When the Dark Wins

More tugging at her right arm, and then the sound of cloth ripping. August yanked the sleeve away while she humped at the ground, straining without effect to right herself up and out of his hold. When Buckeye felt the fabric threading beneath her forearms, she went feral.

“Fuck you! No!” She bucked like he’d struck her with lightning. “They ain’t ever getting’ their money! I ain’t ever gonna have it! Fucking pig!”

“Ain’t nobody wants money from you, woman.” He ignored her writhing, voice resolute while he finished the binding. What was left of her shirtsleeve cinched down tight, and she felt him tie off a knot.

“So what?” Buckeye seethed. “They just gonna have me killed then? One of their little shows? Make a fucking example?”

A fist was in her hair. She jerked useless arms against the ties. “Listen,” he said, giving a sharp tug for punctuation, “you ain’t getting’ out of this. Y’hear? You’re still drugged up and I can run faster’n you. Now I’m gonna pull you up. Are you gonna fuckin’ walk back to the truck with me? Or are you gonna be difficult?”

Breath came with effort, the severe angle of her neck crimping her windpipe. Silver lined the side of the bastard’s face, the rest of it silhouetted by the moon where he leaned over her. Buckeye tried to swallow and shake her head.

“No,” she said. “I’ll walk.”

“Good.”

The knee came off her back and the fist moved to her shirt again, gripping as it had when she’d come to, a calf led to slaughter. August hauled her to her feet. She bolted.

Or tried.

“For fuck’s sake!” He spun her into a stumble, a firm hold still on her shirt. “Fine, we’ll do it the hard way.”

For an eyeblink, she was free. Then a shoulder was in her gut and she was rising, feet coming off the ground. Her new view was cracked earth passing under the tall man’s striding boots.

Buckeye tried to rock onto her outer hip, even if it meant falling the long way, getting the wind knocked out of her. There was no way she’d just let this asshole carry her off without a fight.

His arm tightened around her hip.

“Buckeye, I will hurt you.”

She kicked a foot back and connected, probably with his jaw—she couldn’t see. All it earned her was a grunt. Then pain shot up her left leg. Buckeye shrieked.

Something clamped down on her ankle. Through leather and sock and everything. Clamped and held, tighter, tighter. Blue-yellow shock lanced the nerve and her spine arced backward, a mindless response to a blade-sharp stimulus.

He kept hold of her that way, leg pulled diagonal across his chest, for the rest of the walk back to the truck. She squealed and swore the entire time, calling him everything but a fried egg, but the man was unrelenting.

“I warned you,” he said, when he dumped her onto the floor of the cargo box.

“Fuck you!” She spat the words at him, her injured ankle tucking up on instinct, but with bound arms there was no sitting upright. Instead she tried to roll, furious.

Another hand grabbed her under the arm, this one from inside the truck. The male voice she’d heard earlier said to August, “This isn’t going to work.”

No. Nothing was going to work. This is what happened when people had debt with a house of Greed and ran. The enforcers caught up with them.

“Well we’re out of the T-40,” said the blond jackal who’d chased her through the desert, “so you’re gonna have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

She had just enough time for her eyes to open wide before a heavy thing struck behind her ear. The face of the traitor glittered to blackness, and Buckeye Wheeler was gone.

Everything was wrong. This wasn’t her mail truck. This wasn’t The Rose. This wasn’t any sort of way to wake up from a nap.

The bumping had started it. The jostling, again and again; the snarl of an engine working hard. Some background process in Buckeye’s head decided at last these were not dream noises and stirred her back toward consciousness.

She was lying on her right side, warmth at her front and back. Her body wedged between two others like a single card slid into a deck.

Breathing came first, by instinct, and she swallowed to wet her throat.

There was something between her teeth. Pulling back at the corners of her mouth. It didn’t budge when her tongue went to push it out, and her eyes snapped wide awake with the rest of her.

There was nothing to see but black. Her head whipped to the side, pupils dilating to suck down light, but there was none. Fabric grazed her nose and, with the jerk of her face, she could feel it covering her ears, her hair, tucking down around her neck and into her shirt collar. Something held it in place around her throat and Buckeye decided it was time to panic.