“Lady, what the hell?” the receptionist says.
Patricia shoves her back with a hand to the stomach and slams the car door, locking it. She pushes the button to start the car and is already throwing it into reverse. The receptionist should know by now that if she doesn’t get out of the way, she’s going to get run over.
All bets are off when Patty comes out.
“You can’t leave!” the receptionist shouts as she squeals out of the space.
Patricia rolls down her window the barest bit.
“Watch me,” she growls.
She peels out of the cracked little parking lot past the abandoned sofa cemetery. She looks back once and sees the receptionist standing in her parking space, one hand still on her cheek.
What are they going to do, call the police?
They won’t come, anyway.
Not to the judge’s house.
He may have abandoned her, but he still owns that property.
Just because he’s taken everything from her doesn’t mean she’s nothing. Even when all is lost, there’s some part of her that won’t give up.
Turns out Patty was not destroyed.
She was just waiting, deep underneath, until she was needed.
41.
Ella blinks. She’s facedown on the ground with something very heavy on her back. Rough, old brown carpet is pressed to her cheek. It smells like bleach and sour beer. She can’t breathe.
“Help!”
As she says it, barely enough breath to groan out the word, the weight presses down, and she can’t reinflate her lungs. She panics, flails, wants to scream but can’t. She flashes back to the time her dad choked her unconscious, to the world going gray and red and fading away. She wants to reach for her throat to protect herself, to push away the tightening there, but can’t. Her arms are pinned to her sides.
“Shh,” a voice says, right by her ear. “It’s okay. You’re not alone. You’re scared now, and that’s normal. You were storming. We dogpiled you. We’re going to get off now. We’ll help you through it.”
Ella recognizes that voice—the girl from the drugstore. Leanne. She sounds so calm and reasonable and kind. It makes Ella go a little limp, and as if that’s exactly the key that was needed, most of the weight lifts from her back. There’s some grunting, and she hears another familiar voice—River.
“Where’s the antibac cream? She clawed me.”
The world comes into focus. Ella is on the floor inside their RV, facedown on the carpet. Up ahead, there’s a thick sheet of plastic taped over an open, narrow door. Through it, she sees an entire tiny room coated in the same plastic, taped down. It’s like something out of a serial killer story, and her body tenses, her hands whipping forward to help her stand so she can get the hell out of here.
She was wrong about them.
So wrong.
“Steady there.” Leanne is still—Jesus, on top of her? But she doesn’t have her full weight on Ella anymore. River must’ve been on top of Leanne, and that was the lifted weight that offered enough room to breathe. So they were both on top of her, holding her down? They just dragged her into their murder van and tackled her?
It starts coming back. Ella inhaled pepper on purpose because she didn’t know how to escape. They wanted something from her, and she was trapped between them and the RV door, and the security guard wasn’t coming, and the only option she could see was letting the Violence decide who was going to live. So…
“How are you not dead?” she asks in a tiny voice. “Get off me.”
Leanne doesn’t budge, but at least Ella has enough room to breathe now.
“Not until I’m sure you’re safe. See, there are certain facts about the Violence that aren’t commonly known.” Leanne’s voice sounds like she’s teaching in a classroom, not pinning a teenager to the floor with her body. “One of them is that if someone is storming and you hold them very tightly so that they can’t hurt anyone and you compress their body, they’ll stop storming within a few minutes. It’s pretty fascinating, actually, how the body goes from attack to playing dead, shutting down—well, that’s probably more science than you want. But people who are storming don’t actually have to kill anyone to stop storming. The people around them just need to be brave enough to dogpile them until they come back around.”
Ella’s mind races with this knowledge. Everything she’s ever read about the Violence—and she did a deep internet dive, once she knew she had it—suggests there is no way to stop someone from storming, that they’re simply going to act out their disease until they’ve killed someone and only then come out of it. But now Leanne is on her back and River is over by a table, neither one of them dead.
“Did I kill the security guard, then?”
“You didn’t kill anybody. Nice trick, though, keeping pepper in your pocket. Smart.”
“It’s easier to admire if you’re not going to have scars for life,” River calls grouchily. “This face is my moneymaker.”
“Your voice and wit are your moneymakers, and anyway, you told me you love scars,” Leanne says, teasing.
River snorts. “On other people.”
Ella is having a hard time grasping this reality. She was scared, and she made the choice to kill someone rather than be kidnapped in this very RV, but now she’s learning that not only has she not killed anyone, she’s in the van anyway. It’s a very meta moment, as if her emotions haven’t caught up yet but reason is definitely present and trying to understand the situation. She wants to be scared, but her system doesn’t have any more fear juice to squirt.
“I’m freaking out,” she says but it sounds like a question.
“You’re not, though. The amygdala gets hijacked during a Violence storm, and then it’s all used up for a little while afterward and can’t do much. You’re drained. You’re out of spoons.”
“Out of hearts and hp,” River adds.
“Sure, if you’re into videogames and D&D. Point is, if you can promise me that you’re not going to try to hurt anyone or pepper up again, I’ll get off you. And we can get our groceries out of the parking lot before someone steals them and we can eat hot soup like reasonable people.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Ella says.
Leanne sighs. “Yeah, no one does. But you were still willing to do it. We started off on the wrong foot here. We are not kidnappers, and this is not a murder van, and if you will just chill out and trust us and possibly help us, we will vaccinate you. If you want to be vaccinated. I can understand how the disease can be a boon if you’re alone in today’s world.”
It’s her use of the word boon that finally gets through to Ella.
This is not how kidnappers talk.
Kidnappers do not offer to vaccinate or not vaccinate you based on your consent.
“Tampa is a leading city for sex trafficking,” Ella starts.