She sat with her hands zip tied in front of her. She’d been murdered forty-seven times, or was it forty-eight? She’d lost count somewhere along the way. She’d been strangled. Stabbed more times than she could accurately remember. She’d suffocated and drowned each more than once. She’d been poisoned a few times too, sometimes dying in horrible agony. None of that was happening now, but she had to wonder, was this going to be number forty-nine?
Unfortunately, the way things were going, she was more convinced this was going to be worse. She wasn’t dead yet, and it was looking like that would have been the easier way out of this.
Her knees were jammed up under her chin. The smell of sweat and fear permeated her nostrils, there were others here with her and they were smart enough to be terrified. Though she couldn’t hold on to much else, she tried to think her way out. Every time she tried to connect two ideas, they both slipped away, dancing just beyond her grasp.
She wasn’t supposed to be here. She knew that much. She’d screwed up.
She thought she was smart. Her mama had always told her she was too bright for this shit. Maybe Mama was wrong. How many times had she walked away thinking that was a close call? Certainly too many. She shouldn’t have even been in close calls that often. But it was who she was. She was born to the history and the name and the skin and so she was often—too often—prey.
She’d always gotten away before. She’d been slick and smart and didn’t mix with the wrong men. She didn’t stop and help stranded motorists when she was alone. She shrugged and said she didn’t have it when the trucker leaned down out of the cab and asked if she had a light.
But not this time. This time it was the time she’d fucked up. It was over, and she couldn’t even remember what she’d done that was stupid. But it had to be her own fault. She’d fallen for the wrong man or the wrong ruse. She’d wanted something she shouldn’t have.
She’d spent her life from the age of thirteen up as a target. She hadn’t known it at the time, but later, when she was older, she’d understood. In recent years, people had started talking about the numbers. And the numbers were bad. So many were surprised they were as bad as they were. But they learned because it happened to them. Or it happened to them again, and they had to find out it wasn’t a fluke. It was a plan.
Her mother had warned her: “Be careful. Don’t talk to strangers. Bad things happen to girls like you.”
She’d been so smart. Until today. If it even still was today. Time had slipped away, too. She couldn’t count the hours in the dark, and she couldn’t hold anything with her gooey brain. She’d fallen asleep more than once and there was no way to measure how long that had been.
She was jammed into the back of what she could only assume was a semi-truck. It bumped and rattled. She thought the noises beyond the metal wall behind her were freeway, but she couldn’t be sure. Figuring out which direction they were going or how long they’d been on the road, was too much effort when she couldn’t even stay awake.
The woman next to her slid as the container rolled up and down, head dropping onto her shoulder with a heavy thud against her bone. Swallowing the bile that crept up, she tried to pull away. Was the other woman sleeping, or had she died?
She fought the shudder that crept through her. She would have to stay sharp to get out. But sharp was something she couldn’t do right now. She tried to hold the little things. Truck. Slippery. People. Road. Uncomfortable.
She suspected a few of the women jammed into the truck were already no longer alive. They would be counted as lost cargo, lamented for the profit they would not bring, and no more.
Talisa had gone missing three years earlier. Was this what had happened to her? Hard to say. Even if it was, she was too groggy to hold the idea of that now.
Swallowing the bile that rose up in the back of her throat, she tried to pull away from the others, to avoid being touched and leaned on, but they were packed in too tightly. Then they were all thrown violently forward, shoulders and hips and heads cracking against each other as they weren’t conscious enough to fight the momentum. Brakes squealed, ringing in her head, as the container ground to a halt.
Time slipped and oozed, and she tried to get herself upright but found she couldn’t. There were others lying half on top of her now. She didn’t have the coordination, and her usual intelligence had fled.
A squeal, a grind of metal, and a clank, and light flooded in. Cranking her head back and ducking to the side, she tried to close her eyes, to shut out the brightness.
Wherever it was, they were here. She’d survived. And she was pretty certain that was her first mistake.
