Angela drifted in and out of consciousness, at times hardly feeling the blows.
Miguel stood between her open legs as he unbuttoned his work overalls. He wasn’t smiling anymore. His expression was an odd mix of lust laced with loathing. He pulled his arms out of his overalls and then pushed them down enough to free his erection.
In a daze from being hit so many times, Angela struggled weakly, more out of a frenzied sense of helpless fright than any belief that she could escape. Miguel knelt between her legs, leaned in, and punched down into the gut a few more times. Her screams turned to tears of choking agony. He lay down on top of her.
If she had learned anything from the visions of the killers she had found, this was more about hatred, humiliation, and control than sex. But they still wanted the sex.
Angela struggled to breathe with the weight of him on top of her. He made no effort to hold his weight off her to give her enough space to breathe. She gritted her teeth as tears streamed from her eyes. She had to swallow the blood in her mouth to keep from choking on it.
She had been down this road enough times before, and seen enough visions of men like these, to know what she was in for.
In that moment she became a young girl again.
It became Frankie and Boska again. It became the same terrifying ordeal all over again, the same ordeal she could never escape. It again simply became the way her life was going to be.
Her instinct was to beg them to stop, but she knew that never did any good. If anything, it only excited men like this and made them feel more powerful. Screams were a reward to men like this. She vowed not to reward them with screams.
But then she did.
And then, in that moment as she became that young girl again, she felt as if she left her body. She could see herself there on the floor, her legs being held open. While one monster was top of her the others held her, pawing her breasts, eager for their turn.
Her mind drifted away and she was gone to another place.
What was happening to her there in that filthy factory didn’t matter. It couldn’t really touch her, touch who she was.
She was outdoors with the peaceful woods all around. It was her grandparents’ place, near the cabin, on a rock ledge where she often went to sit because it was so achingly beautiful.
It was night.
The moon was out, watching over her.
As she cried somewhere back in another world, the moonlight took her away.
TWENTY-THREE
When Miguel was finished, he traded places with one of the men holding her legs. When he punched her again as he got up it brought her back in a rush from that distant place. It was an unwelcome return.
She struggled, teeth gritted, still trying without success not to give in as each man took his turn. She knew that struggling was useless, but she couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t want them to remotely think that she had given in, or worse, that she was willing.
She wanted to kill them. She promised herself that one day she would kill every one of them. Kill them dead.
It was different this time than with Boska. She had never fought against Boska. He would have hurt her bad, and hurt her mother to further punish Angela. He was the ever-present brute. She knew he would always be around. As long as she lived at home, he could always come into her room. If she didn’t come home, he would always come and find her. Fear of Boska paralyzed her. But she always knew that if she gave in to him, he would eventually finish and let her go.
She knew that these men had no intention of letting her go.
She was a woman, now, not that helpless little girl. While there was still fear, the emotion that overrode everything now was rage.
She fully expected that these men were going to do something horrific to her. Her visions when looking into the eyes of killers had shown her what sorts of things men like this liked to do to women to show their power over them. Those visions from killers had opened her eyes to a world of degradation, pain, and horrifying death.
She was now in the hands of men like that.
She could see in the eyes of these men that they were not yet killers. She knew by what she saw, though, that they were on the cusp and this was the night they fully intended to cross that line.
For some reason their murderous desires had been building but they had lived lives of restraint. Now those restraints were off and they felt they had license to do whatever they wanted. She could tell by the way they hit her that they were finally free to live out long-held urges.
By the time the last man was done, Miguel had recovered his erection and was lusting for another turn. He pulled her up by her hair and then punched her in the gut a few times—fast and hard. It doubled her over, leaving her limp. He lifted her like a rag doll and threw her facedown over a table so he could take her from behind. He grabbed her hair in his fist and pressed her face down against the table while he was violating her.
Lying there helpless as he grunted and slammed into her from behind, she could see blood, lots of blood, her blood, smeared on the table. Her face throbbed from the blows.
She could also see under the edge of the blanket that covered the things on that table. As if in a dream, she saw the oddest, whitish yellow geometric-shaped objects, several inches thick. There were a half dozen cell phones under the blanket as well. It didn’t make any sense to her.
When Miguel finished and pulled out of her, one of the other men took his place. He held her head down on the table the same way. Blood ran out of her mouth onto the table. As he was going at her, Miguel used a blanket to scoop up the things on the table and then carried them out. She could hear the door scrape open. A few moments later, she heard the trunk of the car slam shut.
When the last man had finished, he wrenched her up by her hair and threw her down on the floor. She didn’t have the strength to try to break her fall. He kicked her in the face, his heavy boots stunning her. Instinctively, she curled into a ball, arms around her knees, hands covering her head as she shivered. She held her breath against the blows as the men kicked her.
Angela knew that after the raping would come the killing.
She heard an odd sound. She realized after a moment that it was the sound of her teeth chattering.
The last man stood over her, watching her, gloating with his power over her, satisfied they had put her in her place. As he watched her, he pulled up his overalls, stuffed his arms through the sleeves, and buttoned it back up. Angela stared ahead at their feet.
Defeated, she couldn’t bear to look up at any of them.
She heard the front door slam as Miguel came back in. He stood over her a moment and then went to one knee beside her. He leaned down, putting his mole-covered face close to hers. She didn’t want to look into his terrible eyes, but she did.
He had the paper that had been in the box she had delivered. He waved it in her face.
“Do you know what this paper tells us?”
Angela looked away from his eyes toward the paper, but it was in Spanish, so she couldn’t understand it.
When she didn’t answer, he told her anyway.
“These are our orders from Rafael, our team leader. We are getting close to the day we will finally destroy the Great Satan. These orders tell us that when the courier delivers these parts we need for that glorious day, we must kill the courier. That is you.” He flicked a hand against the paper. “You are this courier. It says we should kill you so that no one knows where you took this package, or who was here to take it from you. Dead people can’t talk, no? Americans are stupid. You make it easy for us. You are all easy to fool. So, you see, you were dead the moment you picked up this package. You should be happy that we are merciful and let you have one last fuck to enjoy.”
The others chuckled.
Angela hadn’t expected that, exactly. She expected that they were planning on killing her when they had finished, but simply for the lust of killing as well as to cover up their crime. She hadn’t expected that they would
receive orders to kill her. She especially hadn’t expected that she would be the one to deliver her own death warrant.
Angela accepted her fate with grim resignation. As she was growing up she had always expected that one lunatic or another would eventually kill her. That sense of destiny had always shadowed her. She had always thought she was living on borrowed time. She was ready to die. Life held little for her. Death promised more. Death promised release.
The only time she felt truly alive was when she was killing men who killed, when she was making them suffer for what they had done to women who couldn’t fight back, women who could never seek justice for themselves. When she was killing a man who had done things to his victims like these men were doing to her, it gave her a high. It was ecstasy.
That was all she lived for. That was all that her life was good for—bringing death to men like these, bringing justice down on them, preventing them from ever again harming anyone.
It seemed ironic that this was to be the way she died.
Death, though, held the quiet offer of everlasting peace. If there was a God, then maybe He would let her be with the only ones she had ever loved—her grandparents.
In a way, she was surprised she had lived this long. She took chances she knew could get her killed, like with Owen, because she didn’t really care if she died, and being that close to the edge made it all the more exhilarating.
Those risks enabled her to get closer to the pure ecstasy of vengeance.
Angela had grown up around dangerous men. Now she hunted dangerous killers. She’d always known that death could come at any time.
Miguel abruptly snatched her by her hair and hauled her to her feet. She stood before him, before all four men, naked, shivering both in pain and in helpless fear of what was coming. She didn’t really care if she was about to die, but she feared the agony of how they would do it. Men like this didn’t like to make a quick kill. They liked to make it an agonizing death.
Miguel spoke in Spanish to the others. They discussed something for a moment, and then Emilio ran off into a room to the side. He came back with a rope.
Emilio held the coiled rope he’d retrieved up before her. “A rope can kill quick, no?” He held a hand up above his head and did an impression of being hanged and the rope snapping taut. His tongue flopped out to the side of his mouth. “See? Break the neck and it is quick.”
“But quick is too good for Americans,” Miguel said.
Juan and Pedro nodded their agreement. By now, she had learned all their names, and the name of the man who gave the orders: Rafael.
“We have something better in mind for you,” Emilio said.
A wicked smile grew on Miguel’s face. “Hold her.”
As the other men held her arms and hair again, Miguel tied one end of the rope around her neck. The rope was coarse and hard. It hurt as they tied a knot at the back of her neck and jerked it tight. It was already starting to choke her. Angela didn’t know much about hanging, but she did understand that they didn’t want it to be an easy death by breaking her neck.
“Should we tie her arms?” Emilio asked.
“No,” Miguel scoffed. “Let her have her hands free so she can claw at the rope that will be choking her to death. Let her be free to struggle. That will make it worse that she cannot get the rope that is strangling her from her neck.”
Emilio peered up at the ceiling for a moment and then tossed the rope up and over one of the iron beams.
The men all let go of her to grab hold of the end of the rope. They quickly pulled together and hoisted her up off the ground by the rope around her neck.
Angela took one last gasping breath as her feet were lifted off the floor and her weight tightened the rope. The men pulled together until she was about four feet above the floor. It might as well have been a mile. Already she was panicking from not being able to breathe.
One of the men tied off the end of the rope on a post.
Angela kicked and twisted. She wanted to scream at the men, but she couldn’t. Desperation took control of her. She clawed at the rope that was strangling her, just as Miguel said she would.
“Let’s go,” Miguel said.
“Don’t you want to watch the American whore die?” Emilio asked.
“Now that we have the parts we need, you know that we have other things we must do. It is already getting late. We will come back for her truck later. When we do, we will dispose of her body as well. We already took too much time with her.” He grinned as he smacked her bare bottom. “But it was worth it, eh?”
Angela kicked at his head, but he easily dodged to the side. She desperately wished that she could reach a table with her feet, but the tables were way too far away. Her body rotated around and around as she kicked, all the while desperately clawing at the rope strangling her. Tears streamed down her cheeks, mixing with all the blood that was dripping off her jaw.
She was still kicking and struggling as she watched the four men hurry toward the door carrying more bundles from the shelves. She couldn’t see it, but she heard the front door scrape the ground and then slam shut. She heard the car start as doors shut and then the tires chirp as it raced away.
Angela was completely alone in a dark, deserted factory her grandfather had helped build. No one was going to save her.
The rope around her throat held all her weight. The pain was horrific. She desperately needed a breath.
Her vision was narrowing down to a dark tunnel.
As she twisted, the world was starting to go black.
TWENTY-FOUR
Hanging by her neck at the end of the rope, Angela twisted and spun as she struggled. She could only imagine the shock when her corpse was eventually found hanging there, naked, her tongue bulging out of her mouth, her skin blue.
What a sensation—a naked girl found hanging by her neck.
Naked.
The word seared through her panic-stricken mind.
She was naked—except for her boots.
They had pulled off her shorts and underwear and then ripped off her top to get at what they wanted, but they hadn’t bothered with her boots.
Even as she realized that she was still wearing her boots, Angela knew she was rapidly running out of time. A desperate plan was forming in her mind, but being unable to breathe she knew that her window of time for a chance to do anything to save herself was very small and closing fast.
If she wanted to live, she knew she had only seconds to act.
Move, Angela, she told herself. Don’t let them win. Move!
She frantically reached up with her left hand and grabbed the thick, coarse rope above her head. She pulled with all her strength to at least take some of the weight off her throat, but more importantly it gave her the ability to more easily twist her shoulders so she could reach down with her right hand. She wasn’t able to keep the rope from strangling her, but it at least helped ease the excruciating pain a little so that she could focus on what she needed to do.
With her right shoulder tipped downward, Angela bent her right leg at the hip and knee, as if she were squatting, to get her boot up closer to her hand. She tensed her neck muscles as hard as she could to try to help blood get to her brain before she blacked out.
Although her whole arm was tingling like it had fallen asleep, nerve pain shot down the length of it, so moving it was difficult. She wanted to scream at how hard it was to reach down. She needed to reach down if she was going to save herself. Her tingling fingers were going numb.
Holding her leg up with the little strength she had left, she felt around blindly, desperately, until the tips of her fingers found the handle of the knife down inside the top of her boot. It was a moment of giddy success amid the icy dread of death cloaking her in darkness.
She reminded herself that she was going to lose consciousness and die if she didn’t hurry.
As frenzied as she was at not being able to breathe, Angela forced herself to be as deliberately careful as possible as she worked the
knife up out of the boot. She knew that once she got it partway out of the sheath, if the knife slipped and fell from her numb, tingling fingers, she would lose her only chance to live.
It was so frightening to be hanging by her neck, and so difficult to try to pull the knife up, that part of her wanted to give up. It seemed so inviting to simply let the darkness smother her. It would be over, then. If she gave up, she would have everlasting peace. There would be no more pain. No one would ever again be able to hurt her. As her vision and her mind dimmed, that option seemed ever more inviting.
It felt as if the peaceful realm of the dead was calling to her, whispering promises that if she simply gave up, she could be forever at peace and safe. If she just stopped struggling it would only be a moment longer and there would be no more pain.
A moment longer and she could be with her grandparents again.
But some part of her deep down inside wanted to live.
Move!
She didn’t want to be one of those women who died, never to see their killers punished. She didn’t want this to be the way she died. She wanted her life to be more, to mean something.
She didn’t want those men to win. She had made a promise that she was going to kill them. She couldn’t do that if she gave in to the sweet whispers.
Even as the specter of that inviting end to the pain called to her, with her last, waning bit of strength, Angela’s weak fingers kept working at the knife until she wiggled the end of the handle up far enough to be clear of the top of her boot. She struggled to muster the power to lift her heavy leg up even more, to bring her boot up closer to her quivering fingers. It felt as if it were made of lead.
Her lungs burned with pain. Her brain could hardly think of anything other than the desperate want of air and the simultaneous desire to give up. She had never known how much it hurt to strangle to death. She knew now what the women in those visions felt when their killers strangled them to death.