The guy crushing her turned his head and ground out something guttural to the others.
Words in Russian resolved themselves in Sarah’s head.
He’d said, “This is too easy. I’ll take woman to other room. You wait for man.”
Sarah knew better than to admit she understood what they were saying. Books had taught her that information was a weapon.
Instead, she tried to scream through the guy’s hand sealed to her face, “Let me go!Let me go!”
For her screams, the man pinched her nose shut.
No air,no air.
Terror and panic running through her veins consumed all the oxygen in her lungs like a bonfire.
Dark walls fell toward her.
Every muscle fiber in her body fired andyankedas she fought to breathe.
The guy released his thumb from her nose.
Air poured down her throat.
Sarah huffed air, snorting it in as hard as she could to feed the frantic starvation.
He muttered beside her ear, “Be quiet, and I let you breathe.”
Sarah was trying to burst out of her body to get away from him, but she couldn’t let him kill her.
She had to be alive to warn Blaze.
She had to be alive to escape.
The guy was walking backward, dragging her, and she stumbled with her heels and toes on the rugs on the wooden floor to try to stay upright. He dragged her into her own living room and stood just inside the door, his back to the wall and his arms binding her.
No escape for her. She knew that. The cord of her life would be cut there in her house or wherever they took her, and she commended her soul to Jesus and Mary and hoped like hell it had all been enough.
Hours, minutes, nothing mattered. She was ending.
Because she wasn’t worried about staying alive, other options presented themselves.
Sarah closed her eyes, shutting out even the view of her living room.
Her head lolled to the side as her legs collapsed like noodles.
She sucked the energy out of her body, leaving a hundred and sixty pounds of boneless meat.
The guy swore a bunch of Russian words that Sarah had never heard before and juggled her like an enormous jellyfish slipping and squishing in his hands.
He took his hand off her mouth, and Sarah sipped air as she pretended to have fainted.
When she ended up folded in half, hanging over his arm, the guy dropped her on the floor and shoved her over with his foot so she was on her stomach, and then he planted his heavy boot between her shoulder blades.
Even though he was shoving her into the rug with his boot, this was an improvement, Sarah was pretty sure. She could breathe, at least some, although the guy was almost standing on her back.
Play dead.One tactic to survive school shootings was to pretend you were already dead.
The front door was a dozen feet away, but she’d have to unlock the door and then the screen door to run out.
