Atlanta skids to a stop—but there, coming up fast behind her, is Skank. Doing the sociopathic adult version of running with scissors: sprinting with switchblade. Look on her face says she wants to cut Atlanta open and eat her heart.

It’s fight or flight. But Atlanta doesn’t have anything—no gun, no mace, no baton.

Her body makes the choice for her. She turns and bolts through the trees, the Skank hot on her tail.

One question remains unanswered:

Where’s Mitchell?

She crashes through the tree line on the other side. Sees the road ahead. Jumps a soggy ditch, trips on a drainpipe, lands hard on her knee—the asphalt tears through her jeans like they’re tissue paper, and pain blooms bright in her leg.

Atlanta leaps forward, can’t care about her knee—she turns and starts to run down the hill, the pines and oaks rising up on each side of her.

It’s then that she hears the gunning of an engine.

It’s then that she finds out just where Mitchell Erickson’s been.

The Lexus comes barreling up the hill, a bloodred flash of luxury steel, and it cuts hard on the brakes—the car drifts sideways, blocking the road and her path.

Atlanta turns to go the other way—up the hill instead of down—but here comes Skank. Grin cruel and sharp, like the knife in her hand.

Back into the woods, Atlanta thinks, and she goes to leap over the ditch once more, but she doesn’t make it, and again she falls—hands forward into the ditch, into the muck, and then Skank has her feet and is pulling her out. Her fingers scrabble against asphalt as Skank drags her onto the road. Two of her fingernails break, one after the other.

Skank turns Atlanta over, presses the knife against her throat. Atlanta feels warmth and wetness creep down her neck and along her collarbone: blood.

“Wait!” Mitchell says, and for a moment Atlanta thinks, He knows this is going too far and he’s offering me a reprieve, maybe I should start believing in God after all because I sure do need to thank somebody for this, but that’s not what’s happening, not at all.

Instead he throws Skank a black backpack. “Put that over her head.”

Atlanta resists. Thrashes. Tries to throw a punch at Skank’s head.

Skank turns to let her shoulder take the hit, then she returns with one of her own. A sharp pop against Atlanta’s nose does her a world of hurt: she sees a bright firework flash of stars and feels her head snap hard against the road. Tears well up and drag the world behind a curtain of bleeding colors and blurring shapes.

Hands twisted behind her back. Wrists bound up with duct tape. Mouth, too.