The Missionary

It was now or never. Stone blinked a bead of sweat out of his eye and moved toward the red door, reminding himself to breathe.

You crazy, the man had said. Crazy, and dead. Stone was worried he was right. The red door swung open slowly, resisting motion, scraping against the dirt. Stone entered with his pistol drawn, sliding through the doorway in a tactical crouch.

Here we go, he thought.

And then hell broke loose.

7

~Now~

Wren woke to the sense of being watched. She hurt all over. Stifling a groan, she opened her eyes, starting as his eyes bored into her from a foot away.

“Time to go, little bird,” he rasped in his accented voice.

Does he know my name? Wren wondered? Or maybe it was just a coincidence. She didn’t think she’d been asked her name. Would it matter if she told them? Was anyone looking for her?

She forced herself to stay still when he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a slim, long rectangle of silver, then flicked his wrist. Metal flashed and spun, the knife in his hands glinting and gleaming in the dim light shed from above. The blade wavered, serpentine, looking razor-sharp. He leaned against her, sniffing the skin of her neck as he slid the blade between her hands, tied at her back. Pain lanced through her palm as the edge sliced her skin, and then the bindings gave way and her hands were free. She brought her arms around front and shook them to erase the numbness. Blood sprayed from her cut palm, dotting her captor’s face.

He reared back, wiping at his face and cursing in Filipino. “Hey, watch it, bitch,” he said in English. He slapped her with his empty hand, knocking her sideways. “I don’t want your blood on me.”

Wren couldn’t sob, couldn’t breathe. Pain was a vise clamped around her ribs and lungs as her cracked rib protested the way she’d slammed into the ground. Her palm stung as dirt caked on the open cut, but that was a distant twinge in comparison to the agony of her ribs.

She felt her feet being freed, and then an iron-hard hand latched around her arm, just beneath her armpit, and yanked her to her feet. Her arm socket joined the chorus of aches, but she ignored it, focusing on remaining upright and drawing air into her lungs. Tears leaked down her cheeks, but she kept silent. She forced one foot in front of the other, up the stairs and into relative brightness. She squinted. It was still dark, she realized, but after the total darkness of the pit she’d been in, any light was blinding. He mounted the stairs behind her, pushing her into a corner and lowering the trapdoor, laying a thick square of cast-off carpeting to hide it.

Around her, the walls were bare, the roof low, not even two feet over her head. There was no window, nothing except a tiny card table in one corner with two folding chairs, an electric camp lantern shedding blue-white light. Each chair held a man, both short but muscular Filipinos, one with a nasty scar pulling his left eye down. They both had guns across their laps, black machine guns with tan wood stocks, the kind she saw terrorists on the news holding, and army men from third-world countries. The one with the scarred face had a cigarette pinched in the corner of his mouth, the smoke curling around his nose and narrowed eyes. They both watched her in silence, until the scarred one spoke in Filipino, gesturing at Wren with the barrel of his gun. It sounded like a question, judging by the tone of his voice.

Her captor responded with a single syllable, a harsh negation. He pushed Wren by the center of her back, sending her stumbling toward a doorway. Each step made her ribs scream and stole her breath, but she forced herself to walk anyway, gasping and trying not to cry, trying to keep her wits about her. She was still dizzy and foggy from whatever drug he’d given her, and she felt a hot, needy ache in her belly, deep down. A kind of craving, a desperation. For what, she didn’t know. For something. She needed it, her body needed it.

She moved through another room, this one empty but for a stained blue and white mattress on the ground, and then another one identical to the last, except a Chinese girl (or was she Japanese? Wren didn’t know) lay on the mattress, naked butexcept for dirty white underwear. Her ribs showed, expanding as she drew a deep breath and depressed the plunger of a needle stuck into her forearm. A blissful expression swept over her features as Wren watched, and then the needle went slack, tumbling to the mattress beside her. A man Wren hadn’t noticed scooped up the syringe and vanished, nodding at Wren’s captor.

Through another room, this one larger, wider, with a higher ceiling. Couches lined three walls, an ancient TV flickering on the fourth wall. Except for the TV, she hadn’t seen any other sign of electricity. A clear plastic liter bottle hung down from a hole in the ceiling, fastened in place, filled with water. Sunlight refracted through the water in the bottle, shedding light into the room.

Wren had assumed it was nighttime, since every room she’d been in was dark or dimly light, but now she realized it was daytime, there were simply no windows to let it natural light.

In the center of the room was a long, low table littered with bottles of alcohol, ashtrays, needles, packets of various kinds of drugs, bongs, pipes, pistols, boxes of condoms, clips for guns. Men sat on the couches, watching a soccer game on the TV. When Wren entered, a dozen pairs of eyes focused on her. All of them went narrow and hooded with lust. Against all reason, she shrank against her captor, who only laughed and pushed her away from him.

“You aren’t for dem,” he said. “Dey can’t afford you.”

One of the men said something, and her captor responded with the same short barking negative. The man who’d spoken adjusted his crotch, and then leaned over the arm of the couch and shouted something through a doorless entryway. He was short, heavyset with beady eyes and skin greasy with sweat, a scar twisting his mouth into a permanent snarl. At his shout, a girl entered the room, a small, petite Asian girl no more than eighteen, with long, tangled hair and bloodshot eyes. She stood by the arm of the couch, head down, waiting. She was clad in a dress, a barely-there thing that left her chest mostly bare and didn’t quite hit mid-thigh. The man spoke again, tugging at the zipper of his jeans. The girl responded immediately, sinking to her knees.

Wren couldn’t look away, although she wanted to. Beside her, the man she’d come to think of as her captor spoke quietly into a cell phone. She didn’t dare move, or speak, so she was left watching the unfolding events on the other side of the room. None of the other men so much as glanced away from the soccer game, although one of them reached for a pipe and flicked a lighter, sucking at the pipe and holding the smoke in his lungs for a long time before blowing it out with a hacking cough.

Wren’s heart lurched as the Asian girl undid the man’s pants and lowered her mouth to his member, bobbing her head and making a faint slurping noise. The man let his head thump back against the couch and fisted his hand in her hair. After a few moments, he began shoving her head down with increasing force, and every time he did, the girl gagged audibly. Wren’s heart lurched, and her stomach twisted. But she couldn’t look away. She closed her eyes, but she could hear the girl gagging, the man shoving her head down, and that was almost worse. She opened her eyes again to see him lift his hips once, gagging the girl, who made an audible gulping noise, twice, and then he released her. She fell back onto her bottom, wiping at her mouth. The man grinned at her, and then, as she struggled to her feet, he slapped her. It was a desultory blow, not meant to really hurt her, and she stumbled, sagging against the doorframe.

Beside her, Wren’s captor uttered a short command without moving the phone from his ear. The other man grumbled, digging in his pocket and tossing a wadded peso bill at the girl. She scooped it up hastily, and then hesitated again, as if awaiting a command. The man who summoned her waved his hand in dismissal, and the girl scurried away. Before she vanished, the girl met Wren’s eyes.

The brief glimmer of sympathy Wren saw in those otherwise dead brown eyes frightened her more than anything else.

Her captor ended the call, stuffing his phone in the back pocket of his shorts. She’d never noticed his attire, before, or really much about him, but she did now. He was young-looking. No more than thirty, and he wore baggy khaki cargo shorts and a skinny black tank-top clinging to his wiry, muscular frame. He had a round face, rotten teeth, cruel, intelligent eyes, a small crescent-shaped scar beneath his right eye. And the green flip-flops. She knew those. She saw those every time he visited her.

He reached behind himself, withdrawing a black pistol, ejected the clip, checked it, and then returned it to the small of his back. He said something in Filipino, and one of the men grabbed a clip from the table and tossed it. Her captor caught it easily and shoved it into one of his pockets.