wriggling my arms around, seeing if there was any leeway in my bindings, but there wasn’t. I tried to fit my body through the circle of my bound arms so at least I could get my hands in front of me, but there wasn’t a whole lot of room to maneuver, and my injuries seriously hampered my efforts. I forced myself to lie still for a moment, sucking in deep breaths, reminding myself my life might depend on me staying as calm and rational as possible under the circumstances.
If I wanted to survive this encounter—or at least survive this encounter in a manner that didn’t make me wish I hadn’t—I had to get free. I could try to position myself so I could give my attacker a kick to the face with my bound legs when he opened the trunk, but if I wasn’t able to run for it, that would only delay the inevitable. I’d heard that escaping duct tape wasn’t all that hard, but I wasn’t sure I believed it, and I didn’t know any tricky methods to accomplish it. The best I could do was try to wriggle my hands and wrists until the tape either broke or stretched, or until I somehow had enough space to get my hands through.
There wasn’t a whole lot of wiggle room at first, that was for sure. I was painfully aware of the passage of time, painfully aware that every second I spent struggling, we were closer to wherever my attacker planned to take me to finish things. Panic kept trying to take over my brain, and though it was cold in the trunk, I was sweating from a combination of exertion and terror.
The sweat worked to my advantage, giving my wrists a little lubrication as I twisted and pulled and writhed, trying to find a way out. I definitely had a little more freedom of movement now than I’d had when I first started, and I seized on to that tiny hint of success to fuel my efforts to keep trying.
Those efforts were complicated by the fact that my attacker was a terrible driver. The car lurched whenever he hit the brakes, and he took every corner just a little too fast. Having no way to brace myself, I was thrown around the trunk like a sack of groceries, and the repeated, jarring impacts weren’t doing my head a whole lot of good. It didn’t help that the damn shovel was getting tossed around, too. I landed on it—or it landed on me—more than once. I tried to push it out of the way, trying to make sure the metal blade wouldn’t come into contact with my head, but there wasn’t anywhere to move it to.
I didn’t know how much time had passed—it seemed like some weird combination of forever and not long enough—before I started to feel like I had a chance of getting out of the duct tape after all. The car had stopped doing so much starting, stopping, and turning, and I figured that meant we were on a highway somewhere. The steadiness meant that I didn’t keep losing my progress every time I was tossed around, and I had slipped one hand up and one hand down so that only the ball of my thumb was holding me in. If I could just get that big part of my thumb out, I would be free, and the shovel would become my best friend. I almost grinned thinking about the look on my attacker’s face when he opened the trunk, expecting to see a helpless, bound female, and instead found a heavy metal shovel coming at his face.
My thumb was coming free millimeter by millimeter, and I knew that at any moment now it would slip all the way through the tape, and I would be out.
Suddenly, a car horn blared from way too close.
Even from the trunk, I could hear my attacker’s shouted curse as he stomped the brake pedal. Tires shrieked in protest, and I could tell the idiot at the wheel didn’t know to pump the brakes, because we were skidding wildly.
I slammed into the side of the trunk, hitting it with my forehead while the shovel thunked into me from behind.
More shrieking tires, more frantic blaring of horns. And then, impact.
I can only guess at exactly what happened next, because the sound of the impact is the last thing I remember of the accident. I think I took another blow or two