Robyn burst through the door. "I want ice cream!" she shouted, with a wild-eyed intensity usually reserved for much more terrifying sentences.

Everybody down on the floor!

I'll cut ya, man!

You're eating raw chicken!

That sort of thing.

But the wiry Latino teen - whose name, according to the cursive tattoo on the back of his neck, was Hector - seemed neither frightened nor surprised. He simply sighed wearily as if to say, "Oh, this again" and magnanimously waved his hand in front of the prismatic assortment of frozen ice cream flavors. Help yourself.

At this point, neither decorum nor hygiene were high on Robyn's list of priorities. She did not so much eat the ice cream as assault it, clawing it out of the sticky metal pans with her fingers and jamming it her mouth.

After the endless weeks she had spent drinking Tenacity's execrable concoctions, the ice cream's effect on Robyn was more sexual than gustatory. She had heard the term "mouthgasm," but had never experienced one before. Now, she was having multiples, her body shuddering and unearthly moans emitting from deep within her.

But in her frenzied state, she ate too much, too fast, and she suddenly felt a biting pain rip through her skull. She grabbed her head and howled in agony.

"Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia," Hector observed.

Still pressing the sides of her head with both palms, she cast a surprised and uncomprehending look at him. "What?"

"It's the scientific term for brain freeze," he clarified.

Mercifully, it wasn't long before the pain began to subside. Robyn let out a relieved sigh and took her hands from her head, leaving multi-colored splotches of gooey, melted ice cream in her hair.

"I'm pre-med," Hector said and she stared at him again. Sensing her doubt, he held up the medical text book he was reading to corroborate his claim. "This," he gestured vaguely towards the store, "is just so I can afford books and stuff. I have a scholarship, but-"

"I need a phone," Robyn said abruptly, having realized - now that her desire for sugar was more than satiated - that she still had no way to get home.

Stung by Robyn's brusqueness, Hector did nothing, until she added a sweetly contrite, "Please?" Only partially mollified, Hector pointed curtly towards the cordless phone by the register, revealing a tattoo on his forearm. She only glimpsed it for a brief moment, but it appeared to be The Crucifixion, with Wile E. Coyote subbing in for Jesus.

"Thank you," she said gratefully as she crossed over to the phone, lifting the handset from its cradle. She extended an index finger with the intention of dialing Brian, when she was struck by an awful realization.

She did not know her own fiancé's phone number.

In fact, she didn't know anybody's phone number. They were all stored in her smart phone, leaving her mind free to remember other, more important things, like the names of all the major characters on Game of Thrones and the combinations to each and every one of her old high school lockers.

She did, however, know the phone number of the Urban Outfitters corporate office she worked for, having given it out so many times in the past.

Julia also worked there.

Julia would help her.

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Julia chose to ignore the faint buzzing of the cell phone vibrating in her purse. Instead, she listened attentively as Caleb - an excitable, freckle-faced farm boy from Kansas - threatened to kill her.

Julia was conducting Caleb's employment termination meeting in a small conference room buzzing with fluorescent lights. She had already blindsided him with the news that his services were no longer required, then moved on to the part where she assured him that it was not a result of anything he had done wrong. He just "wasn't a good fit" - the "it's not you, it's me" of corporate America.

Now, it had reached its climax, what Julia called the "Fuck me?! No, fuck you!" phase in which the employee lashes out. This usually took the form of an obscenity-filled tirade, in which case Julia would simply let them vent. But on extremely rare occasions, someone would raise the specter of violence and things would go a little differently.

Julia looked at her oversized rose gold watch and when the second hand reached XII, she raised her head. "So how, exactly, are you planning to kill me, Caleb?"

"What kind of question is that? Who the hell cares?" He hadn't thought this through. Julia took an untroubled sip of her decaffeinated Five Hour Energy Drink. Angrier now, and desperate to save face, Caleb groped for an answer. "I'll... fucking... strangle you!"

Julia exhaled sharply through her nose, her eyes crinkling with amusement. "You'll strangle me? There's six feet of conference table between us, Caleb. So good luck with that."

"I could shoot you."

She openly laughed at this. "Ohhhhh, so you have a gun now!"

"That's right." He was flailing, his corn-fed face a bright red.

"Show it to me," Julia challenged.

"I don't want to."

"You can't shoot me without showing me the gun, Caleb. That's just Murder 101."

"I know, but..." The last of the fight went out of him and his whole body wilted like steamed spinach. Julia looked down at her watch again and scribbled something quickly on a Post-It Note.

"Caleb, this is what we call a teachable moment," she said, adopting a pedagogical tone. "I want you to think about what just happened. First, you committed yourself to a goal, namely killing me, without the slightest idea of how you were going to accomplish it. And then, when you ran into difficulties, rather than coming up with a workable solution, you simply gave up. And all of that only took..." - she glanced at the Post-It note, then held it up for him to see - "...forty-four seconds."

"So with that in mind," Julia concluded, "is it really such a mystery why we canned your ass?"

——————————————

Moments after Robyn concluded her frantic message on Julia's voicemail, they came for her. Dave pushed through the front door with his left arm. His right was in a sling. He had dislocated his shoulder when he collided with the reinforced door of Robyn's bungalow.

Brando followed him in and stood frowning behind Dave, with his arms folded like a bouncer.

Robyn was astonished.

"But... I smashed the tracking bracelet in a million pieces! How the hell did you find me so fast?"

"Because I'm the smartest man who ever lived," Dave said, his bitterness at her betrayal giving his tone a sharp edge. "I mean, who else could possibly figure out that you were at a Coldstone Creamery a hundred and fifty feet away?"

Robyn knew that Dave's sarcasm was the least of her problems at the moment, but it still hurt. "You don't have to be mean about it," she grumbled.

"Says the woman who kicked me in the face. Twice!" He gestured at the bloody, wadded-up tissue stuffed in his left nostril.

"She did that?" asked Hector, shaking his head. "That's why I didn't mess with her. She had that look." He tilted his head back and opened his eyes wide in a caricature of her insane stare.

"Ready to go?" Dave asked Robyn. She had the idea of running out the back door, but two more lycra blackshirts appeared behind her.

"So who's going to pay for...?" Hector gestured towards the ravaged ice cream trays, all of which would need to be disinfected.

"We'll add it to her bill," Dave assured him.

"Wait... my bill?!" Robyn said incredulously. "You mean, you're charging me for my own kidnapping?"

"We're not running a charity here, Robyn."

——————————————

"Move your hand," Dave advised Robyn and, unwilling to risk crushed fingers, she complied. He shut the door and she heard the click of the padlock snapping into place.

"I don't want to be in here!" she screamed at Dave.

Dave looked through the grate at her. The sun was behind him and he was mostly silhouette. "Yes, I know," he said acerbically. "That's what makes it a punishment."

And then she lost it. She struck the grate furiously with her palm. "You're a fucking asshole, Dave! You hear me? A real fucking asshole!" She had a lot more to say on the subject of Dave and what a fucking asshole he was, but he was now standing up and even at the peak of her rage, she couldn't help but feel foolish shouting at his knees.

"See you later," he said with mock congeniality, taking unseemly delight in her fury. He walked away.

Alone now, her anger began to ebb and she started to feel the weight of her confinement. The box was a lot smaller than it had appeared from the outside, like an Economy Class coffin. The air was stagnant and smelled strongly of other women's sweat. Until this second, she had never realized she was claustrophobic and she struggled to control her breathing as anxiety squeezed her lungs.

She kicked walls, pounded on them with her fists, flesh against unyielding carbon steel. It was a futile gesture, but Robyn was past the point of rationality and had moved on to pure animal panic. She screamed for help and then, when no help came, she screamed because she couldn't stop herself from screaming.

Finally, Robyn exhausted herself. It had taken an impressively long time. All of her cardio work was, in that sense, paying off. She was softly crying now, her moist skin sticking to the metal. It all felt so hopeless. She was stuck in here indefinitely and she didn't know if she could handle it. Worse, she realized it didn't matter if she could handle it or not. She was stuck in here until they let her go.

If they let her go.

——————————————

It was only when a remorseful Caleb was escorted out of the conference room by Security that Julia retrieved her cell from her purse. She listened to her voicemail messages, which were mostly solicitations of some sort or another, or tedious business calls forwarded to her cell from her office phone. She deleted all of them, usually after only a few seconds, until she heard Robyn's voice.

What Julia heard was distressing. She had been told that Robyn had taken a leave of absence for some undisclosed medical reason that was apparently serious enough to require six months away from work, but not serious enough to postpone her wedding.

But now there was this fantastical story about how Robyn had been kidnapped and held prisoner at some industrial park, but she escaped to a land of delicious ice cream, and now she needed Julia to come and get her, because it was only a matter of time before they tracked her down and put her in the box.

Julia, her brow furrowed with concern, realized that there were only two possibilities. Robyn had either completely lost her mind... or she was actually being held captive at a weight loss facility. And she wasn't sure which one was more troubling.

She immediately called Brian and breathlessly told him what Robyn had told her. His reaction was disturbingly inauthentic.

"Wow," Brian said, feigning surprise. "Gosh. That's... that's unbelievable. And terrible! That's unbelievably terrible!"

"You knew about this?!" Julia cried, her voice a lot more shrieky than she intended. A startled custodian looked at her, alarmed. She gave him small apologetic wave and turned away from him. Then, an octave lower and a few decibels quieter: "You fucking knew about this?"

There was a long, guilty silence. She could practically feel the sweatiness of his palm through her Galaxy phone as he tried to formulate his explanation. He mumbled about video files and table cloth swatches and a rollerblading Kendra. He could tell that he was only digging himself in deeper.

"Where is she?" Julia demanded.

"I... don't know." And off her furious silence he took one more stab at defending himself. "Listen," he pleaded. "I know it sounds bad, but-"

"Rot in fucking hell, you irredeemable piece of dog shit!" And then Julia hung up on him, before she said something she'd regret.

She stood there, fuming and trembling with rage. She needed to think, but couldn't dispel the anger that was clouding her mind. OK, Julia. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

And then it hit her. In all his semi-coherent babbling, there was something Brian said that stood out. She pressed redial and immediately Brian picked up.

"What was that you said about table cloth swatches?"

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