Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

I was just about to tell her that I agreed when a black vehicle pulled into the parking lot alongside George’s Toyota sedan. I saw the driver lower his window; I assumed he needed directions or would ask after someone else from the party.

  A second later, I heard a scream and felt Kristine’s grip on my hand tighten into a death grasp.

  Cold metal jutted against the right side of my head. Somehow, I knew it was a gun. I went limp at the feeling of hands on my arms and the back of my neck. My body was being stretched in two directions—toward Kristine and toward the SUV. Its chrome wheels glinted in the street light. Voices shouted, the men’s in anger, Kristine’s in desperation.

  The cold sensation at my neck ceased, and I saw—first out of the periphery and then fully across the field of my vision—the weapon move in Kristine’s direction. I felt every hair on my body stand on end and a bead of cold perspiration run down the side of my body.

  “Let go,” I said to Kristine. Her eyes wide and her mouth agape but silent, Kristine released my hand. I watched as she stood there, arm extended, like a relay runner reacting to a failed handoff. A thought flickered briefly in my mind.

  I’m alone. I’m going to have to do this myself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Black SUV

  Thoughts, sounds, and images all ran through my head, colliding with one another. The one constant was the hands gripping my biceps and around my neck, my struggle to breathe, the feeling of near weightlessness as I was half-dragged and half-lifted across a short stretch of pavement. Though it was only seconds before I was tossed into the vehicle I’d seen pull up, I was aware of flailing when my feet lost connection with solid ground. Then my face was pressed into the carpet, the rough fibers scratching at my cheeks and lips, the sour smell of something I couldn’t identify, something like body odor and chemicals, stinging my eyes and throat.

  Above me, voices seemed to be swirling. I tried to count them, to note the differences in their tone, but at times they seemed to blend into a single accented voice. Their words were all layered on top of one another, but I could pull them apart.

  “Stay down or we’ll shoot you!”

  “Don’t you try to move!”

  “We’ll kill you!”

  “Please,” I begged the three men. “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t. I don’t want to die!”

  I couldn’t be sure if I had been heard. The engine added its roar and I lay there as the car bumped and shuddered over what may have been a curb before the ride smoothed and the men’s voices stilled. We drove straight ahead for what must have been miles. We turned right a couple of times, and the road grew rougher. My neck ached with the effort to keep my head from bouncing too painfully against the hard floor.

  I repeated my pleas, and when I got no response, I added, “You can have whatever you want. Just let me live.”

  It was as if my words set them in motion. A hand grabbed my arm and I was pulled roughly upward. I swung my legs to gain some balance and sat with my back against the second row of seats, my feet beneath the third. Somehow, I’d managed to hold on to my cell phone during those opening minutes of the ordeal. Even before the thought could fully form in my head that I could use it, another hand grasped me around the wrist and shook my entire arm. More out of shock and surprise than pain, I dropped the phone. One of the men picked it up and stuffed it into his pocket. I thought of all the numbers of the people I knew and loved that were stored on that phone. I hoped that I would have another opportunity to speak to every one of those people again.

  I could make out one voice better, mostly because it was the loudest, the most shrill. One of the men was down on one knee beside me. He held the gun in one hand. As the vehicle turned, he seemed to lose his balance and he was bouncing back and forth between the two rows of seats. Each time he swayed back and forth, he grew angrier, louder, and more impatient. The gun passed across my face. I needed no reminder that it was there.

  “How old are you?” that loud voice asked. Before I could respond, he added, “And don’t lie, because I have a gun.”

  “Twenty,” I said. I was too afraid to lie. I hoped that if I told the truth, things would turn out better for me. A moment later, they seemed to. I could hear my phone ringing, a distant but distinct jangling of fake bells.

  I craned my neck and could see the man in the middle seat moving around. He brought the phone up to his ear and raised his hand in the air like a teacher quieting a class. We all obeyed. After a few seconds, I yelled out, “Please don’t kill me!” louder than necessary, just so whoever was calling could hear my voice and know I was still in that SUV. I heard a voice coming from the cell phone, but then the man hung up.

  The gun crossed my vision again. “I will do this. You be nice!” A thin smile sliced the man’s round face; his red-rimmed eyes bulged from their sockets. His free hand scraped across his close-cropped hair and then massaged his blunt chin. My eyes went back to the gun.

  I felt as if I was shrinking, that each time he raised his voice at me or pointed the gun my way, I was disappearing inside my clothes, like I was a snail retreating into my shell. I put my hands up as if to ward off his words, but each one felt like a blow to my flesh.

  He pawed at my coat and kept shouting. I thought it was best to cooperate with him. I turned my back slightly and raised my arms so that he could remove my jacket. I wrapped my arms across my chest, and even that seemed to make him fiercer. He pulled my right arm toward him. He fumbled with the clasp of my watch; I started to move to help him, but he slapped my hand away. Next, he took two of my rings, sliding them off easily.

  The third ring, a thin silver band that I’d had since I was a little girl, fit snugly. A childhood girlfriend, Nina, had given it to me when I was ten. It had a small plastic diamond on it. How I wished that diamond was as real as the ones I’d seen on the fingers of the women of Dallas, that its value would be enough to satisfy these men.

  I flinched as he tried to scrape it past my knuckle, my flesh bunching up like a closed flower. I looked at his forehead and saw the same image there—pinched flesh. Though I couldn’t see his eyes, I watched as his lids and brows twitched.

  “Give it to me now!” he yelled. “Don’t fuck with me!”

  I twisted the ring off my finger and dropped it into his palm. He rocked back onto his heels and let out a heavy sigh. If he was so angry about such a small and essentially worthless thing as that ring, what might he do to me later? Still, he refused to look at me. I watched as the tendons in his jaw pulsed and he chewed at his lips, his expression twisting into a grimace I’d seen when runners were approaching the finish line.

  I knew that we were only getting started.

  Please see me, I thought. Stop what you’re doing and see that I am a human being. I’m not just some thing that you can steal with no more thought than a shoplifter.

  In answer to my silent plea, he brought his hand close to my face. I flinched, thinking that he was going to strike me. I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth. Instead, I felt a slight tug at my ears, the flat of his hand briefly touching my cheek. In another context, that gesture would have been a sign of a welcome and desired intimacy and not a violation. A tear leaked from my fiercely shut eyes. It felt hot, as if I had a fever. It made me aware that I was cold and shivering.

  I opened my eyes and saw him staring at my earrings, appraising them. He frowned and then shook his head.

  “Basura,” he said, and tossed my earrings over his shoulder toward the two in the front of the vehicle.

  The other men laughed.

  I didn’t have much time to think about what he might have said. More than anything, I was shocked by the sound of the men laughing. How could they?

  As bad as they all were, the man kneeling astride me was the worst. When he finally looked at me, I could see nothing in his eyes. I saw no anger. I saw no pleasure. I saw nothing, a deadness that I’d never seen before in my life. I drew my legs in close to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, buried m
y face in the hammock of my dress’s fabric.

  In the next instant, I was on my back on the vehicle’s backseat. The man I’d come to think of as the Worst One stood above me. He grabbed the hem of my dress and pulled it up, thrusting his hand between my legs. I twisted away, but he bent over and leaned his weight on my hip bones, pinning me there. A flash of memory came back to me. I was in a laboratory classroom and on a tray in front of me was a frog that we were about to dissect. Its flayed skin was pinned to the cork lining of the tray.

  “Take it off.”

  He eased some of the pressure off me, and I did a kind of sit-up as I pulled the dress over my head. Growing impatient, he grabbed the back of my bra and yanked it over my head. My arms entangled in the elastic and fabric, I couldn’t maintain my balance and I fell back, the buckle of a seat belt digging into my shoulder blade. A few seconds later, he had my underwear off.

  “Don’t fight me. This is what you want. You like this.”

  Could he really believe that?

  I didn’t fight him. He dragged me toward him and onto his lap. I could hear him unsnap his pants and lower his zipper. I willed myself to do what I’d been doing for years as a runner—to let go of my body and ignore the signals of pain it was trying to send to my brain. As he thrust himself against me the first time, I imagined that I was in a pack of runners jostling for position, the body contact not really registering, my eyes focused on the meters of track just ahead of me, the lane lines. The crowd on the outside and the other competitors in the infield all reduced to shadows and indistinct sounds. One terrible thought passed me and overtook my vision of a clear track ahead of me—that gun. I knew that I could outrun and survive anything except a bullet.

  For me, the finish line was the moment when I was going to be turned loose from these men. I was going to do whatever it took to get there.

  The Worst One thrust his hand upward at me, but he couldn’t penetrate me. He muttered something angrily in Spanish and tossed the gun to the man in the front seat, the one I’d heard them say was the boss. I pressed my head against the seat back in front of me. I shivered as I heard his breathing grow more rapid. Still not inside me, his anger increasing by the second, he finally shouted, “I know you know how to do this, so don’t pretend you don’t!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think it’s just that I’m nervous. Please, just let me go.”

  I’m sorry? For being difficult to rape? It was absurd, and yet it was all I could think to say to keep me alive. I knew that I only served one purpose for him then. If he failed to get what he wanted from me, I’d be more dispensable and easier to kill.

  The road noise came to a stop. The engine fell silent. I heard a door open and close, and then another. I heard the other two shuffling around, drawing nearer.

  I tried not to think of what the Worst One would do to me after he succeeded. And I didn’t know how to make my body respond so that he could do what he wanted to do and let me go. As much as I was trying to outrun any thoughts of my friends and family, I couldn’t help but let them catch up. Only hours before I’d been studying, while on my laptop’s screen a photo my best friend in Norway had sent to me just two weeks earlier sat watching over me. It was of her newborn son. I was days away from returning home to see them all. I knew that Mama’s and Papa’s hearts were bursting with joy, they were so eager to see me again. I couldn’t do anything to ruin that for them, spoil everyone’s Christmas. Kristine and I had talked endlessly about the upcoming season, how she was going to run a personal record in the fifteen hundred meters, earn all-conference. The two of us would qualify for the Olympics, hang out in London, become poster girls together.

  The Worst One finally forced his way, but it didn’t soften his anger at all.

  “Make some sounds! Show me how much you like this,” he ordered.

  I did as he asked, but what he took as sounds of pleasure were actually sounds of revulsion. My stomach turned and I felt the lone beer I’d drunk rise in my throat. I worried that if I vomited on this man, I’d only make things worse for myself. I forced myself back onto the track. Unlike the way it was there, though, time had lost all meaning for me. In a race, I always knew how far I had to go, how I had to pace myself. In that cramped area with those three men, I had entered some zone where time and space had collapsed on themselves. I was there and I wasn’t. Time was compressed and elongated. Nothing I had been able to count on in the past was working; all was uncertainty. In running the steeplechase, I always knew exactly where the hurdle and the water pit were; I timed my steps precisely to use my left leg to lead, my right to trail behind. I tried to focus on my breathing, the technique I used to get over that obstacle as cleanly as possible, to get my proper cadence back.

  I felt a presence in the vehicle. I also heard a very faint voice telling me that I was going to be okay. I opened my eyes, but it was still just the four of us there, yet that feeling that someone else was there watching over me lingered and gave me hope.

  Weakened and distracted and temporarily unable to fight against it, I thought of Robin. His kind words of concern gripped my throat and my heart. I knew I’d done nothing wrong, that I’d been careful and yet somehow this was still happening. My reassurance to him that I could run away from any attacker felt hollow now. I wanted to kick and scream and lash out at these men, but shock and fear seized control of my limbs; my brain told me one thing, but my body didn’t respond.

  Robin was the first man I’d truly been in love with, and I’d somehow managed to mangle things. I quickly chased that sentiment away. He would understand, surely he would. After all, he was the man who, the summer after we first met, had arranged a surprise visit to Norway to see me. We had been using Skype to keep in contact, and we’d established a set time each day when we’d both be available. One late afternoon, I logged on and waited for the Skype ring to sound. I waited and waited, but the Skype screen sat empty. I went downstairs, and Mama told me that I just needed to be more patient. Back upstairs nearly a half hour later, I heard the doorbell ring and faint voices. I left my bedroom and walked down the stairs. Halfway I caught sight of the familiar red hat, wrapped my arms around Robin, and told him, as endearingly as I could, “You idiot.”

  In that moment with those three men, all I wanted was to be with Robin as far from that place as possible.

  I knew that Kristine, Viktoria, and George must be out of their minds with worry. Had they called Robin? What was going through his mind just then?

  “Kiss me.”

  Given that it was the Worst One who’d said that, given that I’d just been thinking about Robin, the contrast was too much and those words roiled my stomach once again. His request was the most invasive part of the whole thing—I had already let him take over my body, but now he wanted me to look him in the eyes and show him affection, share that intimacy with him?

  I turned my head away, tried to tuck my face beneath my arm. Grabbing my hair, he yanked my head back to his. I felt the barrel of the gun being pressed to my temple. My bladder burned, and in taking a sharp inhalation of breath, I could smell and taste the man’s putrid breath. I balled up my fists and wanted to strike out at the Worst One. In my moment of hesitation, he seized the opportunity and pressed his face against mine, his lips working senselessly and greedily.

  The other two men laughed, and I pulled away long enough to look at them.

  “Turn your head! Don’t look!” the man I started to think of as the Boss said. The gun convinced me to do what I was ordered to.

  Why can’t I look now? Will this be my moment to die? Is he about to shoot me in the back of the head?

  If they didn’t speak, if they didn’t make a sound, it was easier for me. I’d learned about dissociation in my Psychology class—how your mind has the ability to withdraw from a terrible place. Since I was consciously trying to do exactly that, I knew that I wasn’t psychotic. I was using this as an appropriate coping mechanism. Pierre Janet. A French philosopher and psychologist. He
was the one who came up with the term. I shut down that stream of thought, unwilling to consider all the ways in which something could be final.

  This was something that happened in Stieg Larsson novels and to people on the news, not to me. I involuntarily saw flashes of those news clips—the photos of the women found dead after being abducted and raped. Did women ever survive this? What would it feel like when they shot me, and who would find my body?

  Done with me, the Worst One pushed me away from him and pressed my head back down into the filthy floor.

  “Don’t you move,” he spat.

  As an athlete I had devoted my whole life to movement. I loved the feelings of freedom and exhilaration that running produced in me. I also felt so in control when I was running, that my speed was solely dependent on my muscles’ effort and my will. What chance did effort and will stand against three men and a weapon?

  “My boss is coming now, so behave,” the Worst One said. “Don’t even try to turn your head. Don’t look at our boss. Just give him what he wants. You don’t want to disappoint him.”

  He continued to push my head down. I heard the “boss” step out of his seat, then the jangle of a belt buckle letting me know what the Boss had planned. I couldn’t believe that the man who had just raped me was using that word, saying that another man was his boss. I wondered briefly if that was how he justified in his mind what he had just done to me.

  In the minutes that followed, I would find out. It wasn’t as if they had a well-thought-out set of work orders to complete some job in a neat and orderly fashion. Amid much conversation among them, what sometimes sounded like squabbles and infighting, they raped and sodomized me—singly, in pairs, the three of them working together to subdue me, to break me.

  With my head pushed down most of the time, I didn’t know who was doing what after that first encounter. But I briefly made eye contact with the third man, the one who took the longest to join in. He looked almost sorry. Could that have been it? Was there remorse in his eyes, or was I imagining it? Was I hoping that somehow, if there was at least a tiny shred of decency among the three of them, then somehow that might redeem my faith in people? If I could hold on to that thought, then maybe this all might end with me escaping with my life?