21 NOVEMBER 1988

She shut the door of the hotel room behind her with a decisive thud, whipping around to pull the curtain aside and peer out of the window at the parking lot to make sure it was still empty.

Margaret then crossed the room and, giving in to the childish urge to be somewhere small and safe, wedged herself into the gap between the bed and the wall, pulling one of her carefully stashed joints out of her bag and lighting it, taking a long drag and leaning back against the wall. She held her breath until the smoke caught at the back of her throat, fighting down the cough and losing the battle — going into a coughing, wheezing fit that had her clutching her chest and gasping for air as the room tilted crazily on its axis. Once she caught her breath, she slumped and let her chin tilt down. She closed her eyes and rubbed her face, trying to calm the panic gnawing at her chest.

She had just spent the better part of the past two days on the road, leaving her tiny northwest Texas town behind and winding up in an even tinier town on the Mexican border. Maybe she would be safe here. Hopefully. Her husband was, put mildly, a piece of work, and she'd finally gotten tired of wondering if this was the day he'd finally snap and kill her — and likely get away with it, being as Sheriff Hawkins was very, very well-liked in town. Well-liked enough that no one ever seemed to notice the cuts and bruises on his quiet little wife, or if they did, they accepted her pat little explanations of clumsiness. She glanced down at the ring of bruises around her forearm and grimaced, then hit the joint again before snubbing it out against the baseboard.

Margaret was so tired. She hadn't slept in two days, but she was terrified she was going to look up and Kenny would be standing over her, and she was hoping that smoking would finally let her sleep. She didn't do it often enough to have any kind of tolerance for it, and she already felt like her hands wanted to float. She knew she needed to get up and throw the deadbolt and chain lock on the door, but movement suddenly seemed like it was a lot more effort than it was worth. She'd get it in a minute.

She closed her eyes for a second…

It was pitch black in the room when she opened them again, and she immediately felt like something was wrong. She couldn't see, the curtains were drawn and it was the middle of the night, but she could hear faint rustling and she could smell at least one other person in the room with her — and that sent her into a full spiral of panic. The last time she'd caught that pungent odor of gunpowder and corpses had been at a gas station over a decade ago.

Something hit the bed next to her, and a rough male voice groaned and swore. Someone was laying on the bed, not four feet from her, and this close she could also smell the distinct reek of deep-set infection and sickness.

"Fuck, Whitey, I can't fuckin' - can't keep moving on like this, brother." The groaner continued, answered by a noncommittal grunt from a different part of the room. Margaret's eyes widened. There were at least two people in here with her.

Whitey.

Her mind flashed to all the newscasts about Otis Driftwood and Baby Firefly escaping recently with a new member of their little band of Rejects. Some guy the papers called The Midnight Wolfman, some kind of relation to Otis.

The lamp clinked on and Margaret blinked rapidly to adjust to the light, then let out a shriek as pain ripped through her scalp — one of them had hold of her hair and they were pulling her out of her little corner and she couldn't do anything but scream and flail, fear blacking out her vision for a second.

"Come on, mama, front and center."

Otis. Otis had her by the hair.

She grunted and yanked back against him, clawing at his wrist, then yelped when he wrenched his arm and yanked her down onto the mattress, over the other one's feet, and dumped her unceremoniously on the floor. The second his grip relaxed, she scrabbled frantically for the door, half running, half crawling. She almost made it, then he was on top of her again, driving a knee into the small of her back and slamming her face against the floor — her mouth flooded with blood and she sputtered, spat, and threw an arm out to try and shove him off of her. He knocked her hand away, gripping her hair and smacking her head into the floor two more times, leaving her dazed and limp, wheezing against the patch of linoleum in front of the door.

Otis' weight lifted from her back and she drifted, trying to regain her senses while the two men — she had no idea what they were doing, she couldn't focus well enough to make sense of their words and movements. The world slowly came back and she took a long, quiet breath, bracing herself to bolt again. Except when she lurched upright, the room tilted and her stomach lurched nastily, leaving her to sink back down to her knees in a cold, nauseous sweat.

Unfortunately, this pulled Otis' attention back over to her. She yelped as he grabbed her shoulder and wrenched over on to her back, vision blurring and head pounding from the sudden movement — and then something snapped in her and she screamed, putting all of her rage and frustration into the noise. She'd laid down and taken years of abuse from Kenny, she'd been spared by this murderer once before, and even though she knew in her gut hat she had a less than zero chance of making it out of this room alive, she was damned if she was going to let him do whatever he wanted to her.

Margaret bucked as Otis dropped down to straddle her belly, teeth snapping at and catching his hand as he tried to grab her arms to pin her down. He swore and backhanded her, then lurched up to straddle her chest, his knees on each of her arms to pin her to the floor so that he could grab her head and wrench her face around to look him in the eye. "Vicious, ain't you?" He laughed, then leaned back long enough to pull a knife out of a sheath strapped to his leg, sending Margaret into a fresh frenzy of flailing and screaming — she managed to bring a knee up into his spine, making the older man grunt. Otis grabbed her by the hair and wrenched her head back, stroking her cheek with his opposite thumb, which put the blade of that knife terrifyingly close to her eye.

Margaret's eyes slid over to it and she let out a low whimper that turned into a sob when Otis smiled down at her. "You should thank me, I made sure this was real good and sharp this mornin'." He drawled, and Margaret sucked in a sharp, frightened breath, then jerked her head away and bucked, clawing desperately at whatever she could. This accomplished nothing, save her losing a chunk of hair to Otis' death grip on her head. He simply smacked her against the floor again, stunning her and making colors dance nauseatingly in her vision.

She was still trying to blink the world back into focus when sheer agony ripped down the side of her face, a burning, searing pain that knocked the wind out of her — and then wrenched a throat-cracking scream out of her when the pain hit again, deeper this time, and there was pulling and Margaret's world went silent except for a high pitched ringing in her ears, everything coming into razor clarity for a split second.

He was cutting her face off. He was cutting her —