No Exit by Taylor Adams 2

“That’s true, Darbs,” Ashley interjected. “But I can hurt
you.”
Yeah? She wanted to say. You have half an hour, asshole.
She desperately hoped thirty minutes was a realistic
estimate for when the police would arrive here, and not just a
dispatcher’s wild guess. Between the jackknifed semi and the
blizzard, there were a lot of possible complications that might
not be visible from an alert desk inside a warm sheriff’s station
somewhere. What if it wasn’t thirty minutes, but forty? An
hour? Two hours?
Ashley groped her as she walked. The nail gun prodding
her backbone, his fingers exploring her pockets, front and
back. Her legs. The sleeves of her hoodie. “Just making sure,”
he breathed down her neck.
He’d been searching for his keys.
The only thing keeping me alive right now is that stupid
keychain. She imagined those keys now, resting in the snow
outside the restroom window where they’d landed. Slowly
vanishing, one snowflake at a time.
“You should just tell me now what you did with them,” he
whispered. “It’ll be so much easier for both of us.”
For a long moment as they walked, Darby didn’t quite
grasp what he meant by that. Then the realization came to her
slowly, like a great shape emerging from the depths, taking
monstrous form.
When they got back inside the visitor center, Ashley was
going to torture her. This was a certainty. He would give her a
yellow card, or a red card, or worse, until she confessed the
keychain’s location. And the second she did, he’d kill her. She
felt her heartbeat hitch in her chest, like a trapped animal. She
considered running, but he’d just nail-gun her in the back. And
he was far too strong to fight.
The rest area came closer, taking form in the moonlight. It
looked falsely serene, like a model inside a snow globe. She
saw the cars — their Astro, her Honda, the buried dumpster