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.
TWENTY-THREE
When Miguel was finished, he traded places with one of the men holding her legs. When he punched her again as he got up it brought her back in a rush from that distant place. It was an unwelcome return.
She struggled, teeth gritted, still trying without success not to give in as each man took his turn. She knew that struggling was useless, but she couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t want them to remotely think that she had given in, or worse, that she was willing.
She wanted to kill them. She promised herself that one day she would kill every one of them. Kill them dead.
It was different this time than with Boska. She had never fought against Boska. He would have hurt her bad, and hurt her mother to further punish Angela. He was the ever-present brute. She knew he would always be around. As long as she lived at home, he could always come into her room. If she didn’t come home, he would always come and find her. Fear of Boska paralyzed her. But she always knew that if she gave in to him, he would eventually finish and let her go.
She knew that these men had no intention of letting her go.
She was a woman, now, not that helpless little girl. While there was still fear, the emotion that overrode everything now was rage.
She fully expected that these men were going to do something horrific to her. Her visions when looking into the eyes of killers had shown her what sorts of things men like this liked to do to women to show their power over them. Those visions from killers had opened her eyes to a world of degradation, pain, and horrifying death.
She was now in the hands of men like that.
She could see in the eyes of these men that they were not yet killers. She knew by what she saw, though, that they were on the cusp and this was the night they fully intended to cross that line.
For some reason their murderous desires had been building but they had lived lives of restraint. Now those restraints were off and they felt they had license to do whatever they wanted. She could tell by the way they hit her that they were finally free to live out long-held urges.
By the time the last man was done, Miguel had recovered his erection and was lusting for another turn. He pulled her up by her hair and then punched her in the gut a few times—fast and hard. It doubled her over, leaving her limp. He lifted her like a rag doll and threw her facedown over a table so he could take her from behind. He grabbed her hair in his fist and pressed her face down against the table while he was violating her.
Lying there helpless as he grunted and slammed into her from behind, she could see blood, lots of blood, her blood, smeared on the table. Her face throbbed from the blows.
She could also see under the edge of the blanket that covered the things on that table. As if in a dream, she saw the oddest, whitish yellow geometric-shaped objects, several inches thick. There were a half dozen cell phones under the blanket as well. It didn’t make any sense to her.
When Miguel finished and pulled out of her, one of the other men took his place. He held her head down on the table the same way. Blood ran out of her mouth onto the table. As he was going at her, Miguel used a blanket to scoop up the things on the table and then carried them out. She could hear the door scrape open. A few moments later, she heard the trunk of the car slam shut.
When the last man had finished, he wrenched her up by her hair and threw her down on the floor. She didn’t have the strength to try to break her fall. He kicked her in the face, his heavy boots stunning her. Instinctively, she curled into a ball, arms around her knees, hands covering her head as she shivered. She held her breath against the blows as the men kicked her.
Angela knew that after the raping would come the killing.
She heard an odd sound. She realized after a moment that it was the sound of her teeth chattering.
The last man stood over her, watching her, gloating with his power over her, satisfied they had put her in her place. As he watched her, he pulled up his overalls, stuffed his arms through the sleeves, and buttoned it back up. Angela stared ahead at their feet.
Defeated, she couldn’t bear to look up at any of them.
She heard the front door slam as Miguel came back in. He stood over her a moment and then went to one knee beside her. He leaned down, putting his mole-covered face close to hers. She didn’t want to look into his terrible eyes, but she did.
He had the paper that had been in the box she had delivered. He waved it in her face.
“Do you know what this paper tells us?”
Angela looked away from his eyes toward the paper, but it was in Spanish, so she couldn’t understand it.