Alice and Friends

by catt dahman

  ‘ With some extra,’ Alice says. “I have hope for this girl,” Aaron said. He patted Alice on her shoulder, and she whined again in fear.

  Alice felt her legs give way right outside the door to the basement, but John half-dragged her to the bottom and through the door to where Connie awaited. This would have been a great time to fight back, but she was too weak and in shock, and she was unable to stand on her own.

  Connie’s eyes were haunted and tear-stained, so she may have been raped as well while they were gone, but at least it wasn’t by the freak upstairs. Connie must have assumed Alice had been through the same but didn’t ask anything as she cowered beneath a sheet and blanket. Alice collapsed onto her thin mattress and climbed beneath the covers, thankfully.

  “Sleep well, and Tara will be back soon. She got a little of a reward tonight, a nice hot bath,” John said and looked them over but didn’t put shackles on their wrists or ankles; the cuffs were gone now. “Potty chair over there and food and water in here; you’ll be fine; get some rest. Tomorrow you can meet Father.”

  Later, Tara was returned, carried by Tom, and put on her mattress before he pulled the sheet and a blanket over her. Tara didn’t awaken when she was tucked in, and Alice fell asleep again, only looking up once when another girl joined them. “Who are you?” Alice asked.

  “Sadie.”

  “What did they do to you and Tara?” Connie whispered.

  Alice stayed quiet. Sadie shook her head. “Can’t you tell? Tara’s been brutally raped and drugged. My God, I think Alice is in shock.”

  “The men here, they are horrible,” Connie said.

  “But we’ll get out of this. Trust me; they won’t win.” Sadie promised. “They can’t.”

  Alice nodded. It was someone else’s turn to deal with all this, so the new girl could handle the nutty brothers a while.

  When Alice awoke and felt alert, she guessed she had slept enough, unsure how long she had been out, hours or days.

  Connie was already up and digging through a bag. She took out cans of Coke and handed them out, setting one next to Tara. “Not real cold but not hot, either.”

  The door opened, and Mikey set a tray in. He looked at Alice curiously and then stepped away, locking the door again.

  Connie groaned a little as she went to get the big tray. “We eat all we can.”

  Alice felt every bruise and scratch on her body. She was sore.

  “Sounds smart. We have to keep our strength up, never know when it could stop,” Sadie agreed.

  Connie filled paper plates and handed them out, trying to keep busy so that she didn’t stare at Alice and the sick look in her eyes.

  Scrambled eggs with coarse, black pepper, dotted with pieces of tomato and small spinach leaves looked very good. A fruit salad of fresh strawberries, blue berries, and orange slices were placed over thick Greek yogurt on a paper plate; and oatmeal, flavored, and milk and a couple of slices of a banana were all in a bowl.

  “We get a protein, some milk product, and a bunch of fruit. Lunch is unusual, and they like to give us Mexican food, sometimes.”

  “What? Why? That’s not healthy at all.”

  “Soft tacos, with a salad of avocadoes, tomatoes, and lettuce in them, and lean beef or chicken, a tiny spoonful of rice, and the pinto or black beans are healthy. They are good but no cheese. Tacos can vary some: chicken breast and salsa or Chinese stir fry with a little meat and ton of veggies, just don’t expect any butter, sweets, bread, or carbs.”

  “Unreal.”

  “Have you not figured out that even insane people have rules and certain ways of behaving?” Connie rolled her eyes. “Their realities are realities. We eat healthy because that is their rule.”

  “We’re on diets? Kidnappers put the victims on healthy diets? What the hell is wrong with these crazies?”

  “I think they believe the world is about to end, and

  they want women who are healthy and can… well

  deliver healthy babies for them,” Connie explained. “They want us healthy; I suppose being beaten isn’t unhealthy. She angrily ate a strawberry as she saw Tara beginning to stir.

  “You do realize they’re certifiably crazy, right?”

  Tara rose on one elbow and groaned. “I don’t feel so great.” She was confused and wasn’t entirely sure where she was or what had happened to her. “Connie?”

  “Tara, stay sane; keep your mind in this.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can you eat?”

  “My insides ache; no, they burn and ache…oh,” she cried. Her voice was scratchy and hoarse from all of her screaming the night before.

  Connie thought for a minute, then got up, and took things out of a big plastic tub, nodded, and pointed to the wall where there were spigots. One ran cold water, and the other was hot water.

  The other girl, Sadie, walked to the door and thumped on it until Tom looked in. “What now?”

  “Hey, Hon, can you get us some Epsom salts; you got that? That gal needs something to help her if you want her in any way healthy.”

  “Hang on.” He locked the door because Sadie had tried it a few seconds after he had closed the door. Then he returned with a small baggie that he handed to Sadie. “That’s all?”

  “For now,” she winked at him.

  “How can you do that? Flirt with him?”

  “She wants to survive,” Tara said although she looked at Sadie with confused eyes and almost fear. She waited patiently as Sadie dumped in half the bag and ran hot water into the makeshift tub. As the cool water began, she tested it often, adding more hot water and then more cold. “Okay, get in.”

  Tara had come in wrapped in the powder blue sheet; she dropped it and climbed in with her knees close to her chin. “Ouch. I hurt so much.” The bath turned faintly pink with blood. “I can’t…”

  “Too hot,” Sadie said. She looked at the blood stains on the sheet.

  “It’s fine,” Connie said and held Tara’s hand until she leaned back and sighed.

  “You okay, Alice?” Connie asked.

  Alice didn’t say anything.

  Sadie shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t hurt her, yet. They’re making her dread it and getting her scared first. It’s as if they’re messing with our minds. I guess they break us in ways they think will work best. They think they have to break our minds down.”

  “Tom came back here,” Connie said as she rubbed soap on a washcloth and massaged Tara’s back with the lather.

  “I hate them all, but I made it through another round.” Her pixie hair was easily to slip behind her ears. “I’m not broken; I just want a chance to get out of here and cut off their balls.” Tears ran down her cheeks. “We have to stay in this mentally.”

  “Wait until they come after me,” Sadie sniffed.

  “Oh?”

  “I’ll give ‘em such a good time that they’ll leave everyone of y’all alone; see if I don’t. That’s one way to survive this, just zone out and play along and think of a way out. I’ll get them after me, and you can figure a way to get free while they take turns with me. We can do this.”

  Connie stared at her darkly. “That’s sickening. It’s rape.” She looked faintly as if she had a ‘smushed’ bug on her shoe sole. She was disgusted with that. “You aren’t okay at all; you’re losing it.”

  “No worse than picking up a man in a bar; they get rough, too. I like sex anyway. I can fight back a little and then kind of pretend to fall under the spell; men dig that.”

  Connie shuddered, “I don’t understand you at all. You’re scaring me. Stop talking like that.”

  “Survival. That’s my name right now,” Sadie told her, “whatever it takes.”

  “Really?” Memories had come back to Tara, and she had her face covered as she wept, trying not to shriek as she remembered everything now as the drugs wore off. “Connie, Cain, he’s some kind of freak.”

  “They’re all freaks.”

  Tara cried harder. “No, worse, he’s
like a freak at a side show; he’s messed up. Two faces, an extra hand, and a leg sticking out of his side. Oh, my God. He’s so big, like a giant. But he’s a freak; he isn’t right,” Connie had to pat her until she stopped the whooping cries. “He hurt me,” was all Tara could say.

  Alice didn’t say anything because it would be worse if Tara knew she had watched and had seen Cain and ‘the little bit of Abel’ that showed. Instead, she remained quiet, pretending that she didn’t know, hadn’t seen, and didn’t remember, while Sadie talked with the other women.

  She already knew Sadie’s story now; it was like the trap she had fallen for on the dark road. And Sadie had decided to be a survivor at any cost.

  “I’ll handle Cain and his freaky twin, too.” Sadie straightened beds and used the potty chair while she promised she would try to keep the men off of the others.

  “Disgusting,” Connie said.

  Sadie huffed.

  “I didn’t expect that when we met you; I figured…well…I don’t think it’ll work if you try. Tara can’t handle much more.”

  Sadie giggled at Connie, making the others wince. “Let me make them fall in love with my razzle dazzles, and then, when they are in orgasmic ecstasy, I’ll get rid of them for us, and we’ll get out of here. Men are weak-ass fools.”

  “These aren’t weak,” Connie muttered.

  “But Cain, Oh, my God, he’s horrible and deformed and huge.” Tara shivered as she dried off and put on some sweat pants and a shirt with Connie’s help.

  “I’ve probably had worse over the years when I was drunk,” Sadie shrugged, flipping thick blonde hair off her neck and batting her eyes.

  “You’re acting strange. Did they do anything to you? What did they do?”

  Sadie glanced at Connie. “They didn’t put a hand on me. Yet. But they will, and I’ll be ready. We each have to do what we can do best…and that part…the sex shit…I can handle that best, so I will.”

  Tara towel dried her hair, wiping at her eyes and nose as she continued to cry. “He’s an abomination…a freak, and he’s huge. If he gets me again…if he touches me, I am going to cut my own throat. Cain, I mean.” She meant it and just wanted them to understand.

  “No,” Connie said.

  “Do you think we’ll be here forever?” Connie asked.

  “No. I think they make mistakes just like any other person, and if we are smart, we’ll catch one…a mistake, and we can use it to help ourselves and to get the hell out of here. But only if we stay sane. They play games and mess with our heads, but we have to stay sane.”

  They stopped talking as the older man and Tom came into the room with ladder-back chairs that they set near the doorway. Tom held the cattle prod in one hand but casually instead of menacingly. Aaron watched from behind them.

  “I am Father.”

  No one responded.

  “I suppose last night took some starch out of you, ladies. It’s a crying shame it came to that, to be honest, but such are the trials we face. It’s a man’s place to keep a woman walking a righteous path.”

  “And that includes rape?” Alice asked.

  “A woman has a duty to submit to her husband.”

  “We aren’t married,” Alice shook her head.

  “Man doesn’t ordain marriage.” Father sat with his palms up on his thighs, smiling like a kindly uncle or friend. “Ladies, let me explain a few things, and maybe that will help with your wayward attitudes.”

  “How?” Connie asked.

  “Prophecy,” he said.

  “Oh.” Connie tried to hide her disappointment at having to hear another tirade of his supposed sight into the future.

  “In the near future, the world, as we know it, will change. We are in the end of times. The red horse will thunder in with a flashing of swords and gnashing teeth, and he will bring a brutal, violent War where blood will run in pools down the streets, and that scarlet stream will be poison. There will be a great slaughter.”

  The women shivered as they listened.

  “Then, after the red horse, we will see the black horse that will bring Famine, and masses will starve, crying and pleading for food as they scavenge and pull at the barren soil, but there will be nothing to sustain those who hunger. The land will be fallow.”

  Alice didn’t believe any of it, but she still had the creeps.

  “The pale horse is in fact greenish, and he is Death. He is rot and ruin, an abomination upon earth. Upon this land, corpses shall walk. Ghouls will stumble about with their rotten flesh and putrid breath, but we will only find the dead, their souls trapped between worlds.”

  “And that’s a frightening image,” Tom agreed “War, Disease and Famine, Death.”

  “But there is more. There is Hope,” Father told them. None looked interested.

  “Yes, there is,” Tom said.

  “The mighty white horse will defend the US Constitution and use his massive hooves to bash at the evil, but the fight will not be easy.

  You can see right now that lawmakers and false prophets are working on destroying the Constitution with their lying interpretation and threats to take our firearms. We have seen the signs, Ladies, and they are happening now, right before our eyes.

  There will be wars and famine, disease and dead who walk among the living.”

  “There have always been those things as long as we’ve had history; it’s doesn’t mean it’s now. As for the dead roaming around…ummm…I don’t think Dawn of The Dead was real,” Alice said.

  “It is true.”

  Alice almost asked why the horse cared about the Constitution of the United States when this was all supposedly about the entire world. She just made a little noise and said, “Okay.”

  “When all this comes to pass, and it will be soon; those of us who are walking the right path will survive and be safe from the misery and horror of this world. And you are wrong; the time is now.”

  “Is it you that will be safe?” Alice sank a barb at him, “Just you and your chosen? Huh?”

  “Yes. And so will the wives we have chosen and our children. We are preparing.”

  “Noah and his ark stuff,” Sadie whispered so only Alice heard her.

  It was as Alice had thought. “Do you think God agrees with abducting and raping women?”

  “You can use your words all you wish, but I am following His word. You will recall people wandered for years in the desert and were tested; they made sacrifices, and God used tough, strong tactics to bring the people to His feet. God’s Gifts were not given easily.

  I’m not here to argue and debate. I am here to remind you that we will search for the right wives, that no women will ever be set free, and that it will be in your best interest to learn our ways, cooperate cheerfully and obediently, work hard at chores, and learn to become a chaste, loyal wife who serves and obeys her husband.”

  “That is like the Middle Ages,” Alice said, “We are people, not property.” She yawned and didn’t cover it.

  Alice felt a stinging slap across her cheek. She would have a new bruise to match the one she got before.

  “Yes, she is sharp-tongued but strong, and she has good hips for breeding, and we don’t forsake even one of our sheep; work on her attitude, boys; break her, please. Bring her back into the fold.” Father was disgusted by the sullen looks from the other women and the scorpion-like barbs from the new girl.

  Connie was caught rolling her eyes.

  “Whores were stoned, and people gave burnt offerings, so do you not think we’d do the same?”

  Alice knew that it was impossible to argue logic to the insane. Many people thought and believed this way; the only oddity was that she happened to be kidnapped by the people who practiced this behavior.

  “She can take care of the kitchen.” Father said and left.

  “I don’t do dishes,” Alice said and took the expected slap across her face from Aaron.

  “Come on, Alice, we’re trying to help you and doing what we can. You have to try to ge
t your mind around all this before it’s too late.”

  Upstairs, she was taken to the kitchen, which was at the back, and found it much larger than she had anticipated; the house must have been massive. She didn’t argue about the chores she was told to do since they killed time, helped her gain information, and might give her a chance for escape.

  While she washed breakfast dishes, she looked over all the utensils carefully for a small one she could hide on herself but didn’t see anything yet.

  Next, she scrubbed the cabinets and the stove. Cleaning and scrubbing felt faintly normal and nicely familiar in all this insanity.

  John came in and relieved Aaron after a while, and Alice was allowed to sit at the table with him and have a glass of water. The cubes tinkled in her glass. “Do you work, or is this your work? Collecting women?”

  “I work here on the farm.”

  “I see.”

  “The home place always needs work; we have animals: chickens, hogs, and cows, and we grow food and can it. That takes a lot of time, keeping things watered and weeded, fed and plowed, and all that.”

  “You make money that way?”

  John shrugged. “No, but Luke and Tom and Cain work.”

  “He works? Cain? You have to be kidding. Where would they hire him?”

  “There’s a big show over at the state line, which has carnival ride, rodeos, games and side shows and competitions. The show is a big event on the weekends around these parts and not too far to drive to work a few nights a week. It’s got singing and dancing and stuff, but there is a kind of a monster-type show, too…scary, and poor ole Cain does pretty well with scaring the ladies and kids in the spook house.”

  Alice had asked, yes, but now she knew where they spent time, and there was no way they were going to ever let her go. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “You saw. It’s a birth defect. My mother was punished, I suppose. He was supposed to be twins, I guess, but something happened, and the other one was absorbed somewhat. He’s a little slower than some people and can be hard to handle if he’s feeling ornery. He isn’t evil though.”