Page 3 of Her Mercenary

It was an invisible yet undeniable presence, a thick, sticky mass that spread to the corners of the room, consuming everything in its path.

Heavy and wet, the hot, humid air coated my skin like a layer of Vaseline. It was stifling in that small room, like sucking air through a straw, getting just enough oxygen to stay alive but never enough to thrive.

This is what I will always remember of that time. The humidity. The dank heat in that concrete basement. So severe, it was like a third person trapped in there with me, an omnipresent tormentor with no concept of day or night.

The nostalgia triggered from the smell of ocean air has been rewritten in my brain. The sour, briny scent once associated with Mai Tais and sunblock will now forever remind me of a pit where discarded humans were thoughtlessly tossed and held against their will.

There was a time that I didn’t believe in hell. An eternal optimist, maybe, but I believed that the chosen were lifted to the heavens, while the “others” decomposed, returning to the earth, their souls simply fading into thin air like smoke from a cigarette catching on the wind.

The chosen would receive the gift of peace, living—whatever that looked like—in true contentment, while the bodies of the others would remain on earth, only to be forgotten, nameless faces slowly slipping from the binds of the flesh. They would become nothing, the ultimate punishment.

Now, though, I have a very different perspective on heaven and hell, good and evil, for I have seen real-life demons up close and personal.

Hell is not the afterlife. It is the now.

It is very present, in the dark corners of the world where the most vile, savage sins are committed. Where humans are nothing more than animals, devoid of morals and decency, and instead driven by carnal needs like lust and greed. There is no restraint, no respect, no dignity, only shameless surrender to sexual needs and urges. Human, animal, beast, or child, no one is safe on this path.

It is very real, this morally bankrupt, corrupt playground that I will forever consider hell on earth.

“That would never happen to me.”

How many times have you said those words? Thought them?

I certainly had. I was one of those people, the naive small-town girl who thought, Nope, that kind of stuff doesn’t happen around here.

How foolish I was.

Now I sing a very different tune, because the girl who grew up playing softball and wearing second-hand Converses, the girl whose biggest worry was whether she would get a date for the prom, became a statistic at age twenty-nine. I became a name, a headshot in one of those horrific news stories that steals your attention for only a minute before you turn away, pushing it away, and think, That would never happen to me.

I was a normal, nothing-special woman with no criminal record, no dark past, no addictions—aside from coffee, though who considers that an addiction anymore? I was just normal. Like someone you know. Like you, perhaps. I didn’t hang out with the wrong crowd; I didn’t tempt fate. I just trudged through life doing the best I could with what I had.

Divorced, single, discontent.

Nothing—nothing—in my life suggested that I, this average woman, would find myself abducted and thrown into hell on earth ... most of me yet to return.

The woman who was taken that fateful night wasn’t the same woman in this cage. I lost a piece of my soul during my captivity, that childlike joyful spirit that delights in the small things. I lost my roots, my core.

Essentially, I lost myself.

One day, maybe I’ll be able to reflect on what happened without having a physical reaction. One day, maybe I’ll slip into those Converses again and try to remember what it was like to be normal. Who I once was.

3

ROMAN

Her name was Samantha Greene, age twenty-nine, divorced, seventh-grade schoolteacher from Fairhope, Oklahoma, population five thousand. Five-foot-four, blond hair, hazel eyes, and a weight of 120 pounds, this according to her driver’s license.

Additional details not included: the slight bump in the middle of her nose that freckles in the summer. The faded scar above her right eyebrow, the one that she furrows when deep in concentration. The coral flecks in her irises—a color I’d never seen before—shimmer almost eerily like a cat’s when the light catches them just so. The ridiculously long, feathered lashes that emphasize this aforementioned feline resemblance. And then there’s the round, feminine mouth that appears to be stuck in a perpetual pout.

Her lips stole my focus for longer than I care to admit, but her eyes are what got me. I’m unsure why. They were the kind of eyes that seemed to peer directly into your soul. Tried to figure you out. In every photograph, every social media post, every article I’d dug up, Samantha Greene (known as Sam) was always smiling.

Fairhope happened to have a Peeping Tom that summer. The sick fuck would reposition CCTV cameras to peer into unsuspecting women’s apartments and homes. I discovered that Samantha Greene was one of his victims.

I’d hacked into the CCTV feed from the camera across the street from her apartment, which pointed directly into her living room window. The street cam had been strategically positioned by the Peeping Tom, a lecherous, metrosexual twenty-something named Blade Barney. Barney, and his unfortunate last name—only slightly worse than the first—was a Fairhope police department new-hire, addicted to both fake tanning and BDSM pornography, the latter revealed to the chief of police by an anonymous tip.

Blade Barney no longer works for the FPD.

While the camera has since been repositioned, the images were forever burned into my brain.

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