She jerked up to sitting, head spinning from the sudden motion. She was panting again, and she bent her head to her knees, touched her chest to her thighs. She had to get hold of herself. She couldn't give in to the thirst. She couldn't let the dementia settle into her brain again so that she lost where she was.
"What are you doing?" the stranger whispered, terrified.
"Leave me alone."
"He'll hear you. He'll come down."
"He's not coming down," Pauline snapped. Then, to prove it, she screamed, "Come down here, you motherfucker!" Her throat was so raw that she started coughing from the exertion, but she still screamed, "I'm trying to escape! Come stop me, you limp-dicked motherfucker!"
They waited and waited. Pauline ticked off the seconds. There were no footsteps on the stairs. No lights turned on. No doors opened.
"How do you know?" the stranger said. "How do you know what he's doing?"
"He's waiting for one of us to break," Pauline told her. "And it's not going to be me."
The woman asked another question, but Pauline ignored her, lining herself up to the wall again. She braced herself to pound into the wall again, but she couldn't do it. She couldn't hurt herself again. Not right now. Later. She would rest a few minutes and then do it later.
She rolled onto her back, tears streaming down her face. She didn't open her mouth, because she didn't want the woman to know she was crying. The stranger had heard the sobbing, heard Pauline sliding around in her own piss. That show was over. No more tickets would be sold.
"What's your name?" the stranger asked.
"None of your goddamn business," Pauline barked. She didn't want to make friends. She wanted to get out of here any way she could, and if that meant walking over the stranger's dead body to freedom, Pauline would do it. "Just shut up."
"Tell me what you're doing and maybe I can help you."
"You can't help me. You got that?" Pauline twisted to face the stranger, even though they were in total darkness. "Listen up, bitch. Only one person is going to make it out of here alive and it's not going to be you. You understand me? Shit rolls down hill, and I'm not going to be the one smelling like a sewer when this is over with. All right?"
The stranger was silent. Pauline fell onto her back, looking up at darkness, trying to brace herself for the wall again.
The woman's voice was barely a whisper. "You're Atlanta Thin, aren't you?"
Pauline's throat tightened like a noose had been put around it. "What?"
"'Shit rolls down hill, and I'm not going to be the one smelling like a sewer,'" she repeated. "You say that a lot."
Pauline chewed her lip.
"I'm Mia-Three."
Mia—slang for 'bulimia.' Pauline recognized the screen name, but still insisted, "I don't know what you're talking about."
Mia asked, "Did you show them that email at work?"
Pauline opened her mouth, just tried to breathe a while. She tried to think of the other things she had told the pro-anna Internet group, the desperate thoughts that raced through her mind and somehow ended up being typed onto the keyboard. It was almost like purging, but instead of emptying your stomach, you were emptying your brain. Telling somebody those awful thoughts you had, knowing they had them, too, somehow made it easier to get up every morning.
And now the stranger wasn't a stranger anymore.
Mia repeated, "Did you show them the email?"
Pauline swallowed, even though there was only dust in her throat. She couldn't believe she was tied up like a fucking hog and this woman wanted to talk about work. Work didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. The email was from another life, a life where Pauline had a job she wanted to keep, a mortgage, a car payment. They were waiting down here to be raped, tortured, murdered, and this woman was worried about a fucking email?
Mia said, "I didn't get to call Michael, my brother. Maybe he's looking for me."
"He won't find you," Pauline told her. "Not out here."
"Where are we?"
"I don't know," she answered—the truth. "I woke up in the trunk of a car. I was chained. I'm not sure how long I was in there. The trunk opened. I started to scream, then he Tased me again." She closed her eyes. "Then I woke up here."
"I was in my backyard," Mia told her. "I heard something. I thought maybe a cat . . ." She let her words trail off. "I was in a trunk when I came to. I'm not sure how long he kept me in there. It felt like days. I tried to count away the hours, but . . ." She went into a long silence that Pauline didn't know how to interpret. Finally, she said, "Do you think that's how he found us—on the chat board?"
"Probably," she lied. Pauline knew how he had found them, and it wasn't that damn chat room. It was Pauline who had led them here—Pauline's big mouth that had gotten them into trouble. She wasn't going to tell Mia what she knew. There would be more questions, and with the questions would come accusations that Pauline knew she wouldn't be able to handle.
Not now. Not when her brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton and the blood dripping down her eyes felt like the tiny, hairy legs of a million spiders.
Pauline gasped for breath, trying to keep herself from freaking out again. She thought about Felix and the way he smelled when she bathed him with the new soap she picked up at Colony Square during her lunch break.
Mia asked, "It's still in the safe, right? They'll find the email in the safe and they'll know you told the upholsterer to measure the elevator."
"Bitch, what does it matter? Do you not understand where we are, what's going to happen to us? So what if they find the email? Some fucking consolation. 'She's dead, but she was right all along.'"
"More than you got in life."
They shared a moment of commiseration. Pauline tried to remember what little she knew about Mia. The woman didn't post much on the board, but when she did, she was pretty on point. Like Pauline and a few other posters, Mia didn't like whiners and she didn't take much bullshit.
"They can't starve us," Mia said. "I can go nineteen days before I start to shut down."
Pauline was impressed. "I can go about the same," she lied. Her max had been twelve, and then they'd put her in the hospital and plumped her up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Mia said, "Water is the issue."
"Yeah," Pauline agreed. "How long can you—"
"I've never tried to go without water," Mia interrupted, finishing the sentence. "It doesn't have any calories."
"Four days," Pauline told her. "I read somewhere that you can only last about four days."
"We can last longer." It wasn't wishful thinking. If Mia could last nineteen days without eating, she sure as hell could last longer than Pauline without water.
That was the problem. She could outlast Pauline. No one had outlasted Pauline before.
Mia asked the obvious question. "Why hasn't he fucked us?"
Pauline pressed her head to the cool concrete floor, tried to keep the panic from building up inside of her. The fucking wasn't the problem. It was the other stuff—the games, the taunting, the tricks . . . the trash bags.