No Exit

Darby lands hard on her back against the edge of a urinal. She grabs her keys and phone, which only has seven percent battery remaining. She reenters the main rest-stop area, where Ed and Sandi sit with Ashley, who is now calm and steady in opposition to his friendly and nervous act from earlier. Ashley nods toward Darby’s chair, where he has left a note that says, “IF YOU TELL THEM, I KILL THEM BOTH” (71).

Ashley taunts Darby subtly so Sandi and Ed don’t notice as they sit in the rest stop. Lars enters, hiding his gun under his coat. Darby says her biggest fear is “making the wrong choice, failing, and letting someone else get kidnapped or killed” (74), which catches Ashley off guard. Ashley proposes a new round of the icebreaker game: favorite movies. He reports, while making meaningful eye contact with Darby, his are kaiju movies, like Godzilla, because the human characters are only there to be crushed. The coffee runs out, so Ed goes to his truck to get instant-coffee grounds, leaving Darby with the kidnapping brothers and Sandi, who is asleep. Ashley offers to forget anything ever happened if Darby lets them leave with Jay without a fuss, but Darby can’t agree, even when Ashley promises they won’t hurt Jay.

Ashley makes pseudo-friendly conversation as Darby frets about how long Ed has been gone, wondering if he has noticed something amiss. Ashley claims that he and Lars have only kidnapped Jay for ransom, and that they don’t intend to hurt her, but Darby counters that she saw how he shot Jay in the hand with a nail gun. His manner turns cold, and he asks what she thinks he would be willing to do to her, someone who holds no value to him, if he’s willing to hurt the child he plans to ransom. He smashes her face into a table, then tells Sandi the high altitude has caused Darby’s nosebleed when Sandi wakes. Darby snaps at Ashley, causing Sandi to notice the tension between them just as Ed reenters. Darby makes warning eye contact with Sandi as Ashley signals for Lars to stay calm. Ed is unaware. Quietly, Darby writes a message and passes it to Ashley.

Darby’s note says, “YOU WIN […] I WON’T SAY A WORD” (84). Ashley smugly thinks he has the upper hand and reflects on his childhood visits to his uncle Kenny. When Ashley was young, he learned that his uncle kept and sexually abused a woman imprisoned in his storm cellar. After Ashley discovered the woman, Kenny killed her. Ashley elected not to tell anyone of this crime, due to his enjoyment of his uncle’s sexist and racist jokes. He returns to the present and realizes Darby has disappeared and follows her to the restroom.

Darby decides to escape out the restroom window and run as far as she can, hoping to get a signal. When she pulls herself up to the window, however, she hears Lars breathing outside. Before she can decide what to do, Ashley seizes her from behind, pressing a plastic bag over her face.

Inside the van, Jay saws through the final bar in the kennel. Jay recalls her kidnapping and wonders why she froze instead of running when she encountered the brothers, then masked as a zombie and werewolf, attacking her family’s housekeeper. She opens the door to the van and looks out into the snow.

Darby screams and thrashes against Ashley’s hold as the plastic bag causes her to run out of air. He murmurs mockingly soothing words to her as she suffocates. She thinks of all the unfinished things in her life and tries to bite through the plastic of the bag when she realize she is the only one who can save Jay. She succeeds, catching Ashley off guard, and slams him into the sink. He tries to hit her with the rock-in-a-sock, but she slips through the window too quickly. He is unconcerned, thinking Lars will stop her, but Lars has come inside, having heard the struggle. They realize Darby has stolen their keys.

Outside, Darby runs for Ashley and Lars’s van, planning to escape with Jay inside. She hears Ashley and Lars behind her and makes it to the van. All three simultaneously realize that Jay is gone.

Darby can’t resist taunting Ashley as his plan has fallen apart. He swings the rock-in-a-sock at her but throws it at the last minute, making an improbable hit at a far-off streetlight. She thinks about how Ashley and Lars have been manipulating her, pretending not to know one another and hinting at their crimes to gauge her reactions. She and Lars simultaneously realize that Jay, without proper winter clothes, will freeze to death. Ashley tells Darby that the only way to save Jay is to lure her back to them.

They follow Jay’s footsteps until they abruptly disappear. Lars frets that he and Ashley may have gotten Jay killed, but Ashley retorts that they did not; rather, Darby may have. She regrets getting involved instead of waiting until morning and calling the police. Darby realizes that since Jay has almost certainly frozen to death, then Ashley and Lars no longer have any reason to keep her alive.

Ashley signals to Lars to kill Darby, but before he can pull the trigger, Darby clicks off her flashlight, plunging them into darkness. Darby runs. Lars is blinded by the sudden darkness, but Ashley kept one eye shut to preserve his night vision, a trick Darby taught him before she knew of his duplicity. She hears him take the gun and throws herself downhill, as she can fall faster than she can run through the deep snow. She hears a gunshot, but it misses her, so she runs before Ashley can aim again.

Though he missed Darby with the gun, Ashley is initially unconcerned. When he sees the landmark of Melanie’s Peak, however, he realizes she has turned them around in the dark and that he is headed back toward the rest stop. Darby reaches the rest station parking lot, angry with herself when she realizes the fourth “car” buried under the snow is actually a dumpster. She plans to steal the brothers’ van and escape before realizing this would leave Sandi and Ed vulnerable and that the snow is too deep to drive anyway. Ashley calls out taunts, threatening violence from a distance.

Darby rushes into the rest stop, halting in relief when she sees Jay inside with Ed and Sandi. Sandi protects Jay by brandishing pepper spray until Jay confirms that Darby saved her. Darby tells Ed and Sandi they have to flee. Ed has a lug wrench and Darby is glad they have a weapon. She notices a medical bracelet on Jay’s wrist but doesn’t have time to ask about it. The group is about to bolt for Sandi’s truck when Darby senses that the brothers are hiding in wait.

The brothers guard the cars while Sandi, Ed, Darby, and Jay stay in the building. Darby thinks of the situation as a “stalemate,” then amends it to a “siege.” Darby is dismayed to realize the others are looking to her as a leader, a role for which she feels unequipped. She says the building will be “[their] Alamo. For the next four hours” (108) and directs Ed to block the window.

Outside, Ashley expresses admiration for Darby’s cunning. He thinks that “the fun” in killing is “deciding how” and tells Lars that everyone inside is to be killed (109).

Ed uses the wrench to break into the coffee shop in the rest area. They can’t find weapons or a phone but decide to boil water to throw on the brothers. In a janitor’s closet, Darby finds a phone, but it doesn’t work. She finds a note from Jay that reads “DON’T TRUST THEM” (110), evidently indicating Sandi and Ed. Ed smells of alcohol and Darby prays he isn’t drunk as she outlines her plan to hide in the bathroom until Ashley and Lars sneak in the small window, then blind them with Sandi’s pepper spray. Ed vows to go to rehab after this experience. Darby throws Ashley’s keys out the bathroom window, offering him a chance to depart without bloodshed, though she knows he won’t take it. She drafts another text message to her mom, promising that she “didn’t stop fighting” (113).

Darby asks Jay where the brothers were headed when they were stranded at the rest stop, but Jay corrects her: The brothers had been planning to come to this rest stop, though she didn’t know why. Ed asks Jay about “meds,” and explains that Jay’s medical bracelet reveals she has Addison’s disease, which requires daily steroid injections. Jay hasn’t had hers for four days. Darby silently asks Ed how serious this is, to which Ed eventually indicates fatal. Outside, Ashley grabs the nail gun while Ed counsels that the best treatment for Jay is to keep her stress down, which Darby considers an impossibility, given the circumstances.

Ashley uses the nail gun to puncture Darby’s tires. He reassures a nervous Lars that after “just a little dirty work” (117) they can go play video games at their uncle Kenny’s. He thinks sympathetically of Lars’s disabilities brought on by fetal alcohol syndrome. As the brothers prepare to infiltrate the rest stop, Ashley tells Lars that only Ashley can kill Darby.

As the brothers approach, Sandi begins to panic as Darby struggles to keep Jay calm. Jay reports that Sandi reminds her of her school-bus driver in San Diego, which makes Darby suspicious. Despite the imminent attack, she presses Ed until he says he is from Carlsbad, California, which relieves her until Sandi pepper-sprays her.