When Ali’s eyes blinked open again, more time had passed, although she couldn’t guess how much. She noticed that the darkness wasn’t as complete as it had seemed before. Her moving prison was suffused in a strange green glow. Did that mean it was night? She didn’t know. Some time ago, long before she found herself locked in this prison, it had been morning. She had been somewhere-Phoenix, maybe? — and on her way to see someone, driving under a clear blue sky. She remembered being somewhere that had seemed like a bar, and a guy with a mustache who had been angry about something. Maybe he was the one who had locked her in here. Maybe he was the one who was driving her God knows where.
She remembered someone else-had that been earlier than the bar or later? She didn’t know. A woman who seemed to be walking away from Ali, striding off across a parking lot. Concentrating, Ali could almost sort out the woman’s features but not her name. What was it? Susan, maybe, or Sally or Cynthia? Whatever her name was, part of the time she had been scared and part of the time angry, but she was worried about someone else. Her child, a son. The kid was in some kind of trouble-trouble that had something to do with a box. Suddenly, for no reason Ali could imagine, the lyrics to a song from Fiorello! were running unchecked through her head:
A little tin box
A little tin box
That a little tin key unlocks.
What was that all about? As the song went back out of her head, Ali realized she was no longer hearing the roar of traffic from outside. Yes, there were occasional vehicles coming and going, but they sounded more like cars than trucks. There was pavement under the tires, but they were no longer traveling on a freeway. They were on a less traveled road.
As Ali attempted to assemble the pieces, her heart filled with dread: They were on a less traveled road to some deserted corner of the desert. It might be night. She was being driven there by someone evil who, for reasons she didn’t understand, had locked her in a trunk. When they got wherever they were going, she was going to die, because she remembered that much. That was what had happened to the other woman, the one in the trunk, and this was the same thing. The person driving the car had killed that other woman-what was her name? Jan. Gina. Jill. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t dredge it up.
This time, much as she wanted to, Ali didn’t allow herself to fall back asleep. She willed herself to fight through the mental fog-to remember whatever it was that she didn’t want to forget. She twisted her cramping body and managed to free the arm that had been trapped. As circulation returned to her aching limb, Ali used the painful waves of needles and pins as a reminder that she was alive.
The car turned sharply to the right, thumping off the pavement and onto something much rougher. A dirt track, maybe? If that was the case, they were probably getting closer to stopping, getting closer to the end-of everything she held dear.
Her mind was filled with an endless parade of folks she’d never see again if she were dead. These were the beloved people she had left behind that day, or even the day before, without holding them close and saying a proper goodbye. B., of course, and then her parents; Chris and Athena; Colin and Colleen. It pained her to think that her grandchildren most likely wouldn’t remember anything at all about her except that she had been hauled off in a trunk and murdered. And then there was Leland Brooks. What would happen to him?
It was remembering all those people that did the trick, that made her want to go on living. That made her refuse to give up.
“I may die,” Ali Reynolds said aloud in the moving darkness, “but I sure as hell won’t go out without a fight!”