Nothing.
She sat up. It took five minutes. Her wrists were bruised and raw from the cuffs, but she thanked God that Saunders had been compassionate enough not to have cuffed her behind her back. That would be a death sentence. In front … there was at least a chance.
She could not see out of the window. She was too short and the window was fogged with condensation. That meant that she had to get up onto the bench seat.
“Come on, you lazy cow. ”
She reached up and threaded her fingers through the mesh of the wire cage that separated the front seat from the back. Her fingers ached from the cold, but Dez fed that pain to the furnace of anger that she was stoking in the center of her chest. She set her teeth and pulled, pushing with both legs. It felt like hauling a transmission out of a pickup truck, but her body moved.
Then she was on the seat.
She immediately lay back down, stretching herself on the seat as she listened for moans. Listened for anything that might be reacting to the noise of her movement.
The wind and the rain did not change in pitch or tone.
Dez slowly sat up again.
She leaned and tried to look out through the open driver’s door, but the angle was bad. All she could see was a bit of blacktop and tiny waves of runoff cascading toward the shoulder.
She shimmied over to the left-hand rear window and used her sleeve to wipe away the condensation. Everything outside was still a blur, the shapes smeared by the constant rainfall. Even so … those shapes were constants. Unmoving.
What had happened to the damn dead?
It didn’t make sense.
Until it did.
The hammering of the rain on the roof was half the answer. Noise. And the smell of the rain—charged with ozone and rich with earthy odors from the flowing mud—was the other half. The dead could not hear or see her. Not in that downpour. Not hidden in the back of the cruiser, not through those same smeared windows.
“Well fuck me blind,” Dez said out loud.
She grinned. A real grin this time.
Then she looked down at the footwell. At where she had been. At what she had been down there. Small. Broken. Weak. Abandoned.
Her head abruptly rose and snapped around like a spaniel, her eyes focused to the east as if she could see through car and storm and buildings all the way to the elementary school.
Where the kids were. Where the old folks had been taken.
Were they trapped there? Abandoned by parents who could not get through the storm to pick them up? Or, by parents who had encountered some other problem? Like Saunders had.
“Christ,” growled Dez. She patted her pockets in the vain hope that Saunders had somehow overlooked her handcuff key. Not a chance.
Damn.
The cage was heavy-gauge wire and she was never going to kick that out of its frame. The doors had no handles inside.
But the windows.
Dez sneered at the glass. She’d knocked in her fair share of car windows in her time. With her baton and the end of her flashlight. With a standing kick more than once. And even with the head of Rufus Sterko after Dez had busted him for beating his wife with an electrical cord. Side windows weren’t that tough. Safety glass was made to shatter under the right kind of impact.
The problem was going to be one of angle and resistance. She couldn’t stand up, and that was the best angle. And lying down meant that there was nothing to really brace against. This was going to have to be all muscle and speed. Snapping speed.
She turned and lay down on the seat and scooched down so that she could place her heels on the window with her knees bent. Then she wrapped
her cuffed hands in the nylon seat-belt strap, took a deep breath, and kicked.
Her heels hit the glass and rebounded and Dez knee-punched herself in the mouth, smashing her lower lip against her teeth. She tasted blood as pain flared along the inside of her lip. The glass remained unbroken.