Page 3 of Dragon's Code

We walk inside and I see the few people in the building do a double take when they catch sight of me.

We walk up to the nurses’ station. “Officer Frank, who do we have we here?”

“This is Athena.”

“Athena Miller,” I fill in.

The nurse’s hand flies to her mouth as she gasps. “You’re that missing girl.”

“She needs to be looked at. She’s got some injuries.”

“You’ll want to get a rape kit too,” I say in a monotone voice.

My body doesn’t even feel like my own right now. All I feel is everything that’s been done to it since my father told them he wasn’t going to pay the ransom.

The nurse comes around the counter of the station and gives me a quick once over. She grabs a wheelchair and brings it to me. I gently sit down and the nurse puts the feet holders down. I ease my feet into them, not really wanting them to touch anything, but I’m too weak to hold my legs up. My skin screams against the hard plastic, and I’m afraid to even look at how much damage I’ve done, running barefoot through the woods.

She pushes the chair into a room, and Officer Frank trails behind us.

“Sit here.” The nurse says after she helps me get into the bed. “I’ll be back.”

I nod and lay back against the pillows. The longer I lay there, the more my body starts to hurt.

“Would you feel up to telling me some details of what happened to you?” Officer Frank asks, a small notepad and pen in hand.

I nod, keeping my eyes closed. “Friday, October 20th, I was kidnapped outside of my school by three men in a gray van.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen,” I reply.

He nods as he writes it down. “What is your school called?”

I give him as many details as I can remember. “They called my father and told him they’d release me if he gave them five million dollars. He declined to pay the ransom. So the men decided that I would be their new favorite toy until I died and then they would dispose of me.”

He tries to keep his expression void of emotion, but he must still be new at this because there’s a flash of anger that crosses his face as he continues to write everything down.

The nurse returns with another woman in scrubs. They excuse the officer so they can get the tee shirt I’m wearing into a bag, and then they start the violating exam of collecting DNA from my body and checking to see how injured I am.

I spend a lot of time staring at the ceiling, mentally picturing numbers and letters, lines of code across the starkly white surface, imagining what each line does, what each word would change in an app, anything to distract me from the women poking and prodding at my abused body, stitching up what they can, disinfecting all my wounds.

It takes forever, but finally they help me to the bathroom so that I can shower, wash out my cuts, clean the violation off my body, out of my hair. There’s a bench in there, so I sit for as much of the shower as I can, just letting the hot water warm me up from the outside in as I scrub my skin nearly raw.

I don’t know how long I’m in there, but when I get out, I just feel exhausted, so exhausted I can barely move.

I struggle to pull on the gown and pants, but I abandon the slippers in the bathroom. My feet hurt too much to even attempt sliding them into the shoes. I hobble over to my bed and crawl back inside.

The nurse returns after a bit to finish bandaging me up, to wrap my feet loosely in antiseptic-soaked gauze.

“You can make calls from this phone,” the nurse says. “I can leave if you want some privacy.”

I shake my head. “It’s okay.” I don’t really like the idea of being alone.

She nods and gives me a couple of pills for the pain, a Plan B, and antibiotics. It’s a fun cocktail. Then she sets up an I.V. to rehydrate me, and goes to work on my feet.

I pick up the phone and call the first person I can think of, the person I most want to know that I’m all right. He probably doesn’t even know I’m missing, but I still need to hear his voice.

The phone rings once before his voice comes through the speaker. “Hello?”

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