I’d jumped to completely the wrong conclusion. All this time, I’d had a clue and not even known it.
“A ranch would make sense,” said Hunter. “Out in the country, lots of privacy.”
Mac dug out his phone and we made a list of every ranch within a two hour drive. “We’ll split up,” said Mac. “Take a few each.” And he started dividing them up. A few minutes later, I was on my way to my first one. Hold on, Annabelle. She had to be in one of them.
53
Annabelle
For the first hour, I was beyond thought. The fear took over and I sat against the bars of my stall, eyes closed, arms hugging my knees. The place was too clinical, too hard, too white. You couldn’t even look at it without despair taking over.
But the blackness behind my closed eyelids wasn’t any better. Everything comforting I found there was gone. And it was all my fault. Mom’s trailer? Destroyed. Ox, the gentle giant? In hospital, maybe with brain damage. The MC? In jail.
And then there was the biggest loss of all. Carrick was dead.
No one was coming to save me. I was right back to the nightmare I’d been in when I made that fateful phone call...except I’d gotten Carrick killed and ruined countless lives. It was too much. The panic rose up inside, overflowing. I opened my eyes but that was even worse. The slaughterhouse rose around me, huge and merciless. This was a place designed to process animals and now I was one—
A man dressed in coveralls came to my stall. He couldn’t have been much older than me, with sandy-blond hair. “Take off your clothes,” he told me. “Fold them at the back of your stall.”
I gaped at him. Then I saw the stick hanging on his belt, like a slender aluminum baton with two shining metal contacts at the end. An electric cattle prod.
I took off my clothes, hiding my body as best I could, and folded them at the back of my stall. He showed no interest in me sexually, even when I was naked. “And the necklace,” he said.
I looked down at the gold shamrock: my last connection to Carrick. My hand closed around it protectively.
The guard stepped forward, his hand on his cattle prod.
I slowly pulled the necklace over my head and dropped it on my pile of clothes.
The guard turned and walked away.
“Wait!” I called after him. “I need to use the bathroom!”
He didn’t even break his stride. “Use the bucket.”
I turned and saw the metal bucket in the shadows. My stomach turned and, suddenly, I was crying. Weirdly, it was the total lack of privacy that tipped me over the edge, more than the nudity. I closed my eyes and clutched the bars. Why? Why not just take us to the bathroom? There must be a bathroom for employees. Why make us undress but leave our clothes with us? I was losing it, panic breathing between my sobs. I didn’t understand anything and every question increased my fear, made me feel even more like weak, warm, animal flesh in the middle of this huge machine—
And then, at the very height of my terror, I saw it.
This was a machine. It had been a machine when they built it, one designed to turn cattle into meat. Now it turned women into prisoners...docile, obedient prisoners, too scared to fight back, like the woman who’d refused to even look at me.
I opened my eyes. I was staring at my pile of clothes and the gold necklace that lay on top of them. I grabbed it and closed my fist around it.
This place was a machine designed to break us.
I wasn’t going to let it.
If it was a machine, I could understand it. I could learn its secrets and find its weaknesses. And I could figure out how to beat it.#p#分页标题#e#
I squeezed my fist tight around the necklace. And over the next four hours I watched.
They wanted to depersonalize us. They could have let us keep our clothes on but stripping us naked, when the men were clothed, made us feel weak. Inferior. As did the bucket toilets and the stalls. We were no better than animals, stripped of our pasts. Except I had a secret: the necklace, gathered up and clutched in my fist. It reminded me who I was.
The slaughterhouse had a second, more terrifying impact. All around us were reminders of the fate cattle had once had here: the bolt guns used to kill them, the hooks and overhead track that lifted and transported their bodies, the hose-down floor that had once run with blood. We used to kill animals here. You’re an animal. Don’t misbehave. The slaughterhouse, I was sure, had been a deliberate choice by Volos. It worked in ways an abandoned factory or office building never could. But whenever the fear threatened to paralyze me, I squeezed the necklace tight, feeling the shamrock pressing into my palm. They’d taken him from me. No way was I going to let them win.