much scarier. If they didn’t care what she heard, she was probably going to die. And then she heard the words “sell” and “auction,” and her heart sank. She hadn’t just been kidnapped for ransom. They weren’t going to try to get money out of her parents. She was the product they were going to sell.
Her naïveté and rash behavior had put her in the hands of human traffickers. They weren’t going to kill her after all, but she might soon wish they had.
The ride went on forever, and after a time she began moaning and screaming behind the gag, trying to tell them she needed to pee. But they didn’t pay any attention, and they didn’t stop, and she wet herself, and they kept driving.
The ride ended after dark. Only then did the men in the front seat become real. She heard a door slide back and felt a breeze on her face. One of them stepped up into the van, then began cursing her when he smelled the urine. He grabbed at her breasts and squeezed them hard until she moaned, then dragged her out of the van, still bitching about the smell of urine on her and her clothes.
“Stand up,” one of them growled, as he removed the ties around her ankles, then the blindfold and gag.
“I can’t feel my feet,” she cried, as she went to her knees.
One of them yanked her to her feet and slapped her.
She cried out.
“Did you feel that, bitch?”
She nodded. Fear had a whole new meaning.
“Then shut up and do what we say,” he growled.
There was nothing on her mind now but survival. She couldn’t think about family. There would be no rescue. No one knew where she’d gone. She didn’t even know where she was. They were in the middle of nowhere, and all she could see were the stars overhead and what looked like a long metal building in front of them.
Then a light came on inside, and she watched in growing horror at the opening door. The man who came out was tall and skinny.
“Get her inside!” he yelled.
The two men grabbed her by the arms.
“Walk, or we’ll drag you,” one said, but her legs were shaking so hard she couldn’t make them move.
One of the men punched her in the stomach. With no breath left to scream, she leaned over and threw up until there was nothing left but the faint taste of bile in the back of her throat.
This time when they grabbed her by the arms, she followed.
* * *
People in Nashville were holding vigils for Starla. Her last school picture was on flyers posted all over town.
Her brother, Justin, had nightly dreams about her screaming for help. He could hear her voice, but he never found her.
Their family was in mourning. Connie took to her bed. John went to work every day because it’s all he knew what to do, then came home and drank himself to sleep. Justin became the boy whose sister was gone. Starla wasn’t the only one who had disappeared. Their family unit was gone as well, and verging on implosion.
* * *
Starla was thrown into a room with five other girls who appeared to be around her age, and from the looks of their clothes and blank stares, they’d been there awhile. Each of them had a manacle and chain on one wrist and the other end of the chain fastened to a wall. At first they wouldn’t talk to her, and then when they began, she regretted it. They all knew Darren, and they had no idea how they’d gotten here, but they knew where they were going.
The auction block.
Dread shot through Starla like a bullet ripping through flesh. Less than twelve hours later, they moved the girls in the dark, and when they stopped they were taken out blindfolded and led into another building.
An hour later they were forced to strip and, under the watchful eye of three armed men, were sent to a communal shower not unlike the ones in the gym at Starla’s school.
The humiliation of undressing in front of strange men was only the first in a long line of horrors to come. The girls scrubbed their bodies and then their hair, then went straight from the shower to another room full of young girls and women in the same state. They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t speak. They sat on the floor, hunched up to cover their nudity from each other, waiting to be called. Starla’s hair slowly dried, as did her skin, then soon beaded with sweat again. When Starla’s name was called she stood up. The shame she felt was less about her nudity than the lies that had gotten her here. She had to face a hard truth. Her last hopes were gone.
The room they took her to was air-conditioned, an accommodation to the nearly fifty men there, but it was thick with smoke from their cigarettes and cigars.
The open bar was manned by two young naked men, who moved among the crowd with shots of whiskey and tequila, and longneck bottles of beer.
Starla walked in with her head held high, past the humiliation of being nude, locked into the fear of what would happen next.
Her hair was dry now and hanging halfway to her waist, and beneath the bright overhead lights, her pale blond hair almost looked white.
A guard marched her up the steps to a small round stage in the middle of the room before he untied her. Then he grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked.
“Look up,” he growled.
So she did, and when it was announced that she was a virgin, the crowd, as a whole, moved closer. She began to pray again, but this time not to be rescued. She was asking for something easier—asking God to strike her dead.
The first bid started at a thousand and flew up to ten, and then fifteen thousand, and the bidders were thinning out. She wouldn’t look at them and was trying not to cry. Her survival instinct was already guiding her, telling her not to let them see her fear, and so she stared at a spot above their heads.
But then the bidding suddenly came to a stop and the room went quiet. When she realized the crowd was beginning to part, her heart started to pound. Something was happening, and she had to look, because it was going to happen to her.
A fortysomething man was coming toward the stage as if he owned it. Their gazes locked. His eyes narrowed as hers widened.
He was someone important. That much she guessed. He was dressed fit to kill, but she didn’t know that he was also willing to do it to get what he wanted.
“The bidding stops now. She is no longer for sale. She is mine,” the man said.
The silence in the room was sudden—almost as if men were afraid to breathe, and then the auctioneer slammed the gavel down on the dais.
“The girl known as Star is no longer for sale.”
Starla blinked at the name change. She was lost—so lost—and now she no longer existed.
“Take the girl down now,” the man said.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Baba. Right away.”
Baba snapped his fingers.
