Dogs, huge, hungry dogs surrounding her, growls coming from all sides, unseen in the blackness. Sylvia knew, somehow without remembering it happening, that she had been pushed down the stairs into the cellar to be food for the dogs. Naked, unable to defend herself, unable to get away, Sylvia felt terror beyond any she'd ever known, and now she felt the first bite, sharp teeth raking her skin, the dogs whimpering with excitement at the smell and taste of blood, Sylvia's blood. More bites, on her legs, her arms, her breasts, her buttocks, the pain of ripped skin and the rough tongues licking, drinking from her. She tried to scream, but was unable to voice a sound...

Sylvia was brought out of sleep by a sudden real pain that dwarfed the dreamed pain of attacking dogs. The original cramp in her right thigh had returned again, and the agony of it took her back to the cell, to the memory of the precious padlock key pinned against the side of the waste hole as the seizing muscle ripped Sylvia apart, while the remnants of her latest nightmare refused to depart, and she still sensed the dogs all around, ready to resume the attack.

Sylvia gritted her teeth, breathing in tiny sips as she threw her legs out straight, pulling her right foot backward with her left to stretch out the muscle to ease the cramp, while telling herself No dogs, no dogs, there are no dogs here, that was a dream, I'm alone, no dogs.

It had been a dream, she knew that. But there had been a... solid quality to it. That seemed the best way to describe it. The memory of it now, awake, was somehow more tangible than a normal dream.

Slowly, slowly, the pain of the thigh cramp abated, leaving a residual ache and a feeling of relief that, for the moment, nothing hurt very much. Except all of the unseen bumps and bruises covering every part of her body.

She suddenly remembered: that movie. She'd been eight years old, her brother Dylan thirteen, old enough to babysit Sylvia for the first time. She had sat with him watching that horror movie, including the scene in which a female character was shoved to fall down the stairs, into the cellar where the dogs were kept. In a low-budget solution to the problem of how to show a woman being eaten by dogs, the cellar had been invisible in darkness, and only the sounds of a snarling pack of dogs and a screaming woman had been used to allow the viewer to imagine what was happening. Sylvia had had nightmares for days, and Dylan hadn't been allowed to babysit anymore.

The woman hadn't been naked or bound, and certainly not voiceless, but Sylvia's mind had obviously added that much of her own current situation to the movie woman's fate.

Sylvia remembered fully where she was now. She'd been counting the cross-corridors, so she knew she had been stopped by a fence at the end of the next-to-last pair of cells. This was not the same fence she had seen in place yesterday at the start of the corridor. That one was ahead of her, and had to be open now; if it was closed and locked, then Judy had left her with no way out at all. Judy couldn't do that. Sylvia still had one, and only one, possible exit: through that down-but-unlocked fence she had spent half an hour unsuccessfully trying to get under, back when she had far more energy than she had now.

I have to get out of here, she told herself. I've already experienced a small part of what will happen if I don't. The cramps, the disorientation, the imaginary dogs eating me, tearing me apart. The pain, the delirium, and the terror will get much worse than they have so far, and it will all seem to last for an eternity before I finally die. I just need to hop through nearly the entire length of the building, twice, and find a way under a fence that eluded all my efforts before. Never mind that last part, she ordered herself. I'll just have to figure that out when I get there.

The gate key, she marveled. Somehow I still have it in my hand. After all that.

She couldn't seem to think of the sequence of moves that would get her standing upright. At last she worked it out, took a few breaths, and started hopping dizzily, her elbow keeping contact with the left-hand wall of the corridor, brushing walls and cell bars in alternation.

She had lost count, and was surprised when she bumped against a concrete wall -- luckily not hard, for once. Oh yes, she told herself, the back wall of the cell block. I've reached the end.

She turned right and hopped along the back wall, her left elbow soon brushing against the library door. She continued, knowing she was nearing the door to that awful room, the one where... Never mind. Sylvia found she was too exhausted to care properly about what she had gone through in that room. She suddenly remembered just before reaching it that she had left that door standing open. She began moving forward in the one-inch steps that were all she could manage in the way of walking. It took longer than she expected before she finally bumped the door, and crept carefully around it, then across the opening in the wall, bumping at last against the door frame. Easing herself around it, she regained the wall beyond it and resumed hopping. She stopped hopping once more, proceeding in tiny steps again until she bumped into another wall, signaling her arrival at the corner of the corridors. She turned right and began hopping again, relieved that her progress had taken her back to the other main corridor, without further damage to herself.

Again her elbow brushed against the alternating walls and cells, and she kept count this time. She knew what was ahead of her, but wanted to be sure when it was coming.

She felt as if this was all she had ever done in her life, as if every memory of doing anything other than hop blindly towards longed-for freedom was a figment of imagination.

By the time she reached the closed fence at the front entrance to the corridor, the muscles in her legs were trembling so badly from fatigue, and aching so much from earlier cramps, that she knew she couldn't make it any farther. She eased down to sit and lean against the fence, needing rest nearly as much as she needed water, but almost immediately shook herself to alertness, breathing hard, at the sound of growling dogs, one seeming just inches from her left ear, its panting breath billowing against her neck, a stream of what she somehow knew was saliva dripping onto her right breast. It seemed much less a dream now, seemed that much closer to the surface of her consciousness, as if it was crossing the line between dream and hallucination. There are no dogs there are no dogs! she shouted silently, and shivered with the fear that her grasp of reality without dogs was slipping, that she would fail, the next time, to banish them by force of will, or even to remember that they weren't really there. She sat upright, putting herself back in motion. Hopping was out for the time being -- until she had rested, any attempt to continue that mode of movement seemed well beyond her strength. She started moving to her left by lifting her butt off the floor with her fingers, letting it swing to the side and easing it down gently so it wouldn't scrape on the floor, moving her heels afterward, and repeating the process, moving slowly across the fence, turning the corner to move along in front of the cell, turning again into the cross-corridor and moving along its length until she came to the fallen, unlocked fence.

She sat for several minutes, recalling her past efforts here and wondering what she might do that she hadn't already tried.

The trouble is, she decided, I kept having parts of my body in the wrong place, either too far away to be able to twist them around to get them under the fence, or else blocking the fence so I couldn't lift it. I need all of my body right there, at one time, ready to go under.

She worried for a time that the approach she was contemplating would get her immovably stuck underneath the fence, dooming her to die there. She finally told herself: I'm going to die for sure if I don't try this. Nothing else has worked.

She stretched out full-length along the gritty floor along the bottom of the fence, and wriggled around so that her back was turned to the chain links. Keeping a tight hold of the gate key in her left hand, she reached back with her right and wrapped her fingers around one of the wires at the very bottom, just above the metal tubing that anchored the wires along the bottom. Wriggling forward, the skin on her right side scraping the floor, she pulled the fence outward and upward. Once the tubing was far enough off the floor, she pushed her feet back underneath it to keep it from falling back, and rested briefly with the weight of the fence resting painfully on her left heel, itself atop her right. Shifting her grip now, she took hold of the tubing itself and wriggled farther forward, twisting her body as she lifted and at last getting the tubing to rest on her buttock near her hip. She lay there for a time, her body pinned to the floor by the fence, not eager to begin the next movement.

At last she took a deep breath, and began twisting her entire body, her side scraping the floor harder than ever, moving just millimeters at a time while the fence tubing remained perched on her butt. She reached a point where the fence had her so firmly pinned to the floor that she feared she couldn't move in either direction, and panic began to set in as she felt herself stuck exactly as she'd pictured it. The panic granted her an extra burst of energy and she managed to wriggle just a little farther underneath the fence, and farther still. On her stomach by now, her breasts taking the worst of the scraping, the fence on her left buttock, she felt herself get past the balance point beyond which turning under the fence became easier. The fence finally slipped off her buttock and banged to the floor, slapping Sylvia's behind and rolling her onto her back, on the other side of the fence. Ahead of the locked fence that had stopped her earlier.

Her thirst, her exhaustion, and the burning of her skin, all were forgotten just for a moment, as she exulted, I'm though! I did it!

She wanted to lay there, relaxed, basking in the elation and restoring her energy, but knew that even seconds might well count in her battle against dehydration -- and also that if she fell asleep, or even let her attention wander, the dogs would return to terrorize her. She sat up, and grunted with effort as she used the back side of the fence to get herself standing upright again.

She hopped across the front of the last cell -- or first, from the cell block gate -- paused at the corner, and realized she would need to cross the corridor with no walls on either side to help her. Impatient to reach the gate, her energy renewed by her success with the fence, she hopped carefully ahead until she nearly lost her balance, recovered and began creeping ahead in one-inch steps. As she made the crossing, and as more time went by, her fear built that she had curved off in one direction or another. At last her head nudged a wall, at an angle from her direction of travel. She knew that her path had bent off-line at least slightly, and she thought to herself Please, please, please be the right wall. If this wasn't the wall with the gate in it, she would have to figure out which wall it was, and where she was in relation to where she wanted to go, all of which would take time she didn't feel she could spare.

She turned left and hopped along the wall, stopping when she came to metal bars. Her heart pounded. This is either the gate, she told herself, or the bars of the first cell in that corridor Judy and I came down. Sylvia thought the latter was a greater distance than she could possibly have traveled, but did not feel completely sure.

She hopped along the front of the bars, feeling them with her elbow. When the bars ended far too soon to be anything but the gate, she gave a voiceless whoop of joy. I'm here! she told herself. This is the gate! Breathing hard, she turned her back to it to feel it with her hands. The keyholes, of course, were on the outside. She kept the key in her left hand while she reached through the bars with her right and felt for the uppermost keyhole with her fingertips. There, got it! She worked hard to throttle down the excitement now, knowing how careless impatience would make her. As carefully as she'd ever done anything in her life, she shifted the key to her right hand, reached again through the bars, pointed the key along her extended index finger, found the keyhole again with her finger, and guided the key in. She breathed a little easier for the moment as she gave the key a full turn, sensing it pulling the bolt back, then pulled the key out and began again, searching with her fingers for the lower keyhole, the key in her right palm, her fingers probing the lock surface. She crouched slightly, her legs achy but holding.

The cramp in her left calf muscle hit with no warning. All her muscles clenched with the sudden pain, the fingers of her right hand slapping against the lock mechanism, pinning the key against it. Desperately she flattened her hand on the lock, covering the key, and held it there as she walked her feet in tiny steps outward to straighten her leg to start relieving the spasm. Her sweat-slick back slipped slightly against the metal bars. Panicked that she was about to fall sideways and lose her hold on the key, she shifted her hand for a better grip, her palm momentarily losing contact with the lock. She gritted her teeth as she felt the key begin to slip, and then it was gone, hitting the floor with a pinging sound an instant later.

She slid quickly down to the floor, her calf muscle screaming at her as it tightened still further, and desperately felt the floor with both hands behind her butt. There was no key within the tiny area she could reach.

She put her legs out straight, and the cramp gradually eased. Then she bent forward, her head down, her entire body shaking, crying without a voice. I was so close, so close, so close! she thought. Judy tried so hard to trap me, and she couldn't do it. And then my own body killed me!

Soon, she told herself hopelessly, my whole body will be cramping, every part of me feeling like my leg just did. And I'll be hallucinating about those dogs, those damned dogs. Their teeth ripping my skin away everywhere on my body, the pain from it very real, but I can't bleed out from it because it isn't really happening. So it will just go on and on.

From somewhere inside, the calm, rational Sylvia fought her way to the surface of her mind. The key could have bounced in any direction, she reminded herself. I couldn't tell which way it went, but there is a fifty-fifty chance it's on this side of the gate. And even if it's on the other side, it could still be within reach. It can't be more than a few feet away. I have a better than even chance of finding it.

She wriggled to the side feeling first the gate behind her back and then the wall, and stopped, as nearly as she could judge, about three feet beyond the gate. She turned around there to lie on her side, straight outward from the wall, her toes touching the wall. She realized rolling wouldn't be sufficient. She had to keep the full length of her body in constant contact with the floor, or she could easily miss the key. She began inching her body forward along the floor, keeping herself as flat as she could, trying to make sure every square inch of floor space, for five feet outward from the wall, was touched by some part of her body as she squirmed ahead.

Once she had gone past the full length of the gate on the floor and about three feet beyond it, she began crying again. If the key was on her side of the gate, she didn't think it could be anywhere she hadn't touched. It couldn't have bounced farther away than that.

Please, please, please let it be close enough to reach, she begged the universe.

Her feet, she decided, could reach farther past the gate than her hands. She sat up in front of the gate, and thrust her feet out through the two leftmost spaces between the bars. She knew she would be blocked from probing farther outward by the padlock connecting her ankle bands hitting the bar, but was still disappointed in how small the distance was that her feet could get past the bars.

I've got to do better than this, she told herself. She pulled her feet back, laid down on her side, and tried to put both feet through the same space. Her heels caught on the bar, and she couldn't seem to point her feet enough to get past it.

This has to work, it has to work, she thought. Sitting back, she pulled upward with her right foot to try to twist her left ankle band a quarter-turn counterclockwise around her ankle. The sweat around her ankle made it sufficiently slippery against her skin, and she managed to get it turned. Then she twisted her right foot around, rotating it inside its ankle band, and at last had her right foot directly in front of her left, rather than beside it. She found that arrangement allowed both her feet to get through between the bars.

She pushed them out as far as they would go, and felt along the floor beyond the gate with her left heel. She couldn't go very far to one side or the other -- only straight back from the gate, really. Finding nothing, she backed out and put her feet through the next space between the bars.

Increasingly desperate by the time she had felt the floor behind ten different spaces, she gasped as her heel suddenly felt something sharp.

Please don't be a chip of concrete, don't be anything but a key! she shouted in her mind. She bore down with her heel and tried to pull whatever it was back towards the gate, but couldn't quite get enough downward pressure on it. She had already reached a point where the width of her calf muscles prevented her from pushing her feet out farther. She gritted her teeth and pushed harder, her calves feeling crushed in a vise. With her heel out beyond the object at last, she dragged her heel towards her, felt the object being pulled along. From the sound, it did seem to be something metal.

Not wanting to kick the object some unpredictable distance, she waited until it was just inches from the gate and gave it a final nudge with her heel to send it sliding just a small distance more. Pulling her feet out, shaking once more, from excitement and anxiety combined, she turned around and felt the floor through the bars with her fingers. Seconds later she was holding the key, her body limp from released tension.

She waited a few minutes, breathing deeply, slowly, mouth open, trying to calm herself -- she didn't need the shakes when she tried unlocking the gate -- and finally got herself upright in front of the lock.

It was a little easier now from previous practice. She located the keyhole, slid the key in, turned it. When the gate sprang open, she hopped up and down in place, whisper-shouting, "Yes!! Yes!!"

There was nothing with a lock on it between her and the creek!

She realized she had no idea what time of day it might be. It could be the middle of the night. There might not be a moon, and the outdoors might be as black as the cell block. She might have to wait hours for the sun to come up so she could find her way to the creek. No, she thought, please be daylight, please be a bright, sunny day.

She hopped towards the wall to her left, and proceeded along it, passing that lounge or whatever it was, and found the door to the stairwell. She had to negotiate the stairwell sitting down, lifting her butt with her elbows and then bring her feet up after, one step at a time. She opened the door at the top, and then... light!!

To her fully dilated eyes, which hadn't seen a single photon of light in hours, it seemed dazzling, dim as she knew it really was. It was coming from the entryway that lay to the right, around the corner far down at the end of the hallway. But it was easily sufficient to see by. I don't need to feel my way along anymore! she thought. Though she knew it was impossible, her exuberant senses swore to her that they could smell and hear the creek from here.

I beat Judy I beat her I beat her! she crowed within. I won because I wanted life and Judy didn't. Judy gave up on life.

She took a few hops down the hallway, then stopped suddenly -- she had looked down to make sure her way was clear on the floor in front of her and had caught sight of her own body. She looked, she thought, like an impressionistic painting of a forest fire in a thunderstorm. Her skin, all parts of it that she could see from her breasts down her stomach and legs, was gray from dirt and dust, over an angry red coating of blood, mostly Judy's, some her own, both layers of color mixed, swirled, and streaked by the flow of sweat, most of it cross-hatched with scrapes and abrasions and mottled with bruises in various colors and stages of emergence. There was almost not a single square inch anywhere on which unblemished skin showed through. I guess it doesn't matter if I can't talk, she thought. Whoever finds me is going to know to get me to the emergency room.

But I can clean up in the creek! she told herself, resuming hopping quickly along the hallway, feeling almost orgasmic joy that her way to the Heaven of flowing water was clear. As she came to the entry hall she turned and hopped into it, grinning as she saw the door, bright sunlight streaming through narrow vertical windows in it. She overflowed with happiness at the simple act of seeing.

She stopped suddenly, almost falling, and stood rooted there, ten feet from the door of the building.

Wrapped around the two vertical handles, one on each door, joining them inseparably, there was a long chain, secured by a padlock. The doors couldn't be opened.

It can't be, Sylvia thought. It wasn't there when we came. Of course it wasn't. We got in.

She hopped closer to the door, and turned to feel the chain with her hands. It's on there really solid, she determined. She tried pulling the door open, with no success. She gave it a harder yank, a harsh hiss starting in her throat. I'm three feet away from being outside! she screamed within.

Obviously Judy put it there, she observed. Maybe as the very last thing before she came down to kill herself. There have to be other ways in and out of the building, Sylvia reminded herself. No building has just one way in. And Judy wasn't allowed, by her own rules, to trap Sylvia with no way out. But where are the other doors?? I don't have any energy to start...

"What in the world have you been doing, Sylvia? You're a total mess!" The voice came from behind a partly-open office door straight across the entryway from the building's entrance. Sylvia froze, looking up to see the door open fully and Judy emerge, fully dressed, rather than naked as Sylvia had last seen her. Her arms were folded, and she had a smile on her face. "I imagine you're pretty proud of yourself."

Sylvia heard a buzzing in her head, sensed a gray fog entering her vision. She had never fainted, in her entire life. Somehow, she knew that she was doing it now.