“Help! Help me!” Tears streamed down her face, mixing with the blood around her eye. “Heeeeeelp!”
“Save your breath.”
Hanna jumped back and pressed her lower half into the metal cage, moving as far away from the voice as possible.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
“It’s me.” The voice was raw and hoarse, but recognizable.
“Robin? Robin, wha-what happened? Where are we?”
She wiped pink tears from her face and focused. There was another cage beside hers, separated by a gap of two or three feet. Inside, Robin sat cross-legged, her hands on her milky thighs, her head hung low.
She was completely nude.
This wasn’t the confident girl that Hanna had met, plastic gun or not. She’d been reduced to a terrified fifteen-year-old. It dawned on Hanna that she was also naked, and while this came as a surprise—mostly that she hadn’t noticed earlier—it wasn’t as big a deal as it might have been a few days ago.
What could this John do to her that Brett hadn’t already?
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” Robin said softly, not even looking up from her lap.
“I was in the alley and then… did he take us somewhere?”
“I don’t know, Hanna.”
“We have to get out of here,” Hanna said, her desperation mounting. She grabbed the wire cage and rattled it again. The metal flexed and bowed between her fingers but gave no indication that it would break. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know, Hanna. I don’t know what happened. That guy, the guy you tried to trick, he hit me and then…”
“And then what?”
“And then I woke up here,” Robin said dully, finally raising her eyes to look at Hanna.
The fear in the girl’s flat expression heightened Hanna’s terror. Desperate not to be overwhelmed by this emotion, Hanna forced it into the pit of her stomach and focused on something else, something more grounding.
“You tricked me,” she said, clenching her jaw. “You tricked me. That whole thing with those… those assholes… was all a trick, a scam.”
Robin lowered her gaze.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like that… I didn’t know there was going to be a knife. That wasn’t—they weren’t supposed to do that, Hanna.”
“But they did. They pulled a knife on me and—”
“I’m sorry. They were just supposed to scare you, that’s all. Fucking Robbie…”
Hanna closed her eyes for a second and thought back to how terrified she’d been when the boy, Robbie, had slashed at her T-shirt. It seemed like baby games now, after what she had been through—was still going through.
“How could you?”
Robin’s eyes shot up.
“How could I? What do you mean, how could I? You’re a rich girl with a loving family, more money than you can spend in five lifetimes. I have nothing—I live in the streets. A fucking boarded up apartment building with no running water or lights. So, yeah, when we saw you walking along with your fancy-ass purse, we decided to scan you. But the boys were just supposed to scare you a little bit before I came in to save the day.”
“You stole my money.”
“I didn’t steal anything, Hanna. You gave it to me. There’s a difference.”
“But… but you tricked me.”
Robin pressed her lips together.
“It wasn’t about you. It was about me. I needed that money to survive. Anyways, if it weren’t for me, they would have taken it all. The credit cards, the cash, everything.”
Hanna opened her mouth to reply but closed it again.
None of that mattered now. So what if she’d been scammed out of some cash? That paled in comparison to having her head bashed against a dumpster, being stripped naked, and thrown in a cage designed for… for what exactly? It was hardly big enough for a bear but a mountain lion, perhaps?
This, too, seemed unlikely, given that the population of mountain lions in New York City, if that’s indeed where they still were, had to be incredibly low. Or zero. Hanna had read once that coyotes had been sighted in every major city in the United States, including New York.
That was the only animal that made sense.
“Coyotes,” she whispered.
“What?”
Hanna ignored Robin, who was still sitting in place and started to search the cage for weaknesses. She might not have the same strength as a coyote, but they weren’t known for their ability to open doors.
If whoever made this wasn’t—shit.
The cage door was firmly padlocked shut.
“Check your door, see if there’s a lock on it.”
When Robin didn’t move, Hanna repeated her instructions.
“It’s locked,” Robin said, still seated. “I already tried. We’re not getting out of here unless he lets us go.”
Hanna checked her own lock and found that, rusted as it was, there was no way to pry it open.
Unless…
She started to look around the cage, hoping to find a piece of scrap metal or something that could be used to pop the lock. But all she saw and felt was dirt. Dirt and small piles of straw. If it weren’t for the wooden joists above their heads, Hanna would have thought that they were in a cave of some sort. There was also a workbench toward the back of the room, but it was too dark for Hanna to see what tools might be sitting on top of it.
Not that it would matter; if she squeezed her hand through the diamond-shaped openings in the fence, she could reach to her elbow, but that was it.
If anything was sitting more than a foot and a half from her, Hanna wasn’t getting it. The only thing she could grab were two large silver buckets resting just outside the door. Robin had an identical pair by her cage as well, but Hanna couldn’t think of a way that she could use them to break out.
Dejected, she slumped against the cage again, feeling the metal dig into the skin on her lower back.
“I don’t have a loving family,” Hanna said unexpectedly. Robin surprised her with a reply.
“Yeah, well, the only family I had was a mother who left me at the side of the road when I was eleven.”
This shut Hanna up pretty quick. They remained silent for several minutes before the overwhelming sensation of dread became unbearable.
“How long have we been here?” Hanna asked.
“A day, maybe less.”
“And what does he want?”
When Robin didn’t answer, Hanna looked over at her. The girl must have sensed that she was being observed because she shrugged several times.
“Robin? What does this guy want?”
More shrugging.
“What do all men want?” Robin said at last.
A sudden flurry of movement from near the workbench caught Hanna’s attention and she pushed herself even harder against the cage.
“What I want,” a man said as he emerged from the shadows, “is for you to love me. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Chapter 44
Now that he was standing in the light, there was no question that this was the same man who had driven the gray Chevy, the one who had accosted them in the alley.
Only he was different.
In the alley, he’d been wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Those were gone now. In their place was a thick black apron and nothing beneath. The man’s face was different, too. When he’d first pulled over to the curb, Hanna had seen kind features behind the wheel.
Now, the John’s expression was hard.
“Let us out of here,” Hanna begged. “Let us go. We won’t tell anybody.”
The man tilted his head as if Hanna’s request was surprising.
“Tell me you love me,” the man repeated. His voice was almost childlike and didn’t fit his tall and lean frame.
“I’m not telling you shit,” Robin snapped.
Hanna cringed.
A growl came from deep within the man’s throat and he continued forward, eventually dropping down
so that he could be on Robin’s level.
“You will submit,” he said again in his childlike voice. “You will tell me you love me. And then I will show them how good my work can be.”
Them? Who is he talking about? Is he insane?
Unlike Hanna, who wanted to put as much space between her and this man as possible, Robin scooted closer to the front of the cage.
“Fuck you.”
A smile crossed the man’s lips, which quickly vanished when Robin spat in his face.
Hanna gasped, expecting the man to lash out violently like he had in the alley. But he didn’t. He just reached up, calmly wiped his face clean, and then stood. There was a lopsided grin on his face that was somehow more terrifying than any snarl Hanna had ever seen.
“You’re going to tell me you love me,” the John whispered as he backed away.
Hanna couldn’t take her eyes off the man until she lost sight of him in the darkness.
“Where did he go?” she whispered.
Robin didn’t get a chance to answer before the man reappeared, standing directly below the bare bulb. He flicked his wrist, making sure that the light reflected off the long blade clutched in his right hand.
A machete… he’s got a fucking machete. He’s going to chop us up into tiny pieces and put us in those buckets.
“No, please.” Hanna was hyperventilating now, and the metal cage was biting painfully into her flesh. “Please.”
“You will tell me what I want to hear.”
The man flicked the blade once more, then retreated into the shadows. Hanna watched him go, expecting him to head back to his workbench, perhaps to retrieve another implement of torture. Something sharper, more violent, exceedingly sadistic. But the sound that Hanna heard next wasn’t a mace or a cattle prod.
It sounded like the man was heading up a set of stairs that she couldn’t quite see. Her suspicions were confirmed by a door opening and closing.
Hanna, convinced that this was just some sort of trick, a ruse, waited in silence. Time passed—how much, she had no idea.
Minutes, probably, but it could’ve been close to an hour. When she didn’t hear anything except for hers and Robin’s breathing, she finally built up the courage to speak.
“Robin?”
There was no answer.
“Robin, we need to get out of here… we need to get out of here before that psycho comes back! I don’t want to die,” she sobbed. “Oh God, I don’t want to die. Please, help us. Somebody help us. Mom, Dad… anybody?”
Chapter 45
Hanna’s hands ached. Her fingers were raw and her nails torn from hours of trying to stretch, damage, or otherwise destroy the cage that held her.
It was impossible. Hanna had heard about people gaining superhuman strength in life and death situations, and this most definitely qualified, but as of yet, she hadn’t so much as widened even one section of the wire cage.
Robin was either conserving her energy or had simply given up. After the man had left them, she’d assumed a posture similar to Hanna’s when he’d threatened them with the blade: knees to chest, her chin nestled between them.
As her hunger grew, Hanna began to regret her decision to try and break free.
How long has it been since I’ve had something to eat? To drink? she wondered.
Without a window to see the sun set and with only the same constant glow from the bulb overhead, Hanna couldn’t be sure how long she’d been here. Robin had said she thought a day had passed when Hanna had first come to, which felt about right.
But that had been a while ago.
Hanna glanced down at her naked body. Thanks to years of playing soccer, she’d developed muscular legs.
How long would it be before her body started cannibalizing those muscles to survive? A week? Two?
More pressing than that was the fact that Hanna could feel white paste forming on the corners of her lips. Every time she opened her mouth, she heard an audible separation—a tacky smack.
She might be able to survive three, perhaps four weeks, without food, but another day without water and she would lack the strength to even move away from the John when he returned.
And Hanna knew that he would come back.
Tell me you love me. Submit.
Why was he doing this? What the hell was he talking about?
She thought back to what he’d said in the alley.
“You think you can just strut around here, parade yourself, make money that way? And because of that, mom is gonna pick you instead of me? Hmm? Well, what if I made you ugly… what if I made it so that you couldn’t do this, either? Couldn’t sell yourself? Maybe then mom would love me the way she loves you.”
Hanna’s stomach growled.
What did it mean? What did any of this mean?
“I’m hungry,” Hanna said. There was no intention behind these words; they’d just slipped out of her mouth. “I’m hungry and I have to pee.”
Robin grunted something incoherent, the first sign in hours that she was still conscious.
“Robin? Robin, I can’t do this alone. I need you.”
There were tears in Robin’s eyes.
To Hanna, she looked like the eleven-year-old who had been abandoned by her mother, which was strange because she hadn’t known the girl then. How had she survived for so long alone? Surely, she couldn’t have been scamming men at that young an age, could she?
Hanna hated her mother, hated the woman for trying to control her, for not believing her about what Brett had done, that she’d been raped. But Robin was right, at least she knew where her mother was, and the woman had put a roof over her head and food in her belly.
I’m so hungry…
Hanna pictured her mother standing in the doorway of her room, the skirt that she’d worn to Brett’s party draped over her arms.
“There’s dinner if you want it. Don’t let it get cold.”
Hanna sobbed.
Why didn’t I just apologize? Why didn’t I eat the damn dinner? Why—
“Don’t do it, Hanna,” Robin said softly.
“Don’t do what?” Her lips seemed to cling together between each word.
“Whatever you do, don’t tell that psycho you love him.”
Hanna grimaced.
She’s quiet for hours and when I say I’m hungry, that I’m starving, that we’re going to be hacked to bits by a pervert in an apron, she says, don’t tell that psycho you love him? That’s all she has to say?
“I won’t,” Hanna promised. “I won’t.”
She sighed and leaned up against the cage. She was forced to adjust her positioning so that the wires nestled into the grooves they’d already made in her skin. That area was numb.
But maybe I will, she thought. Maybe I’ll tell the John what he wants to hear, and maybe he’ll let us go. I’ll tell him that I love him, that I’ve always loved him, and then he’ll say thank you. I’ll say that mom loves him, too, and that he did a good job, whatever that job was. Then, after opening the cage, he’ll hug me, and I’ll promise never to tell—
The sound of a door opening was nearly deafening in the dirt basement. Exhausted or not, Hanna’s heart began to pound again. The man’s footsteps came next, moving slowly down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, Hanna could make out most of his outline, but then he disappeared into the shadows near the workbench.
Another sound joined their collective breathing.
A squeak, some sort of squirrel or small rodent, perhaps. Hanna’s first thought was that there was a rat near her cage, but she quickly realized that the sound was coming from the workbench.
What the fuck is going on?
The animal sounded larger than a rat, and its squeals grew more intense when the man grunted and raised something above his head. The machete caught the light at the perfect angle and Hanna saw the reflection of the John’s face in the blade seconds before it came crashing down.
He didn’t look like the man in the alley. He didn’t even look
like the man who Robin had spat on.
This man looked feral.
The blade hit something solid, and the squealing immediately stopped. Hanna managed to keep it together even after hearing the sound of something thick and wet start to drip on the dirt ground. But once the tearing started, she lost it.
The first thing out of her mouth was a moan, but this soon transitioned into a pained wail. She didn’t stop even when the man turned and rushed to her cage.
In his hand, he held the headless corpse of a small raccoon. The only way that Hanna could tell what it was amidst the blood and gore was by the striped tail.
“Fuck you!” she screamed. “Fuck you! Let us go!”
Blood still pumped from the raccoon’s neck, coating the John’s arms in blood.
“Tell me you love me,” the man demanded. “And I’ll show you that I can do good work, mama.”
In her entire life, Hanna had never seen or heard something so chilling.
Sobbing, she only saw one way out of this place, this cage.
“I lo—” she began, but Robin cut her off.
“Fuck you, you piece of shit!”
Robin, just tell him, just tell him what he wants to hear, tell him you love him.
The man smiled and then began eviscerating the animal with his bare hands. Hanna’s stomach lurched and she gagged, but she had nothing in her stomach to give up.
The horror only lasted a few seconds, which in and of itself was terrifying, before the man pulled the raccoon’s internal organs free in a single glistening wad. He tossed them into one of the buckets in front of Robin’s cage and the girl jumped back, but she wasn’t fast enough.
Blood splattered her feet and calves.
“Tell me you love me,” the man said, for what felt like the hundredth time. “Submit and tell me you love me.”
Chapter 46
It was the smell, Hanna realized, that made the basement unbearable. Not the cage, not the lack of windows, but the pervasive cupric odor of blood and the underlying funk of organ meat.
There was the hunger, too; despite the horrible smell, Hanna’s hunger hadn’t completely subsided. Robin, even though she was thinner than Hanna, was clearly accustomed to going without and seemed less bothered by the lack of food. Both were sitting with their knees to their chests, but Hanna was doing this to try and keep her stomach as small as possible, while Robin appeared to be trying to conserve her energy.
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