by TAYLOR ADAMS
Instead, she almost cried.
She was certain now — she’d die tonight.
“Hey.” Ed leaned between them, straining to remember her name. “Are . . . are you okay, Dara?”
For Christ’s sake, it’s Darby.
She swallowed, her voice mouse-like. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t. She felt sobs trapped in her chest, shuddery spasms struggling to escape. Her spine ached where she’d landed on the toilet. She wanted to jump forward, grab Ed by the shoulders, to scream at this nice old veterinarian and his sleeping cousin: Run. For the love of God, run right now. But where?
Ashley nodded again at the table, harder.
At her chair.
She noticed a brown object neatly placed on the center of her seat, and recognized her brown napkin. The same napkin they’d used before, back when she’d thought he was an ally.
She approached the chair and picked up the napkin. Still watching her, Ashley’s lip curled. It was the beginning of a smug grin, unnoticed by Ed and Sandi.
She unfolded the napkin with numb, clumsy fingers.
IF YOU TELL THEM, I KILL THEM BOTH.
12:09 a.m.
Ashley moved to the table and sat directly across from her. He’d crossed the room silently, and he sat now with both palms flat on the tabletop. His hands were large and callused.
Darby re-folded the napkin and set it in her lap.
The radio crackled.
“I’m sick of Go Fish,” Ashley said crisply. “How about something else?”
She said nothing.
“How about . . .” he thought. “Oh! How about War?”
She glanced over at Ed and Sandi—
Ashley snapped his fingers. “Hey. I’m right here, Darbo. Don’t worry about the rules. War is real simple. Simpler than Go Fish, even. You just cut the deck in two, see, and take turns drawing, one after the other, and we see who has the higher card. Higher card takes both, and adds them to your deck. You know, because every war is fought one battle at a time.”
He grinned, pleased with himself, and fluidly shuffled the cards in front of her. Then he curled the cards backward with a harsh chatter.
“Winner has a full deck at the end.” He looked her in the eyes. “And the loser? Well, she’s left with nothing.”
Behind her, Ed pumped the COFEE carafe to fill his cup, and it made that drowning scream again. Like lungs bubbling with water. Something about it made her shoulder blades quiver.
“Bad news, friends.” Ed rattled the security shutter. “Coffee’s out.”
Ashley’s eyes goggled with faux-horror. “What? No more caffeine?”
“Afraid so.”
“Well, I guess we’re all going to start murdering each other now.” Ashley shuffled the cards a final time. It occurred to Darby, in a slow drip, that these grubby playing cards were probably not a fixture of the Wanapani rest area. The brochure stand was bolted down and the radio and coffee was caged behind a security grate. Ashley had brought these cards himself. Because he was a playful sort of evil, fascinated by games and tricks. Sleight of hand, surprises, and misdirection.
I’m a magic man, Lars, my brother.
The clues had all been there. She just hadn’t seen them.
“You should get some rest,” Ashley told her. “You look tired.”
Her throat felt like dry paper. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“No rest for the wicked.” He grinned. “Right?”
“Something like that.”
“How much sleep did you get last night?”
“Enough.”
“Enough, huh? What’s that?”
“I . . .” Her voice broke. “An hour, two—”
“Oh, no, that’s not enough.” Ashley leaned forward, creaking his chair, and divvied the cards between them. She marveled; his fingers were so chillingly fast.
“Humans are built for six to nine hours of sleep per night,” he told her. “I get a solid eight every night. That ain’t a recommendation, honey, that’s biology. See, less than that erodes your brain function. That’s everything — your reflexes, your emotional stability, your memory. Even your intelligence.”
“Then we’ll be evenly matched,” Darby said.
Ed chuckled, returning to his seat. “Kick his ass. Please.”
But she didn’t pick up her cards. Neither did Ashley. They quietly regarded each other across the table as the wind growled outside. A gust blew through the broken window in the men’s restroom, rattling the door on its hinges. The temperature in the room was dropping, but so far no one had noticed.
“Fortunately for you,” Ashley said, “the card game War is entirely luck. You know, unlike the real thing.”
Darby studied his eyes. They were vast, emerald-green, flecked with amber. She searched them for something recognizable, something human to relate to — fear, caution, self-awareness — but found nothing.
Eyeballs are on stalks, she’d learned randomly, back at an art gallery in October. She forgot the name of the artist, but he’d been there mingling with the crowd, sipping a Dos Equis, gleefully explaining that he’d incorporated authentic autopsy photos into his work. To Darby, the shape of the human ocular nerves had looked disturbingly insectoid, like antennae on a garden slug. Something about it made her skin crawl. Now, she imagined Ashley’s big eyes hanging in their sockets, firing electrical signals along those drooping stalks into the coils of his brain. He was a monster, an alien bundle of nerves and flesh. Utterly inhuman.
And he was still watching her.
“Unlike the real thing,” he repeated.
The playing cards sat between them in two ignored heaps. Questions fluttered in her mind like trapped birds, things she desperately wanted to ask aloud but couldn’t. Not while Ed and Sandi were within earshot.
Why are you doing this?
Why abduct a child?
What are you going to do with her?
And those green dragon eyes kept staring back at her, full of secrets. Jewel-like, scanning her body, assessing her dimensions, running contingencies and what-if’s. They were frighteningly intelligent, in all the same ways Lars’s had been frighteningly dumb. But it was an icy intelligence.
Other questions sparked in her mind: How fast are you? How strong are you? If I slashed your face with Blue’s keys, could I blind you? Right now, if I ran for the building’s front door, could I make it?
A door opened. An icy draft slipped into the room.
Ed glanced over. “Hi, Lars.”
Ashley smirked.
Over a snarl of deflected wind, Rodent Face took position by the door, his right hand tucked in his jacket pocket, wrapped around the grip of that black .45. She’d seen it now, glimpsed twice when he’d chased her. She knew little about firearms, but she recognized this one as magazine-fed, which meant it held more shots than a revolver’s five or six. She could just barely identify its outline under his blue coat, a bulge at his right hip — but only because she knew to look for it.
Ed wouldn’t notice it.
And Sandi was asleep.
Darby was surrounded again. Ashley at the table, and Lars posted at the door. She’d been surrounded this entire time — they’d been tacitly coordinating their locations all night — although she sure hoped her swan dive through the restroom window had been a surprise. It’d certainly saved her life, at least for a few more—
“Dara,” Ed said, startling her. “You never answered the question, did you?”
“What?”
“You know. The circle-time question. Your biggest fear.” He twirled his empty Styrofoam cup on the table. “I gave mine. Ashley gave his door-hinge story. Sandi hates snakes. So what about you?”
All eyes darted to her.
She swallowed. She still had Ashley’s IF YOU TELL THEM, I KILL THEM BOTH napkin clutched tightly in her lap.
“Yeah.” Ashley suppressed a grin. “Tell us. What scares you, Darbs?”
<
br /> Words clogged up in her throat. “I . . . I don’t know.”
“Guns?” he prompted.
“No.”
“Nail guns?”
“No.”
“Getting murdered?”
“No.”
“I don’t know. Getting murdered is pretty scary—”
“Failure,” she said, interrupting Ashley and looking those green eyes dead-on. “My biggest fear is making the wrong choice, failing, and letting someone get kidnapped or killed.”
Silence.
On the bench, Sandi stirred in her sleep.
“That’s . . .” Ed shrugged. “Okay, that was a weird one, but thanks.”
“She’s—” Ashley started to say something but stopped himself. Ed didn’t notice, but Darby did, and it thrilled her. What did he almost blurt out?
She’s—
She, as in Jay Nissen. The little San Diego girl in the van outside, whose life hung in the balance right now.
It was just a small error, only a fraction of a sentence, but it told Darby she’d caught her enemy off-guard. Maybe Ashley and Lars had underestimated her — this hundred-and-ten-pound art major from Boulder who’d stumbled into their kidnapping plot. Surely, they couldn’t have predicted that restroom window escape. She was proud of that.
She hoped she was getting under their skin.
They don’t want to kill me here, in front of witnesses.
Because then they’d have to kill Ed and Sandi, too, and that seemed to be a last resort. One homicide was probably easier to manage than three. They’d wanted to kill or incapacitate her outside — discreetly, but she’d outsmarted them: hurtled face-first through a tiny-ass window, bruised her spine on a toilet, and earned herself another ten minutes of life.
Those ten minutes were almost up.
Inhale, she reminded herself. Count to five. Exhale. She had to keep her breaths full and steady. She couldn’t lose it. Not now.
Inhale. Count to five. Exhale.
Ashley glanced over her shoulder, to his brother, and gave a slight but commanding nod. Without question, he was the alpha. If Darby killed one of them tonight, it would need to be him.
She wondered how much of what he’d said was true. The buried car outside wasn’t really his. Was he really studying accounting in Salt Lake City? Had he really almost died in a coalmine in Oregon with his thumb crushed inside a rusty hinge? Ashley seemed intoxicated by the act of lying, misdirecting, wearing different hats, presenting different versions of himself. He was a kid performing a magic show.
It was past midnight now. Darby had to make it for another six hours until the CDOT snowplows arrived at dawn and opened up the highway for an escape. That was a lot of ten-minute increments. But she’d try.
She didn’t know what Ashley’s little nod to his brother had meant — so far, Lars had remained glued to the front door — but she didn’t like it. The two brothers had just made another silent chess move against her, and she was now, again, on the defensive.
But as long as Ed and Sandi are here, they won’t kill me.
She glanced up at the clock on the wall, and for a bleak moment, she thought about how far away dawn was. How dark and cold the night was. How outnumbered and outmatched she was. They could kill everyone in this room. Maybe they planned to. Maybe the threat on the napkin was just a little game.
Ashley grinned, like he’d read her mind.
This stalemate won’t last.
“Alright, everyone,” he said cheerily. “War with Darbs seems to be a bust. Who’s up for a new round of circle-time?”
Ed shrugged. “Sure.”
“Let’s do . . . first job? No. Let’s do favorite movies.” Ashley glanced around the stuffy room, a beaming game-show host. “Okay if I answer first again?”
“Knock yourself out.”
“Alright. Actually — well, I don’t have a single favorite movie, but rather, a favorite genre of movies. Is that acceptable for everyone?”
Ed gave a who-cares hand wave.
“Monster movies,” Ashley said, his eyes darting back across the table to Darby. “Not, like, small monsters like werewolves. I’m talking about the huge, towering ones, twenty stories tall, like Godzilla and Rodan. Kaiju movies, they’re called in Japan. You know the kind, where something big is terrorizing a city, hurling model cars around?”
Ed nodded, not really listening. He was tilting his coffee cup, trying to capture the last few precious drops.
It didn’t matter, because Ashley was only looking at Darby as he spoke, his words clean and composed, revealing his Crest-white teeth: “See, golly, I just love kaiju movies. And . . . the thing I find fascinating about them is this. The human heroes — Bryan Cranston and that bland Sergeant Vanilla guy, in the 2014 Godzilla reboot, for example — they’re just placeholders. They’re ciphers for the audience. Do these puny humans have any effect on the actual plot?”
He let his rhetorical question float for longer than necessary.
“Nope,” he finally answered. “Zero. Their role in the story is entirely reactive. Godzilla, Mothra, the MUTO’s — the true stars of the show — they’re going to fight and settle their business, and the humans can’t possibly hope to stop the carnage. Does this make sense to you?”
Darby didn’t answer.
“No matter what you try, the monsters are going to do what they want.” Ashley leaned forward, creaking his chair, and she whiffed his moist breath as his voice lowered into a husky croak: “See, the monsters are gonna fight, and flatten skyscrapers and smash bridges, and all you can do is get the hell out of their way, or you’re gonna get crushed.”
Silence.
She couldn’t look away. Like staring down a rabid animal.
His breath was overpowering. Like boiled egg yolks and bitter French Roast, curdling with meat-like odors. Sixty minutes ago, his tongue had been a warm slug in her mouth. But now his boyish smile returned, like slipping a rubber Halloween mask back on, and in another moment, he was back to being the jovial chatterbox she’d first met. “So, what about you, Darbs? What’s your favorite type of movie? Horror? Ghosts? Torture-porn?”
“Romcoms,” she answered.
Lars giggled by the front door, a raspy noise that reminded her of a chainsaw on idle. Ashley traded glances with his brother, and his lips curled a little as the swirling snow intensified outside. “This is . . . this is going to be a fun night.”
Maybe so, Darby thought, looking him in the eye.
But I promise, I won’t make it easy.
“But,” Ashley said, rubbing his eyes in stage-managed sleepiness. “I admit, I would kill for a cup of coffee right now.”
“Actually. . .” Ed considered. “Hey, you know, we have some in the truck. It’s the cheap-o instant camping type, where you just pour in the grounds and add hot water. It tastes like river silt, but it’s coffee. Anyone interested?”
“Cowboy coffee?” Ashley beamed, like a prospector discovering gold. He’d planned this. “That would be wonderful.”
“Sandi hates it.”
“Well, luckily she’s asleep.”
“Yeah? Takers? Alright.” Ed slipped on a pair of black winter gloves, moving to the door. “I’ll be back in a sec—”
“No worries.” Ashley’s grin inflated. “Take your time, amigo.”
Darby tried to think of something to say — wait, stop, please don’t leave the room — but her mind was as thick as peanut butter. The moment passed, and in another stomach-fluttering instant, Ed was gone. The visitor center’s front door swung closed, not quite engaging.
Lars pushed it — click.
The two brothers glanced at each other, then at Darby. In a microsecond, the room’s air pressure changed. The three of them were now alone. For however long it took Ed to walk out to Sandi’s truck, rummage through his luggage, find his camping coffee, and walk back. Sixty seconds, maybe?
Now . . . the only thing keeping Darby alive was Sandi.
And she wa
sn’t even awake. She snored like a purring cat on the blue bench, her arms crossed across her potbelly, her paperback precariously balanced on her face. The lightest breeze could disturb it. For the first time all night, Darby could read the title: Luck of the Devil. For the next sixty seconds or so, Darby’s life depended on how light of a sleeper this middle-aged woman was.
“Romcoms,” Ashley muttered under his breath. “That’s cute.”
“Better than Godzilla.”
“Alright, Darbs, I’m sick of talking around it.” Ashley kept his voice low, controlled, watching Sandi in the corner of his eye. “So here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to make you an offer.”
She listened, but in the back of her mind she was counting seconds, like steady clockwork: Sixty seconds for Ed to walk to his cousin’s truck and back.
Fifty seconds, now?
“This offer is going to stand once, Darbs, and then it’ll be gone forever. No second chances. So think hard, please, before you make a decision—”
“What’re you doing with that little girl?”
He licked his lips. “We’re not talking about Jay right now.”
“Are you going to kill her?”
“That’s not important.”
“It’s pretty goddamn important to me—”
“Darby.” He was getting aggravated now, baring his perfect Colgate teeth, his voice a strained whisper: “This isn’t about her. Don’t you understand? This is about you, and me, and my brother, and everyone else caught in the crossfire at this rest stop. This is about the decision you’re going to make, right now.”
Forty seconds.
She thought about Lars, guarding the door behind her, and her stomach tightened with queasy horror. His mooning grin, the shiny scar tissue peppering his hands, his flat little eyes. She didn’t think she could say it aloud — but then she did: “Is he . . . is Lars going to rape her?”
“What?” Ashley rolled his eyes. “Ew. Gross. Darbs, you’re not listening—”
“Answer me,” she said, glancing over to Sandi. “Or I swear to God, I’ll start screaming bloody murder right now—”
“Do it.” He leaned back. “See what happens.”
