Authors: Koethi Zan
“Surprised I know your name, Sarah?” He laughed again and stopped to pull out a cigarette. “Mind if I smoke? I didn’t think so.” He lit it and took a long slow draw, then blew the smoke, predictably, right into my face. I coughed but tried not to show any emotion.
“I knew who you were right from the start, my dear. That first
day you came walking into my office. Right to my door! I couldn’t believe my good fortune. So, you know, I had you followed. We have tracked you every step of the way. Who do you think that was on your little Girl Scout trip to the lake?”
I looked at Tracy. She was scared. I didn’t know whether there was anything to say that could help us here. If I had thought begging for my life would work, I would have begged. But I could see in his eyes that wouldn’t get me anything but laughter. It would delight him to see me grovel, but ultimately nothing would change his plans.
“Wondering what we do over here in this nice warehouse? Well, of course, this is where we have our services. Sermons several days a week, right, boys?”
The two men laughed gruffly, and the one holding me slackened his grip a bit. I looked at the door they’d come through. It was open. I could see the white van parked outside in sharp relief against the dark sky. I didn’t see anyone out there with it, but could hear the engine humming. A dim hope sparked up inside me.
I glanced over at Tracy to see if she saw this chance too, but her eyes were glazed over from fear and she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make eye contact with me. Once again I would have to leave her to make an escape. I hesitated for an instant—a fatal instant, as it turned out, because before I could act, Noah jerked his head toward the door and the men tightened their grips and dragged us toward it.
I fought back, kicking and screaming as loudly as I could. My violent outbreak finally seemed to shock Tracy out of her stupor, and she started yelling as well. I knew, from every warning of my childhood and every experience thereafter, including that most devastating one, that I couldn’t let them get us in that vehicle. At that point all would be lost.
Never get in the car
. I’d learned it the hard way.
I summoned every last ounce of strength I had, but my captor squeezed my arms so tight, I thought he might twist the flesh off the bone. It burned. I knew that burn. The pain spurred me on to greater violence. I thrashed, I went limp and then taut again, fighting with all my might. But Noah didn’t keep these guys around for their witty conversation. They were strong as hell. And they had us.
CHAPTER 29
Before we could fully register what was happening, the back doors of the van were thrown open, and I saw seven or eight girls, all younger than we were, dressed in identical, thin white robes, with sad eyes and drawn faces, looking back at us without emotion or surprise. We were unceremoniously tossed into the back, almost landing on several of them. They didn’t flinch. In fact, they barely acknowledged our presence. New arrivals, apparently, were par for the course.
I looked up in time to see the van doors clanging shut. I heard the front doors open and slam and the engine rev. A solid metal divider formed a barrier between us and the drivers: we couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see us. A narrow rectangular window ran along each side of the cargo hold. I couldn’t quite tell in the dark, but I suspected they were tinted an impenetrable shade of black. The church van.
I banged desperately on the doors until Tracy pulled me away
and shoved me into an empty pull-down seat at the front of the van. I noticed there were seat belts, but none of the girls were wearing any. Tracy and I sat next to each other, and I pulled the seat belt around me and clicked it in place with trembling fingers. Even in our desperate situation, Tracy raised her eyebrows at me, but then pulled on hers as well. Might as well not die in a car accident, though perhaps these other girls felt it would be a fate better than anything else they had going.
It was dark in back, but one small light had been left on overhead, so I could see the faces of the girls near us quite clearly. They seemed even younger up close. Some were pretty, or had been before the life had been sucked out of them. Some were not. They all looked half-starved, just as we had all those years ago.
I recognized their self-protective expressions, all of them turning their faces inward somehow, to whatever small safe haven was left inside their minds. The one place far in the back, where no one could touch, where even the body’s pain could not reach. I knew that place. I had lived there for about thirteen years now.
The girl across from us must have once had a chic pixie haircut, but now it was as disheveled as she was. She glanced over at us with eyes that were slightly more human, less animal, than the others.
I whispered across to her in the dark, “Who are these guys? Where are they taking us?” I was almost surprised to hear my voice shaking. The shock had—temporarily, at least—conquered my terror. For the moment I was all focus.
A half-smile flickered across her face, then disappeared. I didn’t think she was going to answer. When she finally did, I noticed she was missing a couple of teeth.
“Do you really want to know?” she finally said.
“Yes,” said Tracy, leaning forward in the dark. “Yes, we really want to know. We have to figure out how to get out of here.” I could hear the fear in Tracy’s shaking voice, despite her attempt to hide it.
The girl sniffed, “Yeah, good luck with that,” hastily adding, “If you do figure that out, let me know. I’m in. In for anything. But I doubt it. You don’t know what you’re up against.”
“Then tell us,” I said.
“We’ve seen some pretty bad stuff ourselves. You’d be surprised,” Tracy added.
The girl looked at us straight on. “No. No, I wouldn’t.”
Her glance drifted away, her eyes lulled into a dead stare at the darkened windows.
“Well, what do you
think
it is?” she finally said in a quiet voice, without shifting her gaze.
I didn’t want to think.
Then she faced me directly, “And whatever you
are
thinking? Think worse.”
I told myself she didn’t know how dark my imagination could go, and I tried to focus on something more productive. Like making an escape.
“Do you think we’ll be driving all night?”
“Depends.”
“On?” Tracy muttered, her annoyance barely hidden. She didn’t like guessing games.
“On the order.”
“Order?” I wanted her to get to the point now, too. I wanted to know what was coming.
“You know …” She made a typing motion with her fingers. “Whatever the client orders up on the Internet. My advice? Do exactly what they say, and it hurts a lot less overall.”
I looked out the back windows to see the highway slipping away behind us, trying not to visualize what she was suggesting.
Tracy leaned over and lifted the limp wrist of the girl next to her, who didn’t even seem to notice. “No restraints, anyway.”
“Not in the van,” the girl replied. “They have to be ready with
a story in case we’re stopped by the cops. We know the drill. We’re part of a religious order.” She lifted the arms of her white robe to demonstrate. Then she nodded toward the back doors of the van. “It looks like an ordinary church van, but trust me, they’ve fixed the door handle on our side. It doesn’t connect to anything.”
So that was it. Noah Philben’s religious organization was cover. Had Sylvia been one of these girls? So eager to get out, she agreed to marry Jack Derber?
I shook my head, pushing away these thoughts. Pointless. None of it mattered if we couldn’t get out of this situation alive. At that moment my mind was utterly clear. Even through my fear I felt energized. Just as I had during my escape.
It was as though the only time I could feel calm was when the worst had actually, finally happened. Now I could focus. This is what I had prepared for. And now I just had to think. Only thinking could save us.
“What happens when you arrive at a new location? Tell me exactly,” I said.
The girl smiled wryly and shook her head, covering her mouth with her hand this time.
“That really depends. Sometimes we have special instructions. Sometimes, you know, we have to get all … dressed up somewhere first.” She nodded toward a corner of the van, where a large wooden chest stood, secured with two heavy metal padlocks.
“If we don’t have an appointment, they take us to one of their buildings to get locked up for the night. They seem to have a lot of … facilities, I’ll say that.”
“Are you ever left alone?” Tracy asked, sounding desperate.
“Only when they’re convinced you’re finally brainwashed into total submission. When they know you are so scared you wouldn’t dare make a move. When you believe the stories they tell you.”
“What stories?” I was dreading the answer even as I asked.
“About the white slavery network. That there’s a huge organization that will hunt you down and kill you if you try to escape. And kill your family. If you still have one.”
The van’s engine revved, and we made a hard right turn.
“How did you end up here?” Tracy asked after a few minutes of silence, while we took in the girl’s words, trying to process the impossible.
“I was pretty stupid. Got myself into this mess. I ran away with my boyfriend when I was fourteen, and we hitched our way to Portland. We both wanted to get out of some sticky situations at home.”
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“We should’ve known better,” she continued, “but when you’re young, you think you’re going to beat the odds. You know, whatever, we were just kids back then.”
I held my tongue, thinking how very much she was still just a kid.
Tracy shifted forward, “Let me guess. Drugs. What was it? Heroin? Ecstasy? Special K?”
The girl looked at her blankly at first but finally nodded. “Heroin. That was Sammy’s thing. So … you know the story—he had to pay for the drugs, so he had to sell the drugs. He didn’t exactly have an MBA, so you know, funds got low. Especially because he ended up using half of his own shit.”
She was shaking her head, clearly more disgusted at Sammy’s business acumen than at the fact that he was a heroin dealer and user. “So he got into it with these very gentleman chauffeuring us at the moment. He had to pay off his debts somehow.” She shrugged.
“With … with you?” I asked, revolted.
“Well … Oh, I should have known something was up. He begged me to go with him for a pickup. He got down on his knees and cried, saying he couldn’t do it without me. He was convincing. I guess anyone can turn out to be a hell of an actor when their life is at stake.”
She paused and stared at the ceiling. I couldn’t read her expression.
“Look, I know he loved me. And I know it nearly killed him to do it, but you know, it was him or me. Only one of us was going to live at that point. And he picked himself.” She pursed her lips. “Fair enough.
“He took me out to this warehouse in the middle of fucking nowhere, see. I have played this scene over in my head like a zillion times.
Obviously
this was a bad idea.
Obviously
it could not end well. Who knows? Maybe it was a form of suicide walking into that building that day. At any rate, we did it. We walked in, two kids in the middle of one big shitstorm of a life. And there were these three guys”—she jerked her thumb in the direction of our drivers—“sitting at a tiny little fold-out table in the center of the room. It was comical, really. They were really … big you see.” She held up her hands in the air, far apart. “And the table,” she laughed, “it was so small there in front of them.” She held her hands close together, showing us the proportions.
She couldn’t go on, she was cracking herself up so much. We waited silently, frankly not seeing the humor in it at all.
Finally, she continued. “I didn’t suspect it right away, but I was pretty creeped out when I saw the looks on their faces. Grinning from ear to ear. Looking back, I guess they thought they knew an earner when they saw one. At the time I was afraid they were going to rape me. Ha.” She looked off in the distance and swallowed hard. But there were no tears.
“That was pretty naïve. I thought a little gang rape was about the worst thing on earth.” She laughed, but it was humorless this time. She wiped a strand of brown hair out of her eyes, pushing it back behind her ear.
All three of us shifted uneasily and stared down at our knees. As though we couldn’t even look at each other and see our shared shame in one another’s eyes. I looked up at the row of girls next to
us. If they were listening, they hid it well. Each seemed wrapped up in her own thoughts, or the total lack thereof. Finally, the girl started talking again.
“Anyway, they grabbed me and dragged me away. Sammy was crying and yelling out how much he loved me. But I could see that shifty look on his face and knew he was in on it. Sure he cried, but he was crying for himself. Poor Sammy, losing his girlfriend like this. When they told him to beat it, he turned and ran as fast as he could out the door. He was smart, I suppose. Set me up, then got the hell out. I know it just killed him, though. Well, maybe it was even enough for him to sober up. I hope so anyway.” She sighed.
I was amazed at this girl’s capacity for what sounded like forgiveness.
“Aren’t you—don’t you hate him?”
“Oh, what for?” She sighed again, more deeply this time, and looked up at the dim light above us. “He was really just following his fate. No point in using up my hatred on him. It is what it is. I got dealt this hand—no use suffering regret as well as pain. Right now I just have to figure out each morning if and how I am going to survive the day. I don’t mean, like, psychologically. I mean literally. Will. I. Live. Through. The. Day. Some girls don’t come back.”
“Maybe they escape,” I said hopefully.
“No way. Like I said. Look at these girls.” She gestured broadly at the girls in the van without turning to face them. “They look like they’re plotting an escape? They all believe in the network, don’t you girls?” She kept her eyes locked on us as she said it. “And you know, maybe they’re right. We’re marked, after all.”