Page 24 of The Perfect Stranger

The soon to be dead man demanded she pull the trigger, foolishly believing that if she did, she would be spared.

“Hagalo!” the man demanded of her.

“What’s he saying?” Jase asked.

“Do it,” Alejandro replied. He was next to me, wide-eyed and devastated.

The soldier pressed harder against her temple until her head tilted to the side.

“Hagalo, hagalo,” the lover once again bellowed to his trembling partner.

I could bet on my life it wasn’t her who pulled the trigger.

It wasn’t her who made the fatal decision.

She was just a puppet.

The Glock fired, the boom bouncing between the surrounding buildings.

The demands came to a stop.

The pleas were no more.

The man’s lifeless body fell backward onto the road, the cries of his desperate lover mixed cruelly with sneers and laughter of the taunting soldiers.

“Fuck me!” Jase slid down the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, eyes staring into the putrid darkness. “Estimated number of assholes we need to take out?”

I mirrored Jase’s position and looked to Alejandro for an answer

“Many have left after the initial invasion. Estimated fifty have stayed.”

“How are they feeding all of them? There would hardly be enough for soldiers and villagers since no one is working the fields,” Jase asked. “The villagers come off second best?”

Alejandro gave a grim nod.

“We’ve got to move.” I was first to my feet, peering through the window. The coast was clear.

The soldiers had moved on, leaving the body to rot in the middle of the road.

“There’s a fork in the road further up. The soldiers are staying in civilian housing near the school where the women are being held and the coca fields on the other side.”

“Eating their cake too I see,” Jase quipped

“I think that was their plan.”

These soldiers were ‘living it up’ only mere steps away from getting high on coca leaves and easy access to raping all the women they wanted.

My blood ran cold. It was three against fifty.

If we failed the entire La Balsa community would be killed and no doubt the women, the ones that survived, would be taken as sex slaves.

“Shouldn’t we reach the men first? They can add to our numbers.”

“All good in theory but these men have wives, mothers, daughters and nieces locked away. We don’t need a hundred men acting impulsively and blowing the plan in order to save one person. We get the women out and send them over the mountains and to the Ecuadorian border until it’s safe.”

Jase jumped to his feet hooking his rifle over his shoulder. “Right, let’s blow some shit up.”

The fork in the road led us to the side of a building that had gas lamps ablaze but no movement.

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