AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Fucking cowardly display of dominance is what it came down to.
No one moved, everyone just stared at the food that was now sitting on the floor on cafeteria trays. My eyes darted to the food and to the women in the room, waiting to see if there was some kind of hierarchy. When no one moved toward the trays I got up slowly. The faint smell turned my stomach, but I knew that I would need my strength if I was going to survive this …whatever the hell this was.
My head spun as I stood up to move toward the food. I could only see out of one eye and it was impossible to breathe out of my nose. My body ached with each step. I took a deep breath and concentrated on one foot ahead of the other. I kept my eyes on the prize and made my reluctant feet shuffle to the table for the sustenance I knew my body would need. When I finally reached the table and lifted the bowl to my mouth to drink, I felt watchful eyes on me. Kind, curious, frightened.
I drained the bowl of tepid, greasy soup then I turned towards the tray and began passing the bowls out to the women in the room with me. My gesture was met with nods of thanks from terrified faces. Someone else stood up and started handing out the water. As we sipped out of bowls of cold soup and warm water, there were sniffles and shattered sighs. Someone began sobbing in the corner while another woman moved to comfort her. And although tears were hot and burning behind my eyes, I was not going to cry. When I was free, when I was out of this hell hole, I would cry me a goddamn river. But not tonight.
That foul, dank, dark disgusting room became our world. There was a small bathroom that all of us shared and most of the time I used it to vomit up the same greasy soup that we were fed three times a day. I thought I probably had a concussion and added to all the other fears, I was terrified that I might die in my sleep.
Aside from that lousy soup, there was nothing to break up the monotony of the endless days. The rest of the time was spent just staring listlessly at each other or sleeping on the thin mattresses. My face ached, my head hurt, and I couldn’t hold down anything but water and even that was only after midday. I was sleep-deprived and couldn’t seem to think clearly. I tried to remember the events that led up to my capture, tried to figure out what had happened to land me here, but my brain was fuzzy and I was clueless. If it had been a burglary, why had I been taken? If it had been something to do with Kid and the Silver Sinners wouldn’t they have negotiated my release by now? Unless they didn’t know where I was. But that didn’t make sense either. There was nothing that I was a part of, nothing I knew or had that would make me valuable enough to keep me captive like this. The rest of the women (from what I could gather through the language barriers) had been taken off the street. They had been abducted from dark alleyways, late-night bars, or unlit parking lots. They seemed random, arbitrary, and opportunistic. But my abduction had been different, it had been targeted. I had been chosen.
Whatever this was, I had been caught in the middle of it. And I didn’t like it. Not at all. Not one goddamn bit.Somebody was going to pay for this oneI thought as I sat on my cot with my broken nose, swollen eye, and sore ribs. Someone was going to pay for this, and it sure as hell was not going to be me. Maybe I could rally the women together? Even if we did manage to get beyond the door, how far would we get? I had no idea how many guards there were on the other side. I didn’t think they had taken me too far, but I had no way of knowing that either.
Personally speaking, I wasn’t doing so well. I had started to wake up in the middle of the night to those god-awful Charlie-horse cramps that were torture, and my pee was a dark brownish orange. I knew that I was getting severely dehydrated. I was weak, hurt, and could barely make it to the bathroom on my own let alone turn these terrified, confused women into an army. So I waited. I had no idea how long. Minutes turned into hours, hours turned into days, and still, I waited.
The bright spot came in the form of a lumpy piece of bread and the apples that had suddenly begun to appear with our thin soup. I learned that if I sopped the liquid from the soup up with my bread, then I could keep it down. I had never liked apples much, but now I ate them with a gusto I hadn’t thought myself capable of. When I started doing calisthenics in the cell, the other women joined me. All of us were so weak at first that we started with only a few jumping jacks. It was after the third morning of our feeble routine that Demi, a black woman in her early twenties, got up from her cot and pushed me aside. She busted out some dance moves that had us all gaping with our mouths open. Not only was she a great dancer but a good teacher. Pretty soon, she had us doing a quasi- line dancing routine to imaginary music. Our thin hands patted our scrawny hips. We twirled and made half turns and little jumps.
One day around mid-afternoon the cage door slammed open. It wasn’t mealtime and we all stood with wary attention as a man entered the room with a predatory swagger. The first thing that struck me was how young he looked, the second was how cold his eyes were. He was small and sinewy with a hare lip that gave him the look of a permanent sneer. He held himself with a boastful arrogance that in another place, in another world, would have made me laugh.
But not in this place. In this place, his unexpected and abrupt presence created a fear so palatable that it filled the air. And I thought again, what would happen if we just rushed him? If we just pushed right over him and ran out of the room? I had barely formed the thought when one of the girls did just that. She flew towards the door and almost made it all the way through before he spun around, drew his weapon from its holster, and shot her in the back. The rest of the captives screamed in horror and disbelief as the young woman crumpled to the floor in a dead heap. While we looked on in abject terror, two more men came running through the open door. They shouted at us in words I didn’t understand and pointed assault weapons in our direction. We were all made to stand with our faces towards the wall. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw them. I saw them go back out and come back in with a garbage bag. A thick, plastic, oversized bag whose original use may have been for the disposing of industrial materials, or heavy garbage. They gathered the poor dead girl up and bent her like a pretzel, laughing when her head kept lolling to the side. Then they stuffed her body in the green garbage bag and dragged her out the door.
Like Monday’s trash.
The pretty girl with light blue eyes and dark brown hair. The girl who had once held back my hair while I vomited into the toilet and had cupped water in her hands to help me drink while I lie exhausted on the bathroom floor.
That girl who had been quick enough, and brave enough to make a run for it, had been shot in the back and stuffed into a trash bag. And I could do nothing, absolutely nothing to stop it.
After that, it was two days before they fed us again. And this time our jailers added to the apples, and the bread. This time we got bits of real chicken and tiny carrots mixed into the thin broth.
And cake.
After starving us for two days and killing one of our own, they added chicken and cake to our menu. I wondered if they thought we would be grateful.
Liddy
I settled my head down on the thin, musty pillow and tried to ward off the horrific images of the killing. When the soft clang of the gate echoed in the room, I froze on the mattress. Someone had entered the cell and was creeping around carefully, almost soundlessly, in the middle of the night while we were supposed to be sleeping. My face was towards the wall, and even though I longed to flip over and check to see what was happening, every instinct told me to keep still.
There was one heavy footstep, then another, and another until they stopped at my cot. When I felt the moth-ridden blanket slowly being pulled off me, my heart beat hard in my chest and for a moment I stopped breathing. A horrible instinct crept in, and I knew beyond the shadow of any doubt that Harelip had returned.
I lay very still, willed myself to breathe again, and waited. I was going to wait until he thought I would not fight, and then I was going to kill him. I was going to gauge his eyes out, scratch a vein open, and push his nose into his brain with the power of my fists. But before I could form the rest of the plan, he moved to straddle me. I let out a howl as I sat up and threw a hard, wild punch into his face. He bellowed out in surprise as he reared off me and landed with a thud on the floor. I shot out of bed and pulled my leg back to kick him, but he grabbed my ankle and brought me down with him. In a quick, athletic move he twisted me under him and pried my legs open with a powerful thigh.
My knee raised and caught him hard between the legs. He went down like a house of cards, and when he did, I galvanized into action. I shot up from my cot and screamed out in bloody murder. Then I jumped up and onto Harelip’s back. I pulled his head back by his hair and with a feral snarl bit off a piece of his ear. The sight of the blood flowing down his neck was like honey to a bee for me. Filled with epic fury and raging cortisol I was on him. I bit and clawed and scratched and kicked When he grabbed my hair and twisted it in his hands, I barely felt it. When he held me down and began to try and push his stiff cock against my panties I spit in his face. He slapped me harder and then ripped the thin fabric off me. I struggled against the coming assault with all I had.
But just as I had given up hope of stopping the rape, the other women came running from all corners of the cell and descended upon him. They hauled him off me and to the floor. Then they all began to beat the hell right out of that fucker. They kicked and spit and scratched and bit him. It was like a furious, hungry band of killer bees had suddenly entered the room. All their fury, all their fear, all their sorrow had been abruptly unleashed on the motherfucking bastard.
Suddenly the light came on, blinding with its intensity. Two armed guards unlocked the door and rushed in burnishing their weapons in the air like guerrilla warfare fighters. They pushed us to the corner of the room where we watched as they hauled Harelip off the floor and out the door. The light was switched back off, and once again we were shrouded in darkness.
After that, along with the soup and the bread and the apples and the cake, they added a few decks of cards to our trays.
I guess they figured it was probably a good idea to keep us busy.
Kid
“Holy Fucking Hell.” My father muttered as he got up and paced the floor. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” He yelled out as he picked up the smaller table in the corner and threw it across the room. Full cups of cold coffee, half-eaten donuts, dirty plates, and rancid bottles of beer went flying in all directions. The mugs shattered with the force and left a splatter of coffee stains on the wall. I jumped back and covered my head as an overflowing ashtray just missed me.
“Dad? What’s going on?” My heart jumped up into my throat. I had not left this room…this command post… for days. Now, I walked back in after taking a five-minute piss break and I find my father losing his shit.
Every time a report came in from Jules, we worked it to see if it could lead us to Liddy. We had maps and graphs and strings that tied one piece of information to the other plastered all over the room. Each new bit of information, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential had been added it to that wall. When a brother commented that it looked like we were trying to find a needle in a haystack, three men had to haul me off him before I beat him to death.
