THAT SAME AFTERNOON, A SLENDER, TREMBLING FIGURE SAT ALONE and terrified on the dirty concrete floor of a dingy, windowless prison cell. The cell was cold and damp, and the woman was unclothed, having been stripped naked by her captors and photographed by them for keepsakes, something to perhaps include in their scrapbooks one day.
A little while later, the door clanged open and a rectangle of light was cast in on the figure of the young woman. Her face, hands and knees were dirty. Bruised. Bloody. Her black hair had been cut short and crooked by her captors and was matted with sticky blood and grime. One of her eyes was swollen and was colored a sickly tone of purple, yellow and green. A vertical line of blood from the edge of her lower lip down to her chin was black and crusty. Tears ran down her cheeks, and her eyes squinted in the light.
Two muscular men walked inside, their footsteps clicking across the concrete floor, and the young woman moved as tightly against the corner wall as she could get. “Please, please. No,” she cried, holding her hands up in front of her face. “Nooooo. Yaa Allah.”
The two men simply ignored her pleas and reached down and grabbed her under each arm. They dragged her toward the door as her bare feet intermittently slid against the cold and dirty floor.
===
ROCKY JAGGER LISTENED TO THE MEN DRAGGING the woman down the hallway. He crawled to the bars of his own cell and watched them go by. They’d already taken her before. He remembered her screams.
“Why don’t you just kill us all and be done with it?” he pleaded. “I can’t take this anymore.” He squeezed his head tightly between his hands and almost broke down into tears.
The men said nothing and went out another door at the end of the hall.
Rocky listened to the heavy metal door clang closed behind them. He was alone again with his nightmares. He crawled to a filthy bed in the corner of his cell and tried to close his eyes for a moment and forget what was happening. He shivered, partly from the cold and partly from the fear of when his turn would come again. Next to his head on the wall, he had scratched 87 marks in the dirty green paint. Although he could not be absolutely certain how long he’d been imprisoned since he couldn’t tell night from day in the windowless cell, each mark stood for a day that he believed he’d been held captive. 87 days so far. Nearly three months in a manmade hell.
===
TEN MINUTES LATER, AS THE YOUNG WOMAN TRIED TO STRUGGLE, she was held down and strapped to a hard, cold table in a room that appeared to be a morgue. It had a concrete floor with drains so that it could easily be sprayed clean of blood, bone and flesh with water and chemicals. She’d been there before and had a good idea what was going to happen to her.
One of her captors spoke unemotionally. “Come on, little lady,” he said. “Just give us the names of your contacts, and I can make this nightmare stop for you. It’s really up to you.”
The young woman didn’t speak.
“Come on. Don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be. Just give us the names.”
Silence.
The man suddenly reached out and grabbed the young woman’s head with both of his hands. He banged the back of her head over and over into the table. She screamed and jerked her legs and arms and arched her back, straining against the thick straps, but there was nothing she could do.
The man finally stopped his violent outburst as suddenly as he had started it. “All right,” he continued. “Please tell us what we want to know. We don’t have all day.”
She said nothing.
A few moments later, she was startled as she felt icy cold water rush over her body and then heard someone near her head throw a bucket onto the floor.
She wished that she could prevent what was coming next, but she said nothing.
Shivering with cold, she readied herself for the unbearable pain of the electricity, knowing that it would kill her this time.
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