Page 2 of Defending Van

The eerie kind of quiet.

Makayla shivered as she made a quick tour of the house. It was just as dirty as it had been the last time she was here. It was obvious the parents had done the bare minimum to get their son back. She’d always wondered why some parents went to such lengths to have their children returned when they obviously hated them to begin with. Her parents despised her, and yet time after time, they would make attempts to pretend to clean up just to get her back, and then go right back to abusing her.

Room after room turned up empty.

There was no sign of any of the three people who lived here, and she was beginning to wonder if they’d packed up and disappeared. She had no idea where they would have gone, or where they could have afforded to go. There was no extended family in the picture, which was why the little boy had wound up at a foster home.

Heading outside, she made her way across the rickety porch, in only slightly better condition than the front porch, and over the overgrown yard toward the barn. There were no longer any animals kept in it, no farming equipment either. While this had been a working farm half a century ago, it had since fallen derelict.

“Hello?” she called out as she stepped inside. Maybe Mr. Smith thought he could hide out in here, and she’d just leave without looking for him. Too bad for him she took this job way too seriously to ever just walk away without confirming one of the children in her care was okay. Well, at least as okay as she could get them when she sometimes had to fight against a system that was supposed to protect them and often failed so dramatically.

There was no answer, but as she stepped inside the dark space punctuated only by small streams of light where the wooden board framing the building had fallen apart or disintegrated, Makayla realized what a mistake she’d made.

She had been so focused on finding the family that she hadn't been watching her back, checking her surroundings. She knew better, but sometimes she got so focused on her job that she forgot about everything else.

Movement over her shoulder caught her attention.

It was too late to do anything about it. Although she spun around and tried to determine whether fight or flight was the better option, the man was already on her. At first, she thought it was just Mr. Smith thinking he could physically make her back off, but the hands that grabbed her were bigger, and the shadowy figure beside her was huge.

Self-defense training kicking in, she lifted a knee and slammed it into the groin of the man, digging his fingertips into her biceps, making him grunt and loosen his hold. She followed up by slamming her foot into his knee, and he went down with a surprised oof.

Turning around, she ran back out the door and toward her car. If she could make it to it, she could lock herself inside and then drive away. Or the cops should show up soon. It had probably taken her fifteen minutes to thoroughly search the house.

But she made it only halfway across the overgrown grass filled with waist-high weeds before the man was on her. He tackled her from behind, taking them both to the ground. Pain spiraled up her wrist, which took the brunt of the landing, and she hoped it wasn't broken.

Planting a knee between her shoulder blades, the man kept her pinned to the ground, although she struggled and fought with everything she had. In the end, it didn't do any good. Something sharp pricked the side of her neck, and the world began to grow blurry and distant.

Then it faded away into nothing but an empty, oppressive darkness.

August 24th

8:36 P.M.

This was most inconvenient.

Van Huxley huffed as he drove the huge white van toward their new location. If there was one thing he hated above all else, it was being inconvenienced. He was here to do a job, and he did it well, but he didn't like stupid mistakes popping up and ruining things, making them harder than they needed to be.

He also hated vans.

Nothing reminded him of his stupid parents and their sick sense of humor, naming him Van because they’d conceived him in a van, than having to drive one. Most of the time, he avoided them. He drove an SUV as his personal vehicle, but this wasn't about his personal life.

For now, he was deep undercover as part of the trafficking ring Azure, and that meant doing whatever he had to do to keep in character, including driving around in a ridiculous white van that all but screamed human trafficking ring. Especially given the fact that there were currently five women lying unconscious in the back.

If he was pulled over, there was zero chance that a cop wouldn't find them. Even from up here in the front, he could smell the putrid scent of urine. One or more of the women he was transporting must have woken up—trust one of his colleagues to not bother to ensure they delivered a full dose of the sedatives, he swore if you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself—and wet herself in terror.

That was actually something he could sympathize with, and he never sympathized with anyone. As far as he was concerned, the world was transactional. There was no need to form any sort of emotional bond with anyone to navigate it. In fact, he’d made it three decades without forming a single attachment. He didn't do emotion.

Most people would probably say that was unhealthy, that all people needed people, but they would be wrong.

Those people had probably grown up in wonderful homes with a mom and dad who loved them and guided them, who were always there for them and supported them in all their endeavors. They probably never went to bed starving because there was nothing in the house to eat. Or fallen asleep soaked in sweat on a hot summer night because you slept on a mattress on the floor of an attic that sweltered to well over a hundred and twenty degrees on a hot day. Or tried to push your own broken bones back into place because you knew your parents were never going to take you to an emergency room.

If you didn't grow up having to steal food to survive and bounce around the foster system from one nightmarish home to another, then you had no right to judge anyone who had.

Normally, Van was able to compartmentalize the horrors of his childhood and adolescence. After all, he was thirty now. It had been a long time since he ran from the last home he’d lived in when he was sixteen, choosing to live on the streets over staying in that house a single second longer. But the smell of urine was his kryptonite.

Brought back the one memory he had trouble shoving back down.

His mother used to think it was hilarious to grab a pair of scissors, yank his pants down around his ankles, then grab his penis in her hand, hold the scissors around it, and tell him to pee himself or she’d cut it off. At five years old, the threat had been more than enough to have him comply, and she’d then make sure the urine wet his clothing, before pulling his pants back up and making him stay in the soaked clothes for hours, until they eventually dried. Although wet or dry, the smell didn't go away.