Marc Cameron - National Security

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.

“Are you from Texas?” she asked.

“Wichita Falls,” Carter nodded.

“Wichita Falls…” She began to sob.

“If you’ll come with us”-Carter helped her gently to her feet-“we’ll get you out of this place.”

The shooting had stopped by the time the soldiers escorted Carrie outside. Two Army medics tried to put her on a stretcher, but she refused, opting instead to leave her horrible prison as she thought she never would-alive and on her own swollen feet. As she stepped from the shadows of her prison into the long rays of early morning sunshine, to draw her first breath of fresh air in over three months, she noticed an open CutVee truck with a bed full of handcuffed Iraqi men. To her surprise, one of the prisoners was Zafir. He slouched in the back, pitiful and beaten, surrounded by his comrades and trussed just as he had trussed her with his hands behind his back.

As she walked to her waiting armored Humvee, Carrie veered away, making straight for the truck. Specialist Carter reached to stop her, but she pulled away, stepping out of the camouflage tunic to stand boldly and nearly naked beside the prisoner transport. The morning breeze pressed the thin sheet against her breasts and the jutting bones of her hips. A huge orange sun rested on the desert floor behind her, marking the starkness of her silhouette.

“Hey, bastard!” she shouted in a hoarse croak, loud enough the entire compound could hear. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, Zafir.” Tears streamed down hollow cheeks as she strode closer to spit in the Bedouin’s face. “You think you can conquer me with that teeny little thing you call your manhood? You think you can beat me down with a few weak kicks, you piece of camel shit!”

Zafir stared at his feet, red-faced, fuming. The other men in the truck snickered under their breath; one even went so far as to elbow him in the shoulder.

“Well, I got news for you, mister,” Carrie continued her rant. “You couldn’t conquer a roach. It’s no wonder you had to keep a slave. No good Arab woman would take you to her bed without a few kicks to the head.” Carrie leaned in, but kept her voice elevated so no one would miss a word. “You only did one thing like a real man this whole time I’ve been here.” She stepped back and pulled the tattered sheet up to reveal her swollen naked belly. “I’m gonna have a baby, you son of a bitch-your baby. And guess what, if you haven’t killed him from kicking the hell out of me every day, he’ll never know what Islam is! I’ll raise him to fight your kind. In fact…” She leaned closer to spit again, her voice rising to a screeching crescendo. “I’m gonna name him Christian!”