Side by Side

52

As soon as Dixie Smoot left the room, Lucy stuck a finger down her throat and vomited the foul liquid cocktail into a wadded-up blanket to muffle the sounds of her retching. Gagging, she shoved the blanket between two padlocked crates. She crawled over to the door and lay down with her ear near the bottom of it, listening.

Then she stood and, trembling, slid the door open a crack. The only light in the trailer was the flickering light from the TV. Dixie was lying on the sofa, a bottle of bourbon on the floor beside her, half-full glass in her hand.

Lucy slid the door closed, turned on the flashlight, and used the hem of the T-shirt to cover the lens to soften the light. She had figured out why the dogs hadn’t attacked Eli and her earlier. The scent of the owner of the jacket had confused them. She knew that the bottle of spray she’d found beside the bed was designed to kill human scents to fool deer, and hoped it would work on dogs. She hoped they didn’t decide to bark after all.

She used the spray, which smelled like rotting vegetation, on her legs, her arms, and, closing her eyes, on her face and hair. Putting on the hunting jacket, which was permeated with one of her captors’ scents, Lucy went to the window, removed the bolt, and slid open the screen. She took the empty pee bucket from beside the bed. Feet first, Lucy eased her body out. Once she was hanging from the sill by her fingertips, there was no turning back.

She dropped to the dirt, landing on the balls of her feet. She prayed the sound of the television had kept the sound of her escape from alerting the dogs. She crept to the trailer’s edge and looked around the corner. The dogs weren’t coming out of the storage room’s cracked-open door. Taking a shaky breath, Lucy moved swiftly across the expanse, made it to the door just as one of the animal’s heads jutted out. She turned the flashlight, catching the dog full in the eyes. The animal’s head vanished back into the shadows. Lucy eased the door closed and flipped the catch to lock it.

She crossed the dogs off her mental checklist and thought about the next step. The easy part was done. Now she had to do a couple of things out in the warehouse, go back inside, and get Elijah. If she remained calm, followed her plan, she would be outside the warehouse within ten minutes or so. That, or she would be a four-letter word for “no longer among the living.”