Surrendering(80)

Kate was immediately drawn to Sarah, as always. She lay in her bed, staring at the crumbling drywall ceiling, a completely blank look plastered on her face. Kate wondered how Sarah would possibly be able to recover after they rescued her.

Stay strong, Sarah. We’re going to bring you home soon.

This time it was easier to pull herself away from Sarah to once again look around the compound. This time she hoped she could get more information that would help save these poor women.

She forced herself out of Sarah’s room and into a dimly lit hallway. Down the right side of the hallway were a series of closed doors. She slid into the room next to Sarah’s and once again found the fair-haired young woman she had seen before, who was severely pregnant. She looked peaceful in sleep, but Kate knew she was anything but.

She slipped out of that room and into the next and found a very frail, very young-looking Hispanic woman, with stringy, dark matted hair. She wore a torn, faded yellow T-shirt with a giant smiley face on it, ironic that, and blood soaked cream panties. Kate noticed how bruised her arms, hips and inner thighs were. Her glassy, vacant eyes were sunken and she could see the outline of her ribs through her minimal clothing.

This was almost too difficult to bear, and as much as Kate wanted to wake up so she wouldn’t be witness to any more of this torture, she needed to gather as much information as possible before she was pulled from her dream again.

Kate slipped out of this room and into the next eight rooms, all holding women in similar states and most in various states of pregnancy. She began to distinguish the women that had been there for a while and those that hadn’t, not only by the condition of their bodies, but the expressions on their faces. The newer ones had hope and anger. Those in longer captivity were apathetic. Void of any emotion or life behind their dead eyes.

One young woman was clearly near death. Kate doubted she would be alive in time for them to rescue her. This was absolute agony to bear witness to their torture.

The woman in the last room gave Kate pause. She wasn’t as young as the other women. Definitely not the young nineteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds that had been kidnapped recently. She suspected this woman had been kept prisoner for quite some time. But what caused her stomach to drop was that she looked strikingly like Jamie Hallow. That couldn’t possibly be. Could it? Jamie was never found, but how could she have been kept prisoner for eleven years? Kate couldn’t think about that now, as she had a job to do.

Moving on, Kate found the surgical room where she’d previously witnessed two women being raped. Blessedly, there was no activity in that room at the moment, so she kept going. There had been nothing so far that gave her any further indication of where this place was located and she was hoping to find an upper level with more windows.

She stumbled upon a few more rooms with supplies and office equipment. She scanned the offices for any papers lying around that would give her anything useful and found nothing. Nothing, until the last office she came across, which was a bit bigger than the rest.

The office was extremely cluttered and there were stacks of paper everywhere. On the desk. On the filing cabinets. On the floor. In the chairs. There was almost no surface she could see without the piles of paper. Only a narrow path on the floor, leading from the door to the desk was devoid of paper.

She quickly scanned those, finding none of them useful, and noticed that the computer monitor had been left on. Unfortunately, she couldn’t understand much of anything on the screen. It looked like a bunch of meaningless numbers in a spreadsheet, but she thought it was some sort of master medical document on the kidnapped women. Column headers indicated Subject A, B, etc. She noticed what looked like dates too. She had a fairly good memory, so she’d try her best to remember what was on here so she could tell Dev and the doctor when she awoke. She wished she was able to actually bring things back from her dreams because a flash drive would come in handy about now.

She was about to leave the office when she noticed a newspaper sticking out from underneath the desk, like it missed the trashcan. Upon closer inspection, she noticed that the newspaper was the Door County Advocate. Door County was at the end of the Sturgeon Bay in Wisconsin. Her family had vacationed frequently in Door County when she was younger. Holy shit! Was it possible that they were really a mere forty miles or so away?

Kate quickly left the office and continued down the series of sterile-looking hallways. As she neared the end of this particular hallway, a feeling of evilness seeped into her pores. She was both drawn and repelled by the door standing in front of her and she warred with herself on whether to enter. She thought of those poor women she saw earlier and quickly decided to forge ahead, before she lost her nerve. For some unexplained reason, every instinct inside of her screamed this would be a defining moment in her life.