Shackles Read Free Page B

there and the angle was wrong. He was just a peripheral man-shape hulked above me, doing something with his free hand.
    Metal clanked and rattled; I felt the cold bit of it around my left wrist, heard a sharp snicking sound. Christ —handcuffs. He snapped the other circlet tight around my right wrist. But he wasn’t finished yet. The gun muzzle stayed firm against my spine.
    I smelled the medicinal odor, sharper this time—and realized what it was just before he leaned forward, pressed something rough-textured and damp over my nose and mouth. “Don’t struggle,” he said, but I struggled anyway, fighting helplessly against the suffocating dampness, knowing I would lose consciousness in a matter of seconds. And then losing it, feeling it swirl away on the sickening fumes from a cloth soaked in chloroform….

----
Part One Ordeal
----

----
The First Day
----
EARLY MORNING
    I came out of it feeling dizzy, disoriented, sick to my stomach. It was seconds before I remembered what had happened, realized I was still lying prone on the backseat of the car, my hands still shackled behind me. We were moving now at a steady pace, not fast and not slow, traveling in a more or less straight line on an even surface. Highway of some kind, probably a freeway: I could hear the faint desultory passage of other cars. But when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see anything except heavy blackness. There was something over me, covering my head—a blanket of some kind. I could smell its coarse, dusty fabric, and the odor stirred the roiling nausea in my stomach.
    I tried to move, to throw the blanket off. Pain erupted in cramped muscles all along my body, sharpest in my drawn-back shoulders and arms. More pain, a quick blaze of it, seemed to sweep through my head from temple to temple, then modulated into a fierce throbbing. That goddamned chloroform….
    Bile pumped up into the back of my throat. I managed to twist my body enough to get my head off the seat, hang it down close to the floorboards, before the vomit came boiling up—spasm after spasm that left me weak and shaking. A thick hot sweat oiled my skin. My head felt as if it would burst from the thunderous banging pressure within.
    “Christ, that stinks.”
    Him up there behind the wheel, the son of a bitch with the whispery voice. He sounded offended. I heard him crank down his window, heard more clearly the sounds of light traffic outside. Chill air came into the car, but it didn’t reach under the blanket, didn’t ease the sweaty feverishness.
    I needed that air, needed to breathe it; I was beginning to feel claustrophobic with the coarse wool of the blanket still draped over my head. Painfully I clawed up at the fabric with my fingers, got a grip on it and dragged at it until it came away from my head and neck. The wind was like a rejuvenating drug. I struggled onto my side, turning and raising my head, and sucked the cold air open-mouthed.
    Reflected headlamps and highway signs made occasional flickering patterns of light and shadow across the headliner, the seatback. The light hurt my eyes; I narrowed them down to slits. And then lifted up onto one elbow, trying to see over the top of the seat.
    He whispered out of the darkness, “Don’t try to sit up. If I see you in the mirror I’ll stop the car and shoot you through the head. Do you understand?”
    “I understand.” The words came out thick and moist, as if they had been soaking in the same oily sweat that filmed my body.
    “Good. Lie back and enjoy the drive.”
    “Where are you taking me?”
    “You’ll find out.”
    “When? How far is it?”
    “Quite a ways. Do you like snow?”
    “Snow?”
    “A white Christmas,” he said, and laughed. There was nothing wild or crazy about the laugh; it was low-pitched, wry. He seemed to be enjoying himself, but in a grim, purposeful way.
    I said, “Who are you? Tell me that much.”
    “Don’t you have any idea?”
    “No.”
    “My voice isn’t