NO EXIT a gripping thriller full of heart-stopping twists

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  Silence.

  She raised her hands, like a mic drop.

  And from the front of Sandi’s truck, Ashley heard a strange, scraping chitter. A sound he’d never heard before.

  It was Jay laughing.

  4:05 a.m.

  Thirty minutes.

  Thirty minutes.

  Survive the next thirty minutes, until the cops get here.

  This repeated in her mind on the walk back to the rest area. Ashley had ordered her to walk in front, with Jay at her side, while he held the nail gun to their backs. He also carried her iPhone.

  He’d snatched it from Darby’s hand before she could delete 9-1-1’s text message. He swiped through it now, the screen illuminating the snow a spectral blue as they walked, and she quietly braced for Ashley Garver’s apocalyptic reaction when he learned the truth — that the cops were incoming at this very second.

  But nothing happened. They walked in silence. She heard him lick his lips, adjusting his grip on the nail gun as he scrolled through her phone, and she realized — he’s not reading my texts.

  The possibility of Darby texting the police hadn’t occurred to him. He was only scanning her call records, searching for successful voice calls to 9-1-1. Which, of course, she’d already tried, dozens of times, back at 9 and 10 p.m. He was scrolling through them, inspecting the timestamps.

  “Call failed,” he read. “Call failed. Call failed. Call failed—”

  You have no idea. She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t.

  You’re holding it in your hand.

  “Good, good.” He sounded like he was relaxing.

  She squeezed Jay’s unhurt hand, lowering her voice. “Don’t be afraid. He can’t kill me, because I know where his keys are—”

  “That’s true, Darbs,” Ashley interjected. “But I can hurt you.”

  Yeah? She wanted to say. You have half an hour, asshole.

  She desperately hoped thirty minutes was a realistic estimate for when the police would arrive here, and not just a dispatcher’s wild guess. Between the jackknifed semi and the blizzard, there were a lot of possible complications that might not be visible from an alert desk inside a warm sheriff’s station somewhere. What if it wasn’t thirty minutes, but forty? An hour? Two hours?

  Ashley groped her as she walked. The nail gun prodding her backbone, his fingers exploring her pockets, front and back. Her legs. The sleeves of her hoodie. “Just making sure,” he breathed down her neck.

  He’d been searching for his keys.

  The only thing keeping me alive right now is that stupid keychain. She imagined those keys now, resting in the snow outside the restroom window where they’d landed. Slowly vanishing, one snowflake at a time.

  “You should just tell me now what you did with them,” he whispered. “It’ll be so much easier for both of us.”

  For a long moment as they walked, Darby didn’t quite grasp what he meant by that. Then the realization came to her slowly, like a great shape emerging from the depths, taking monstrous form.

  When they got back inside the visitor center, Ashley was going to torture her. This was a certainty. He would give her a yellow card, or a red card, or worse, until she confessed the keychain’s location. And the second she did, he’d kill her. She felt her heartbeat hitch in her chest, like a trapped animal. She considered running, but he’d just nail-gun her in the back. And he was far too strong to fight.

  The rest area came closer, taking form in the moonlight. It looked falsely serene, like a model inside a snow globe. She saw the cars — their Astro, her Honda, the buried dumpster she’d once mistaken for Ashley’s car. The icy flagpole, standing like a needle. The bronze crowd of Nightmare Children. And emerging from the darkness, half-buried in windswept snow, with its dead lamp and barricaded window, the Wanapani visitor center itself.

  Big Devil, the name meant.

  Then Ashley pivoted her — “Turn, turn,” and they followed the footpath from the parking lot to the front door. The final fifty feet.

  I’ve saved Jay already, she reminded herself. I’ve gotten the police involved. They have guns. They’ll take care of Ashley and Lars.

  All I have to do is survive.

  This long walk back had taken ten, maybe fifteen minutes, she guessed. So she was already halfway there.

  Just fifteen more.

  As the building crept closer, Darby realized something — she wasn’t even afraid anymore. She was exhilarated, actually, drunk with a strange sort of excitement. She’d already been shot at, pepper-sprayed, and asphyxiated with a Ziploc bag, and like a goddamn cockroach, she’d survived everything Ashley and Lars — and even Sandi — had thrown at her. Against all odds, Darby was still in this fight. It was too personal; this eight-hour psychological duel with Ashley, all of the night’s tricks and turns and wins and losses. And now she had to witness her grisly checkmate. She wanted to be there the second it happened, to see the shock on Ashley’s face when the first approaching police car flashed red-and-blue. It thrilled her, in a dark way she couldn’t describe.

  You’ll hurt me, Ashley. You’ll hurt me bad. For these last fifteen minutes or so, I’m all yours. But after that?

  You’re mine.

  And you have no idea—

  “Oh, hey.” Ashley stopped. “You . . . got a text message back at the highway.”

  The blue glow returned. He was reading her phone again.

  Darby panicked. 9-1-1 must have sent a second text message. Of course. The well-intentioned emergency dispatcher had no way of knowing that Darby herself was under duress, that her phone was now in the killer’s hand.

  “From . . .” Ashley squinted. “From someone named . . . Devon.”

  Then he held the cracked iPhone out to her, and when her eyes pulled into focus, whatever remained of Darby’s world disintegrated.

  It happened. Mom died.

  “Ooh,” Ashley said. “Awkward.”

  Then he broke her iPhone in half. “Keep walking.”

  * * *

  The front door shut like a gunshot.

  Jay screamed when she saw Ed. Ashley grinned, all white teeth, grabbing her by the collar and forcing her to look. “Cool, huh?”

  Ed Schaeffer was slumped in a sitting position under the Colorado map, the front of his Carhartt shiny with dark blood. He tilted his head up at them as they entered the room, and his lips weakly quivered, like he was trying to speak.

  “Don’t move, Eddie.” Sandi knelt beside him, trying to wrap the right length of medical gauze around his ruined jaw. The white first-aid box was open on the floor, its contents scattered. “Don’t move, I’m trying to help you—”

  Over her trembling hands, Ed’s eyes darted up to Darby — a flash of recognition — and he tried again to speak, but only managed a moaned gurgle. A mouthful of blood, ropy with snakelike clots, squirted through his locked teeth and splashed down into his lap.

  Jay cried, struggling to look away, but Ashley wouldn’t let her. “See?” he said into her ear. “That’s a red card.”

  Across the room Lars watched all of this like a scarecrow, holding the .45 in one hand and a white jug of bleach in the other, as Ed’s strangled scream reached a fever pitch in the confined air.

  All of this horror barely registered with Darby.

  She wasn’t there. Not really. She was somewhere else, and this world had gone slippery, tinged with oil. Lights smeared into shafts. Her body was a cold suit, her heartbeat and breaths falling into a slow, mechanical rhythm. She imagined a tiny creature, her truest self perhaps, pulling levers and viewing camera feeds inside her own skull. She’d seen that in a movie — Men in Black. She recalled watching the DVD years ago, with her mother on the basement sofa, sharing a Snoopy blanket. I like Will Smith, her mother had told her, sipping a drink that smelled like peaches. He can rescue me anytime he’d like.

  She was gone now, Darby realized.

  The body of Maya Thorne would remain in some hospital in Provo, Utah, but the tiny being that l
ived inside her head was lost forever.

  Now Ashley squeezed her right hand, interlocking his icy fingers into hers like teenagers on a date, and he guided her through the room. Past Ed and Sandi, past the stone counter, past the coffee machines. She didn’t know where he was taking her, nor did she care. She numbly noticed her right foot was leaving red footprints — she’d sleepwalked through Ed’s pooled blood. Like a nightmare, she just wanted it all to be over.

  For it to please be over.

  She twisted her neck, glancing back at the old Garfield clock on the wall. It read 5:19 a.m. For winter daylight savings, she subtracted an hour.

  That made it 4:19 a.m.

  She’d received 9-1-1’s text message at 3:58 a.m. The walk back had taken twenty-one minutes. Subtracted from thirty, that made nine minutes left until the police arrived here. Nine short minutes.

  Survive nine more minutes.

  That’s all.

  Ashley halted her abruptly — here, at the janitor’s closet door. Still half-open, from when she’d unlocked it. He gently twirled her now, like a slow, dizzy tango, and pushed her against the wall.

  “Sit here,” he said.

  She didn’t.

  “Sit, please.”

  She shook her head and tears tapped the floor. Her sinuses ached.

  “You’re not going to sit?”

  She shook her head again.

  “You’re not tired?”

  Oh, she was exhausted. Her nerves were shredded, her muscles sagging meat. Her thoughts blurry. But somehow, she knew that if she sat down now, it would all be over. She’d lose her will. She’d never stand up again.

  For a moment, she considered just blurting it out, saying what couldn’t be unsaid: Ashley, I threw your keys out the window in the men’s restroom. They landed just ten, maybe twenty feet away in the snow.

  You can kill me. I’m done.

  Across the room, Jay wept. Rodent Face knelt by her, trying to calm her. “Don’t look at Ed. Don’t look at him, okay? He’s fine—”

  Ed took in another tortured breath through his nose as Sandi wrapped another bandage around his jaw, and then he made a strange sound, like a wet burp. The clean white gauze blotted red.

  “He’s fine, Jaybird. Wanna, ah, play circle time?”

  “We’re all . . .” Sandi sighed, wiping Ed’s blood on her pants. “We’re all going to prison for the rest of our lives. You know that, right?”

  Ashley ignored her. He was a black shadow, towering over Darby, studying her. Still gripping her wrist, trapping her against the half-open closet door. His eyes moved up and down her body.

  Darby stared at the floor, at her size-eight Converse, slashed by ice and browned with dirt and blood. Ten days ago, they’d been new in a box.

  “Were . . .” Ashley cleared his throat. “Were you close with your mom?”

  She shook her head.

  “No?”

  “Not really.”

  He leaned closer. “Why not?”

  She said nothing. She fought his grip on her wrist, and he gently retaliated with his other hand, pressing his nail gun against her belly. His knuckle on the trigger. Something about the thing’s color — a sickening Crayola-orange — made it look like an oversized child’s toy.

  He repeated himself, his hot breath tingling on her neck: “Why not, Darbs?”

  “I was . . . I was kind of an awful daughter.” Her voice trembled but she steadied herself. Then, like a levee breaking, it all came out: “I took advantage of her. I manipulated her. I called her horrible things. I stole her car once, with a shoelace. I’d leave, for days at a time, without telling her where I’d gone or who I was out with. I must have given her ulcers. When I . . . when I left for college, we didn’t even say goodbye. I just got in my Honda and drove to Boulder. I stole a bottle of her gin from the cabinet on my way out.”

  She remembered drinking it alone in her dorm room. The sour burn in her throat, under a bleak wallpaper of stranger’s graves, of names and birthdates drawn in charcoal shadows of crayon and wax.

  Ashley nodded, sniffing her hair. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re lying—”

  “I mean it,” he said. “I’m genuinely sorry for your loss.”

  “I wouldn’t be,” Darby said through her teeth. “If it was your mom.”

  She felt more tears coming, stinging her irritated eyes, but she fought them. She couldn’t start now. That would come later. Later, later, later. After the cops kicked down the door and raked Ashley and Lars with bullets, after Sandi was handcuffed, when Darby and Jay were safe in an ambulance with wool blankets draped over their shoulders. Then, and only then, could she properly grieve.

  Ashley furrowed his brow. “How’d you steal a car with a shoelace?”

  She didn’t answer. It was an unremarkable story. Her mom’s Subaru had been broken into once before, and the dumbass thief had mangled the ignition with a screwdriver trying to hotwire it. It took two keys — one for the door and one for the ignition. Darby had acquired one, but not the other.

  You rotten little bitch, her mom had said from the porch, watching her own Subaru pull into the driveway at 3 a.m.

  You rotten little bitch.

  “And . . .” Ashley put it together. “That’s how you broke into our van, huh?”

  She nodded, and another tear hit the floor.

  “Wow. It’s like tonight was meant to be.” He grinned again. “I’ve always believed things happen for a reason, if that’s any consolation.”

  It wasn’t.

  Death is supposed to transform you from a person into an idea. But to Darby, her mother had always been an idea. Somehow, after eighteen years of living in the same tiny two-bedroom house in Provo, eating the same food, watching the same television, sitting on the same sofa, she’d never truly known who Maya Thorne was. Not as a human being. Certainly not as the person she would have been, had Darby never existed. Had she really just been the flu.

  Oh God, Mom, I’m sorry.

  She almost broke. But she couldn’t — not in front of him. So it stuck thickly in her chest like a wet, knotted towel, a dull ache in her soul.

  I’m so sorry for everything—

  Ashley inspected her for another long moment. Another thoughtful breath. The dense odor of his sweat. She heard his tongue move behind his lips, like he was wrestling with words he couldn’t quite say. When he finally did speak again, his voice was different, overcome by some emotion she couldn’t identify: “I wish you were my girlfriend, Darby.”

  She said nothing.

  “I wish, so badly, that you and I . . . that we’d met under different circumstances. This, all this, isn’t me. Okay? I’m not evil. I don’t have a criminal record. I’ve never hurt anyone before tonight. I don’t even drink or smoke. I’m just a business owner who got involved in a little thing that went south, and now I have to clean up this mess in order to protect my brother. Understand? And you’re getting in the way of that. So I’m asking again, before it gets ugly — where are my keys?”

  She stared back, rock-hard, giving nothing.

  Over Ashley’s shoulder, she could see the clock. The characters on it. Orange Garfield still offering those roses to pink Arlene. Her blurry eyes focused on the minute hand — almost vertical now. 4:22 a.m.

  Five minutes until the cops arrived.

  “Did you hear me, Ashley?” Sandi stood up. “Are you having a psychotic episode? Keys or no keys, it’s over. We’re all going to prison.”

  “No. We’re not.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Ashley didn’t answer. Instead, his dark silhouette turned back to Darby, and his grip on her wrist changed. His fingers walked over her skin like clammy octopus tentacles, rearranging themselves around her, tightening. And he lifted her hand up, up, sliding against the wall . . .

  Sandi raised her voice. “What are you doing to her?”

  Darby craned her ne
ck to see — he was holding her right hand against the supply closet door. Right up against the door’s hinge. Pressing her fingertips flush against the golden jaws, where the brass was spotted with old lubricant and brown cavities of rust. She saw her pinkie fingernail, painted crackle-blue, her vulnerable flesh seated in there like a tiny head in a guillotine.

  Five minutes.

  She looked back at Ashley, her gut twisting with panic.

  He had the nail gun tucked in his armpit now, leaning to grasp the doorknob with his free hand. “You might not remember this, Darbs, but earlier tonight, you made fun of me for my phobia of door hinges. Remember that? Remember what you called me?”

  She closed her eyes, squeezing acidic tears, wishing it would all go away—

  “Yeah, oops, huh?”

  —But it was real. It was all really happening, right now, and it could never be undone, and her artist’s fingers were about to be crushed by unsympathetic metal.

  Sandi gasped. “Jesus Christ, Ashley—”

  “Don’t do it,” Jay begged, fighting Lars. “Please, don’t—”

  But the tall shadow of Ashley Garver wasn’t listening. It leaned in close to Darby, licking its lips, and she smelled something sweetly bacterial, fetid, like decaying meat. “You’re giving me no choice. If you tell me, I promise I won’t hurt you, okay? You have my word. Where. Are. My. Keys?”

  Fiveminutes—fiveminutes—fiveminutes—

  She forced herself to open her eyes, to blink away the tears, to steady her gulped breaths, to look the monster in its green eyes. She couldn’t take the bait. She couldn’t submit and play this game, because the instant he knew where his keychain was, he’d kill her. There was no other option. Ashley Garver was many, many things, but above all else, he was a pathological liar.

  “Please, Darbs, just tell me, so I don’t have to hurt you. Because if you don’t, you’re forcing me to slam this door.”

  He knelt down close so she could see the pained glimmer in his eyes. She knew this was all staged. Another head of the Hydra. This negotiation was just like any other act she’d witnessed tonight, just another version of Ashley to be worn for a while and then discarded, the way a python crawls out of its wrinkly gray skin.