KIMBRA

When the gunshots quieted, Kimbra raised her head. She heard footsteps somewhere nearby, heard silence. Move.

Kimbra blinked at the red light of the black camper, the things on the wall, the bare kitchen. Browder was slumped on the ground near a black metal refrigerator with a sharp corner on its door. He didn’t appear to be breathing.

From a few feet away Joel whispered, “Do you see a key to these cuffs on him?”

She turned back and saw Joel seated, his ankles cuffed to hooks in the floor, his hands pressed to his shoulder as something black and bright seeped through. “What did he do to you?” she said.

“No keys?”

She ran her eye over Browder’s body and didn’t see anything useful on him. “I think he’s dead.”

Joel said weakly, “That pipe looks loose.”

Kimbra turned away from Browder’s corpse and followed Joel’s eyes up the kitchen’s wall. Her hands had been cuffed—so tightly her fingers were numb—around a rusted pipe that ran between two exposed joists. Kimbra lifted her arms to situate herself well back on her ass. She pulled her legs up, easing them past Browder’s slack body, and braced a foot against the wall’s joists.

She jerked the chain of her cuffs against the pipe and felt it shift, loose in its casing. Dry rot, she thought. Her father would have just the fix.

“Try it again,” Joel said in a low voice. “I think you can pull that pipe loose.”

She pulled again. The pipe did, indeed, move a little.

From behind the trailer’s back wall she heard a man’s voice.

Hurry.

Joel was right: with enough leverage, she might just be able to wrench the pipe from the wall and free herself, though her numb fingers refused to help her. She listened to the way the chain of the cuffs click-clacked against the rusty metal and grimaced. This wasn’t going to be pleasant.

She braced her other foot against a joist, took a long breath, bit her lip. She pushed with her legs and pulled against the pipe with the cuffs’ chain and choked on a squeal. A sharp bite of metal on her wrist, a sudden cold ache in the bone. This, she thought, must be what it’s like to use a rowing machine in hell.

When she stopped to catch her breath, Joel said behind her, “You’ve got this. Please.”

“Easy for you to say,” she said through a gasp. Kimbra saw blood beading around the tight cuffs. She braced her legs again. Pulled.

She’d never felt pain like this before. She pulled until she thought her arms would tear free of her shoulders, pulled until she thought every bone in her wrists had been ground to powder. She bit the top hem of her Bisonette’s singlet and screamed into her teeth.

The pipe shifted an inch. Another. She heard a crack, a low moan of old wood and then, in a shower of splinters and dust, the pipe snapped free of its casing and came plummeting toward her face.