INDIE

I jolt awake. My heart pounds in my chest, and my body is slick with sweat from yet another nightmare. I’m still in the biker’s room, one arm is still cuffed to the bed, and the other is still hooked up to the IV that prevents it from falling forward. I attempt to move within my restraints, but what the hell is the fucking point? My limbs prickle with pins and needles. My arse cheeks are numb, my bladder full to bursting. I blink my tired eyes and adjust to the dimness that is my hell without windows. At least in the warehouse I knew what time of day it was. Three days could have passed here, and I wouldn’t know if it was midnight or morning.

I know my cookie’s still there, though. I can smell it.

If the biker ever comes back, it’s gonna be a tough decision between peeing and stuffing my face with enough trans-fats to kill off a village full of African children. I sag against my restraints. If the biker ever comes back, feeding my face is probably the least of my worries. I already know I need his help to find those bastards that raped and maimed me, both physically and psychologically, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to trust him. How can I, when he’s every bit as dangerous as them? I know it’s not an act. He wasn’t playing good cop, bad cop with me—I know a monster when I see one. I’ve spent enough time with monsters to know, to feel the wrongness that seeps from every single pore on his body. What I don’t understand is my reaction to him. He may have saved me, but for what purpose? He can play nice guy now and pretend that we need each other to bring those bastards down, and maybe we do need each other for that, but why did he take me in the first place if it wasn’t just to use me the way they did? To wring every last bit of humiliation and pain and dread from my psyche?

Jesus. All these questions are giving me a headache. Or maybe that’s just the copious amount of drugs I’ve had pumping through my system for days. No, not days, weeks apparently.

I wonder what my parents are doing now. Are they trying to find me? Are they out walking the streets, seeing my face in every brunette they pass? Did they have any leads? Would they have ever found me if the biker hadn’t found me first?

A rustling has my adrenaline spiking again. I dart my gaze all around the room, but despite how my vision has adjusted to the lack of windows, I can’t see a damn thing but junk, empty trays of take-out, and unwashed coffee cups. Every freaking surface is covered with filth. Biker’s a pig, but it’s not just that. Apart from a couple of pieces of beaten up furniture and the plasma on the wall that’s probably stolen, there’s nothing here to tell me anything about the man who has me chained to his bed.

The rustling is closer now, and the scurry of tiny feet along hard surfaces has icy fingers creeping down my spine. My eyes roam the room, falling on the table where the biker left the wadded up paper from his sub. The paper moves, falling off the edge of the table onto the floor, revealing a tiny grey mouse with his nose in the air. His little mouth twitches and then he practically pounces on the cookie.

My cookie.

I lurch forward, but my restraints hold me back. I buck and shout, “That’s my fucking cookie!”

The mouse scurries down the table leg and under the armchair the biker had been sleeping in hours earlier, but it isn’t the mouse moving around that catches my eye now—it’s the biker. I was so worked up over that fucking cookie that I didn’t hear or see him come in. He moves through the room like the angel of death, all darkness, and unleashed fury. He pulls the knife from his belt, crouches down and then spears the mouse on the end of the blade.

He holds it up. Blood and innards stain its short grey fur. A single droplet slides down the mouse’s tail and falls onto the carpet. Biker carries it across the room and slams his foot down on the pedal of the stainless steel bin, jiggling the knife over the rubbish until the tiny body slides off the blade and lands in the garbage. Something about his brutality, about his ruthlessness and complete disregard for life, enrages me.

“You didn’t have to kill it,” I shout.

He glares at me. “You’d rather me let it eat your cookie?”

“You’re disgusting,” I hiss.

Rounding the small bench he stands in front of the sink, his back to me. The giant winged skull on his cut mocks me. Savage Saints MC, the patch reads. Savage is right. Biker runs the water and rinses off the blade and pulls a tea towel that’s seen better days from a rail above the sink. He wipes the knife clean, slides the blade back in its sheath on his belt, and turns to face me. “I can promise you that was a much quicker, and more humane death than setting traps.”

“Maybe if you cleaned up this shitty room, you wouldn’t have mice you had to kill.”

“Gotta sink my blade into something, little spitfire.” He smiles as he sits down in the armchair opposite me and leans his elbows on his knees. “Can’t afford to get rusty with a priest and a cop to kill.”

He’s baiting me. I know it, and yet I can’t help but rise to it. “What do you get out of helping me? Besides your tape back?”

“So you’re going to tell us what you know?”

“If I do this, we take down those fuckers, and I walk away. You let me walk away.”

He nods his acquiescence. His dark blue eyes glint with hunger; he’s like a wolf with a prize that he knows is within his reach. I don’t trust him, but what choice do I have? I tell them what I know, or I keep my mouth shut and die anyway. I’m dead if the Priest finds me, so what do I have left to lose?

“Where do we start?”

“You tell me what you know, and we go from there.”

“Can I at least pee first?”

“If I uncuff you are you gonna run?”

“Really?” I ask, impatiently. “You left me sitting here for an entire day, staring at a fucking cookie and trying desperately not to think of running water and you’re asking me if I’m going to run? Hell yes, I’m going to run, straight to the freaking bathroom, and then you’re going to feed me, and then we’ll talk.”

He smiles and shakes his head, walking over to the dresser he produced the cuffs from a few hours ago. He holds the keys up in front of him as he walks forward and sits on the edge of the bed. “What I said before still stands. Until Prez gets the info he wants, if you leave this room, they will not hesitate to put a bullet in you.”

“Yeah, yeah, big bad bikers come equipped with lots of guns and big hurty bullets. If you don’t hurry up and uncuff me, I’m going to pee all over your bed.”

He sighs and then slips the key in the lock. The sound of that tiny latch unlocking has to be the greatest noise I’ve ever heard. I don’t remember the sound of him unbuckling the restraints in the warehouse—he knocked me unconscious for that—but I don’t think even that sound could have compared to this. When he saved me from that warehouse, I wasn’t truly free, and while I might be held in the tender loving care of the Savage Saints Motorcycle Club right now, the fact is that once we find the arseholes who abducted me, I’m free. Forever. I’ll take karate, learn how to fire a gun—I’ll carry an entire bag full of pepper spray with me everywhere I go. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure another man can never enslave me again.

***

The knot in my belly twists and I fear that the half a pizza sitting heavily in my insides wants to revisit the outside. That could have something to do with the fact that I haven’t eaten a real meal in weeks, but it’s more than likely because the biker is sitting on the armchair opposite me, while I sit on this worn, shit-stain coloured couch. His dark blue eyes burn into mine. He waits, though not patiently, because the label from the beer bottle he finished almost as quickly as he opened, is torn into tiny pieces and strewn all over the floor.

“Start talking, Indie,” biker says.

“Where did that name even come from?”

“I don’t know. You reminded me of the Indy 500.”

“I reminded you of a car race?”

“You reminded me that we’re runnin’ a race.”

“Shouldn’t I remind you of shoes then? I could be Nike or Puma? Now that’s a bad-arse name.”

He sighs. “You’re wasting time. Tell me what you know.”

“Where do I even start?”

“At the beginning. Before you were taken. Did you see anyone, hear anything? You were a couple blocks from your house, right?”

“How did you know that?”

“I saw it on the news. CCTV saw you get off the train at around 9:00pm. A woman was interviewed by the cops, said she walked a ways with you before you reached her door.”

“Rachel. She’s two blocks before me. She’s a student too; we shared a class that night, and it ran late. We caught the later train. I walked Rachel to her gate, like I usually do, and then I headed for home. Only I never made it. I didn’t hear anyone behind me. I didn’t see anything suspicious. I just hurried along the footpath, and then I was pulled back into a little laneway between a set of row houses. He covered my mouth, and stuck a needle in my neck. I remember seeing a garbage bin in front of me. I reached out, and pulled it over—glass shattered as the recycling spilled out. That’s the last thing I remember before I passed out.”

“And when you woke up?”

“I was in the warehouse. They didn’t have the chair at first. The room was empty. I was suspended from a beam in the ceiling by chains, stripped naked and freezing. I could feel the cold winter air coming up from under the door. I don’t know how long I was out; it was still dark outside. Or maybe that was just the blindfold over my eyes.

“The Priest was the only one there the first time. At least, I think he was alone. In the beginning, they’d blindfolded me. His was the only voice I heard that first night. I can still remember it, you know? When I close my eyes, I hear him whispering in my ear. ‘And if they have a change of heart in the land where they are held captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their conquerors and say, “We have sinned, we have done wrong, we have acted wickedly.” My nostrils flare as I fight back tears. “1 Kings, 8:46-47. Do you know how I know that?”

Biker shakes his head.

“He’d recite those verses; every time.” A short, humourless laugh escapes me. “I never knew what it meant, but I think I’m starting to. And then he’d tell me that ‘we were all sinners and that it was time to atone.”

“They ever use their names in front of you?”

“No. They called him Father. That was it.” I swallow back the lump in my throat. “The Cop liked to wear his full uniform when he fucked me, and you already saw the Dentist in action.”

“What did the Priest do, that first night?”

“What do you think?”

“I think this will all be over a whole lot quicker if you tell me everything you remember. I can’t find these guys if I don’t know exactly who I’m looking for. There are hundreds of churches in Sydney; that’s a lot of fuckin’ clergies’ doors to bust down. And the Cop could be anywhere; he could be anyone. How do you know the uniform was real, and not just part of his M.O.?”

“He was a cop,” I say, resolutely. “His weapons, the rigid posture. He had special patches sewn onto the sleeve of his uniform. And a duty belt.”

“You can buy that shit off eBay,” he says, leaning forward on his elbows again and piercing me with that narrowed gaze. “How do you know for certain that he was a cop? Do you know the weapons were standard police issue? Did he have a badge? What did the patches on his shirt say?”

“I’m sorry, I was a little distracted by the knife he held to my throat to pay too much attention to the fucking patches on his shirt,” I shout.

The biker sets his jaw. A muscle in his cheek ticks, and his eyes glaze over as he clenches his right hand into a fist. He doesn’t like it when I yell. He’s going to have to get used to it.

“I know this might make you a little uncomfortable, but I need to know this shit, so I don’t wind up serving a sentence for killin’ a cop who had nothing to do with your abduction.”

“A little uncomfortable?” I spit. “You wanna know what’s uncomfortable? You wanna know exactly what they did to me? He fucked my arse until I bled out all over the floor. Then he raped me with his baton while the fucking Priest egged him on. They tied me to a post and beat me senseless. The Priest liked to quote bible passages, and call me a whore as he raped me over and over until I begged for him to kill me. Until I promised to repent for sins I never fucking committed.

“The Dentist liked to knock me out and wake me up in the middle of an extraction. He liked to hold my mouth and nose closed until I was choking on my own blood, and passing out from oxygen deprivation. And that’s just the stuff my brain hasn’t repressed.” I snap.

“Calm down, Indie,” he says, his hands raised in a warding gesture.

“Calm down? Fuck you,” I say. “You want me to give you information that tells you for certain that he was a cop? I can’t do that. I don’t know the difference between a real uniformed officer and a fake. But I know in my gut he was a cop. Just like I know that priest is out there somewhere, sitting in a confessional booth, hearing the sins of his congregation, and drizzling holy water over the top of babies’ heads for baptismal rites. I know I wasn’t the first girl they’ve done this to. And unless we find them, I sure as fuck won’t be the last.”

My breath comes in short, hard gasps. My hands shake and tears sting my eyes. Frustrated, heartbroken, and so full of rage I can taste it in the back of my throat, I stand, and instantly regret it. I dash for the bathroom and manage to get the seat up before I spill the contents of my stomach into a porcelain bowl that looks as if it hasn’t been cleaned since it was installed.

The biker’s shadow looms over me. He stands in the middle of the tiny room, probably not knowing what the hell to do. I vomit again, and again, and then I pause, leaning over the bowl. Hot tears sting my face. My hair is yanked back. I cry out and skitter away from his touch, wedging myself as close to the wall as possible. “Don’t touch me. Don’t fucking touch me.”

He backs away. “Just tryin’ to help, little spitfire.”

I wipe the vomit from my chin with the hem of the T-shirt he’d given me. I cover my mouth with my hands. The levee, the wall I’ve been building to fortify my heart, my spirit, crumbles, and just like that I fall apart completely. I don’t know how to deal with any of this. I can’t reconcile where I am from with where I was a few days ago, and where I am now. I want to see my mum. I want to hug my dad, something I can’t remember doing for the longest time.

The biker moves from the doorway. Without a word he stalks from the bathroom, through the living area and out the door, slamming it behind him. I lay down on the floor, curling into a foetal position. I thought I could give them what they wanted, and in turn, he’d help me to take the Priest out, but reliving that stuff? I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I have it in me. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to face all the things I don’t remember from that warehouse of horrors.