Not that Josh or Gaby could have gotten to the guns even if they wanted to. They were locked inside a cage like animals. The cage was barely three feet long and stretched all the way up to the ceiling, and from one side of the semitrailer to the other. It was padlocked, with the key hanging from a hook next to the gun rack. Josh guessed it was about ten feet away.
Too far. Way too far…
And they weren’t alone in the cage.
There was a woman inside with them. She was blonde and tall and wore a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. She kept to herself, staying to one side of the cage while Josh and Gaby sat on the other. She had a bruised right eye and her lips were cracked. She stared at Josh like a cornered animal, ready to fight them, their captors — anyone. He didn’t want to think about what Folger and the others had done to her.
“Does she have a name?” Josh asked Gaby.
He said it just low enough so the woman couldn’t hear, but of course they were so closely packed into the cage she probably heard anyway.
“She wouldn’t say,” Gaby said. “I asked her a couple of times, but she hasn’t said a word.”
The woman stared back across at them and said nothing.
They’ve hurt her. The way they’ll hurt Gaby…
Over the last three hours, Josh had seen the men coming and going, their presence signaled by loud clanging of shoes against the lowered ramp at the end of the semitrailer. They left the back doors open because there was no point in closing them with Josh and the others locked in the cage. And in the day, it was probably too hot to keep them closed.
He counted six in all, including Folger. There was Del, the big guy with no neck. Then there was Betts, the one with the ugly scar who had been left behind to watch them. The other three were a medium-height guy with a dark complexion, a short man named Hiller, and finally Manley, who had cat-like eyes with slivers of yellow that made Josh shiver just a little bit whenever he caught a glimpse of the man. The others never failed to look back at Gaby, greedily drinking her in. Except for Manley. The man didn’t look back at her, and for some reason that unnerved Josh even more. You didn’t ignore a girl like Gaby. And if you did, you were up to no good.
They had left him his watch, a plain, ten-dollar Citizen that kept decent time. Right now it was 4:04 p.m.
At 4:30 p.m., Betts came over with three potatoes and tossed them into the cage. “Eat up. There ain’t more coming.”
Josh noticed that Betts had a radio clipped to his hip. The man turned and left without another word.
He was famished and grabbed the closest potato. It was baked and hot, and he almost dropped it. Gaby picked up hers while the woman just looked at the remaining potato, then watched Josh and Gaby break off chunks of theirs and feast on them. Apparently this was enough to satisfy her that the potatoes weren’t poisoned, and she picked up the third and final one and devoured the potato in only a few minutes, skin and all.
Josh sat back against the cold metal wall of the semitrailer and listened to his stomach rumbling. Gaby glanced over and almost giggled. Josh smiled back at her.
“We’ll be all right,” he said.
She nodded, but he didn’t think she believed him.
“I’ll get us out of here,” Josh said.
He was surprised by how certain he sounded and realized he meant it. She had put her faith in him, and letting her down, letting these men do things to her, would shatter that trust. He couldn’t allow it. He wouldn’t allow it.
He wondered how he was going to keep his promise, though.
Yeah, that’s the tricky part…
He figured out how he was going to do it — save Gaby, and hopefully himself, too — when he saw how Betts was looking at her when he returned to the semitrailer a few minutes after bringing over the potatoes. Betts swapped out his sweat-drenched T-shirt for a fresh one from a box of clothes stacked in one of the crates. Betts didn’t just show interest in Gaby, it was primal lust.
After Betts left, Josh said, “Do you trust me, Gaby?”
She looked at him, confused by the question. “Of course I do. What kind of question is that?”
“I can get us out of here, but I need you to trust me.”
“What are you going to do?” She looked frightened and he felt bad for drawing it out, but he had to be sure.
“You just have to trust me,” he said. “Do you?”
“Yes,” she said, even though he could hear her voice trembling slightly as she said it. “I trust you, Josh. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have given you Matt’s gun. What are you thinking?”
The other woman was listening, though trying not to make it too obvious.
Josh looked at Gaby carefully. She was still wearing the white cotton undershirt underneath the plaid long-sleeved shirt, along with the khaki shorts and pink sneakers. He thought it was amusing that even at the end of the world, girls still went for pink if there was a choice.
Gaby saw the way he was looking at her and frowned. “Stop staring, Josh, you’re freaking me out.”
“When Betts comes back, can you take off the shirt?”
“What? Why?” She looked almost offended by the suggestion.
“I promise, he’s not going to do anything to you. I’ll make sure of that.”
She stared at him, and he thought he knew what she was thinking: “Can you actually make good on that promise, Josh?”
He thought he could. Or maybe it was just bravado talking, a vain attempt to delude himself into thinking he could do something he had never done before in his life. It was going to be physical and tough, and he might get the shit kicked out of him. It was, essentially, something he had always avoided throughout his life.
But he couldn’t avoid it now, not if he was going to get Gaby out of here.
Josh looked back at her, summoning all the confidence in the world and pushing it onto his face. “I promise. He’s not going to do anything. But I think this is the only way we’re going to get out of here. We have to do it now, before the others come back.”
She didn’t answer him right away, but after a while — twenty seconds, maybe thirty seconds, he wasn’t sure — she finally nodded. “Okay. Now?”
“Not yet. When he comes back. He has to see you taking it off.”
“What if he doesn’t come back?”
“He will.”
She gave him another long, reluctant look, but then finally nodded. “You better be right about this.”
“I am.”
God, I hope I am.
To make this work, he couldn’t be near her, so Josh got up and moved to the other end of the cage and told her to move closer to the center, directly in front of the door. She gave him another odd look, feeling like some kind of meat being dangled in front of a lion, no doubt, but she did as he asked anyway.
The other woman continued to look on while still pretending she wasn’t. Josh wondered what she would do when it went down. Would she leap to her feet to help, or stay still? His plan didn’t really count on her pitching in, but he wasn’t going to say no to it, either. She was a fighter. He knew that much just from looking at her. But would she fight when the time came? Maybe…
He expected Gaby to start protesting at any moment, but she never did. Instead, she sat back against the wall and waited. It was disgusting and insulting to her, he knew, but it had to be this way. Josh knew intimately how men thought. He was one of the species, after all. Okay, maybe not a man yet, but almost a man. Man-ish. Still, he had been around enough of them to know what they said when there were no women around. He felt almost dirty knowing exactly what had been going through Betts’s mind the last time he had glanced over at Gaby.