TWENTY-TWO
The man with the rag finished wiping his hands and tossed it on a table.
“You have something for us, no? Something for Hartland Irrigation?”
“That’s right,” Angela said, trying sound official. She wanted to give them the package and be gone.
He put his fingers to his chest. “I am Emilio. Here, come put your package on the table.” He held his hand out toward the table beside him.
Angela couldn’t imagine anyone sending long-stemmed roses to these men, so she knew the package had to contain something else. At the moment, that was the least of her concerns. She tossed the long package on the table.
“There you go.” She backed away. “Thank you.”
“No no,” Emilio said, waving a hand back and forth, “wait for us to see if everything is … is …” He turned to one of the other two. “Que es la palabra?”
“No damaged,” one of them said.
“Yes, that is the words.” Emilio turned back to her with a smile. “No damaged. We will see first if the things inside is no damaged.”
“I’m running late,” Angela said as she continued backing away. She gestured to the package. “There is no damage to the outside of the box. I’m not responsible for what’s inside or how it was packed. If there is any damage inside you will have to notify the shipper.”
“The shipper!” Emilio said, looking at the others briefly.
His gaze returned to glide down her bare legs.
When his eyes turned up, he gave her a sly smile. “But they are very, very far away, so let us first see that there is no damage inside.”
She could sense Mole-face up close behind her, making sure that she didn’t try to leave. She could smell him—a combination of some chemical smell and stale body odor. She didn’t let herself turn to look at him. She wanted to break and run for the door, but she knew that he was waiting for her to try that. She also knew that he had locked the door, so it would take her precious seconds to unlatch the dead bolt.
Emilio pulled a big combat knife from a sheath under his waistband and slowly ran the blade down the length of the box. He returned the knife to its sheath and lifted the flaps of the box to look inside. He pulled out a folded piece of paper along with a long plastic tube, hardly thicker than his thumb. Inside the tube was what looked to be a long, folded, very thin wire with a red cap at one end. After inspecting it, he put it back in the box with the others and then set the box on the table.
He then unfolded a piece of paper and read it in silence, his smile widening as he reached the end. He showed it to the men to either side, pointing out something.
“Miguel, I think you should see this,” he said to Mole-face standing behind her. “These are orders from Rafael.”
Emilio stepped forward to give Miguel the paper. It gave him the chance to move in close in front of her. Closer than she liked. She was sandwiched between the two men.
Angela glanced around, looking for another way out. The front door wasn’t a good option because it was locked with a dead bolt. She didn’t like the odds of four against one, and decided that if it came down to it, her best option would to make a break for the empty factory floor. She was sure that out in the open she could run faster than these men, giving her time to try to find another way out.
She was acutely aware that her gun was out in the truck. A gun would even the odds, but carrying a concealed weapon was illegal, so she always had to leave it in her truck. Lot of good it did her there. With the door bolted, and these four close to her, there was not going to be any way for her to get to the gun if she ended up needing it.
A sickening sense of dread washed through her. Her knees felt weak. A voice in her head screamed for her to break and run, but she knew that predators were driven to chase prey when it ran. If she ran and didn’t find a way out, she would be trapped. Still, against four men, running was her best option.
With no time to waste, Angela suddenly bolted for the space between the men. She elbowed one of them aside as she made a mad dash toward the opening between the standing shelves.
Mole-face yelled to the others, “Agarrala! Agarrala!”
Everything seemed to move in slow motion, her legs feeling as if they were mired in molasses. As Angela knocked one man aside, two of the other men blocked her escape route. They each seized an arm before she could go for her knife as a third man, the one she had elbowed out of the way, swept an arm in around her waist from behind. With three men holding her there was no way for her to run or fight. She tried but couldn’t break their hold on her arms. The man with his arm around her waist snatched her hair in his other fist. Panting in fury, she tried to twist out of his grip around her, but he was too strong.
She kicked at them, trying to get them to let go. They danced around with her, avoiding her heels as she kicked. She squirmed and fought as they all tightened their grips on her, controlling her arms. As Miguel put his hands around her throat, she tried to use her head to smash his face, but the one holding her hair pulled her head back, preventing her from striking.
When one of them adjusted his grip on her arms, she landed a kick in the kidneys of the man to the other side. He immediately punched her in the gut to take some of the fight out of her. It worked. Besides struggling to get away, she now had to struggle to get her breath.
Angela didn’t know if they had a plan to begin with, but when they saw her—recognized her from the bar—and realized she was alone and vulnerable, they saw their opportunity to take something they all wanted.
“Hold her tight,” Miguel shouted as he went to a shelf and pulled down a grease-covered moving pad. He threw it on the floor.
He came up in front of her and put his face close to hers. He grinned. “I felt your leg before, remember? In the bar. I liked what I felt. I told my friends how good it felt. Now I am going to feel much more.”
Angela’s fear at what these men were going to do to her made her struggle frantically to get away. She tried with all her strength to break their hold on her arms. Not having the use of her arms only increased her sense of helplessness. She tried to kick Miguel. The men to each side locked a leg around one of hers, preventing her from kicking. Miguel slapped her hard across the face. The three men holding her had her completely locked down and unable to fight back.
Miguel sneered as he hit her again as if out of some deep-seated contempt.
He leaned in to whisper in her ear. “You are all the same. American women think they should have a say, but in the eyes of God you are all Satan’s whores. Women are dirt in His eyes, and the eyes of all devout men.”
Angela wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but it fit her first impression of these men when she had seen them in the bar. By the look in their eyes now she could see that they all shared some sort of fundamental disapproval of her, of her way of life. They were all somehow viscerally offended by her, and yet they were also sexually aroused by her.
Miguel unbuttoned her shorts and then slowly unzipped them. He sank down before her, pulling her shorts and panties down her legs as he went. Angela gritted her teeth as she growled in rage.
With the way the others were holding her, there was nothing she could do to stop him. He pulled her shorts and underwear off over one boot, then did the same to get them off her other leg. He threw her shorts and panties to the side.
Angela could feel her face going red with rage as well as humiliation.
Mole-face, still down on his knees, leaned in and kissed her belly. “It would be good for you to be with my baby, but you will not live long enough for that to happen.” He reached up and pushed her top up over her breasts. “Yes, you could be a good mother to feed my baby.” He squeezed a breast. “One day all American whores will have our babies to man our great armies.”
Angela strained and twisted, trying to get away, but it was hopeless. Even one of these men was stronger than she was. Four were easily able to control her. She was furious at her own helplessness, at her own inability to do anything to defend herself.
Even though she intellectually realized she would not be able to stop these men or get away from them, her fear and panic kept her struggling as hard as possible. She’d had enough visions from killers to know how this was going to end.
Miguel slid his hand up between her legs as he stood. He let out a moan of satisfaction at what he felt.
Angela gritted her teeth. “You are all going to die.”
Miguel, with his finger up inside her, smiled. “Really? And how are we to die?”
“I’m going to kill every fucking one of you, that’s how. You have my word on that.”
“I think we are the ones to do the fucking, no?”
The other three laughed.
Miguel punched her in stomach for her insolence. It bent her face down. His fist came up into her face. He called her an American whore and hit her in the middle again for good measure. It knocked the wind out of her. The pain was staggering. She gasped, trying to get her breath. She thought she might vomit.
He pointed at the moving pad on the floor. “Put her there,” he told the others. “Hold her legs. We will show her a woman’s proper place as a servant for men.”
When they got her down on the ground, two of the men pulled her legs apart while a third held her arms up over her head with her wrists held tightly together. The man holding her wrists punched her in the face, apparently to make her stop struggling. When she twisted again, he hit her again, but harder. It made her vision start to go dark. He grew angry and kept hitting her face as hard as he could. Grunting with the effort.
Angela drifted in and out of consciousness, at times hardly feeling the blows.
Miguel stood between her open legs as he unbuttoned his work overalls. He wasn’t smiling anymore. His expression was an odd mix of lust laced with loathing. He pulled his arms out of his overalls and then pushed them down enough to free his erection.
In a daze from being hit so many times, Angela struggled weakly, more out of a frenzied sense of helpless fright than any belief that she could escape. Miguel knelt between her legs, leaned in, and punched down into the gut a few more times. Her screams turned to tears of choking agony. He lay down on top of her.
If she had learned anything from the visions of the killers she had found, this was more about hatred, humiliation, and control than sex. But they still wanted the sex.
Angela struggled to breathe with the weight of him on top of her. He made no effort to hold his weight off her to give her enough space to breathe. She gritted her teeth as tears streamed from her eyes. She had to swallow the blood in her mouth to keep from choking on it.
She had been down this road enough times before, and seen enough visions of men like these, to know what she was in for.
In that moment she became a young girl again.
It became Frankie and Boska again. It became the same terrifying ordeal all over again, the same ordeal she could never escape. It again simply became the way her life was going to be.
Her instinct was to beg them to stop, but she knew that never did any good. If anything, it only excited men like this and made them feel more powerful. Screams were a reward to men like this. She vowed not to reward them with screams.
But then she did.
And then, in that moment as she became that young girl again, she felt as if she left her body. She could see herself there on the floor, her legs being held open. While one monster was top of her the others held her, pawing her breasts, eager for their turn.
Her mind drifted away and she was gone to another place.
What was happening to her there in that filthy factory didn’t matter. It couldn’t really touch her, touch who she was.
She was outdoors with the peaceful woods all around. It was her grandparents’ place, near the cabin, on a rock ledge where she often went to sit because it was so achingly beautiful.
It was night.
The moon was out, watching over her.
As she cried somewhere back in another world, the moonlight took her away.