January 1st, 2013
Outside Bonneville, Wyoming
1
"There's a storm coming." Samantha's tone was low. She hadn't forgotten who she was talking to.
Her captor's hard voice lashed out in the cold, Wyoming wind. "Tell us something we don't know. It's rained every day since you geniuses blew us up!"
Flinching, Samantha ducked her head, dirty blonde curls hiding a pale, bruised face full of loathing. Instead of arguing, she poked at their reluctant fire with her once expensive shoe, watching the creepy darkness of the highway overpass around them. The clinking echo of the heavy chain around her ankle made her quit before Melvin could tell her to. Now was a bad time to draw attention.
Samantha had never hated anyone as much as she did the two drunken men sprawled carelessly in lawn chairs just behind her. Warm in their paint-stained overalls and long johns, she shivered miserably in the same torn, reeking office clothes she'd been taken in. She wanted to be alone inside their rusty van, out of the icy wind, and searching for something she could use as a weapon, but the two males liked to wait until she was nearing frostbite before climbing in behind her to take what they wanted.
The wind blew harder, bringing sounds of dogs yapping incessantly in hunger; thin, distant screams; loud bangs they couldn't identify. Sam tried to huddle into a ball that would keep it all out, the thought of sex while there were bodies rotting in cars and on the hard cement all around them, making her stomach lurch.
It was supposed to be Henry's night - the Cruz Painting Company brothers sharing her - but Melvin, the elder, was making shot after shot of Wild Turkey disappear. When he got like this, both Samantha and Henry gave him what he wanted to keep him from getting bent out shape. Melvin was mean and bitter when he was sober, but he was a violent drunk. Instant Dick, she thought, eyeing the vague shapes of farmhouses and fields at the other end of the windy overpass: just add alcohol.
Blackness surrounded them in every direction, not a speck of light except for their tiny fire, and Samantha tried not to think about the horrors she couldn't identify through the dark, gently touching her swollen lip. The two she could see were enough.
"Where we gonna go, Mel? It's all trashed."
Melvin took another long swig from the dirty brown bottle, digging at the filthy crotch under his large stomach.
"Nah, man. Not south. We'll stock up and go to Mexico. Take over like the A-Team."