Corsair

There wasn’t enough food in Alana’s stomach for her to throw up. Instead, she bent at the waist, braced her hands against her knees, and dry-heaved until her stomach was a knotted lump. When she straightened, a guard she didn’t recognize eyed her with some interest.

A half hour later, the meal finished, Alana and the other women were cleaning the tin serving dishes, using fistfuls of sand to scour the metal. Not that the prisoners back laboring in the mine and along the railroad had left much behind on their plates. One of the principal means for the guards to maintain control was to keep all the captives on the verge of starvation.

She was kneeling on the ground, swirling sand inside a bowl, when a shadow loomed over her. She looked up. The other women working with her kept their attention on their work. Alana was suddenly yanked to her feet and turned around violently. It was the guard who had slapped her earlier. He was close enough that she could smell the tobacco on his breath and see that he wasn’t much older than twenty, and that there was a lifelessness in his eyes. He didn’t see her as another human being. There wasn’t enough behind his gaze to make her think he saw her as an animate object at all.

The other guards meant to watch over the dozen women were purposefully looking away. An arrangement had been made, a deal struck. For however long he wished, Alana Shepard belonged to this man.

She tried to ram a knee into his groin but must have telegraphed her intentions because he turned aside adroitly and took the glancing blow to his thigh. The leering expression on his face didn’t change, even when he slapped her on the same cheek that was already swollen and beginning to bruise.

Alana refused to cry out or collapse. She swayed on her feet until the stinging subsided and her head cleared. The guard spun her again, and with a bony hand clamped on her shoulder so that his fingers dug into her flesh he maneuvered her away from the others.

A hundred yards off was an old shed. Half the roof was missing, and the sides were bowed like the swayed back of an old horse. The door hung askew on a single rusted hinge. Just at the threshold, the guard shoved Alana hard enough to send her sprawling. She knew what was coming, had suffered the ordeal once before in college, and had vowed never to let it happen again. When she turned to face him from her supine position, her arm swept the floor to scoop up some pebbles and dirt.

He came forward in a rush and kicked her wrist. Her fingers opened reflexively and her arm went numb. Her meager weapon was scattered back to the ground. He said something in Arabic and chuckled to himself.

Alana opened her mouth to scream, and he was suddenly on her, one filthy hand clamped over her nose and mouth, the other she refused to think about. She tried to thrash under his weight, to bite his fingers, to block out the horror of what was about to happen, but he held her pressed to the earth. She couldn’t breathe. His lunge had knocked the air from her lungs and his hand shut off her airways. Her head began to swim, and after just a few seconds of a defense she thought she would never give up her body betrayed her. Her motions became less frantic. Unconsciousness loomed like a black shadow.

Then came a loud crackle, like the staccato snap of a bunch of twigs, and she could turn away and draw breath. Above her, she saw the back of a man’s hand and the back of her attacker’s head. The guard was dragged off of her, and Alana could breathe more deeply, short, choppy gasps that nevertheless filled her lungs. The would-be rapist came to rest next to her, his face inches from hers. If it was possible, death brought a certain amount of life to his unblinking eyes.

Kneeling over her was the guard who had watched her dry-heave in the mess line. He had snapped the other man’s neck with his bare hands.

He spoke in a soothing voice, and it took her a second to realize she recognized the words. He was speaking English. “You’re okay now,” he’d said. “His ardor has cooled. Permanently.”

“Who? Who are you?” He’d pulled aside his kaffiyeh. He was older than all the other guards she had seen, his skin weathered by a lifetime of living outdoors. She noticed, too, that unlike any of the other people she’d seen recently, one of his eyes was brown and weepy while the other was a startling blue.

“My name is Juan Cabrillo, and if you want to live you and I have to get out of here right now.”

“I don’t understand.”

Cabrillo got to his feet and extended a hand to Alana. “You don’t need to. You just have to trust me.”

AFTER A NIGHT OF moving by moonlight across the valley toward the construction site, gaining access to the facility had been simplicity itself. The guards had orders to keep people in. There was nothing about keeping men dressed like themselves out.