“How much do you think our bonus will be for this one?” Ernie asked, his voice excited.
“I don’t know,” the driver muttered. “All I’m thinking about is making sure those fangers don’t catch up with us before we get to the warehouse.”
“They’re still two car lengths back,” Ernie said, his voice growing a little louder and Mary stilled, her eyes closing. She was quite sure the man had turned to glance back toward her as he spoke so stayed as still as she could, practically holding her breath.
“We still have six blocks to the warehouse,” the driver said grimly.
“Yeah, but they won’t try anything on a busy street,” Ernie said, his voice returning to the quieter level, suggesting he’d turned away again.
Relaxing a little, Mary carefully opened her eyes and glanced toward the front of the van. This time she was able to tilt her head. Her gaze slid over the driver and passenger, Ernie. All she could see was the backs of their heads over the seats. Both had dark hair.
Lowering her head again, Mary started feeling around with her fingers, trying to sort out what she’d been tied up with. A quick inspection of whatever was around her wrists told her she hadn’t been tied. Instead, something that felt very like shackles to her were around each wrist. The shackles both had chains flowing away from them. Following the chains with her fingers, she found that it was actually one chain connecting both shackles. But that it was threaded through some sort of metal circle attached to the sidewall of the van, she noted, wincing as the chain made a clanking sound behind her.
Mary stilled, her eyes instinctively closing in case the sound made one of the men glance back, but their conversation continued, unhindered.
“The bonus has to be huge,” Ernie muttered. “Hell, even if we don’t catch the others, he’s gonna be pleased with the woman. Especially once he finds out that the hottie in the back was an old broad just yesterday. He said he thought the fangers could turn mortals and she’s proof they can.”
“Maybe, but we still don’t know how they did it, and he’ll want to know that more than anything else,” the driver pointed out. Mary dubbed him Bert rather than keeping thinking of him as “the driver.”
“So? She’ll know,” Ernie said with certainty. “He’ll make her tell him.”
“Actually, I almost feel sorry for the woman,” Bert said, “From what Jackson says, some of the experiments the doc performs on the fangers are pretty nasty.”
“This is no time to be going soft,” Ernie said firmly. “Just think of the bonus we’re going to get.”
Mary’s mouth tightened. Dante had said people had been going missing in San Antonio. What he’d meant was immortals, she realized, and she and the others were going to join their ranks if she didn’t do something about it. It seemed to her that she was the only one who could. Dante, Russell and Francis had no idea they were being led into a trap. She did. If she could somehow warn them, or get out of her chains . . .
She wasted a moment trying to force her hands out of the shackles, but quickly gave it up as a lost cause. They were too tight. She considered the situation briefly as the men continued to talk and then she grasped the chains higher up their length, closer to the metal circle they were threaded through and gave a tug.
Mary wasn’t terribly surprised when nothing happened. While Dante had said the nanos made them stronger and faster and all that, she suspected they didn’t work so quickly that she would suddenly be as strong as the Hulk.
Despite that, she blindly felt her way up to the metal circle and, just for shits and giggles, tried to turn it like it was a wing nut. Much to Mary’s amazement the circle apparently wasn’t well affixed to its base, that or her tug had loosened it. The metal turned under her pressure, just a little, but it turned. Grasping it more firmly, she tried again, and it snapped off.
Mary was so surprised by her success that she just lay there for a minute, her heart pounding and eyes wide, but then she started trying to figure out what she should do next. She was free and needed to stop the van before it reached this warehouse they’d mentioned. How much time did she have? Mary wondered. And how the hell was she supposed to stop the van?
Her gaze slid to the side door of the van. It was just feet in front of her, and Mary supposed she could probably leap the short distance, slide the door open and leap out before Bert or Ernie could stop her. The only problem was she didn’t know what kind of road they were on. Was it one lane or two lanes? If it was two lanes, she might get run over by a vehicle coming along in the next lane when she tumbled out of the van. Or even a vehicle behind them if it was one lane.