Page 12 of Shatter

And once I'm in Seattle, there's nothing to keep me alive at all.

"Go to hell." I say it to the dark behind my eyelids.

He cuts me.

It doesn't hurt at first.

There's a line of cold down the inside of my arm.

Then heat floods in behind it, and blood runs over my wrist and drips off my fingertips onto the asphalt.

I scream.

Colin claps his hand over my mouth and waits for me to stop.

When I do, he wipes the blade on my apron, folds it, and pockets it.

"We'll finish the conversation in the car." He pries the keys out of my fist, one finger at a time, then my phone from my apron pocket. "It's a long drive. You'll have plenty of time to change your mind."

He stands.

His boots crunch away across the lot toward the dark sedan, unhurried.

A trunk pops open.

Plastic rustles, and then comes the soft zip of cable ties pulled off a bundle.

The lot is so empty I can hear the Coke machine humming outside the laundromat next door.

Move.

Get up.

When I roll onto my stomach, my ribs scream, and I bite my tongue to keep the sound in.

The diner is forty feet away.

I locked it, and the keys are in Colin's pocket.

I start crawling anyway.

One elbow, then the other, my cut arm leaving a dark smear on the asphalt, gravel grinding into my knees through my jeans.

Twenty feet.

Tears run sideways across the bridge of my nose and drip onto the asphalt, and I don't remember starting to cry.

My vision goes gray at the edges and comes back.

The owl in the window isn't lit.

Nobody's inside.

Nobody's coming.

I stop crawling and lie there with my cheek on the ground, panting, my good hand closing around a jagged chunk of broken asphalt the size of my palm.

If he wants me in his trunk, he'll have to drag me.