22 NOVEMBER 1988

1:27 PM

Margaret didn't know how long it had been since Otis had finally gotten bored and left her bleeding on the bathroom floor. Long enough that the chill of the tiles had creeped into her bones and set her to shivering wildly, aggravating the cuts and bruises that felt like they took up every square inch of her body.

She curled into a tight ball and sobbed, arms crossed and fingers dug in to her biceps so hard that she knew her nails would leave bloody little half-moons, but she barely felt it over everything else. Even just shrimping up on the floor shot agony up her body, centered in between her legs and in her lower belly. He'd done things with that knife that she didn't know if she'd be able to come back from.

There was a part of her that couldn't help but take a mental inventory of all of her various injuries even as the bigger part of her couldn't stop crying, couldn't stop the shivers that rattled her teeth and made her limbs shudder like she'd grabbed hold of a live wire. At least two heavily bruised, if not broken, ribs, the damage done to her face, cuts and welts and bites everywhere else. There was a long cut running up her inner thigh that still hadn't stopped oozing blood. That was a concern, but at least it was oozing. Arterial spray would've — well, she would've been dead about an hour ago. As far as internal damage… she didn't want to think about that.

The tears eventually ran out and she drifted, vision blurred around the edges. The world had gone soft and fuzzy and nothing felt quite real. She realized this wasn't a good sign, but she couldn't quite bring herself to care. That was, until the silence caught her attention. She froze, straining her ears to listen for movement from the other room, and heard nothing.

She had to get up.

The first attempt ended poorly, she slipped in a puddle of her own blood and landed hard on her hip, the impact reverberating up her body. She had to bite down on her fist to keep the pained noise from coming out of her throat, and she sat and rocked in place for a moment before trying again, this time crawling over to the vanity and using it to haul herself upright.

She very, very pointedly did not look in the mirror.

It was a quick lurch over to grab the door frame and swing around it, and she brought herself up short at the sight that greeted her. Foxy was still unconscious, his breathing was a steady, if labored rasp. Otis was slouched down as far as he could get in the chair without sliding on to the floor, legs kicked out in front of him, knife resting on his belly, with his chin resting on his chest. This close, she could hear him snoring quietly. Margaret blinked, momentarily struck stupid by this stroke of luck. Her eyes flicked to the door and she got hit with a jolt of adrenaline, heart racing and spine straightening. She could do this. She could.

She crept across the room, using the wall and dresser to steady herself, not daring to breathe when she had to step over Otis' feet. She had just gotten to the door when Otis coughed and shifted behind her, and she froze, heart crawling up into her throat. Margaret peered over her shoulder, one hand on the chain lock and the other on the door knob, and relaxed fractionally when she realized he'd merely shifted in his sleep.

She took two steadying breaths and undid the locks as quietly as she could, then she slipped out of the room.

Once outside, any semblance of calm left her and she bolted, barefoot and naked across the parking lot, unheeding of the rough gravel under her feet. Her breath was ragged and painful in her lungs, rasping in great heaves as she slammed bodily into the glass door of the front office, jerking on the door and letting out a nearly inhuman wail when the door did nothing but rattle in its frame. Locked. She screamed, full throated and raw, and pounded her fists against the glass. Movement in the building caught her eye and she redoubled her efforts, practically bouncing up and down with the need for this person to just unlock the door and let her in.

The lock turned and clicked, and the door opened and Margaret all but fell on the desk clerk. He was a scruffy boy, no older than twenty, and it was clear by his reaction that this was far more than he'd bargained for when signing up for a summer job riding a desk. She could see the whites all the way around his eyes, see his mouth moving but she couldn't process what he was saying, she was too frantic, needed him to listen to her too badly to care about what he was saying.

"Please! They're here, they're here, they're here, they'll kill us, please, please, please call someone! Call the cops! Please!" She was begging, babbling, and the kid just stared at her, bewildered. So she shoved him, putting as much effort into it as she could. "Phone! I need your fucking phone! Move it! We are going to die!"

He grabbed her by the upper arms, both warding her away from him and trying to steady her. "Lady, lady, it's okay, we'll call the cops, come on, it's just over —" The kid's head snapped backwards in a spray of blood and bone.

Margaret couldn't do anything but stare at the little hole in his forehead as he dropped. Everything was muffled except for a high pitched ringing in her ears. It took her precious seconds to realize what had just happened. Seconds too long. She started to drop to her knees, instinct taking over, she reached to take the kid's pulse — pointless, useless, habit — and then screamed when an arm hooked around her throat and hauled her up and flush against her attacker. She caught the movement of long gray hair out of the corner of her eye. Otis.

"No," she gasped. "No, no, no, no, nononononononono — let me go, let go, let go!" She choked when Otis's arm tightened around her throat and abruptly cut off her air. Her hands came up of their own accord and clawed at his arm, nails hooking into the scabs of the healing slash wounds on his forearm. Then the butt of his pistol slammed into the side of her head.

21 NOVEMBER 1988

5:42 PM

When she opened her eyes, it was to pitch darkness. She was balled up and couldn't fully stretch out in any direction, and wherever she was, she was surrounded by a thrumming, vibrating rumble. Her breathing sped up and she tried to reach, to feel around and see if she could make sense of anything, only to find that her hands and feet were bound and connected by a length of rope, so even if she wasn't confined by her current surroundings, she wouldn't have been able to stretch out. At least her hands were in front of her instead of behind her back.

The thrum and rumble slowed, and she became aware of a sense of motion right as there was the subtle jerk of coming to a stop, and her breath caught in her throat.

She was in the trunk of a car.

She had no idea where she was. She didn't know what day it was, what time. So she did the only thing she could think to do, since she wasn't gagged.

Margaret screamed bloody murder, hoping that someone was walking by since the car was still stopped. Hoping someone heard her. Unfortunately, what she heard in response was a muffled swear and the clank and thunk of the door opening and closing. The trunk popped open and she was blinded by the afternoon sun glaring directly in her eyes, and she cringed away from it — only to be yanked halfway out of the trunk by her hair, Otis blocking the sun out and leaning down into her face.

"If you don't shut the fuck up, I'm gonna blow your fuckin' brains out of your head, do you understand me?" He snarled down at her, teeth bared, and shook her violently by the grip in her hair. Margaret's stomach churned as he aggravated what had to be one hell of a concussion by this point, and then everything started melting together and she was gone again.

21 NOVEMBER 1988

11:23 PM

Margaret groaned as she struggled back into consciousness again. She blinked and squinted, staring at Otis looming above her, so blurred that there might as well have been six of him. Then he straddled her, and his weight settling on her already-abused ribs snapped her into absolute awareness in the span of a second. She gasped in pain and reached up to shove him off of her, but her hands wouldn't obey her. They were under him, still tied. He stilled her wriggling with a quick cuff to the injured side of her face, grinning at the wail of pain he got for his efforts. Then he grabbed her by the lower half of her face and pinned her head in place, pulling his buck knife from the sheath on his leg.

She panicked the second she saw the blade, screams and protests muffled against his palm, and her fear intensified when he started chuckling, a giddy, demented noise.

"Yeah, mama, you remember this, don't you?" He flipped his grip on the blade, then pressed the flat of it against her cheek, with the point less than an inch from her eye. Margaret froze, not even breathing.

"Now, me and my brother had ourselves a little talk while you were out, seems he's taken a bit of a shine to you. So you're gonna be stayin' with us for a while. So we're gonna talk about the rules. They're real simple, sugar. You behave, you keep helpin' my brother, you don't go and fuck anything up for us, and you get rewarded — you live. You keep all your pieces. You try to run? Try to call attention to us or fuck us over? Mama, I'll make you fuckin' wish you were dead." He'd leaned closer and closer as he spoke, by the end of it he was talking with his mouth brushing against hers. "You fucked up today. No rewards for that."

Margaret didn't even have time to inhale before his knife-hand jerked and then she couldn't see out of her right eye. She had a split second of befuddlement over what happened, why she couldn't see, and then the pain slammed into her. She screamed, back arching hard enough that Otis was forced to rise up on his knees or be unseated, and she slammed her head back against the floor.

The pain was indescribable, something electric and biting cold but searing hot, her nerves unable to process the trauma appropriately, giving her every reaction they could. And somewhere in the middle of it, she became aware of Otis's mouth on hers in a wet, messy, biting kiss. She gagged, as much from the pain as from revulsion, and his mouth was gone in an instant, followed quickly by the pressure of his whole body as he stood and walked away from her, leaving her to pant and keen on the floor.

She laid there, dizzy and nauseous and drenched in a cold, sickly sweat. It felt like she'd stepped outside of herself in that moment, cataloguing her body's reactions with a detached, clinical interest. Concussion on top of a concussion on top of a concussion at this point, and she was quickly sinking into full-blown shock. Heart going too fast and hyperventilating, vision going dark, and…

Gone.