She broke off, exhaling hard, the sound full of fear.
Dryden thought he heard one last syllable from the dispatcher, and then the girl began screaming, high and terrified.
“We didn’t call anyone! We didn’t call anyone! I promise, it’s okay! We didn’t call anyone!”
For a moment it sounded like the girl was somehow talking and screaming at the same time. Then Dryden realized what he was actually hearing: There was another girl inside the trailer. Maybe several.
Even as he registered that fact, a man began shouting over the girls. “What did you do? What the fuck did you do?”
Next to Dryden in the dark, Claire swore and broke into a full sprint. Dryden matched her. Though Claire had told him nothing about the people in the trailer, the key points of the situation were as clearly defined as razorwire tips.
The man’s screaming became almost indiscernible over the girls’ cries, but the phrase kill you stuck out more than once. The man’s shrieks sounded more animal than human. That was the last thought that crossed Dryden’s mind before the ground dropped out from under him.
His feet had been pounding the desert surface, and suddenly one of them came down on empty space. He pitched forward and threw his arms ahead of him, aware of Claire doing the same thing to his left. For a sickening half second he imagined there was nothing beneath him but a hundred-foot drop, and then one knee smashed hard against a metal edge and pain exploded through his leg. His hands landed amid trash bags and scattered pieces of plastic—broken casings of machinery and who knew what else. He heard Claire crash down into similar debris, five feet away, already fighting to climb up the other side of the trench they’d fallen in—an arroyo strewn with garbage.
Dryden moved his leg and found it wasn’t injured. He’d banged the kneecap badly, but nothing was broken.
In the trailer, the man’s screams continued. “—gonna fucking kill you, do you understand that?”
Dryden was still holding the Beretta Claire had given him. With his free hand he pushed himself upright and scrambled toward the far side of the arroyo—
And found himself yanked to a halt by his other leg.
The calf of his jeans was hung up on something. Some jagged metal corner that’d pierced the fabric and now held like a barbed hook.
Five feet away, Claire was struggling to move, too. Dryden could hear something like rusted bedsprings warping and straining under her exertion, the whole mass shifting amid clutter as she fought to free herself.
Inside the trailer, the man’s voice had taken on a lunatic chanting quality—“Kill you … kill you…”—as if he were speaking only to himself now. There came a wooden banging noise over the audio: cabinet doors being flung open, it sounded like, one after the next. Cans and boxes being shoved aside in a mad search for something.
Dryden yanked his trapped leg toward himself with all his force, meaning to rip the fabric free. It was no good; the trash simply shifted beneath him, giving him no purchase from which to pull.
“Kill you … kill you … HERE!”
The slamming of the cabinet doors ceased, along with the voice. All that followed was the sound of the girls screaming.
Dryden jammed the pistol into his waistband and groped in the darkness for any solid handhold. One elbow thumped lightly against a metal surface, the sound of the impact blunt and reverberant. A washer or dryer, half-sunk into the dirt wall of the arroyo. He wrapped both his hands around an edge of the appliance, as if it were the lip of a cliff he meant to scale. He wrenched his body upward and felt the jean fabric tear and give way. Both legs came up fast; he drew them up to his chest, braced his feet where his hands had been, and exploded from the crouch like a runner out of the blocks. Half a second later he was on the surface again, landing on all fours, coming up and sprinting as fast as his body could move.
One hundred yards to the trailer.
Seventy-five.
Fifty.
“Want to see what you get?” the man inside screamed. “This is what you fucking get!”
Dryden drew the Beretta and covered the last fifty yards in an adrenalized surge that felt more like flying than running.
There was a low wooden porch in front of the trailer’s door—two steps and a shallow platform. The door was hinged to swing outward, but it was also rusted and damn near falling off its frame. Dryden vaulted onto the porch without slowing and hit the door with his shoulder; the cheap frame buckled and the door burst inward, and just like that he was inside, the details of the space coming at him all at once.
A big steel cage with four young girls in it, screaming and holding on to each other.