by Lily White
“Hey,” I answered back, regretful that it was time to leave the warmth of the bed to hit the road.
When I didn’t say more than that single word, she pushed herself up into a sitting position and stretched. Twisting her body around to lock her eyes with mine, she flashed me a crooked smile before asking, “Is it time for us to go?”
I would have given anything to tell her we still had time to relax and enjoy just being together, but for every minute that passed, her brothers were getting away.
“Afraid so, beautiful. I can make us a quick breakfast before heading out. Do you think you can get yourself ready in time?”
Soft laughter flowed over her lips. “Yeah. I’m not one of those women who need hours to make themselves presentable. Fifteen minutes should be fine.”
Forcing myself out from beneath the covers, I pulled a shirt over my head and padded barefoot into the kitchen. Breakfast ended up being as simple as they came with some scrambled eggs and burnt toast. Maggie didn’t seem to mind the fact that I wasn’t the world’s best cook, and after packing bags with my clothes and getting dressed, we were out on the road within a half hour.
Maggie hadn’t been lying when she said it would take a day to travel to the first place her brothers would go. She sat silently for most of the trip, and I had to fight just to get small bits of information out of her. I didn’t want to push her too much after everything she’d just been through, so I asked easy questions every so often, simply making conversation rather than making it sound like she was being interrogated.
What little bit I’d learned was that the place we were going was an abandoned farm. She mentioned that the farm had been used mostly for livestock. When I asked what kind, she shut down on me for a few seconds before finally admitting that the farmer had mainly raised hogs.
I couldn’t understand why she appeared frightened when we pulled up to the property. It must have had something to do with the nervousness she felt for possibly seeing her brothers. But I didn’t feel any qualms about driving up to the dilapidated house that sat a quarter mile in from the dirt road that led to the overgrown driveway.
Maggie had seen far too much death in her young life, and I hated that she would see a little more. But as far as she told me, she wasn’t too concerned about the loss of her brothers’ life.
Bringing the truck to a slow stop, I peered through the dusty windshield to see a vast expanse of abandoned land and run down buildings. The house was a one-story shack with blue paint peeling from the exterior walls and a metal roof covered in dirt and mold. One side of the house was buckled and open to the environment. On the left side of the building were a network of beat down sheds, and on the right was a large sty where I imagined the hogs had been held.
Glancing around, I didn’t see fresh tire tracks or much else that would have indicated Maggie’s brothers came here to hide.
“It looks like this place hasn’t been touched in years,” I casually mentioned. Turning to look at Maggie, I found that her eyes were rounded and glued to the building in front of us.
Shaking herself of whatever unspoken thoughts held her captive, she swallowed hard before blinking her eyes and turning her gaze on me.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Elliot. I haven’t told you all there is to know about where we are.”
My body stilled at the tone of her voice, my fingers lightly resting on the steering wheel as I averted my eyes to keep from seeing the devastation written all over her face. Not sure whether I wanted to know what she had to say, I braced myself to listen to it anyway.
“When I was a kid,” she practically whispered, “my father brought me to this farm when we were headed out of town. He thought I’d like the animals that were here, and I did for the most part, but that wasn’t the only reason we came here.” Swallowing again, her tongue peeked out to wet her lips, and she dared a glance at me before quickly turning her eyes away.
Dread crawled along my spine, but I remained motionless. I didn’t think I liked where the conversation was going.
“I don’t know any other way to say this, so I’m just going to spit it out. This farm was the last place I remember seeing your wife and son. After driving me home from the park on the night she was taken, your son and I had a tea party while my father and brothers –“
Her voice trailed off, her mind lost to the memories that had haunted her since she was a small child. I’d never had the luxury of knowing what happened to my family, and it wasn’t making it any easier to hear the truth of it now.
Gaining control of herself, Maggie released a breath. “Anyways, after that night, it was time to leave and we came here first. When we drove away, I watched your son standing in front of the house holding his stuffed rabbit. I don’t know what they did with your wife, but at the time we left, Michael hadn’t been touched. Not by my family anyway.”
Unsettling calm took me over at that moment and I thought it was funny how the body has a way of protecting itself against the mind. My thoughts were an explosion of rage, hatred and violence inside my head, but my body settled into a necessary stillness, a cool calm that was in complete opposition of everything I was feeling at that moment. It was as if the pain was so great that it short-circuited something inside of me, and I couldn’t feel a damn thing at all.
Several minutes passed before I found the ability to speak again, but even then my voice was dangerously hushed.
“You were only four, Maggie.”
“I know,” she answered quickly. “But I shouldn’t have kept that information from you. It was killing me inside, but I was too afraid to say anything while you were driving.”
Nodding my head once, I forced my hand to the handle of the door and took a steadying breath before stepping outside. On furtive steps, I moved forward, breathing deeply before surveying the land that surrounded me. I was in wide open space of which I was unfamiliar, and from a tactical standpoint, it wasn’t looking good.
Maggie’s brothers could be hiding out just about anywhere. Behind one of the sheds. Beneath the raised foundation of the ramshackle house. Or perched in a tree with the scope of their gun pointed right at me. Not liking the odds, I had no other choice but to step softly and investigate every nook and cranny of the rundown property.
Moving back towards the truck, I knocked on the glass of the driver’s side door. Maggie turned to look at me and I motioned for her to lock up. She followed the instruction immediately without daring to argue or complain. I was thankful for that small bit of cooperation on her part, although I wasn’t sure if it was because she was scared of her brothers possibly hiding out, or if it was because she felt too guilty to be around me.
Either way, I felt safer knowing she was behind locked doors, and I’d intentionally left the keys in the ignition in case she had no other choice but to drive away.
Rounding the truck, I dropped the tailgate and pulled one of my rifles from the duffle bags. With a powerful scope and high caliber ammo, I felt safer with a weapon that would take out an enemy several hundred feet away. However, close contact fighting could also be on the menu today, so I tucked a handgun into the back of my jeans, and stowed a large knife in a sheath hidden on the inside of my boot. As ready as I could be, I slammed the tailgate shut and closed the distance between the truck and the house that was falling apart.
Reaching the door, all I had to do was touch the rotting wood for the decaying partition to fall away. A cloud of dust kicked up from the wood hitting the ground and I stepped back to allow the mess to settle. Keeping my body as protected as I could behind the exterior wall, I peeked around to get a look inside the structure.
Littered with inches of dust and thick cobwebs, it was obvious no person had stepped foot into the house in several years. The lack of footprints on the ground made me feel more secure about walking inside and taking a good look through every room. The floorboards groaned loudly beneath my feet, so I treaded carefully over the rotting wood. It only took me fifteen minutes
to look over the small space. The home only had one bedroom, and the furniture was so sparse that it was obvious nothing could have been hidden here.
Stepping back out of the house, I exhaled heavily to evict the dust from my lungs. My eyes darted toward the truck and from a distance I could see that Maggie was still safely sitting inside. The network of shacks would take longer to inspect than the sty that sat to my right. I decided to take a peek over the gate to quickly rule out that someone was huddled behind the wooden barrier.
What I found was even more depressing than I could have imagined. Although the years had ensured that the remaining flesh of the hogs had withered away, it was painfully obvious that after the farmer died, nobody had come out to tend to the livestock. Hundreds of bones littered the dirt, the skulls of the dead pigs lying where the animals had died, the teeth decayed with age and the mud having long run dry. I imagined most of those pigs had been eaten by their own, the last few remaining most likely dying of slow starvation. Disgusted by the evidence of cruelty and neglect, I swallowed to clear my throat of the dust that remained trapped inside.
All that was left to check were the shacks. As far as I could see of the remaining land, it was covered with tall weeds and broke down fences. There was nowhere her brothers could hide in that mess without worry of rattlesnakes or other nasty critters that were as dangerous to their health as they were to mine.
With the truck in my peripheral vision, I moved towards the shacks. A network of three, they were connected by a shoddily built pathway walled in by rotting plywood. I didn’t understand the reason for those pathways, but it wasn’t of much interest to me either. Reaching the first shack, I used the tip of my rifle to push the door open. I could see directly through to the last shack, the doors having been removed between them. It occurred to me then that, rather than buying a larger building, the farmer had simply connected the three into one long storage unit.
Walking through the first shed, I encountered all the typical items you’d expect to find on a farm: long handled garden tools that were now rusted and sinking into the floor, bags of animal feed that were rotting and torn apart, most likely by foraging critters. Nothing was out of place, and like the house, the tool benches and floor was covered in a layer of dust, while above my head, large veils of spider webs concealed the metal ceiling. The wooden boards of the floor were rotting through in places, so I stepped carefully in order to not push through and break an ankle.
The second shack held more items like the first, also things of use to a farmer, but nothing particularly shocking or unusual. There were a few cans of gas, a box of matches, and some water barrels that I’m sure had long run dry, but that was to be expected with farm life.
Finally reaching the third shack, I regretted not having grabbed a flashlight from my truck. None of the structures had windows and having walked so deep inside, the light coming in from the door to the outside was splintered and muted by the distance. Above my head swung a single bulb light source, but I doubted the property had any power to make the bulb fire to life.
The toe of my boot kicked against something heavy and metallic. Glancing down, I stared at the odd barred box, realizing after several seconds it was an animal cage of some sort. At the far end of the shack was a basket of cloth, or some other burlap that I couldn’t make out. Above it was a wall with what looked like pictures nailed to the surface.
Curious as to why pictures would be kept in such putrid conditions, I used the butt of my gun to knock away at the rotting wall to my side, finally satisfied when I opened a hole large enough to let in significant light.
Turning around, I froze where I stood, my jaw falling open as anger and pain - horror like I’d never known - assaulted me on the inside.
My eyes scanned the images as fast as they could while tears welled and burned paths down my cheeks.
Children, at least a dozen boys from what I could tell, were barely dressed. Their faces were marked with bruises and cuts, dirt smeared over their skin, and their eyes so full of fear and agony that I felt it down to my core.
Closing my eyes, my body shuddered where I stood, my mind unable to handle what stared me back in the face with such raw truth that I wished I never had to know.
Forcing them back open, I ripped the pictures from the wall, staring at each face and memorizing the details despite the way my stomach lurched with dread and disgust. My thoughts screamed at me to back away before the final truth was revealed.
It was a moment where I should have listened to the instincts that warned me. A moment where I should have settled for not knowing rather than demanding the answers I’d lived without for a long fourteen years of my life.
Eight pictures had passed through my hands before a familiar face stared back at me, accusation in his eyes that he’d been left alone to the machinations of a depraved monster, that he’d been turned over to the worst form of torment, because his father hadn’t been there.
At the moment of recognition, my knees and entire body gave out. I fell to the floor, my ribs aching from the beating of my heart as it threatened to rip clean from my chest.
Bent over myself, I struggled to remain lucid, the tips of my fingers turning white as the blood was forced out. Holding onto that image with the strength I wished I’d used to hold onto my family, I stared for several minutes while my brain fought to register the horror I was seeing.
Michael.
His eyes were the same color as his mother’s, but in this picture they were stained red with tears. He screamed at me from behind the lens of a madman’s camera, his throat shredded by the volume of his cries, his body broken by pure evil.
His hair had been the same dark shade as mine, but in this image, it was shaved off completely.
Missing his shirt, I was able to see the scratch marks that covered his body and the dirt that was caked to practically every inch of skin. His ribs showed through what had once been a healthy, intact body. His small legs barely holding up his weight where he was positioned against a wall.
And when I looked a little closer, I saw the large shadow that loomed over him from the man who’d been taking the picture. The shadow of his captor. The shadow of a stranger who was the last person to touch him, the last person to hear his voice, the last person he saw when he closed his terrified eyes.
I thought I knew pain. I would have sworn that not knowing was the worst form of torture.
I was wrong.
The worst form of torture was knowing the last moments of my son’s life, and accepting the cold, hard fact that I’d been helpless to save him. It was the all consuming realization that I was a coward because my first thought was to wish I’d never discovered the truth.
It had been easy for me to believe my son died quickly, to hide behind the comforting lie that Michael hadn’t suffered. And while the truth stared me blatantly in the face, I wanted to scrub the images from my mind because I wasn’t strong enough to exist in the same reality of my baby boy’s fate.
Every belief I’d conjured that I’d been a decent father was shattered at my feet, my body falling down upon the shards of injustice, inadequacy and failure until my skin was torn and bleeding, until my heart and soul were shredded by a nightmare from which I couldn’t wake.
Desperate to scrub the truth from my mind, I raised my hands to my head and clenched the sides, as if that one motion could erase it all.
The scream that tore from my throat was unrecognizable to me. My voice carried all the agony and pain, the hatred and fury that my body was powerless to contain. A dam broken, I released all the rage inside me in that unholy scream. I fell to the floor on my hands and knees praying for an outcome I knew could never be.
The past was long gone, and along with it, my son. I didn’t need to know the specific details to understand what happened to him. I didn’t have to glance back at the cage to know the last place he’d slept. My mind provided those details to me, as horrible and frightening as what my son had endured. I didn’t need to
hear him scream to understand that he’d been calling out to me. I didn’t need to see his body abused and broken to hate myself for being unable to save him from a cruel and horrible world.
He was so young, so innocent and pure, that he couldn’t have understood why evil had locked its red eyes on him. I heard his cries for his parents echo within these wooden walls. I felt the pain and torment, the crippling cold and fear of the dark that I now knew had been the reality of his final days. When I’d left him, he’d been a happy, chubby boy full of dreams, love and everything good. But what I’d found in the image that was now grasped between shaking fingers, was that his smile was gone, his heart had been broken, and he had been left feeling scared and betrayed by a father who’d been powerless to save him.
All I had left was an image of a boy who had no hope of survival once he’d been kidnapped and sold off. A boy who’d thought his father was a hero because he was a soldier. A boy who believed himself safe because his father had always sworn to protect him from the monsters in the dark.
Releasing the picture from my fingers, my tears dripped onto the image where it landed on the floor. Ripped open and struggling to breathe, I fought against the desire to reach for my handgun and force it to my head.
Death would have been the only release from the torment that now owned me, but I wasn’t brave enough – or strong enough – to take the easy way out. I was a coward, a failure, a man that had left his child in the path of the wolves. I didn’t deserve an easy death, not when my child had been tortured. It made me pathetic that I couldn’t handle knowing what had been done to my son, while he was the one who’d lived through it.
Desperate to find any piece of him that might have been left behind, I began ripping at the burlaps sacks to discover what was inside.
Dozens of stuffed animals fell to the ground, and at the bottom of one rotting bag I found the last thing I had left of my son.
He’d called it Floppy Bunny, and I remembered it well. I’d bought it for him on the day I’d enlisted in the Marines. They were inseparable since the minute that stuffed rabbit had reached his small hands. He took it everywhere, including the bath, much to the dismay of his mother.