Марк Грини - One Minute Out

I don’t have to stop it, I just have to pull a few girls out of it so my conscience will leave me alone.

I’m no saint, I’m just a slave shackled to his principles, just like those women were shackled to one another.

We’re all in this together now, like it or not.

FIVE

Five minutes after the gunfire ended upstairs, the women and girls sat huddled together in the cellar in darkness, because no one dared to get up, pull the slack in the chains on their ankles, fumble around the dead body by the open door, and flip the red light back on.

Already the smell of blood added to the closed room’s stench.

Between the sniffs and coughs and sobs from the group, a new sound emerged. The prisoners heard frantic, angry voices on the stairs down the hall, and they shuddered as one.

Lights shone in the stairwell, then came closer, the shouting between three men continuing. These Serbian guards were known to all of the prisoners down here, and as one of them flicked the red light back on, the other two waved their guns at the group, causing a few fresh shrieks of terror.

One of the security men checked over the dead body on the floor, and then two of them carried him away with no small struggle while the third closed the door.

Only when the loud lock engaged did the women and girls begin talking among themselves about what they had just witnessed and what it all meant for them now.

Some worried they would be killed because of what they had seen, others that they would be beaten or otherwise brutalized, and every last one of them was certain nothing good would come of this event.

They hated the sick and cruel old man, but none of them were thankful that the masked man with the American accent had shown up and killed him.

The females were aged from fourteen to twenty-four, and they had traveled different paths to get here. Many had been duped, promised employment in casinos in Dubai or Italy, or jobs in fancy restaurants or five-star hotels where beautiful women were needed. These women were trafficked and smuggled from their home countries, and then told by dangerous gangsters that they would have to compensate the traffickers for their travel and housing, and the only way they had to earn the money to pay was via sex work.

Others had been recruited at nightclubs or outside Internet live-camera porn sites or even from brothels, told they could work as high-dollar prostitutes in the West, make a thousand euros a day entertaining wealthy gentlemen, and then, after a few weeks, they could go back home, their luggage stuffed with cash desperately needed for themselves and their families.

Some women believed this and went willingly, others had to be coerced over time, and still others felt certain it was some sort of a scam, but desperation at home forced them to hope for the best and go along with it.

And still others had been kidnapped outright, drugged in bars and pulled into taxis or vans, and driven off into the night.

But now, after all these twenty-three women had been through, after all they’d heard from others about their experiences, after the passport confiscations and the locked doors and the sexual abuse many had been subjected to by the old man and the police here or by gangsters at the apartment building in suburban Belgrade, all along this underground railway of hell . . . now they all knew. Their decisions, well intentioned or not, were not important now.

They were slaves.

Some of the girls held on to the hope that once they worked off their debt, they would be allowed to return to their homes, to their families. But it wasn’t much hope. Others, usually the older women in their twenties, insisted none of them would ever see their homes or families again.

And now this. They had no idea what the evil men holding them would do to them now.

The new, even deeper sense of hopelessness in the red room was god-awful.

And fresh sounds of men shouting at one another in Serbo-Croatian in the hall on the other side of the door only made it worse.

• • •

A twenty-three-year-old woman sat in the back of the little room, leaning against a threadbare cushion propped against the back wall, her head in her trembling hands, and she thought of home.

The day she was kidnapped she had been given a new name, as had all the others, and they were ordered to never speak their given names again, not even to one another.

This woman had been called Maja by her captors, and it was her name now, as far as anyone in the room knew. Maja looked drawn and pale, with dark circles under her eyes that were evident even in the poor lighting. She hadn’t worn makeup or taken a bath in days; she’d been shuttled from one dank room to another, or transported in a bus with armed guards and covered windows; and though she’d been fed regularly, the food was low quality and she’d been forced to eat with her filthy bare hands.

Her humanity had been taken from her along with her identity.

But she was one of the lucky few who had not yet been raped. She assumed it was only a matter of time, though, so she felt no great comfort in this fact.

The door clicked, then opened. One of the Serbians appeared, a rifle around his chest and blood smeared all over his T-shirt. He took in the scene, and Maja could tell he was still amped up from the fighting—he was angry and, she sensed, even scared.

The man spoke in Russian to the group. Only some of the girls spoke the language, but no one here spoke Serbo-Croat, so it was better than nothing.

Maja’s mother spoke Russian fluently, and she’d learned enough as a child to follow the man’s words.

“Your hero ran away, leaving you behind. He will be found, caught, and killed. More men are coming in now, and you . . . you all will be disciplined for what has happened here tonight.”

The same blonde who had spoken to the masked gunman fifteen minutes earlier spoke up again, this time in Russian. “We had nothing to do with—”

She stopped talking when the man hefted his rifle and pointed it at her, then shined the tactical flashlight mounted on the rail into her eyes. She and the other girls recoiled at the brightest light any of them had seen in days.

“One more word and I paint this room with all of your blood!”

Two more gunmen appeared behind the first, and they all conferred quietly with one another. Finally, one began unlocking the women from their chains. The first man said, “We are all leaving now. Follow us, and if you try anything, we will shoot you.” No one moved. After a few seconds he screamed, “Stand up!” The women and girls stood and moved huddled together out of the room, past the Serbians, and up the hall. Some cried when they saw the dead bodies of the guards lying unattended in the stairwell, and upstairs they struggled to pass two dog handlers whose snarling, snapping beasts chomped the air as they tried to get to the prisoners.

All the women were put on a bus; Maja thought this one was different from the one they’d arrived on, but just like the other bus, the windows on this vehicle had been blacked out with cardboard. They sat in silence save for some sobs of terror, and soon the engine came to life, armed Serbians filled the front seats, and the bus began rolling off.

None of the victims knew where they were going or what would happen to them when they got there, but that had been the case for Maja since the beginning of this ordeal.

The bus drove for an hour through tight mountain roads; the women were continuously admonished and threatened if they made any noise, so they did little more than look at the headrests of the seats in front of them and worry about both their short-term and long-term futures.

A few vomited, the undulating road and the terror both competing for attention in their stomachs.