“Be careful. I don’t want to have to come in dare and rescue your big butt.”

I smacked him on the arm. “Watch who you’re calling big butt, big head.”

“I brushed my teeth so I could kiss you. Iss dat okay?”

I nodded.

He leaned down and kissed me hard on the mouth, gripping the back of my head and forcing the kiss deeper. His minty tongue tangled in mine, immediately heating me up from my core outwards, the rain only barely keeping us cooled off.

“Gettin’ steamy in heeeere,” said Peter.

Bodo finished the kiss and gave me one more quick peck, before pulling back a little and staring into my eyes, his hands on my neck and cheeks now. “I’m not kidding. Be safe. I luff you.”

I didn’t hesitate. “I luff you, too.”

He grinned big. “Dat’s good. Even if you haff a little Cherman accent. I like it anyway.” He kissed me once more and let me go.

Winky grabbed my arm and pulled me away. “Come on, lover girl. Time to go whoop some ass.”

I turned away from our friends and followed silently, pushing Bodo’s face and kiss from my mind. In what felt like less than a minute, we arrived at the edge of the highway. It was dark and the rain obscured a lot of what we could see. We had to drop down as soon as we got near the edge of the road to avoid being noticed.

The highway had been built up on a slight hill, with the shoulders on either side going down into ditches and then the fields beyond. On the other side, there was just a short piece of bare land before the tree and then the nearby town’s outer limits. The two smashed up cars were in front of us, the closest one a little off to the right. We used the body of the one farther away to shield us from the view of our targets.

“Now what?” Winky whispered, lying down next to me on the upper slope of the drainage ditch.

“Now we army-crawl up to that car and see what we can see underneath it.”

I tried to ignore the stinging scrapes I was suffering as a result of our choice to go on our bellies onto the highway. We might have been able to go to the car standing up, but the frame was smashed up, and it hadn’t been a very tall car to begin with. All of the glass had been broken out, too, making the solid part of the car only a few feet high, or less in some places. Luckily, there was no glass on this side of the car, but the tiny rocks we crawled across felt like I imagined the glass would have felt, anyway, so it wasn’t much of a consolation.

We reached the middle of the highway before we were able to see anything. We had an imperfect view of the trees the slave drivers were sitting under from the space below the car. The weeds on the side of the road had grown so high, we were only able to make out a couple of the people there. Both of them were leaning against one of the trees, and I couldn’t tell if they were sleeping or awake.

“Can you see anything?” I asked.

“No. Stupid grass is in the way,” Winky whispered back.

I was straining my eyes to get a better look when the sound of sliding gravel distracted me. I turned in time to see the black muzzle of a gun pointed at my face. I followed it up to the hand holding it and then to the arm leading to the face.

It was a guy, one of the slave drivers if I wasn’t mistaken, about fifteen years old with sparse patches of hair playing at being a beard on his face.

I took Winky’s hand and squeezed it hard twice before doing a pushup and standing with my back to the car.

“You too,” he said, gesturing with his gun at Winky.

She stood, glancing at me nervously.

“Don’t do anything stupid. I’ll shoot you both if either one of you does anything I don’t like.”

I was too busy praying that none of our friends would come after us right now to think of anything to say. Winky also wisely kept quiet.

“Come with me,” he said, backing up a few steps and waving the gun to our right, telling us to move around the car and join the slave drivers at the tree.

“Well, that went well,” mumbled Winky under her breath. We were walking in front of the guy with the gun, taking the smallest steps possible, trying to prolong our journey and work out a plan.

“What are we gonna do?” I whispered.

“Kick ass,” Winky said quietly.

“Stop talking!” said the guy behind us. “Just walk!”

I put my hands up in a surrender position while looking over my shoulder. “What’s your name?”

“None of your business,” he said, trying to sound tough.

“Mine’s Bryn. This is Winky.”

“Shut up, I don’t care.”

“Where are you guys from?” I asked.

The guy walked quickly to close the gap between us, jabbing me hard in the spine with his gun. “Shut up, or I’m going to shoot you in the fucking head!”

I pressed my lips together, trying to control the panic that wanted to well up and take over my mind. I needed to stay clear, keep it together. My plan to humanize us to this guy so he’d have a harder time killing us wasn’t working. We were nearly to the tree now, so I put my plan-making on hold. I had to focus on being ready to make a move whenever the opportunity presented itself. I snuck a glance at Winky and she nodded once, just enough for me to see it. She’s ready too. Time to kick some slave driver butts.

As we approached, one of the other guys stood immediately. The other two were sleeping, their backs to us.

“Look who I found creeping around up on the road.”

I looked at the kids who were all tied together. Two of them were staring at us open-mouthed. The other was sleeping and even the talking wasn’t waking her up. They were all girls, which had been hard to see from a distance because their hair had been chopped off to what might have been shoulder-length if it hadn’t been so full of knots. They were dirty, bone-thin, and their clothes were ragged to the point of being almost useless. I compared them to the slave drivers who all looked well-fed and clothed in newish stuff, and it made me furious.

“Who the hell is this?” said the smaller guy, taking a few steps until he was just feet away from us.

“How the hell do I know? They were hiding behind that car up there.”

“Were they alone?”

“They’re all I saw.”

The guy stepped closer to us, eyeing us carefully. He looked at Winky and jerked his chin up at her. “You one of them indian kids?”

“No.”

“You sure look indian to me,” he said.

“I’m not from India.”

If she had just come right out and said he was an ignorant ass, it couldn’t have been more clear what she thought of him.

“Ha, ha, that’s fuckin’ funny. You know what I meant, bitch.” He stepped over and slapped her hard in the face. “Answer my question and don’t be a smartass about it. Are you one-a-them indian kids or not?”

“Like I said, I’m not …”

He slapped her again before she could get the rest of the sentence out. “I can do this all damn day if you want.”

“Don’t!” yelled one of the slave girls.

He whipped around and pointed at her. “Shut. The fuck. Up! I told you before! No one wants to hear your shit!” He turned back to us. “So. Are you? Or are you not? One of those indian bitches?”

“She is,” I said hurriedly. “She an indian. A Native American from north of here. Near Orlando. We’re both from there.”

“You ain’t no indian,” he said, scoffing at me.

“No, I’m not.” And neither is she, douchebag. I kept my thoughts to myself, my mind racing, trying to figure out how I could pull my gun out and shoot all of them dead before getting a bullet in my back.

“Did you frisk ‘em?” he asked the guy behind us, making me feel like he’d just read my mind.

“No.”

“Are you fuckin’ stupid? You bring these bitches in here and don’t search ‘em first? Jesus, J-Dog, you’ve got oatmeal for brains sometime, you know that?”

I turned in time to see J-Dog pressing his lips together, and I sensed some pent up rage in him, making me hope we could possibly use that to our advantage later.

The short guy moved up close and started feeling our bodies, spending extra time on our chests and in our crotches.

“I’m pretty sure you’re not going to find any weapons in my vagina,” I said.

That earned me a slap on the face and some more rough handling down there. “Better shut up or I’ll think you like it,” he said, being even rougher.

My face flamed red, both from the humiliation of being violated and from the anger that was growing deeper by the second. I was so looking forward to feeding this guy his nuts in reverse. I tried not to smile at the vision of that move, lest he think he was turning me on with his cruel perversions.

He took the gun and knife from my waistband, but missed the one in my moccasin. It was smaller, but just as deadly as the other. I prayed over and over that he’d do the same with Winky. She put up with the same humiliation as I did, and was relieved of her gun and knife in her pants too. As soon as he turned away, she spit on the ground near his feet.

The slave girls who were awake, flinched, eyeing their captor with stark fear in their eyes.

He stopped, not turning. He tipped his head up and turned it a bit to the side. “Did that bitch just spit at me?”

The guy, J-Dog, behind us cleared his throat. “Kind of.”

Oh, shit … this cannot be good. Even his own guy is trying to protect Winky.

The slavedriver turned around and walked over to her swiftly, grabbing her by the hair and dragging her away.

“Winky!” I yelled, reaching for her, afraid to go with her because of the gun still pointed at my back.

“Let’s go take a little walk, shall we?” said the guy, bringing her towards the tree. “Wake up boys!” he yelled. “Time to have some fun!” He kicked the ones who were sleeping in the back, before smashing Winky in the face, sending her to the ground in a stunned heap.

I could tell even from where I was standing, that he’d packed a solid punch. He was short but stout, and his fist looked like a leg of lamb.

“You two go get her,” he said, gesturing at me. “I’m gonna work on this one, first. Then you can come have some sloppy seconds.” He undid his belt and pulled it out of its loops.

The other two advanced on me, their sleepy faces coming awake quickly, their confusion being replaced with evil grins. “Nice,” said one of them. “Not a fuckin’ twig like those other ones,” he said, not even looking at the other girls sitting on the ground.

The other one joined in. “I like me a girl with some meat on her bones.” He was rubbing his hands together while the other one unbuttoned his pants.

What to do, what to do, what to do, I chanted in my head, as the slavedriver with Winky lifted his arm up and brought the leather belt down onto her hunched-over back.

She screamed shrilly, arching backwards with the pain. I could tell she was still dizzy from the punch, and seemed unable to get her bearings. I had to do something before he beat her too badly. Or worse.

“Don’t!” screamed one of the girls, looking at the guys coming for me. “Leave her alone! Please don’t rape her!”

I was shocked to actually hear the words. I saw their pants being loosened and the gleam in their crazy eyes, but until they were nearly on me, I hadn’t fully grasped that I was about to lose my virginity to rapist slave drivers.

“Oh, hell no,” I said, dropping into fighting stance. I calculated the difference between getting shot in the back and being raped, deciding that being shot was a better end result for me. I had nothing to lose by fighting.

“I’ll shoot!” J-Dog said from behind me, his voice quaking.

“Do it!” I yelled, not even looking at him, circling to the side to get some distance between me and the two a-holes who obviously wanted to eat their own testicles.