I said, “You want to know what I look like? I’m so gorgeous I make Tom Cruise look like he got hit by an ugly-stick.”
Soft laughter came from Erin.
“Really?” Alice asked.
From farther away, Connie said, “What kind of shit are you handing those girls, Rupe? Tell ’em the truth! You look like a fucking chimp! An albino chimp that lost all its hair!”
She was sure in fine form.
“I don’t, either,” I said to Erin. “Chimps have tails.”
“You’d better go,” Erin said, “or she’ll start saying really bad stuff about you.”
“Okay. See you later. You, too, Alice.”
I made my way out of the space between their cages. I got to my feet in front of Alice’s cage. Running a hand along its bars to keep myself oriented, I hurried toward the cages where Connie and my other women were waiting for me.
“What’ve you got, nine lives?” Connie asked when I was in front of her cage.
“Just lucky.” I kept moving slowly, following its bars. “Something broke my fall.”
“You must’ve been hurt,” Kimberly said. Her voice came from a distance ahead of me. “It was a long way down.”
“Got banged up pretty good. That’s why it took me so long to get here. I was out cold for a couple of days or so, then I was too messed up to do much.”
“We’re lucky you’re alive at all,” Billie said from her cage on the far side of Kimberly’s.”
“And lucky that you finally found us,” Kimberly added.
“Yeah.” Connie sounded a little annoyed. “Better late than never.”
Reaching out, I felt no more bars. I’d apparently arrived at me corner of Connie’s cage. Leaving it behind, I crossed an open space. My searching hand bumped against steel.
And got grabbed around the wrist.
“Stay.” Kimberly’s voice. Her hand clutching me.
It felt strong and warm. Heat from it seemed to flow up my arm and spread through my whole body.
“You’ve gotta get us out of here,” she said.
“I will. Are you all okay?”
“Yeah, right,” Connie said. “They’ve had us for a week. All they wanta do is figure out new ways to fuck us over.”
In a low voice, Kimberly said, “They’ve raped all of us.”
“Even you?”
“Yeah, even me.”
“How?”
“What do you mean, how?”
“You’re so… tough.”
“They make you go along,” she muttered.
“It’s my fault,” Connie said. She sounded different, suddenly. Quiet and upset. “They use me. If Mom or Kimberly don’t go along, I’m the one who gets it. They don’t want me getting wrecked, so they… keep cooperating. No matter what Wesley wants.”
“You’ve gotta get the keys away from him,” Kimberly said. Her hand tightened around my wrist.
“I will,” I said. “Are you all okay, though? I mean, I know you’re not okay, but…”
“We’re fucked,” Connie said.
“We’re fine,” Billie said.
“We are not.”
“Our injuries aren’t too serious,” Kimberly explained. “Superficial stuff. We probably don’t need a hospital, nothing that bad.”
“I had you all figured for dead,” I told them.
“Hate to disappoint you,” Connie muttered.
“I couldn’t find your bodies, though. I went back to where we had the fight. I thought… you’d all still be there. But when I couldn’t find your bodies…”
“We gave up,” Kimberly said.
“Thanks to me,” Connie said. “My fault. I plead guilty.”
“Wesley got her down,” Billie explained from her distant cage. “You were already out of it, by then. Thelma’d clobbered you in the head with a rock. You never even saw it coming. Next thing I knew, Connie was flat on her face.”
“I was still on the rope,” Kimberly said. “By the time I got to the top, Wesley had a foot planted on her back. He was all set to kill her with a machete. We had to give up.”
“Glad you did.”
“You wouldn’t be so glad,” Connie said, “if you had to go through this shit.”
“Rupert?” Billie asked. “Do you remember all our talk, those first few days, about Wesley’s motive? How we figured he wanted to kill everyone?”
“Yeah, for the money.”
“We were wrong. It didn’t have anything to do with money. He wanted us. The three of us. He had this fantasy about trapping everyone in a remote place, killing the men, and keeping us as his prisoners.”
“He admitted it?”
“Yeah. Told me all about it. He had me alone—Thelma’d wandered off somewhere—so I started asking questions. He happened to be in a talkative mood. Real pleased with himself. He’d just finished… having a fine old time with me. So I found out a lot. For starters, we were all together the first time he met Thelma. So right from the beginning, he knew what we looked like. Me, Connie, and Kimberly.”
“Three hot babes,” Connie muttered.
Billie said, “He told me that he’d never in his life scored with anything but bow-wows. Women like us would never even think about going out with him.”
“’Cause he’s a fucking loser,” Connie threw in.
“From then on,” Billie said, “everything was a set-up. He started by going after Thelma. She was easy.”
“Being also a fucking loser,” Connie added.
I half expected Kimberly to speak up in her sister’s defense, but she kept silent.
Billie said, “What Thelma didn’t know is that he only wanted her as a way of getting at the rest of us. He figured he would have plenty of access to us if he married her. Then—surprise, surprise—it turned out she was as kinky as he was.”
“A match made in Bedlam,” Kimberly muttered.
“Both of ’em a couple of fucking sadists,” Connie said.
“Was Thelma in on everything?” I asked.
Billie answered. “She sure didn’t know her loving husband had the hots for every other woman in her family. He kept that to himself. Along with his big plan to blow up the boat and maroon us.”
“He knew the cages were here,” Kimberly said.
“He did research,” Billie explained. “My God, he hadn’t even gone on an actual date with Thelma before he started studying up—trying to find just the right place for his little caper. He thought about cabins in the mountains, ghost towns, abandoned factories, warehouses, barns—every sort of place he could imagine where nobody’d be likely to get in his way. Where he could keep us for as long as he wanted, and do anything to us that suited his fancy.”
“Fucking degenerate,” Connie said.
Billie ignored her. “It wasn’t long before he realized that an uninhabited island would be perfect. You’re cut off from everyone. You’ve got the run of the place, so you don’t have to keep your prisoners hidden away. Nobody around to hear them scream. And it’s tough for them to escape.”
“Tough, all right,” Kimberly said, her voice low. “Look what happened to Dorothy.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Their mother. Dorothy. She made a break for it—Christ, just a few nights ago—but they ran her down and
