“Easy there, big fella,” Glenda said, her voice hoarse. “We’re all in this together.”
“I’m not in anything with you,” Aahz said.
Looking at the wreck she had become, it was hard for me to even remember why I had been interested in her in the first place. Could I be that superficial that she had to remain beautiful for me to care? Or did I no longer find her attractive or have any interest in her because she had betrayed us? It was an interesting question I’d have to talk to Aahz about once we were safely back home.
“Oh,” Glenda said, “trust me. If you’re here, in this cell, then we’re all in this together.”
“How’d you end up here?” Aahz asked. “How’d you find the place without the map?”
She laughed. “I went to Dodge City, didn’t find anything, so I asked this guy running a bar where the golden cow was, and he told me here.”
I shook my head. How simple that would have been. Why hadn’t we thought of it?
“Then what happened?” Tanda asked.
“Didn’t even make it into town,” she said. “Got picked up by a bunch of guys on horses yesterday and tossed in here. Then last night I got hauled out to be a snack at the big party upstairs.”
Her hand again went to her neck and she flinched. The red marks there didn’t look like they were healing very well. And I didn’t much like the sound of being a snack like those people lined up on the road had been.
“It was like a bad dream,” Glenda said, her eyes distant. “They kept forcing glass after glass of carrot juice down me while taking turns sucking oh my neck. By morning I couldn’t even walk. I don’t remember how I got back down here.”