Blood of My Blood by Barry Lyga

Howie. You’re seeing them everywhere.”
    Howie snorted. “Well, yeah. That’s only because they
are
everywhere.”

CHAPTER 12
    Nothing Connie tried could budge either the handcuff around Jan’s wrist or the one encircling the bed’s metal frame. She was keenly aware that Billy could return at any second. Every moment that passed, her adrenaline seemed to come more and more alive, as though it were a second being living inside her, one that ran through her every cell, screaming one thing over and over at the top of its lungs:
    RUN
.
    The first thing Connie had done was go to the door, thinking that she might be able to find a key or at least something to pick the lock with, out in one of the other rooms. Barring those possibilities, she figured her cell might still be out there and she could at least call the police.
    But the door refused to budge, even when Connie threw all her weight at it. Too sturdy for just a mere door. Maybe Billy had a police bar on the other side, or a bracketed barricade. Either way, that was it for the door.
    Connie remembered an old movie she’d seen once, wherea guy handcuffed to a bed had used one of the mattress springs to pick the lock. With Jan’s help, she managed to tear open an edge of the mattress and pick open one of the coils, at the cost of abrading her fingers until they bled.
    But no matter how much she poked and prodded the keyhole with her little makeshift lockpick, she couldn’t get the cuffs open. It was much harder than it appeared in the movies.
    “I don’t know what to do,” she said, trying to fight off the
RUN
that still coursed through her. Her fingers were trembling, and her blood smeared the handcuff. “Can we take apart the bed? Unscrew the pole where you’re cuffed?”
    Jan shook her head. “It’s a welded joint. Billy’s not an amateur.”
    Connie stood up and paced the room, jittery as though overcaffeinated. She couldn’t stop herself from touching the side of her neck, tracing the line of the laceration Billy had made there. The new blood from her fingers slicked the tacky, drying blood on her neck.
    “What do we do?” she asked. Some rational part of her understood that she was skirting the line of complete panic; some rational part of her knew that it wouldn’t be long before she began screaming and pulling at her own hair and bouncing off the goddamn soundproofed walls.
    But with every second that ticked by, she grew less and less rational.
    “What do we do, Jan?” she asked again. It was idiotic, but somehow she felt like Jan should have all the answers. Jan was an adult, right? Jan had been married to Billy, for God’s sake. She should know
something
, right? Right?
    Connie tried to slow her breathing and—for the first time since she’d started yoga at twelve—realized that she couldn’t. Which made her breathe even faster.
    I’m gonna hyperventilate right into unconsciousness and Billy’s gonna come back and find me on the floor and then—
    “Connie,” Jan said quietly.
    “What?”
    Jan raised a finger to her lips in the universal sign for
Shut up
. Connie realized she’d been breathing so rapidly that it was audible. She held her breath for a second.
    A door.
    A door, closing.
    Nearby.
    Her eyes met Jan’s. Connie was shocked to find no panic in the older woman’s eyes.
    Just resignation.
    They didn’t say it out loud. They didn’t need to.
    Billy’s back
.
    Connie spun in a circle, as though she could somehow magically manifest another room or a weapon or
something
if she just kept looking hard enough. Her eyes fell on the chair. That was all she had. A plan began to form.
    She would hear him disengage the police bar. She would stand by the door with the chair held high. The door opened out, so she couldn’t hide behind it, but as soon as he came through, she would bash him with the chair and—
    And he would recover and kill her because he was tougher than her.
    Connie spun around again. The room was four walls