At first, Mollie refused to drink the water and eat. She had no idea what these bastards had done to it, but when she saw some of the other people in the cages surrounding her eating and drinking, she conceded to the water but refused the food. She didn’t trust it would be okay, and there were others who weren’t eating.
Granted, those others were only given cups of water and no food, but there had to be a reason for that. Mollie wondered if it was because they refused food before or were already drugged, had experiments or whatever done to them, and were now being starved to death because they were considered useless.
Shifting again, Mollie winced when her tailbone dug into the bars beneath her, making it impossible to get comfortable or sleep. Exhaustion succeeded in pulling her under a few hours ago, and she’d dozed for a bit, but like food, sleep was scarce.
Her stomach rumbled as her thoughts returned to food; she tuned out the noise and the pangs following it. She’d gone without food for longer than this, so if these pricks thought she would cave and eat, they had another think coming.
No one could starve her any more than she’d starved herself for more years than she cared to recall.
When her stomach gave another loud rumble, she dug in to her pocket and fished out her crushed pack of gum. They’d taken her wallet and coat, but left her with the gum. Pulling out a piece, she unwrapped it and slid it into her mouth. It didn’t ease her hunger, but the act of chewing made her feel better.
Plus, the smell of spearmint filling her nose was much better than the human waste and body odor scent of the barn. She’d been in a few barns before, at a fair. She’d examined the animals and held her mom’s hand as they walked through the cows, sheep, horses, and chickens on display. The scent of their shit and animal aroma had been overwhelming, but she’d also smelled hay and feed. In this place, she detected only the faint hint of hay or straw and no animals.
The two-story-tall doors at the far end of the barn suddenly slid open, each of them going in opposite directions. The small influx of light entering through the doors, nearly two hundred feet away from her, caused Mollie to blink even as she strained to see more.
She sat up and gripped her bars. She wished she could kneel, but the last time she tried, her knees dug into the bars beneath her.
Aida! Are they bringing Aida back?
She held her breath as anticipation warred within her.Please, please, let them be bringing her back!
From the numerous cages surrounding her, some of the other people sat up to see what was happening. The last time the doors opened, they’d come in and removed Aida.
In the faint glow of the headlights, dust motes danced on the air as the man who opened the door turned away. When the doors opened for their first feeding, Mollie tried counting the cages within the massive barn, but there were so many around her that she lost track after fifty. Most of those fifty were full of men and women.
If this was a sex trafficking ring, then the operators weren’t picky about age, as some of the men and women looked to be in their fifties or sixties, and others appeared to be in their teens or early twenties.
She believed they were still somewhere in Canada, but she couldn’t be sure. The last town she remembered before her car broke down had a population not much bigger than this barn, yet somehow these sicko perverts managed to gather quite the collection here.
But then, for all she knew, they weren’t in Canada anymore. They could be somewhere in the United States, and she’d have no idea. The last thing she remembered was trying to change her flat tire, someone stopping to offer help, and then blackness.
She’d woken here afterward. Judging by the time on her grandpop’s Rolex wristwatch when she awoke, Mollie assumed she was only unconscious for a couple of hours. But for all she knew, it could have been more than fifteen hours or a day later.
That meant she could be beyond the U.S. as she could have been on a freaking plane without knowing it. They could be in Europe or Mexico right now. Her head started pounding, and she decided not to think about it. She’d never be able to puzzle out where she was while caged.
When she first woke, with cottonmouth and a headache, Aida was sleeping in the cage next to hers, but that was twelve hours ago. They’d taken Aida from her two hours ago. She’d kept careful track of time since waking; it was the only thing she could control in this place.
The man reemerged, and the headlights pulled away as the truck turned around. Standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the lights on the back of the vehicle, the man waved his hands in the air to direct the driver into the barn. The backup alarm sounded until the box truck came a few feet inside the barn doors.
When the alarm stopped, the man gripped the back doors and flung them open. An interior light turned on to reveal the bodies piled inside. From both sides of the truck, men and women appeared and climbed inside. Like an assembly line from Hell, they started removing the bodies and tossing them out to their waiting cohorts.
Mollie gulped and edged away from her bars as some of those in the cages closest to her growled low in their throats. The noises they released made the ones she issued earlier sound human as they crept closer to their bars and wrapped their hands around them.
A shiver of unease ran down her spine. She’d vowed to examine the locks on some of the other cages more closely the next time she had some light, but with those noises, she’d prefer not to be anywhere near some of the other prisoners. Mollie edged further away from the bars when she saw a flash of red in some of their eyes, and that red had nothing to do with the backup lights on the truck.
That can’t be possible; it just can’t.
But no matter how impossible it was, Mollie suspected she’d been tossed into something she couldn’t begin to fathom. Out of all the horrific possibilities for her current situation, she had a feeling she hadn’t hit on the truth yet.
Mollie didn’t dare look at the occupants of those cages again; she’d lose her mind if she did, and she couldn’t risk doing that. Some of the others wept as they cowered in the corners of their cages and pleaded to be left alone. They’d already given up.
She wouldnotbe one of them.
Mollie pressed against the bars at the back of her cage. Behind her was nothing but the wood wall of the barn, but she still felt as if eyes were boring into her nape from the shadows. Shivering, Mollie wrapped her arms around her knees, but she didn’t give in to the impulse to look behind her—mainly because she feared coming face-to-face with two vibrant red eyes blazing out at her from the dark.
She ignored the prickling sensation on her neck as she watched the offloaded bodies being tossed into cages. One of her captors stalked toward her with a large male draped over his shoulder. He opened the door on the cage next to her—the one Aida had resided in—tossed the body inside and slammed the door.
She glimpsed the golden patch on her captor’s black coat when he turned away. Earlier, she’d seen it well enough to know the patch read “Security,” but she couldn’t make out the word on it now. All the others who freely entered the barn wore the same patch on their coats, but what they were the security of, or if they were the security of anything, Mollie didn’t know.
