Jack Wilder - The Missionary

As the built-up, modern downtown faded into tumbledown shanties and the wasteland of poverty, Stone felt his gnawing unease ratchet into outright fear. His guide was constantly turning his head around to grin at him, shaking his head and laughing at if at some private joke.

The joke, Stone knew, was on him. He was walking alone into the lion’s den, basically unarmed. A couple of 9mm pistols weren’t going to do much good against a criminal organization that had all of Manila quaking.

Off the bus and into the maze of sheds and crates and garbage and stench and human suffering, left and right and left and right until Stone was thoroughly lost. People hung their heads out of windows and watched, stared, listless and uninterested, as Stone and the other man passed through, squeezing between buildings, avoiding packs of snarling dogs fighting over scraps, burning heaps of trash, open doorways echoing with the sounds of sex, acrid clouds of drug fumes. Shouting voices, arguments, fights. The sound of a hand smacking flesh and a small voice crying. Rot, the miasma of death and sickness. Puddles of muddy water underfoot, raw sewage. Clothes hanging from wires overhead like multi-colored flags all in a row.

And then, the faces began to vanish. Windows were closed. No one watched. The scent of fear was palpable. Even his guide had slowed and was scanning the rooftops, the narrow alleys, the street behind them.

Eventually, he stopped. “No closer. They see me, you, bam-bam . We bot’ dead.” He pointed down the street, little more than a narrow gap slicing between stacks of shanties. “See da red door? In dere.”

Stone eyed the door in question, a small crimson slab of wood, the paint peeling and marked with Filipino graffiti. Or, rather, what was supposed to be graffiti, but was more likely an identifying marker of some kind.

“How many are in there?” Stone asked.

The man shrugged. “Girls? Or men wit guns?”

“Both.”

“Many, and many. Maybe…tirty girls. Men? More dan dat, men. Maybe? I only know Cervantes, but I see odders, many many.”

“Who’s Cervantes?”

Another shrug. “Cervantes is…Cervantes. Bad, bad. I scare ob him. Ebry-one scare ob him.” A pause, and then: “You really gonna go in dere? One girl, she not wort’ it, I tink.”

“This one is.”

“You crazy. Crazy, and dead.” He spat in the dirt. “I go now, or you kill me.”

“What are you gonna do if I let you go?” Stone asked, turning to watch the man to see if he would lie.

“Run. Go home fast. Get big drunk.”

Stone saw truth in his eyes, and waved his hand. The pimp scurried off into the late evening gloom, not looking back. Guilt washed over Stone. He hadn’t done anything to help the girls in the apartment. Maybe he could go back. But first, he’d be lucky to do anything to help the one girl he came to rescue.

He pushed all thoughts from his mind and turned his attention to examining the doorway and the windows around it. He saw no sign of anyone watching, but that didn’t mean anything. He leaned against the wall, mud sucking at his boot, sweat dotting his forehead, unease rumbling in his gut.

It was now or never. Stone blinked a bead of sweat out of his eye and moved toward the red door, reminding himself to breathe.

You crazy, the man had said. Crazy, and dead . Stone was worried he was right. The red door swung open slowly, resisting motion, scraping against the dirt. Stone entered with his pistol drawn, sliding through the doorway in a tactical crouch.

Here we go , he thought.

And then hell broke loose.

7

~ Now ~

Wren woke to the sense of being watched. She hurt all over. Stifling a groan, she opened her eyes, starting as his eyes bored into her from a foot away.

“Time to go, little bird,” he rasped in his accented voice.

Does he know my name? Wren wondered? Or maybe it was just a coincidence. She didn’t think she’d been asked her name. Would it matter if she told them? Was anyone looking for her?

She forced herself to stay still when he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a slim, long rectangle of silver, then flicked his wrist. Metal flashed and spun, the knife in his hands glinting and gleaming in the dim light shed from above. The blade wavered, serpentine, looking razor-sharp. He leaned against her, sniffing the skin of her neck as he slid the blade between her hands, tied at her back. Pain lanced through her palm as the edge sliced her skin, and then the bindings gave way and her hands were free. She brought her arms around front and shook them to erase the numbness. Blood sprayed from her cut palm, dotting her captor’s face.

He reared back, wiping at his face and cursing in Filipino. “Hey, watch it, bitch,” he said in English. He slapped her with his empty hand, knocking her sideways. “I don’t want your blood on me.”

Wren couldn’t sob, couldn’t breathe. Pain was a vise clamped around her ribs and lungs as her cracked rib protested the way she’d slammed into the ground. Her palm stung as dirt caked on the open cut, but that was a distant twinge in comparison to the agony of her ribs.

She felt her feet being freed, and then an iron-hard hand latched around her arm, just beneath her armpit, and yanked her to her feet. Her arm socket joined the chorus of aches, but she ignored it, focusing on remaining upright and drawing air into her lungs. Tears leaked down her cheeks, but she kept silent. She forced one foot in front of the other, up the stairs and into relative brightness. She squinted. It was still dark, she realized, but after the total darkness of the pit she’d been in, any light was blinding. He mounted the stairs behind her, pushing her into a corner and lowering the trapdoor, laying a thick square of cast-off carpeting to hide it.

Around her, the walls were bare, the roof low, not even two feet over her head. There was no window, nothing except a tiny card table in one corner with two folding chairs, an electric camp lantern shedding blue-white light. Each chair held a man, both short but muscular Filipinos, one with a nasty scar pulling his left eye down. They both had guns across their laps, black machine guns with tan wood stocks, the kind she saw terrorists on the news holding, and army men from third-world countries. The one with the scarred face had a cigarette pinched in the corner of his mouth, the smoke curling around his nose and narrowed eyes. They both watched her in silence, until the scarred one spoke in Filipino, gesturing at Wren with the barrel of his gun. It sounded like a question, judging by the tone of his voice.

Her captor responded with a single syllable, a harsh negation. He pushed Wren by the center of her back, sending her stumbling toward a doorway. Each step made her ribs scream and stole her breath, but she forced herself to walk anyway, gasping and trying not to cry, trying to keep her wits about her. She was still dizzy and foggy from whatever drug he’d given her, and she felt a hot, needy ache in her belly, deep down. A kind of craving, a desperation. For what, she didn’t know. For something. She needed it, her body needed it.

She moved through another room, this one empty but for a stained blue and white mattress on the ground, and then another one identical to the last, except a Chinese girl (or was she Japanese? Wren didn’t know) lay on the mattress, naked butexcept for dirty white underwear. Her ribs showed, expanding as she drew a deep breath and depressed the plunger of a needle stuck into her forearm. A blissful expression swept over her features as Wren watched, and then the needle went slack, tumbling to the mattress beside her. A man Wren hadn’t noticed scooped up the syringe and vanished, nodding at Wren’s captor.