Disclaimer this story contains depictions of human trafficking, rape and drug abuse

She stood, her strength waning, as blood seeped through her many wounds onto the floor. The pain was biting, searing. Slumping against the wall, She hastily rigged an IV and bound her wounds but her strength failed. Darkness enveloped her.

The light was dim. She recognized the murky haze of morphine, time blurred in the hospital bed. Her awareness returned in fragments, the morphine's grip holding her, binding her.

They didn’t speak. The dull, haunting eyes stared empty. She was moved to a new room and a new bed and still the morphine came. It washed over her freeing her from pain and cleansing her momentarily from this new, horrifying, existence. Her wound had healed. Her strength returned slowly. She was bound and drugged. Men came and went. They seemed not to care for her captivity, only for their own, carnal, pleasure. She was beaten, used over and over in an endless, unspeakable, hell.

She grew stronger. The morphine’s grip loosening as her tolerance grew. The horrors of her reality sharpened her mind her training guided her her steps. Slowly the grim details of her captivity came into focus. Each day there was something new. A fragment she could use to escape.

The bathroom—ten stalls, two rows of five. This bathroom heavy with despair and decay. The air was thick and smelled of cheap disinfectant, unable to mask the pungent mix of damp humidity and bodily fluids. The stall doors had been ripped from their hinges. Privacy was an unknown luxury, a forgotten word from a time that didn’t exist. The only peace or momentary escape the women here could find came monthly for some lucky ones some never bled and had no respite. The assaults took place daily. Never when the customers were in - that was bad business and there were rules.

The dingy bathrooms, the cold damp showers their beds nowhere was safe.

The bathroom was trimmed with rust and dirt the floors dirty and mared by cracked ceramic tile.

40 guards 20 on each shift. These were not military soldiers, though some were battle hardened and quite a few had basic training. Their bodies told their stories. The marks they bore carried histories of murder, loss and allegiance. What they lacked in training and discipline they made up with a proclivity for ruthless violence. The men made great sport of the prisoners and committed unspeakable crimes.

Among the faces she encountered, the new nurse stood out. Her eyes, heavy with recent tears, betrayed her story. Like many hers was a story of coercion. A tale of horror to commit these acts or face a living death in some form or another. A sad and universal thread binding all those trapped in this nightmare. It wouldn’t be long. The remnants of light would fade to dull apathy.

All of this burned into her mind. Every fragment every detail. Escape was here.

Her body didn’t feel like her own. It functioned almost mechanically. She built her strength pulling against her restraints. The human body is remarkable - strength once gained is easily regained with time and resistance- two commodities she had ample supply of.

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