Outlaw's Promise(83)

There was no night and no day. The lights never went off: we just huddled down on the floor of our stalls and tried to sleep whenever we could. Every four hours, they’d open the stalls and have us exercise by walking several circuits of the massive floor, our bare feet slapping the cold rubber mats. The barriers directed us, just as they had the cattle. The men, with their cattle prods, made sure we kept moving.

Food was a gray-green slop, served in a bowl with no spoon. It tasted disgusting but I forced myself to eat slowly and try to figure out what I could taste. Oats, definitely. Vegetables...maybe kale and broccoli? It had a milky smell that might have been protein powder. It was probably incredibly healthy: they wanted us to look good when they sold us. Anyone who didn’t finish their bowl was threatened with the cattle prod.

The men guarding us were a mixture of ages and had the look of ex-cons. For the first few hours, I expected them to grab us: we were naked, after all, and there was no one here to protect us. But none of them tried anything. Watching them closely, I realized they were afraid, too: afraid of Volos. And I realized that was another reason for all the efforts to depersonalize us: making us into slop-eating, mindless animals helped remove temptation for the guards.

There were eight women there currently, including me. But from whispering to a few of the others, I learned there’d been as many as twenty, sometimes. One woman had been there for two months. Only the newcomers would talk to me and then only a few words, checking for a guard the whole time. The ones who’d been here more than a few days wouldn’t talk at all. They’d been broken. I learned the most from Cassie, a slender blonde who was in the stall next to mine. She’d arrived just one day before I had.

Most women seemed to stay at the slaughterhouse for a few days. Then they’d be sold to a buyer, either a specific client or a trafficker in another country. Some women had heard things about Europe: there was some guy there who Volos shipped a lot of women to.

I couldn’t believe the scale of it. A new woman arrived every few days. Well over a hundred women a year. How did the FBI not know about this? But then I remembered the story Volos had agreed with my step-dad. She moved to New York with some guy. My bags, packed and then buried. The other women would be the same. No one was looking for us.

I clamped down on my rising panic. I couldn’t beat the system on that level. If I thought about how powerful Volos was, how untouchable he was with all that FBI knowledge and influence, I’d go crazy. I had to focus on the things around me, the stuff I could touch.

I examined the padlock and chain that secured my stall. It was something they’d added when they repurposed the place—the latch had been enough to stop a cow. The chain was heavy duty but the padlock was just a simple, store-bought thing like you’d use to lock your tool shed. That was my way out. A lock was just a machine. A lock could be picked.#p#分页标题#e#

What I needed was some wire. When we next exercised, my eyes searched every surface for a lost paperclip or a piece of electrical wire but there was nothing: everywhere was kept ruthlessly clean and free of clutter. By now, I figured it was late morning although I was rapidly losing track.

I slept a little. I ate. I exercised. I dug my nails into my palms to keep from crying.

It was when I was next trying to sleep that I thought of it. I had my head on the little pile of clothes I’d made and I sleepily pushed one item off it because it was digging into my cheek. I lay there with the thing in my hand for several minutes, idly fingering it, before I opened my eyes.

My bra. My bra had underwiring.

I sat up and started trying to extract the wire. What would have taken seconds with a pair of pliers took a full half hour. But eventually, I had a short length of springy, bendable wire I could slot into the padlock’s keyhole.

I’d never picked a lock. What I really needed was a good book, with diagrams. But as I probed and twisted, I started to build up a picture of what was going on in the mechanism, the shining parts separating in my mind. If I’d been in jail, I could have worked on it all night but here there was no night: every ten minutes or so, a guard would walk past and I’d have to pretend to be asleep and then start all over again. The frustration was unbelievable. But one thing I had on my side was time.

An hour after I started, the lock finally clicked open. I stared at it for a moment, tracing the shining hasp with my finger. Should I just go now? The temptation to just pull the door open and run was unbelievable.

But I had no plan: they’d recapture me instantly. And I knew the guard would be back any minute. I’d have to relock it and trust I could do it again later, now I had the technique. I took a deep, shuddering breath and squeezed the padlock closed, imprisoning myself again. A few moments later, I heard the guard’s footsteps approaching and quickly lay down.