“Son of a bitch!” she screamed, moving her jaw back and forth now that it was free.
“You have a fire,” the man said. He was tall, with a mussed beard and a wild mane of long, black hair that matched his sullen eyes. “I have yet to decide if that pleases me.”
She recognized him as the man who’d pulled out at least two of her toenails with a pair of pliers upon her arrival, tormenting her until she’d passed out.
As Carrie’s eyes became accustomed to the stark white light of her cell, she saw two more buckets of water, along with a towel and a coarse bar of gray soap. Three other bearded men stood leering in the open doorway.
As usual, Carrie let her temper get the better of her.
“Afraid you can’t handle me all by yourself?” She rolled to a sitting position and dipped her head toward the door. “Is that why you brought your creepy little friends?”
“Oh, rest assured, little dog. I can handle you fine all alone.” The man punctuated his words with a swift kick that caught her square in the joint of her hip.
Carrie gasped as waves of pain and nausea engulfed her. “Bastard!” she spat, coughing until she gagged.
The man scratched at his beard, smoothed it, thinking for a moment, then kicked her again. “I know the meaning of these words you use,” he said. “You will soon learn better than to call Zafir such names. You may call me a great many things-your master or your tormentor…” He smiled. “… even your lover. But you must keep a civil tongue in your mouth or I would be most happy to tear it out by the root. And I assure you, in my country, this is no empty threat.”
Carrie swallowed hard, trying to regain her composure. It was amazing how pain cleared the cobwebs from her muddled mind. It was as if she could see the pure evil that made up the man standing in front of her.
“How about some privacy while I wash?” she said, rubbing her wrists. “I thought you Arab men were all about covering your women.”
Zafir sneered. “That particular nicety is reserved for pious Muslim women. The way you dress in your tight pants and transparent shirt, you may as well be naked at all times. Surely a man can not be blamed when his passions are inflamed around a woman of such wanton behaviors.” He threw her a tattered cotton rag. “Now, I will not tell you again so nicely. Clean yourself at once.”
Though every muscle screamed at the slightest movement, Carrie resolved then and there that this man would not witness her pain, no matter what he did to her. She rose up on both feet. Wobbly at first, she used the wall to steady herself. It took all her strength just to put her weight on one foot and peel off her soaked khakis. Defiantly, she dropped her filthy underwear to her ankles and kicked them toward the door where the three wide- eyed guards ogled her. She pulled her shirt over her head to find that her bra was already missing. Deep purple lines covered her left breast. Raw bruises blotched her hips and legs.
Concentrating to control her breathing, she strode past Zafir to the two waiting buckets, where she scrubbed herself with the rough soap before pouring the contents of each over her head. This water was warm so she assumed he actually wanted her clean. It sickened her to think why.
Scrubbed pink, she stood naked in front of Zafir letting her arms dangle, unwilling even to fold them lest he think she felt the need to cover herself. She had nothing to be ashamed of. This was his doing, not hers.
“There now.” He licked his lips as he took a step closer to her. “Things are much different after one has bathed. Don’t you think?”
Carrie shrugged. “I’m not covered in blood and piss, if that’s what you mean. But you are still a bastard.”
Zafir doubled his fist and hit her hard in the mouth, knocking her against the wall and loosening her front teeth.
He knelt beside her, clawing at her injured breast with his gnarled hand. “You sing like a whipsaw for now,” he said. “Let us see how you sound after I have spent some time teaching you…”
Left with nothing to cover herself but a thin cotton shift, Carrie found herself hounded and pestered by the man at least twice a day. She was bound hand and foot almost constantly, freed only when allowed to relieve herself and wolf down a few hasty mouthfuls of bland rice to give her energy before he came to visit.
Early on, a younger guard, barely in his twenties, had thought to spend some time with her. He’d snuck in and promised her he would bring her some extra food if she was nice to him. Zafir caught them before the naive boy had even begun. Carrie passed out from the beating, but she never saw the boy again.
Days turned into weeks, which melted into months, until she lost all track of time and space. Her only world was a bit of rice and the constant raw anguish of knowing that any echo in the hallway outside her door meant a visit from Zafir. And those visits never failed to bring pain.
She learned his triggers, gauging his moods by the way he approached her, the way he held his crooked mouth. He alternated between the brutality he considered intimate and bouts of unbridled rage, dragging her naked from one end of his bedroom to the other by her rapidly thinning hair.
At first, she’d thought to placate him, to stop the kicking and ease the pain, but she soon found that no matter how hard she tried, her conscience wouldn’t allow it. In the end, she merely defied him no matter his mood and let him choose if he wanted to rape her or beat her. More often than not, he did both.
Each and every time, when he was finished and still panting, she looked into his black eyes and called him a bastard.
Carrie had no way of judging how much time had passed. She’d lost a tremendous amount of weight. Her bones jutted out like an inmate in a concentration camp. Her hair was beginning to fall out in clumps, and though she had no mirror, she couldn’t imagine he’d want to keep her around much longer. Every day she asked herself if fighting back was worth it. Every day she struggled to make peace with the fact that she’d never see her mother again, that her last sight on earth was the snarling face of Zafir Jawad.
Just when she’d decided to stop fighting and resigned herself to death at the hands of this sadistic madman, something inside her changed. One night, alone in the dark on the cold tile floor, with no sound but the constant echoing drip of her latrine drain in the corner, she lay on her coarse mat of quilts and decided she wanted desperately to go on living. She couldn’t put a finger on why, after so many weeks of hopelessness, and couldn’t help but wonder if the feeling was fate’s way of telling her death was just around the corner.
Zafir didn’t visit that morning or anytime that day. One of her guards slid an extra helping of stale rice and a fatty bit of lamb under her cell door. For the first time she could remember, she squatted on the floor and ate in a sort of relative, flinchy peace. Every evening for the next week she ate the extra food her unseen guards provided, then curled up on her rags and spent a shivering night, waiting. She dreamed alternately that Zafir had come to her again or that he had died a brutal death. Each time she awoke, her stomach knotted in fear and she had to crawl to her latrine hole in the corner to vomit away the tension of anticipation.
At dawn of the sixth day of what she began to call her awakening, the staccato sound of gunfire popped outside her room. Loud booms echoed from the cavernous hallway, sending showers of dust skittering down concrete walls. Carrie drew herself into a tight ball on her mat, thinking that at any moment, she would become the victim of a stray bomb. She’d heard American planes overhead many times before. Sometimes they dropped their ordnance nearby, but none had ever ventured this close.
Mortars whumped and whistled in from nearby positions. Grenades exploded for what seemed like an eternity, bending the walls and showering the room in dust. Then she heard voices, American voices rich with New York accents and twangy Southern drawls. Her eyes filled with tears when the door flew off its hinges and five American soldiers in full battle gear filed in to the room.
The men looked like camouflaged giants in their helmets and flak vests. The entire line froze in their tracks when they saw her.
Carrie looked up weakly from her quilts. She blinked her battle-worn eyes at these beautiful men in disbelief. “I hope you kicked some Iraqi ass,” she croaked through chapped, swollen lips.
“You bet we did, ma’am.” A slender soldier whose name tag read CARTER winked. He handed his rifle to the man beside him and shrugged out of his flak jacket long enough to remove his uniform tunic and drape it tenderly around Carrie’s trembling shoulders. She’d forgotten how little her flimsy cotton sheet actually covered.
Specialist Carter knelt beside her, taking her gently by the hand. “Ma’am, are you able to walk?” he said in a rough-hewn Southern voice.
