Then she forced herself to shut the hell up and take stock of the situation. Greg wasn't in the room. She could escape. Her mind was still fuzzy, but there had to be way out of this. One that all of those other doomed women had overlooked.

"Don't," said the woman in the cage next to her. Her voice was a weak rasp.

"Don't what?"

The woman blinked twice, hard, as if to focus. "Scream. It hurts my ears."

"Where are we?"

"Does it matter? Wait it out. It's not as bad once you stop feeling anything."

Olivia began to swing her feet. The cage rocked along with her.

"We've tried that. Tried all of that. Tried everything."

"Well, I'm not going to just sit here."

"Yes, you will. That's all you'll do. Sit here. He'll give you water. But no food. Never any food. Soon we'll be like the others."

"They all starved to death?"

"I think he got mad at the first one. That's what I heard. I wasn't here yet. The rest starved."

"We can escape," Olivia insisted. "If we work together, we can get out of this. There has to be a way."

The woman smiled. "You're cute."

"I'm not giving up."

"You will."

"When will he be back?"

"It doesn't matter."

"When?"

"Nobody knows."

Olivia's cage swung back and forth, missing the woman's by inches. They'd probably been specifically spaced out so that they wouldn't collide. And she couldn't imagine that the setup would be so flimsy that she could yank the cage out of the ceiling by swinging it, but she had to try something. She couldn't just sit here and die.

The cage did not pop free from the ceiling.

After a while she quit swinging.

Then she went back to screaming.

Of course the room was soundproofed. The other women would've thought to shout for help. She was wasting energy.

Her legs were dangling free. When Greg returned, she could lure him close to her, then kick him in the face. Break his nose.

That wouldn't do any good, though. She'd still be trapped in the cage.

She could talk to him. Reason with him. Convince him that she'd never tell anybody, not a soul. She didn't know what the other women had said to him. Maybe she could say something different. Something that would change his mind.

She screamed some more.

"You're hurting my ears," said the other woman, when Olivia finally stopped.

"There has to be a way out of this."

"You'll stop believing that. When he comes back, he'll sit in a chair and watch us. Just watch us. Quietly watch us starve."

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

Aw, shit, thought Charlene as she walked into the back room and saw the new girl leaning against the wall, crying. Was she going to have to ask what was wrong? Try to console her? Should she just quietly step out of the room and hope she hadn't been seen?