“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 now. 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 Darby Thorne.
Her mind wandered now, 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, awakening from surgery, about to learn that her daughter had been randomly murdered at a rest stop two hundred miles away from—
No.
She fought it.
No, no, no—
She held onto this, onto 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the plastic airtight against her open mouth, so it was contracted between her front teeth like bubble gum, just a thin, withdrawn centimeter—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 backwards, 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 inhaling 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 backwards 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. 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, leaving a ceramic chip. 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.
Just like that.
She was gone.
Ashley Garver was suddenly alone in the restroom. He staggered upright, nearly slipping on the bloodstained Ziploc bag.
It didn’t matter, he realized, slicking his hair back with a palm, catching his breath. He’d assigned Lars outside the back wall, by the stacked picnic tables, for this very situation. His brother, armed with that trusty Beretta Cougar, was the backup. Darby had escaped his kill zone in the restroom, yes, but in doing so she’d practically dropped herself into Lars’s arms, and now she was be too weak to effectively fight back—
The restroom door banged open behind him. He whirled, expecting to see the befuddled face of Ed, here to investigate the racket, and he already had a story prepared — I slipped on the wet floor, I think I hit my head — only it wasn’t Ed standing there in the doorway.
It was Lars.
Ashley kicked the plastic bag. “Oh, come on.”
“You sounded like you, ah, needed help—”
“Yes. I needed you out there.”
“Oh—”
“Out there.” Ashley pointed furiously. “Outside, not inside.”
Lars’s eyes widened, darting from his big brother to the empty window. He realized what he’d done, what he’d allowed to happen, and his face crumpled and reddened with sloppy tears: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
Ashley kissed him on the lips.
“Focus, baby brother.” He slapped his cheek. “The parking lot. That’s where she’s running, right now.”
He hoped he could still run, too. His lower back throbbed where the redhead had slammed him into the porcelain sink. And as he collected his senses, he noticed something else. A sudden lightness in his right jeans pocket.
His lanyard was gone.
“And . . . the bitch took our keys.”
*
Darby tumbled down the stacked picnic tables, landing hard. She dropped Ashley’s keys in the snow but recovered them, clambering upright.
The red lanyard had become hooked around her thumb in the scuffle. Pure luck, really. When she’d charged him into the sink and broken free, the payload of chattering keys came with her. Now she had them. And he didn’t.
They jingled in her palm. A half-dozen mismatched keys, and a black thumb drive. She stuffed the whole handful into her pocket as a new plan took shape.
What’s better than running for help?
Stealing the abductors’ van and driving for help.
With Jay inside.