Mind prey

CHAPTER 28

The bedsprings were too flexible to make decent weapons. They'd hoped for something like an icepick, but the springs would not fully uncurl. When pressed against anything resistant, they flexed.

But if they couldn't get icepicks from the springs, they got two fat, three-inch-long needles, honed on the granite rocks in the fieldstone walls.

Grace stood on the Porta-Potti and began picking at the nail: "Lots better," she told Andi. "This works great."

She picked for ten minutes and Andi picked for ten minutes more, then Grace started again. Grace was working on it when it finally came free. She thought it moved under the spring-needle, and grabbed it between a thumb and forefinger. It turned in her fingers, and she held tighter and put weight on it, felt it twist again.

Grace said, breathlessly, "Mom, it's coming. It's coming out." And she pulled it free, like a tooth.

Andi put a finger to her lips. "Listen."

Grace froze, and they listened. But there were no thumps, no footsteps, and Andi said, "I thought I heard something."

"I wonder where he is?" Grace looked nervously at the door. Mail had been gone a long time.

"I don't know. We just need a little more time." Andi took the nail, sat on the mattress, and began to hone it on a granite pebble. The nail left behind what looked like tiny scratches in the rock, but were actually whisper-thin metal scrapings. "Next time he comes, we have to do it," she said. "He'll kill me, soon, if we don't. And when he kills me, he'll kill you."

"Yes." Grace nodded. She'd thought about it.

Andi stopped honing the nail to look at her daughter. Grace had lost ten pounds. Her hair was stuck together in strings and ropes; the skin of her face was waxy, almost transparent, and her arms trembled when she stood up. Her dress was tattered, soiling, torn. She looked, Andi thought, like an old photograph of a Nazi prison-camp inmate.

"So: we do it." She went back to scraping the nail, then turned it in her hand. The rust was gone from the tip, and the wedge-shaped nail point was fining down to a needletip.

"What we have to do is figure out a… scenario for attacking him," she said. Grace was sitting at the end of the mattress, her knees pulled up under her chin. She had a bruise on her forearm. Where'd she gotten that? Mail hadn't touched her, yet, though the last two times he'd assaulted Andi, he hadn't bothered to dress before he pushed her back in the cell. He was displaying for Grace. Sooner or later, he'd take her…

She put a finger to her lips. "Listen."

There was nothing. Grace whispered, "What?"

"I thought I heard him."

Grace said, "I don't hear anything."

They listened for a long time, tense, the fear holding them silent; but nobody came. Finally, Andi went back to honing the nail, the ragged zzzt zzzt zzzt the only sound in the hole.

She had Mail in her mind as she honed it. They'd been in the hole for almost five days. He had attacked her… she didn't know how many times, but probably twenty. Twenty? Could it be that many?

She thought so.

She honed the nail, thinking, with each stroke, For John Mail. For John Mail…