“What the hell?” she muttered. Then she remembered.

        There had been something waiting for them in the road, a board, bristling with thick spikes that flattened all four tires. The taxi had skidded and rolled, and her door had come open, throwing her clear. Frightened, she explored her body with cautious hands, feeling for injuries. She counted her teeth with her tongue. Her shoulder was scraped and bruised, but other than that, she seemed to be all right. She was shivering, but she didn’t know if that was caused by the cold rain or the first symptoms of shock.

        “The driver!” she said, and rose shakily to her feet. When she stood, she saw an ambulance parked in front of the overturned car. Its lights were flashing. The road was littered with broken glass. Alice smelled spilled gasoline.

        Two men leaped from the ambulance and squatted down to look inside the taxi cab. One of them reached into his white tunic for something.

        “Help him!” Alice croaked. “He may be hurt!” One of the men stood up and peered into the darkness toward the sound of her voice. The other extended his hand into the window of the cab, toward the driver.

        There was the flat, hard sound of a pistol shot.

        Alice stood for a long moment, still seeing the after-image of the muzzle flash floating before her eyes, trying to mentally process this unexpected development. She was frozen with terror. These were no paramedics. They were ruthless men who intended to leave no witnesses behind.

        And they were after her.

        Alice spun on her heel, choosing a line of flight. The dark highway stretched before her. How long before a car would appear, some Good Samaritan who would take her away? Would the men in white run her down with the ambulance while she tried to flag it down?

        The ditch was deep, but the dark wood beyond beckoned with the possibility of safety. Alice tried to climb the embankment, but the rain had turned the earth to mud. She slipped and fell to her hands and knees. As she fell, she scooped up a handful of mud to throw at her pursuers.

        They were on her before she could regain her footing. She fought them, using the martial arts skills she had learned from Master Sun Yat, but the accident had weakened her. She pummeled them with her fists until they seized her wrists and secured them with handcuffs. She was kicking and biting as they dragged her to the ambulance, but her bare feet had little effect on their shins. They threw her face down on a stretcher and restrained her there with wide canvas straps. They loaded the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, turned off the flashing lights, and drove away.

        Alice was finding it hard to breathe with her face pressed into the leather surface of the stretcher. The strap across her shoulders made it difficult to raise her head. She turned her face sideways and surveyed the interior of the ambulance, seeing none of the things she might have expected, no medical equipment, no white tool chests or gleaming stainless steel. It was only a plain utility van, a prop dummied up to look like an ambulance on the outside. She guessed that these men had originally planned to create the accident and masquerade as paramedics so that they could spirit her away, unconscious or dying perhaps, right under the nose of any possible witnesses. It was a desperate plan. They had to want her very badly to risk killing her, and it was likely that she would not be kept alive any longer than necessary.

        One of the men was sitting in the back with her while his companion drove. She could feel his eyes on her.

        “She won’t be bad looking when we clean her up,” he called up to his partner.

        Alice felt a stealthy hand slide up her skirt and squeeze her thigh. She craned her neck to see the man who was touching her and gave him a withering look. He was not impressed, and the hand explored farther until it toyed with the crease of her buttocks.

        “Feisty too,” he laughed. Then he bent over Alice to whisper in her ear. “When the boss lets us fuck you, guess where I’m gonna put it.” He wriggled a finger suggestively between her cheeks. She clenched her muscles to keep him out, knowing that she was only safe from this promise as long as the strap across her knees bound her legs together.

She memorized his face, promising herself that she would find him someday and put a bullet up his ass.

        “That’s right,” he mocked. “Take a good look. You won’t be talking to any sketch artists.” He threw a leg over her and straddled her chest. His weight made it difficult for her to breathe. He nibbled her earlobe as she thrashed her head about and fought nausea.

        “I hope you hold out for a long time, honey. I hope you play dumb. That way I can enjoy your hot little ass for a long time.”

        When they opened the van’s rear door and wheeled her out, Alice could see that they were in a parking garage. They had descended from street level, at least three stories she estimated. She considered calling for help, but the garage appeared to be deserted.

        They wheeled the stretcher into an elevator, which descended so rapidly that Alice felt herself go weightless for a moment.

        Since the men hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves and weren’t likely to, Alice gave them names of her own. The ferret faced driver of the ambulance she called “Weasel”. She called the big prognathic one “Ape”. Weasel was just a nasty little man with hunched shoulders and an annoying leer. Ape was more terrifying. Perhaps it was the way he bent over her and lapped at the blood seeping from her forehead as the elevator plunged down and down until the processed air became heavy and dank.

        When the door opened, they wheeled her down a long hallway and into a concrete room where they bent over her to release the straps binding her to the stretcher.

        When they unlocked the cuffs, Alice sprang at Ape, clawing for his eyes. He parried her easily, gathering her wrists into a bouquet that he held aloft in one great hand while he slapped her casually with the other.

        “Be nice!” he admonished with a chuckle.

        He was expecting the knee she aimed at his groin and blocked it with a muscular thigh. He slapped her again, harder. “Behave!” he warned. “Don’t make me punch out teeth.”

        Defeated for the moment, she didn’t resist as her wrists were wrapped with rough cord that was tightly and efficiently knotted.

        The free end of the rope was tossed over a pipe high above them and pulled until Alice’s hands were jerked above her. She stood on tiptoe to relieve the strain on her shoulders as the rope bit into the tender flesh of her wrists. The rope creaked with tension.

        Ape tied off the rope and watched her dangle, laughing. She kicked at him but lost her footing and spun helplessly until she found the floor with her toes again.

        They were binding her feet together when the door opened and a third man entered the room. He was enormously fat and carefully shifted his weight with each step as though in doubt that his legs could support him. His nose flared with his labored breathing, and his eyes were mere slits. Alice had no trouble naming this one—Pig.

        He tested the strength of a straight backed chair before he eased his great bulk into it, then he gazed at Alice with a steady attention that betrayed neither malice nor mirth. Alice had no interest in engaging him in a staring contest and surveyed the room instead. She could only imagine how far underground they must be—cave deep, mine shaft deep. How many cellars and sub cellars loomed over her? How close was she to hell’s gate? She felt the raw panic of claustrophobia, the fear of live burial.

        The room was unpainted concrete, meant for storage probably. Rusty water pipes traversed the walls and ceiling. Conduit fed the single bare bulb overhead. The room was furnished with two chairs and a table, all badly used, and an old refrigerator. A black rubber garden hose descended from a spigot in the corner and coiled on the floor like a serpent of impossible length.

        “I saw you compete in the nationals,” said Pig. “It was an unforgettable combination of strength, grace, and beauty.”

        He was talking about her gymnastics career, of course. Alice regarded him warily for signs of sarcasm, but his praise seemed genuine.

        “Thank you,” she said softly. It was absurd. Here, in this place where she would probably die screaming, she found herself graciously accepting accolades. She looked up at her hands which were growing numb. “I’m afraid I can’t offer to sign any autographs at the moment.”

        Pig chuckled appreciatively. “I want you to understand that I have nothing against you personally. If it were up to me, you wouldn’t even be here. I am prepared to see you safely home as soon as you give me what I want.”

        “What do you want?” Alice tried to keep the quaver from her voice, sensing that it would be dangerous to show weakness.

        “Just a disk,” he said, “a simple computer disk.”

        The disk! It was as though a light went on in her mind.

        “I’m dreaming!” There was relief in Alice’s laugh. “I fell asleep in front of my keyboard and dreamed all this up! I don’t have to be afraid of you. I can make you disappear or turn you all into bunny rabbits.”

        The smile slowly melted from her face. Unmasking her demons had not banished them. The pig-man still sat, regarding her with a sort of amused perplexity. She inventoried her sensations. Terror was normal in dreams where emotions are intensified, and there was nothing odd about seeing and hearing these men and this place in a dream, but what of her other senses?

        The concrete chilled her bare feet, and the rough rope chaffed her wrists and ankles. She could smell moldy air   and smoke from the cigarette weasel was lighting. Her head still throbbed from her accident, and ditch mud was still gritty between her toes.

        “Denial is a rather unhealthy response in your situation,” said Pig. “Why don’t you just tell me where the disk is, and we can all go home.”

        Could any dream be so detailed and persistent? Alice closed her eyes. “What disk?”

        Pig sighed. “I was afraid that you would indulge in this sort of melodramatic heroics. I can’t help you unless you are prepared to help yourself.”

        Ape had moved slowly into Alice’s line of sight. He was fidgeting like a child on Christmas Eve.

        “Dispose of those rags, would you?” said Pig. His voice was so polite and reasonable that Alice actually looked around the room expecting to see an untidy pile in some corner. It was only when Ape hovered over her and gripped the damp remains of her gown that she understood.

        He shredded the garment with one swift motion and cast it aside. She had worn no bra under her gown, so Ape had only to rip off her panties to leave her entirely naked.

        These men were going to hurt her. She wasn’t brave. She closed her eyes, resorting to the childish logic of peek-a-boo. If she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her.

        Ape whistled. “She’s hot!”

        In spite of her terror, or perhaps to distract herself, Alice looked down. She was amazed to see herself tan and lithe. Her breasts were high and firm; the nipples stiffened to rubbery hardness by the chill. The belly below was a lean ridge of muscle. Her thighs, once flabby and pale as uncooked bread dough, were now graceful and shapely.

        Then she glanced fearfully at Ape. She had known his type as a child. There is a species of boys who derives power from the pain and grief of others, and prefer to torment and destroy what they can never possess. They select beloved pets for abuse and leave strays alone. They target the proudest homes for vandalism. Ape would not spare her because she was beautiful. Her physical perfection would only make his cruelty more inspired.

        In sudden panic, Alice fought her bindings, but her frantic tugging against the rope above only lifted her bound feet from the floor. She spun slowly, craning her neck to keep Ape in her sight, afraid that he would surprise her while her back was to him. He lowered his eyes, grinned, and cocked his hips to display himself, pressing the fabric of his trousers tight against his hard thighs with the palms of his hands to emphasize the size and contour of the flesh beneath. He really didn’t need to. The bulging shape it suggested was too obvious to ignore and nearly too much to believe. It seemed to strive toward her, like the nose of an overeager dog who strains at a leash.

        “I have no appetite for this sort of thing,” said Pig. “My friends, however, enjoy dealing with reluctant informants.”

        As Pig spoke, Ape reached out and grasped Alice around the waist, ending her pirouette. Her back was still toward him, her best side from his point of view. She gasped at the cold touch of his fingers.

        The dream Alice, gymnast, secret agent, and bon vivant, had known many lovers. The other Alice had never felt the touch of a man. She was amazed to find it arousing her. Was her need so great that even an ugly and hateful man could quicken it? Was fear an aphrodisiac she had never tasted?

        It’s a wet dream! Alice told herself. Just go along with it, and you will be fine. She relaxed herself against him, feeling the iron bulge as he pressed against her cheeks. The thick shaft insinuated itself between her cheeks and settled there, the hot cleft seemed to embrace it. Her head rolled back on to his shoulder, and she found herself looking up at the dark stubble under his chin.

        Ape chuckled, “The bitch likes it rough!”

        “I’m not surprised,” Pig commented dryly. “Fear is a powerful drug for many people. Why do you think she chooses to play such dangerous games?”