No Exit

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  Hey, there. Little boy.

  This had been a shock—he hadn’t known how the woman in the cellar could possibly see him. It was pitch black down there. Only as an adult did Ashley understand that her pupils had been adjusted to the darkness, while his hadn’t. Like Darby’s crafty little close-one-eye trick.

  You’re a nice boy, aren’t you?

  He’d cowered there on the steps, covering his ears.

  No. Don’t be afraid. You’re not like them. The ghostly voice lowered, like she was divulging a secret: Can you . . . Hey, can you please help me with something?

  He’d been afraid to answer.

  Can you bring me a glass of water?

  He wasn’t sure.

  Please?

  Finally he gave in and raced back up the rotten steps, ran back to his uncle’s rancher, and filled a blue glass in the kitchen sink. The tap water tasted like iron out here. When he came back outside, Uncle Kenny was standing by the open cellar door, his hands braced on his flabby hips.

  Little Ashley froze, spilling some water.

  But Uncle Kenny wasn’t angry. No, he was never angry. He’d been all jolly smiles, showing yellow horse teeth, plucking the glass from Ashley’s petrified little fingers: Thanks, kiddo. It’s all right, I’ll take this down to her. Hey, why don’t you go walk your baby brother down to the gas station and grab yourselves two chicken flautas, on the house?

  The flautas had been dry as sandpaper, withered by the heat lamp. Lars didn’t mind, but Ashley couldn’t finish his.

  That same year, a month or two later, Ashley had returned to Uncle Kenny’s a second time for Veterans Day weekend, and he remembered finding that same cellar door propped wide open, with a rattling fan blowing air out. When he descended the steps this time he found the lights on, revealing a bare, gutted bunker, the concrete walls damp with condensation. Scrub marks on the floor. The acrid odor of bleach. The woman was gone.

  Long gone.

  Even at that age, Ashley had known he should confront his uncle about this, or better yet, tell his parents and let them call the police. And he’d come very close, sitting on that knowledge all weekend like it was a loaded gun. But that Saturday night, Fat Kenny made macaroni and cheese with jalapeños and whole slices of bacon in it, and told a joke so epically funny it made Ashley spray a half-chewed mouthful.

  Hey, Ashley. How can you tell a nigger has been on your computer?

  How?

  Your computer’s missing.

  In the end, he’d simply liked Fat Kenny too much. He was too much fun. And he was genuinely decent to four-year-old Lars, too—letting him carry tools in the workshop, teaching him how to shoot crows with a BB gun. So, bottom line, whatever those truckers were doing with the woman in the bunker ultimately didn’t matter to Ashley. He’d just filed it away in a dark corner of his brain.

  That was seventeen years ago.

  And now, at the Wanashono rest area in Colorado, on the frigid night of December 23, the roles had been shuffled, like a classic TV show returning with a cast of new actors. Ashley himself was the new Fat Kenny, scrambling to protect a damaging secret. And Darby was the accidental witness.

  History doesn’t quite repeat itself, but damn, it sure can rhyme.

  Ed reached behind the rattling security grate, testing the hot water dispenser, and then separated two bags of coffee grounds. “I’ve got a dark French roast, and a light.”

  “Either’s fine,” said Sandi.

  “Dark roast, please,” Ashley said. “As dark as it gets.”

  He didn’t actually have a preference; he just liked how dark roast sounded. His taste buds were more or less dead, so all coffee tasted the same to him. But hell, if there was ever a night for jet-black coffee, this would be it. He stuffed Darby’s brown napkin into his jeans pocket, noticing it was smeared with a crescent thumbprint of her blood.

  He realized he’d lost sight of her.

  Quickly, he scanned the room. Ed was there by the locked coffee stand, Sandi was seated like a fat yellow bumblebee, Lars was guarding the front door—but yes, Darby was gone. She’d vanished. She’d taken advantage of his inattention and made a move.

  But it was fine. No worries. Ashley Garver would just make a move, too.

  Restroom?

  Restroom.

  He nodded to his brother.

  * * *

  Darby knew she had only a few seconds.

  She closed the men’s restroom door behind her without breaking stride, passing the stained sinks, her doppelganger following her in the mirrors. Scar visible, like a white sickle. Haunted eyes in the glass.

  Yes, the Wanashono rest area was a pressure cooker. She’d almost gotten Ed and Sandi killed. She needed to get out. She needed to reframe this battle, to relocate it somewhere else. Somewhere without the risk of collateral damage.

  I’ll run, she decided. I’ll run up the highway. As fast, and as hard, as I possibly can. I won’t stop until I find a signal and call 911.

  Or I’ve frozen to death.

  She checked her cracked iPhone again. The battery was now at 4 percent.

  She looked up at the empty window—a triangular little slice of night sky and treetops. It was almost eight feet off the floor. Getting inside had been easy, thanks to the stacked picnic tables outside. Getting outside would be much harder. The urinal she’d hit was too far back to stand on, and even on her tiptoes, she couldn’t reach the window frame. She’d need one hell of a flying leap to catch it with her fingertips. She’d need a running start, and every inch of it.

  She backed up, past the green stalls, past paul takes it in the ass, all the way to the door, her butt touching the wall, and the rectangular restroom stretched out before her like a twenty-foot runway. Smooth tile under her feet, slippery with moisture. She arched her back, dug into a runner’s crouch, and closed her hands into fists.

  She took a full breath—the bitter smell of ammonia. She let it halfway out.

  Go.

  She ran.

  Mirrors, urinals, stall doors, all racing past her. Air whooshed in her ears. No time to overthink. No time to be afraid. She flattened her hands into blades, pumping her legs, and took a hurtling kamikaze leap at the tiny opening—

  Midair, she thought: This is going to hurt—

  It did. She crashed into the tile wall knees first, bruising her chin, punching the air from her lungs, but (yes!) she’d caught the window frame with two desperate fingertips. Fingernails in the soggy old wood. She braced her wet Converse against the wall. Then she re-arched her back, locked her elbows, and tugged her body upward, gasping through clenched teeth, like she was tackling the world’s most hellish chin-up bar, and pulled and pulled and pulled—

  She heard mouth-breathing. Outside.

  No.

  No, no, no, please don’t be real—

  But yes, there it was. Directly outside, on the other side of the wall. That gentle wheeze she knew all too well, that juicy little huff. Lars, Rodent Face, had circled around the building and now waited for her outside. Watching that window, pistol in hand, ready to put a bullet in her brain the instant she clambered up and exposed her face.

  Now what?

  She hung there on aching fingertips, her shoes dangling off the floor, desperately wishing she’d just misheard the growl of the wind outside. But she knew she hadn’t. She knew Ashley had sent obedient little Lars out there to cut off her escape. Which left a far more cunning and dangerous enemy unaccounted for.

  Then she heard the restroom door click shut.

  He’s in the room with—

  A plastic bag tugged over Darby’s face from behind. She screamed, but it was trapped inside her mouth.

  1:09 A.M.

  Jay Nissen sawed through the last bar on the dog kennel.

  She’d cut them one at a time, sawing with the toothed knife the way the red-haired lady had instructed. Like a miniature tree cutter. Her left hand throbbed with pins and needles, so it took a long time. Twice, she’d dro
pped the knife and had to grope for it in the darkness. Once, she’d feared it had bounced outside the kennel and been lost forever. But she had found it.

  And now?

  With a push, the grating fell away and clattered against the van’s door.

  This was the first time the cage had been open since they took her. She didn’t know how many days ago that had been. Four? Five, probably. Going more than a night without her shots made her woozy, and since then she’d fallen into an irregular rhythm of sickly four-hour naps. The sun had been up and down, rising and falling from different windows. The smells of ketchup, ranch sauce, and stale sweat dewing on glass. The crumple of Jack in the Box wrappers. Their murmuring voices, Ashley’s knee-slapping jokes, the hum of blacktop, the urgent tick of the van’s turn signal. Was it a week already? What were her parents doing right now?

  She hadn’t even heard the brothers enter her house.

  She remembered walking to the fridge for a cup of apple juice, and gasping when she saw them standing in the kitchen. They’d worn Halloween masks—a zombie to the left and a snarling werewolf to the right. Both rubber faces swiveled to look at her.

  Outside, the daylight had dimmed. The sun slipping behind clouds.

  By the sink, Jay also saw her family’s housekeeper, Tanya, in a bright red tank top, clutching her mouth with both hands. Eyes watery, back arched, like she was fighting a sneeze.

  No one had spoken, neither the housekeeper nor the monsters, and Jay remembered feeling an uncomfortable sensation, like she’d interrupted a grown-up conversation. Then Tanya looked across the room at her, lowering her hands, and Jay realized the woman’s tank top had been white earlier today—not blood red. She was missing a front tooth when she spoke, calm but urgent:

  Run.

  But Jay hadn’t. She couldn’t. Something about this suspended scene in the kitchen, the three adults, the jolt of cranberry-colored blood, the dreamy strangeness of it all—

  Please run, Jay—

  And she’d wanted to, so badly. But she stood paralyzed, like her bones were locked up with pins, as the monsters circled the counter, stomping blurs on her right and left—

  Just run, they’re here for you—

  And then the werewolf’s big hand gripped her shoulder, powerful but surprisingly gentle, and it was all over. He’d been a looming shadow of painted fangs and fur. He was the one she now knew to be Ashley.

  Tanya’s voice, heartbroken as they took her: Why didn’t you run, Jay?

  She still didn’t know.

  Here and now, Jamie Nissen—or Jay, as she’d been called since first grade—crawled out of the dog kennel on her palms, over the itchy blankets and towels her rescuer had hidden beneath a few hours ago. The metal bars bent and twanged around her; she hoped Ashley and Lars weren’t nearby to hear. She reached the rear door of the van, expecting it to be locked. Lars had always been careful to lock the van’s doors, every time he—

  The handle clicked in her bloody fingers.

  The door swung open.

  Jay froze there on her hands and knees, peering out into the darkness. Thousands of swirling snowflakes. A shivery gust of night air. A parking lot of smooth, undisturbed white, glittering with crystals. It was strangely thrilling. She’d never seen this much snow before in her entire life.

  Now what?

  * * *

  “Now what, Darbs?”

  She couldn’t breathe or see. Plastic stretched tight over her face, suctioning against her front teeth. Knuckled hands around her throat, twisting the bag, squeezing her airway shut. Slippery, buried-alive panic.

  “Shh, shh.”

  She thrashed but Ashley was too strong. He had her arms twisted backward in some kind of wrestling hold. Both of her shoulder blades were wrenched together and her hands were somewhere far behind her, pinned and useless. Like she was fighting the embrace of a straitjacket. She kicked, her feet searching for the restroom wall to use as leverage, but found only empty space. Her backbone cracked.

  “Don’t fight,” he whispered. “It’s all fine.”

  Pressure building inside her chest. Her lungs burning, swelling against her rib cage. She felt her own last breath—a half gasp that had been inside her throat when the bag came down—trapped against her face, foggy and wet. Warm copper spreading down her chin. Her nose was bleeding again.

  And again she fought, twisting, flailing. Her legs kicked out into space. Her fingers clawed and scratched; she found the loop of the lanyard in his jacket. Keys jingled. But there was no gun, no weapon to grab. She was losing energy, too. This thrash had been weaker than the first.

  This is it, she realized. I’m going to die here.

  Right here, in a dingy restroom off State Route Six. Next to the bleached toilets, the scratched mirrors, the peeling stall doors scrawled with graffiti. Right here, right now, with that Lysol taste still in her mouth.

  “Shh.” Ashley moved his head like he was checking over his shoulder. “It’s almost over. Just let it happen—”

  She screamed silently inside the Ziploc bag. The plastic flexed a small bubble. Then her lungs reflexively inhaled—a bracing gulp—but found only negative pressure, sucking a scant few centimeters of reused air.

  “I know it hurts. I know. I’m sorry.” The bag twisted tighter, clockwise, and now she saw the window. Through one clamped eye, blurred by cloudy plastic and tears, she saw that little triangular window, eight feet off the floor, dusted with snowflakes. So close. So agonizingly close. Somehow, she wished it were farther away, across the room, hopeless and unreachable. But no, it was right there, and she could almost reach out and touch it, if only her hands weren’t pinned.

  She thrashed a third time, but it was uncoordinated and limp. This time Ashley barely had to hold her. She knew this was the last one, that there couldn’t possibly be a fourth rally. She was a goner now. Ed and Sandi were in the same building, on the other side of a door, ten feet away, oblivious while she suffocated to death in the arms of a killer. She felt time dilate. A thick and comfortable rest settled over her, like a heavy wool blanket.

  She hated how good it felt.

  “Rest now.” Ashley planted a wet smooch on the top of her head, crinkling the plastic. “You tried real hard, Darbs. Get some rest now.”

  His revolting voice was so far away. It sounded like he was in another room. Speaking to someone else. Smothering some other girl to death. The ache in her lungs was already fading. All of these awful sensations were happening to someone else, not to Darby Thorne.

  Her mind wandered, disconnecting, drifting, taking stock of all the unfinished items in her life. Her capstone painting, incomplete. Her Stafford loans, unpaid. Her Gmail password, locked forever. Her bank account with $291 in it. Her dorm room. Her wall of gravestone rubbings. Her mother at Utah Valley Hospital, waking from surgery, about to learn that her daughter had been randomly murdered at a rest stop three hundred miles away from—

  No.

  She fought it.

  No, no, no—

  She held on to this, to forty-nine-year-old Maya Thorne, languishing in the ICU. Because if Darby died right here, right now, in this restroom, she’d never get to apologize for all the things she’d said to her mother on Thanksgiving. It would all become unchangeable history. Every ugly word of it.

  And suddenly she wasn’t afraid. Not anymore. She tasted something far more useful than fear—anger. She was livid. She was absolutely fucking furious at the unfairness of it all, of what Ashley was attempting to do to her and her family, raging hard against the enveloping darkness. And something else . . .

  If I die here, she knew, no one will save Jay.

  “. . . Darbs?”

  She arched her back, and commanded her weary lungs to do one final task—to open and inhale as hard as possible. To suck the plastic airtight against her open mouth, so it was contracted between her front teeth like bubble gum, just a thin, withdrawn centimeter—

  She bit down.

  Not hard enough
. The plastic slipped out of her mouth.

  “Pancreatic cancer?” Ashley’s lips slithered against her ear, like he’d read her mind. “Your mom has . . . you said pancreatic cancer, right?”

  She tried again. She sucked the bag taut with burning lungs.

  Bit down.

  Nothing.

  “Isn’t it funny, then?” His dense grip, his rotten voice. “You were so certain you’d bury your mom, but it turns out you had it backward, you dumb cunt, because she’s going to bury you—”

  Darby bit down again, and the plastic ripped.

  A pinprick of ice-cold air whistled inside. Racing down her throat in a pressurized rush, like it came through a straw.

  Ashley paused—“Oh”—and in a half second of confusion, his grip weakened and Darby’s shoes touched the floor. A half second was all she needed. She found her footing, kicked off the tile, and hurled her body backward into his.

  Ashley stumbled, off balance.

  She kept running backward, kept pushing him—

  He gasped: “Wait, wait, wait—”

  She rammed him, back-first, into a sink. Vertebrae against porcelain. The faucet clicked on, knocked by an elbow. He grunted and released, her arms twisting from his grip. Her hands finally free. She grabbed the wet bag and ripped it off her face, sucking in a full breath. An inverted scream, clogged with blood, snot, and tears.

  She saw color again. Air on her cheeks. Oxygen in her blood. She fell away from him, her knees mushy, catching herself on the floor with an outstretched palm. Cold tiles, speckled with her blood.

  Behind her, Ashley pulled something from his pocket.

  He raised an arm—

  * * *

  —And he swung the rock-in-a-sock at the back of Darby’s head, arcing the stone like a whipping bola, ready for the wet-porcelain crunch of the girl’s skull—but she was already scrambling forward, moving away.

  It swiped her hair.

  He lunged after her, off balance from his swing, the rock banging off the wall to his left, chipping the tile. He hit his knees and watched her break away and sprint down the restroom, toward that little triangular window, with the plastic bag fluttering behind her. She won’t make it, he told himself. But in another instant, she’d vaulted up to the window frame, caught herself by her fingernails, and hurled her body through the tiny opening like a gymnast. Ankles up, then out.