long gone, careened off the side of the road and into the dark night somewhere.
Behind the divider, she finds a terrified, wild-eyed woman strapped to a gurney just like the one she was tethered to for hours on end. The woman hasn’t seen any of what she just did to the cargo door or the final choice her captor just made, but no doubt, she’s heard all of it. Charlotte expects a frightened struggle when she starts tearing the leather straps free, releasing the woman’s forehead and then her ankles. But the woman goes limp and numb, as if she realizes instantly that no one who wanted to hurt her would try to free her. Not right now. Once she can, the woman sits up, starts pulling on the gag. Charlotte’s afraid this process will require more precision than can be managed in the bouncing cargo area of a speeding truck, but if it’s what the woman wants, who is she to stop her? After what she’s been through, she deserves any release she can get.
Hacking and coughing and clawing at it with her now free hands, the woman spits the gag out; then Charlotte pulls it from her lap and casts it aside so she won’t have to look at the hideous thing anymore. That’s when she sees the body. The other woman is lying in a fetal position on the floor against the metal wall; the gag’s slid across the floor and is now resting against her back. Her lifeless arm is milk pale, and she jostles from the cargo area’s movements with unmistakable deadweight.
Charlotte wants to scream, but instead she runs Luke’s words back and forth through her head until she can breathe again. We’ll do what we can with what we’ve got.
“Are you hurt?” she asks the woman before her, the one she can still save.
“Hurt . . .”
“Injured. Are you physically injured? Can you move?”
The woman shakes her head and swings one leg to the floor as if to prove it.
“What did you do to him?” the woman asks. “He was screaming so loud.”
“He’s gone. He jumped.”
“Are they gonna stop?” Hours of agony are preparing to split the woman’s sanity in two. “Are they ever going to stop?” she wails.
A clanging sound, like a giant rock has hit the underside of the truck. Then another—the clanging of something very large underneath the cargo area. Metal engaging with metal?
Or disengaging?
They’re trying to uncouple from the cargo area, she thinks. They’re trying to cut us loose.
On a major highway, being in a loose trailer would be dangerous because of other traffic, but there’d be enough roadway to recover if they didn’t get struck. Out here on this narrow, winding road, they’ll go plummeting into a ravine, and the only way to protect the woman she came here to save would be to throw her arms around her. Which could also crush her.
Charlotte throws herself against the wall between the cargo area and the passenger cab and drives one arm through it. If she can manage to grab the back of the cab and hold it for a few minutes, she can release it at a time of her choosing, maybe keep the cargo area steady. At the very least, whoever’s driving will realize he can’t cut the cargo area loose so easily. Maybe then they’ll resort to pumping the damn brakes and trying to bail on foot. That’ll give the woman behind her time to recover and the truck time to slow to a stop.
But when she punches her arm through the metal wall, she doesn’t feel open air on the other side like she expected. Instead she feels something slick and warm. She was wrong about how the truck’s built, wrong about her belief that the cargo area was about to be released. There’s no gap between the cargo area’s back wall and the passenger cab at all. She didn’t see the truck from the front as she approached it, and the violent sounds of rocks impacting the underside of the cargo area tricked her into believing it was a different style of truck from the one Cyrus put her in. Thanks to this misunderstanding, she’s just driven her arm straight through someone sitting inside the passenger cab.
She withdraws her arm. It’s covered in thick black blood turning deep red as oxygen hits it. What at first looks like tufts of fabric are actually splinters of human bone pulverized by the quick passage of her fist.