With another big breath, I pull at the ropes binding my wrists behind my back. They don’t budge. The more I struggle, the more the rough fibres dig into my skin.
It’s too hot in here. The air stale and thin. The sack over my head makes all these big, panicked breaths a lot harder to bear. A lot more difficult to fully take in. It’s like I’m… I’m suffocating.
Oh god. That’s what’s happening. I can’t breathe. I can’t?—
“Easy, Gracie,” a deep voice says.
Axe.
A heavy load immediately lifts off my chest. He’s alive. Thank god.
“Keep breathing like that, and you’re gonna pass out.”
With a shimmy of my hips, I wiggle across the dirt-covered ground, searching. “Where are you?”
There’s no movement. No response. “Axe?” Still nothing. “Axe.”
“Yeah?” His voice is strained. Low. Like he’s struggling to talk.
“What’s wrong with you?”
There’s a sigh. A grunt of pain. Shuffling. “I… ah. I don’t…” He clears his throat. “What’d they hit me with?”
“Baseball bat.”
“Right.”
I still, listening for him, and when I pinpoint which direction his breathing is coming from, I inch forward until I bump into what feels like a heavy boot. “Help me out of this thing, will you?”
He takes a deep breath, then another, like he’s working up the energy to move. Then he lets out another long, pained grunt, and the shuffling starts up again. He tugs on the sack covering my head, then pulls on the drawstring wrapped around my neck. Eventually, it loosens, and as the fabric is ripped away, a rush of air hits my face.
“Thanks,” I breathe as I rest my head back against the dirt floor.
Axe is half slumped against one of the aluminum walls surrounding us, his eyes closed. Like me, his hands are tied behind his back.
“You all right?” I ask.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m… I’m good. I just, uh. I need a minute.”
With some difficulty, I push up to sitting, and then I scoot back until I’m next to him. I lean against his shoulder and press against him until he’s sitting fully upright.
It’s hard to see in here, the only light coming from the cracks around the massive sliding door on the other side of the buildingand the few clusters of smashed-out windows high above us. But even through all this dark, there’s no mistaking the thick, dried liquid marking the back of his neck. Blood.
“I think you have a concussion,” I say. “You’re bleeding.”
He blinks a few times. “No shit. That’s what happens when you take a fucking bat to the head.”
“Nice to see you’re still your happy self.” I scan the space with a frown. “Know where we are?”
A few more blinks, then he’s studying the room too, the rest of him unmoving as he takes in our surroundings. It feels like we’re in a big, rusted tin box. It’s cavernous. Every breath we take, every small shuffle against the ground ricochets off the walls. The overhead slopes into a low dome, the corroded aluminum panels patchworked into the curved roof held together by big steel trusses. Most looking like they could collapse with little more than a soft breeze.
Axe straightens a little, gathering himself. “It, uh… looks like a small aircraft hangar. One just like it out in Eden Hills that backs up to an old airstrip. I used to use it for”—he clears his throat—“distribution. It’s a junkyard now.” He winces as he twists his neck from side to side. “How far was the drive here? Could you tell? Was I out long?”
I close my eyes and think back. A few erratic turns that had me bracing in the back seat, trying to balance against the side panel so I didn’t fly into the man in the seat next to me. I can’t get it out of my head. How he kept grabbing at me. How I’d kick away. How he made a game out of snatching me from my seat and then letting me fight my way out of his hold.
I shiver.
Wandering fingers sliding between my legs, a cold laugh when I’d scramble away.
