Page 5 of Her Mercenary

The American schoolteacher was last seen leaving a bar downtown alone, texting on her cell phone. She never made it back to her hotel.

This is where I come in. My mission is to find, extract, and deliver Samantha Greene back to the States.

Dead or alive.

4

SAM

A fly landed on the tip of my nose.

I focused on the sensation of its tiny legs, the small, fleshy spongelike mouth tapping its way over my sweat-slicked skin, sucking up the secretions of my pores. It soon tired of me and zipped away, resettling on the bucket that held my feces.

There was one sickly oscillating fan in the corner of the room. Someone had positioned it eight feet under a small hopper window that had been installed inches from the concrete ceiling. The dusty blades failed miserably to cool the space, instead succeeding only in stirring the foul odor of the room.

Day in and day out, I focused on the whirring white noise, forcing myself into some sort of meditative state in an attempt to calm the crippling anxiety. I knew every whine of that fan, the sharp squeal when it turned to the left, and the three successive taps when it slowly stuttered back to the right.

The cacophonous ballad became a weird kind of centering for me. To this day, I wonder if without it, I would have completely gone mad.

I’d been given a thin blue housedress, the kind you would find on the discount racks at Walmart. It had holes and was four sizes too large. No shoes or socks. No bra.

No panties.

I’d been in captivity fourteen days at that point. I know this because with each sunrise, I’d scratch a mark into my forearm. In that time, I’d watched over a dozen others forced in and out of those basement doors, each in worse shape than the last.

Yet, I’d remained. I was the only woman in the basement who hadn’t been moved, sold, or replaced. I was the only woman who hadn’t been beaten or raped.

And I had absolutely no idea why.

Turning, I surveyed the brunette teen who had been dragged in hours earlier, now curled into a ball next to the bucket in her cage. I guessed her age to be fifteen or sixteen. She was lying in the sunlight pooling in from the hopper window, the only beam of light in the entire room. Under a spotlight, I mused, chained at the ankle just as I was.

Her cage was directly across from mine, the third one down in a line of steel storage lockers that were barely tall enough to stand in and about four feet wide.

There were other victims in the cages in the room, but I never saw their faces. These victims remained still and silent. Sometimes in the night, I could hear them stir. I imagined them as creatures more than humans, pale gray zombies, crawling on all fours. I know now that they had been continually drugged by the guards, slowly becoming addicted to heroin in an attempt to make them more reliant and submissive to the captors.

I still have nightmares about them.

The brunette was curled into the fetal position, weeping, her jerking shudders shaking her body. Occasionally, she would scream out, a long, hair-raising howl that for a moment—just a moment—would drown out the deafening beat of the mariachi music upstairs.

I watched her closely, wondering what her story was.

Her long dark brown hair spiraled in beautiful locks down her back, hair most women would kill for. She was wearing a yellow sundress, a bit short, one that a rebellious teen might wear to brunch with her family on vacation while trying to catch the eye of the handsome young waiter.

Had she wandered too far from the resort? Met a man and was persuaded into free drinks behind the bar? Or had she been stumbling back to her hotel, mindlessly texting her friends, when she was snatched off the street seconds before a needle pierced her neck.

We’d yet to speak to each other.

I wasn’t even sure if she knew I was there. Or if she spoke English, for that matter.

I considered saying something, attempting to console her, but what to say?

I knew her story would be similar to mine. I knew that, eventually, her tears would dry. The fear and sadness would be replaced with the grit of survival—or would it?

Would there come a point in her captivity where she would stop crying and begin searching for something in her cage to kill herself with? Anything to stop the pain, the fear, the life no longer worth living?

In the first few days of my captivity, I fought my circumstances. I was determined to escape, to not give in to them. I spent every second of every day trying to figure out how to do this. I promised myself that I wouldn’t lose who I was. That I wouldn’t lose the strength my mother had instilled in me. Told myself that these motherfuckers would regret the day they took me.

Until the day they forced me to watch a woman being gang-raped. In the two weeks of my captivity, this was the only time I’d considered suicide.