying to break free, and as she rolled over on her back, she looked up to see Jane’s smiling, hated face.
Jane wiped snot and drool from her mouth and nose with a gloved hand and said, “Oh, Bryn. We are going to have such fun again, you and I. After I finish saying hello to my husband.”
Bryn’s voice came out ragged and rough. “Ex,” she panted, and coughed from deep in her chest. “You fucking psychopath.”
“It’s good to get these feelings out. Feel free to cry if you need to. This is the end, Bryn. I win. We win. From now on, everything changes.” Jane gave her a calm, crazy, saintly sort of smile, and moved on to the others. Sharing her gloating in equal measures.
Please, Bryn thought. Her stomach churned, and her brain was flashing feedback, images of the last time Jane had held her prisoner. She didn’t need that. She needed to think. Liam and Annie, they were with Manny and Pansy. Still free. Manny’s paranoia would have triggered by now, and they’d be heading for safety. He had the cure. It wasn’t over.
It couldn’t be over.
But, as Bryn was picked up and carried like a still-struggling corpse to Jane’s truck, she had to admit that it felt that way.
The glass vial she’d swallowed sat heavy in her stomach. It was sealed, but the stomach acids could eat through the stopper. . . . And if they did, what then? If Thorpe was right, she’d just . . . die. Shut down.
It might not even hurt.
The guard with her was a square-jawed Hispanic man with a shaved head. He seemed too young to be doing this, but his eyes were ancient, and utterly cold as he shoved her into place in the back. She struggled, vainly. He ignored her until he’d filled a syringe from a bottle, and plunged the needle home. She felt warmth and chemical bliss spreading rapidly through her body, and tried to fight it.
Lost.
She felt cozy and calm by the time Joe was loaded in next to her, equally drugged. Then Patrick. Riley was last, dumped across their laps in a mumbling daze.
And then Bryn faded off into a sunset distance that wasn’t quite unconsciousness.
She never even felt the SUV drive away.
Chapter 23
Coming out of it was bad—nausea and a pounding headache, ashy taste in her mouth. A general feeling of overwhelming despair. That was partly chemical, of course, the despair, but the situation certainly didn’t call for optimism.
She was alone, in an empty room. No windows. It was smooth concrete, with inset lighting far above protected by thick mesh. One door with no interior handle, and no hinges visible.
The only design feature was a drain about three inches across. That was chilling. She remembered being in one of these types of rooms before when she faced decomposition; the drain represented easy cleanup when all the screaming was over. The only difference was that where the Pharmadene death chambers had been white, and fitted with observation windows, this was more like . . . a tomb.
It terrified her that she didn’t know where they’d taken Patrick, or Joe, or Riley. Dying was something she’d long ago accepted—however long and painfully it might come. But losing people . . . That was something she couldn’t reconcile. She’d lost a sister when she was young, and had never known what had become of her. She’d lost plenty of friends and people she trusted, since all this had turned her life into a nightmare.
But she couldn’t become used to it. The idea of never seeing Patrick again made her black and hollow inside. The idea that Jane would be the last face he ever saw . . .
I have to kill her, Bryn thought, with razor-sharp clarity. If I do nothing else ever again, I have to find a way to kill her.
There weren’t any weapons here. They’d stripped her and put her into a cheap paper coverall, in a deeply unflattering blue. Bare feet in paper slippers.
She stared hard at the drain. It wasn’t just a hole in the ground; there was a brass perforated plate over it, probably to discourage rats from using it as a freeway entrance. No visible screws. She tried pulling it up, but got nowhere. Nails broke off, leaving her fingers bloody, but she finally managed to pry up one end, and work two fingertips beneath for leverage.
The cover snapped off. It wasn’t a lot of help, even then, because it was smooth and round. The screw had broken off cleanly, and there was no digging it out of the fastening in the drain.
Bryn stared at the round shape for a few long moments, then licked the blood from her fingers, took a firm grip, and began methodically working it back and forth against the concrete floor. It would take hours to make any kind of dent in it.
She had all the time in the world.
Hours did pass, long ones; she kept grinding the drain cover down, and once she had a straight edge, she began to strop it back and forth in brisk scrapes. Her dad had favored a straight razor, and she’d often watched him sharpen the blade on the leather strop that had hung in the bathroom against the pale green tile. The same strop he’d used to whip them when they misbehaved, or when they’d gotten in trouble in school, or brought home bad grades, or . . .
All this time, Bryn had never thought about her father much. He was a hole, a shape without a face, but the action of sharpening that makeshift blade filled things in for her. He’d had Annie’s eyes, the same clear color; he’d liked close shaves and sharply astringent aftershave. Clean white T-shirts under his work shirts.
The strop. The strop had disappeared, at some point. Bryn remembered that, remembered hearing an argument between her parents. It was about the same time that her sister Sharon had vanished into thin air at nineteen . . . and about the same time that Grace, then sixteen, had gotten pregnant.
It was all significant, somehow. The strop. Sharon. Grace’s pregnancy. Bryn had just tried to block it all out; her father and brothers had been an angry bunch, though Tate, then just eleven, had stayed close to her.
It had been the strop that was significant, but Bryn didn’t remember why. Just the argument, the indistinct screaming voices. Grace, weeping. Slamming doors.
And Sharon, just . . . gone. Gone and never coming back.
Bryn froze in the act of sharpening as she heard a sound at the door—the distinct click of a lock coming open. She sat against the far wall, knees drawn up, with the drain cover concealed in her right palm. She tested the edge with her pinkie fingertip. Not razor-sharp, but sharp enough to cut, with enough force behind it.
She knew it would be Jane, and it was.
The woman walked in and shut the door behind her, leaned against it, and crossed her arms. “Well,” she said. “Look at you. Feeling better?”
“Sure,” Bryn said. “Love what you’ve done with the place, Jane. You have such a flair for decorating.”
“I do,” Jane said, and gave her a slow, cat-in-the-cream smile. “You’re going to die here, so I’m glad you like the accommodations. Of course, given your upgrades, it’ll take . . . well, a really long time. No food, no water—that will starve them out. But our best estimates are that you’ll probably last at least three or four weeks before you start losing limbs. That’s how it happens, you know. The nanites begin to jettison excess baggage to preserve core systems, so they shut off the extremities. Legs first, one at a time. Then arms. Of course, at that point, you’re just a torso and a head rolling around on the floor, screaming. I really don’t know what comes after that, though; we haven’t done a whole lot of research.”