Page 15 of One Minute Out

But now, after all these twenty-three women had been through, after all they’d heard from others about their experiences, after the passport confiscations and the locked doors and the sexual abuse many had been subjected to by the old man and the police here or by gangsters at the apartment building in suburban Belgrade, all along this underground railway of hell... now they all knew. Their decisions, well intentioned or not, were not important now.

They were slaves.

Some of the girls held on to the hope that once they worked off their debt, they would be allowed to return to their homes, to their families. But it wasn’t much hope. Others, usually the older women in their twenties, insisted none of them would ever see their homes or families again.

And now this. They had no idea what the evil men holding them would do to them now.

The new, even deeper sense of hopelessness in the red room was god-awful.

And fresh sounds of men shouting at one another in Serbo-Croatian in the hall on the other side of the door only made it worse.

•••

A twenty-three-year-old woman sat in the back of the little room, leaning against a threadbare cushion propped against the back wall, her head in her trembling hands, and she thought of home.

The day she was kidnapped she had been given a new name, as had all the others, and they were ordered to never speak their given names again, not even to one another.

This woman had been called Maja by her captors, and it was her name now, as far as anyone in the room knew. Maja looked drawn and pale, with dark circles under her eyes that were evident even in the poor lighting. She hadn’t worn makeup or taken a bath in days; she’d been shuttled from one dank room to another, or transported in a bus with armed guards and covered windows; and though she’d been fed regularly, the food was low quality and she’d been forced to eat with her filthy bare hands.

Her humanity had been taken from her along with her identity.

But she was one of the lucky few who had not yet been raped. She assumed it was only a matter of time, though, so she felt no great comfort in this fact.

The door clicked, then opened. One of the Serbians appeared, a rifle around his chest and blood smeared all over his T-shirt. He took in the scene, and Maja could tell he was still amped up from the fighting—he was angry and, she sensed, even scared.

The man spoke in Russian to the group. Only some of the girls spoke the language, but no one here spoke Serbo-Croat, so it was better than nothing.

Maja’s mother spoke Russian fluently, and she’d learned enough as a child to follow the man’s words.

“Your hero ran away, leaving you behind. He will be found, caught, and killed. More men are coming in now, and you... you all will be disciplined for what has happened here tonight.”

The same blonde who had spoken to the masked gunman fifteen minutes earlier spoke up again, this time in Russian. “We had nothing to do with—”

She stopped talking when the man hefted his rifle and pointed it at her, then shined the tactical flashlight mounted on the rail into her eyes. She and the other girls recoiled at the brightest light any of them had seen in days.

“One more word and I paint this room with all of your blood!”

Two more gunmen appeared behind the first, and they all conferred quietly with one another. Finally, one began unlocking the women from their chains. The first man said, “We are all leaving now. Follow us, and if you try anything, we will shoot you.” No one moved. After a few seconds he screamed, “Stand up!” The women and girls stood and moved huddled together out of the room, past the Serbians, and up the hall. Some cried when they saw the dead bodies of the guards lying unattended in the stairwell, and upstairs they struggled to pass two dog handlers whose snarling, snapping beasts chomped the air as they tried to get to the prisoners.

All the women were put on a bus; Maja thought this one was different from the one they’d arrived on, but just like the other bus, the windows on this vehicle had been blacked out with cardboard. They sat in silence save for some sobs of terror, and soon the engine came to life, armed Serbians filled the front seats, and the bus began rolling off.

None of the victims knew where they were going or what would happen to them when they got there, but that had been the case for Maja since the beginning of this ordeal.

The bus drove for an hour through tight mountain roads; the women were continuously admonished and threatened if they made any noise, so they did little more than look at the headrests of the seats in front of them and worry about both their short-term and long-term futures.

A few vomited, the undulating road and the terror both competing for attention in their stomachs.

Finally, the bus stopped, then began creeping forward. It stopped again, rolled a few meters forward again, and then stopped again. This continued for minutes, and Maja thought it likely they were at a border crossing. This meant they would be passing by police or border guards, but she didn’t get excited with hopes of rescue. She’d been through other border crossings since she was taken over a week earlier, with other men guarding her, other vehicles transporting her.

They’d gone through checkpoints before, and they’d always been allowed to pass. She suspected that whoever was manning the checkpoints had been well aware of the nature of the cargo in the blacked-out bus, and they’d taken money to let it through.

Soon the big vehicle returned to its previous speed on the winding roads, and Maja felt certain they were now in another country.

After another fifteen minutes of driving through hills, the bus rolled to a slow stop. One of the Serbians stood; Maja noticed he had a bandage on his arm and another around his head, and he shouted to the vehicle for everyone to get out and line up single file.

When Maja stepped out of the bus and into the night, a fresh terror washed over her. She saw they were off the road in a gravel parking circle, surrounded by dense forest.

She’d expected a new dungeon. A farmhouse or a warehouse or some sort of out-of-the-way building. But they were out in the middle of nowhere.

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