Ransom X

  Chapter 29 Escape Plan

  Laura cowered in the middle of her living space. She had moved from sleeping on the squeaky cot to the center of the floor. There, under the sheets, she hid her head and upper body under three layers of sheets, each doubled over twice. Her legs protruded from the bundle, naked and pale. Blue watched through the closed circuit TV monitor, as the head shook from side to side in a rhythmic “no” gesture. He marked it down to a control phase that she was going through. An effort to dictate the terms, even if they were only the smallest ones, of her daily routine. As an experiment, on the second day of this behavior, he’d turned down the heat in the dead of night. Her legs had turned a silvery blue, but she did not rise and cover herself in the blankets, which were stacked in the corner of the room. She hadn’t touched them since their delivery.

  Blade tapped on the screen where the shape of her head skimming underneath the sheets moved back and forth. He raised his voice to Mac who sat across the hall in the rec room. “Has anyone requested that we take a major whiz on that pretty copper’s face?”

  Mac replied “hundreds.”

  Blue licked his forefinger then again smeared the screen. “Get the boys together.”

  Mac turned “It’s three in the morning –” a glance across the room at Blue told Mac that arguing was the last thing he wanted to involve himself in. “I’m going.” He walked out of the room passing a sign, exit to cabins.

  Blue whispered to the screen, “no means yes – you little cock tease.”

  Laura kept her head under the sheets, tented beneath the layers of white cotton. She had a coveted secret. The sliver of wood lifted from the floor when she had scuffled with Blue had exposed a thin crack leading to the outside. By gently scuffing her front teeth, she’d opened up enough of a gap to see the ground beneath the raised trailer.

  She could tell when it got dark, and when it was getting light. This might not seem like a lot, but Laura knew that her next escape would be her last chance, and her only advantage was if she could time it under the cloak of night.

  Being seen wasn’t the only obstacle in a clean getaway. Blue kept a trio of Rottweilers in one of the structures that she passed when Blue escorted her back and forth between her trailer and the studio. A squeaky hinged door was the only thing that separated the snarling pack from the civilized world and other than an obvious fear of their master, they displayed a consistent hostility equal to the expectations of their breed – she had heard them each time charging out onto the compound at the first sound of movement.

  Add to that the fact that the unknown geography around her cage beyond the few certainties that she had discerned – clues like the sound of dissimilar doors opening and shutting in the distance meant that there were a number of structures, the complete lack of mechanical noises, no cars, no trains, gave her the indication that she was somewhere truly remote, but not so far away as to need a generator for electricity. There was no concrete under foot when she walked between buildings. The dirt that she squeezed between her toes and studied carefully under the sheet was dry and compacted like the area between buildings that used to be a parking lot or maybe a well-traveled footpath. Blue was careful not to give her the briefest peek at the world around her. There was no certainty that any cover other than darkness would hide her when she made her run. She could wander out in the middle of a desert, or on top of a mountain – or the worst option of all – she could stay.

  Laura rubbed her teeth obsessively against the wood slit on the floor. A little more of an opening, and she’d be able to tell the color of the sunlight, and the color would identify dawn and sundown. Then, some day, they’d come for her with the fullness of night in front of her, and she’d slip into the blackness like the blankets they’d stacked in the corner. Clean, warm and safe.