Mind Prey

whispered.
    “Men are animals,” she said, moving closer.
     
    W HEN SHE WENT to sleep, Lucas, relaxed, warm, moved against her. She snuggled deeper into her pillow, and pushed her butt out against him. The best time to ask her to marry him, he thought, would be now: he was awake, articulate, feeling romantic…and she was sleeping like a baby. He smiled to himself and patted her on the hip, and let his head fall on his pillow.
    He kept the ring in the bottom of his sock drawer, waiting for the right moment. He could feel it there and wondered if it made black sparkles in the dark.

5
    T HE ROOM WAS a concrete-and-stone hole that smelled like rotten potatoes. Four fist-sized openings pierced the top of one wall, too high to see through. The openings reminded Andi of the holes that a child would punch in the top of a Ball jar, to give air to his insect collection.
    A stained double-bed mattress lay in one corner, and the girls slept on it. John Mail had been gone for three hours, by Andi’s watch. When he’d left, the steel door banging behind him, they’d all crouched on the mattress, waiting wide-eyed for his return.
    He hadn’t come back. The fear burning them out, the girls eventually curled up and fell asleep like kittens in a cat box, too exhausted to stay awake. Grace slept badly, groaning and whimpering, Genevieve slept heavily, her mouth open, even snoring at times.
    Andi sat on the cold floor, with her back to the gritty wall, taking inventory for the fiftieth time, trying to find something, anything, that would get them out.
    There was a light socket overhead, with a single sixty-watt bulb and a pull-chain. She hadn’t yet had the courage to turn the light off. A Porta-Potti sat in a corner, smelling faintly of chemical rinse. The portable toilet was meant for small sailboats and campers, and was made of plastic. She could think of no way to use it as a weapon, or as anything other than a toilet. A Coleman cooler sat next to the door, half-full of melting ice and generic strawberry soda. And beside her, on a low plastic table, a game console and a monitor. The console and monitor were plugged into a four-socket power bar, which was plugged into an outlet above the lightbulb.
    And that was all.
    A weapon? Perhaps one of the cans could be used as a club…somehow? Could the cord be used to strangle him?
    No. That was all absurd. Mail was too big, too violent.
    Could you wire the door somehow? Strip the wire out of the cord to the computer, connect it to the door handle?
    Andi knew nothing about electricity—and if all Mail got was a shock, he’d simply turn off the power, and then come down, and…what?
    That was what she couldn’t deal with: what did he want? What would he do?
    He’d obviously planned for this.
    Their cell had once been a root cellar in a farmhouse, a deep hole, well below the frost line, with walls of granite fieldstone and concrete. Mail had knocked out part of an interior wall and had rebuilt it with concrete block to accommodate a steel fire door. The wiring was all new, nothing more than a cord run in from the outside.
    Although the walls were old, except for the part Mail had redone, they were solid: Andi had pushed or kicked at every stone, had probed the interstices with her fingernails. Her hands were raw from it, and she’d found no weaknesses.
    Overhead, between two-by-ten joists, was a plank ceiling. They could reach it by standing on the Porta-Potti, but when they beat on it, the sound was frighteningly dead: Andi feared that if they somehow pulled out a board, they’d find themselves buried underground.
    The door itself was impossible, all steel with a simple slide latch on the outside. No amount of patience with a hairpin would pick the lock—if she’d known how to pick a lock in the first place, which she didn’t.
    She did the inventory again, straining to think of ways out. The chemical in the toilet? If it were harsh enough, perhaps she could throw it in his eyes and slip past him up the stairs?
    He would kill them…
     
    A NDI CLOSED HER eyes and relived the trip out of the Cities.
    They’d rattled around the back of the van like dice in a cup—the cargo space had been stripped and was no more than a steel box, without handholds or comfort. Mail had apparently rigged the steel screen and removed the door handles for the kidnapping.
    When they’d left the school, Mail had dodged from street to street, watching the rearview mirror, then took the van onto