Because of You

by Julie Cannon

  The street vendors here in Bogota seemed to respect her and treat her differently than the tourists that didn’t even make an attempt to speak their language. Their dialect was a little different than what she was used to. The difference was akin to variation in tone and pronunciation between a hard New York accent and a soft Southern drawl. More than once this afternoon she shook her head at an idiot American who thought if they just spoke louder or slower, the vendor would somehow miraculously understand English.

  The contents of the last booth on the street didn’t disappoint her. It was larger and better constructed than most of the others. Its three walls and roof were made of corrugated metal instead of rotting plywood. The tables displaying the vendors’ wares were made of heavy plastic and didn’t bow under the weight of the goods that jammed every square inch of the surface.

  Barrett thumbed through the items on a table in the rear of the shanty, settling on a table runner made of natural fabric that Aaron insisted on. The pattern was simple, but the bold colors would match his kitchen décor perfectly. Hanging from a thin chain over her head was a mobile of butterflies that her niece Erin would enjoy. While the owner of the shop wrapped it up she wandered to the front of the shop and selected a paperweight for her administrative assistant Lori.

  As she was putting her purchases in a bag, someone bumped her from behind. Some help her guide was in keeping people away from her. In addition to taking her where she wanted to go, he was supposed to look out for her. When she got back to the office she’d call the agency that had recommended him and drill them a second asshole. She stumbled, and before she had a chance to catch herself, strong hands grasped her arms. She started to say something but a hand covered her mouth.

  What the fuck? The hand was rough and tight against her mouth, effectively shutting off any sound she might make, as well as her breath. She was lifted off her feet and scuttled away behind the booth. She managed to twist around, searching for her guide for help. She met his eyes, but he immediately looked away, turning his back to her and the man holding her.

  Her heart raced as she struggled against the man and his firm grip. What in the hell was going on? The more she fought against the man, the tighter his grip, and the hand across her mouth muffled her scream of pain. Bile welled up in her throat, threatening to choke her. She forced herself not to panic, but the longer she couldn’t breathe, the more difficult it became.

  Think, think, she told herself. Instinct kicked in, overriding her brain, and she fought against her captor. This petty thug was not going to rob her. She kicked and scratched and finally made progress in her escape when she bit the hand that was over her mouth. The man screamed and loosened his grip. She had an instant to run and she took off. After only a few steps someone grabbed her hair from behind, jerking her head back and effectively stopping her. She let out a scream as she was dragged backward. Though she dug her heels into the dirt trying to stop, the pain in her head was almost overwhelming. She felt large chunks of hair being ripped out at the roots. Then she realized what was happening and froze. She was being kidnapped.

  *

  Dozens of thoughts flashed through her brain. Kidnappings were common in Columbia. Victims were often never released, or if they were, it was sometimes after several years in captivity. Hostages were held for ransom or simply killed as a show of force, power, terror, or all three. Would she be killed? Did they know who she was, or was she just a random choice? Who would pay her ransom? Debra? Aaron? Her parents? Where were they taking her?

  Another hand went over her mouth, this time trapping her tongue between her teeth. She tasted blood, knowing it was her own, her adrenaline masking any additional pain. Her arms were jerked behind her back, and she felt something being slipped over her hands and onto her wrists. Immediately the object tightened, successfully linking her hands together. They didn’t feel like handcuffs, but they accomplished the same thing.

  The hand left her mouth for an instant before someone stuffed a rag into it. Barrett gagged on the disgusting taste and fought down the urge to vomit. A second rag was wrapped around her head, trapping the gag in her mouth. One man held her arms while the other tied the gag tightly around her head.

  Both men were behind her so she couldn’t see her attackers. Hands rough with calluses handled her, and the stench from her assailants reeked of bad breath and terrible body odor. She swallowed and tried to calm down.

  Someone kicked her legs out from under her, and she hit the ground with a groan. With her hands secured behind her back, Barrett had nothing to stop her face from hitting solidly on the hard dirt. Lights flashed behind her eyes, darkness threatening to overtake her. Sharp pain in her nose and her forehead forced its way through her shock and took center stage for her attention. She blinked several times to clear her head but got little relief.

  Someone grabbed her feet, and she started to panic again. She was on her stomach kicking and squirming, still trying to get free. One of the men grabbed her hair again and forced her head backward, effectively cutting off her air supply. He put his knees into her back, and she started to black out when the man holding her hair released it. Her face fell into the dirt again. She struggled to get enough air into her lungs through her bloody nose. Instead, she aspirated blood and dirt before the threatening blackness won.

  *

  Barrett felt like she was deep underwater and slowly rising to the surface. She was lying on her side in the mud, leaves, and other shit she couldn’t identify. Without moving she surveyed her limbs, starting with the toes on her left foot up her leg, torso, each arm, and ending with the toes on her right. Her mental inventory and the lack of any substantial pain told her that nothing major appeared to be broken. Her hands were behind her back, her feet secured with what looked like zip ties, thick plastic bands used by law enforcement as a backup to regular handcuffs. Her fingers were numb, but she was still able to move them.

  The gag had been removed from her mouth, and a pool of vomit and blood lay an inch from her open lips. At least she could breathe, barely. She didn’t need a mirror to tell her the familiar pain in the center of her face was a broken nose. Judging by the amount of blood on the ground and the accompanying pain on the left side of her forehead, she probably had a gash there as well.

  Two men were sitting on a log about six feet away, smoking a cigarette. The larger man, she guessed, was well over six feet tall and had to weigh at least two hundred fifty pounds. His hair was long and his scruffy beard even longer. He was dressed in army fatigues, an effective camouflage in the dense jungle. His partner was similarly dressed but clean-shaven and half his size. At this moment they weren’t paying any attention to her.

  Barrett lay still, in part to stop her head from exploding and also to eavesdrop on their conversation. Their voices were muffled, but what she was able to decipher scared the crap out of her. They were talking about how long it would take to get her back to the main camp. One man said three days, the other four or five, depending on how fast they could make her travel.

  She caught snippets of names—Manuel, Santiago, and The Colonel. She was able to figure out that they’d been sent to get another one, whatever that meant, and something about a girlfriend for Liberty. Most of what they said didn’t make sense, but she learned enough to know she was in deep shit.

  The man with the beard, who looked just like Blue Beard, laughed when he said something about the prize that awaited him when they returned. He rubbed his crotch for effect, and his lascivious cackle made her stomach turn. The other man looked more like a young Desi Arnez and, of the two, was definitely the order-taker. He was wiry and very dark, his hair tied behind his head in a ponytail.

  That thought made the back of Barrett’s head hurt. Her long hair had been pulled at least twice, and she cursed its length, which had provided the two thugs she named Blue and Desi the perfect way to restrain her. When she got out of this mess she intended to cut it all off.

  She closed her good eye and took a deep b
reath. Her ribs hurt where she’d either fallen or had been kicked, but each breath helped clear her head. She was amazingly composed. She’d been beaten, kidnapped, and hog-tied, and she was almost as calm as when she’d found herself buried under fifteen feet of snow on Mount Hood. The circumstances were very different, but like that experience, she could very well die before the day was over.

  Blue moved toward her, telling his buddy it was time to go. Barrett thought it wise not to let on that she understood most of what they said, so she stayed still. He nudged her in the back, indicating she was to wake up. She debated for a moment whether to move but decided he’d probably kick her harder if she didn’t.

  She rolled her head and opened her eyes to find his scuffed boot inches from her face. One wrong move on her part, and he could easily knock out a few teeth. She moaned as a new pain shot through her shoulder.

  “Jesus, enough, give me a minute,” Barrett said without thinking. It probably wasn’t a good idea to say exactly what was on her mind.

  Blue reached down and cut off the zip ties, then dragged her to her feet. Her knees buckled, the darkness threatening to drape over her again. Cold water was splashed on her face and someone slapped her cheek. She screamed, her voice raspy and unhindered by the gag. Blue told her to shut up, and another splash of water hit her in the face again. Her nose hurt, and her forehead stung from the force of the water. She forced her legs to work.

  Blue’s face was in front of her, his decaying teeth showing proudly through a leer. He squeezed her arm tighter and told her in his native tongue just exactly what he would do to her when they got back to camp. He finished his statement with a sloppy kiss that made her retch. Both he and Desi laughed. The gag was back, this time secured with duct tape. Desi pushed her forward, Blue leading the way.

  Chapter Two

  Rebel Camp, somewhere in Columbia

  She got to her feet before they came and hauled her to her feet. It was one of the few things she had control over, at least this morning she did. She’d learned to relish and hold on to the things that others would find inconsequential—like walking where she wanted to when she wanted to and brushing her hair when she wanted to. Even going to the bathroom when she needed to versus when they let her had become a treat.

  For the past eight months, or at least Kelly Ryan thought it was that long but wasn’t sure, someone else had controlled her movements every minute of every day. She moved when they told her, stood where they told her, and ate whatever they gave her. If she didn’t, and sometimes even when she did, she was stripped, beaten, starved, tied to a tree, or worse.

  She hadn’t been held hostage the longest, or the shortest. Juan Cordoba, a Cuban diplomat, held the dubious honor of the longest at two years, and Francois LeCroix, a French banker, had been dragged into the camp four months ago barely alive. She would stop by and look in on him later after she checked on her other patients—the rebels that held her and seven other people hostage somewhere in the jungle.

  Her back hurt from lying on the hard ground, but at least she didn’t have any nightmares while she slept—none that she remembered. When she’d first arrived, and for months afterward, her dreams, when she was allowed to sleep, were filled with images of masked men, shouts, gunfire, and blood. So much blood.

  Kelly was on her third visit to Bogota, along with five other nurses and two physicians volunteering in a rural clinic just east of the war-torn city. Her first trip to Columbia had been four years ago with a fellow nurse, and she’d immediately fallen in love with the country and its people. Their patients had nothing, and health care of any kind was virtually nonexistent. If not treated properly, something as simple as a minor cut could result in death.

  Her team had been two days away from going home when the rebels struck their camp. Kelly knew the risks of simply being in Columbia, but her work and seeing just how much these people needed them had pushed any thoughts of danger out of her mind. The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia, or FARC, was established in the early 1960s by the Colombian Communist Party to defend Communist-controlled rural areas. She’d read that it was Latin America’s oldest, largest, most capable, and best-equipped insurgency, with over ten thousand armed combatants and several thousand supporters. Like during most civil wars, the civilians her team treated were often caught in the middle.

  Slowly she stretched her arms above her head. Her left shoulder ached, a remnant of her encounter with one of the guards she and her fellow hostages had nicknamed Hercules. He was big and burly and reminded them of the mythical Greek hero. Several months ago she hadn’t moved fast enough to suit him, and when he grabbed her by the arm, she heard a pop. He silenced the resulting scream with a backhand across her face. Suffering unbearable pain, she had to talk her fellow prisoners through what to do to slip her shoulder back into its socket.

  At five foot eight inches, Kelly was taller than some of her captors and, before she lost the extra fifty pounds she came in with, had outweighed them as well. She kept her brown hair as short as she could, the length necessary to keep it clean and not get caught on low-hanging branches when they were forced to march through the jungle. Scabs from insects feasting on her the night before were red and raw and itched terribly, but she’d learned how to block the constant stinging from her mind, along with many other things. She ran her crooked finger over the fading scar on her right thigh. The first hadn’t healed correctly after it was broken when she was first kidnapped, and the second had resulted from a fall against a sharp rock a few months ago. Her feet were bare. The shoes she’d had on when she was captured had disintegrated under the harsh Columbian jungle conditions, and she hadn’t received another pair.

  She quickly and quietly followed her morning routine of thanking God she was still alive, making the next move on the chessboard in her head, and doing isometric exercises. She always started at her feet and worked her way up through the major muscles in her body to her head, then reversed the path.

  Other hostages had taught her that routine was one of the most important elements to her mental survival, and it was true. Filling her days with activities that could be repeated, even if they were only in her mind, gave Kelly a sense of control in a life that was completely out of her control.

  She missed her early morning walks. She used to rise at dawn, toss on her sweats, grab Needle’s leash, and be out the door in ten minutes. Thinking of her dog and what might have happened to him still caused pain. Her best friend Ariel always watched him whenever she went out of town and couldn’t take her two-year-old, four-legged friend along. She missed his constant presence in her life and, on more than one occasion, the rangy mutt licked her tears when she lost a patient.

  The sun was filtering through the thick canopy of trees, the sounds of the camp slowly coming to life as she finished her routine. When they had arrived at this spot several days ago, she and her fellow hostages had been forced to clear away much of the heavy vegetation in and around their new camp. She found it ironic that they had to do the work that would prevent someone from raiding their camp and rescuing them. Currently twenty-eight rebels were in camp. The number varied from as few as eight to sometimes as many as fifty crowding their little settlement. She worried about Juan, the Cuban diplomat. The extreme physical labor of the last few days had sapped more of his already weakened strength. She was hoping today would be a day of rest, but she’d learned to never take anything for granted, even waking up.

  Kelly heard voices in the distance, someone blowing his nose, another coughing not far away. She needed to pee and wondered how long it would be before someone came and unlocked her or if she would have to squat out here in the open. Her current situation as a hostage of the FARC living in the jungle had eliminated any sense of modesty. Of course the other issue was the fact that she had five feet of chain secured to her left ankle.

  They still chained her to a tree every night, the clanking of the sturdy links no longer keeping her awake. The night guards were charged with det
ecting any infiltration of their camp by government troops, and with the hostages secured, they could remain focused on their task.

  Kelly saw the guard she’d named Opie heading her way and breathed a sigh of relief. Of all the rebels, Opie was by far the kindest to her and the others. He wasn’t as callous and didn’t get off on humiliating his charges. She’d named him Opie because he reminded her of Opie Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show. He looked nothing like she’d envisioned a guerrilla terrorist. With his baby face and lack of facial hair, he couldn’t have been a day over sixteen.

  She started to say good morning but held her tongue when she saw his expression. He was angry, and if she spoke without being spoken to first, even though he was the nicest of the thugs, she would be punished.

  Lowering her eyes, she stood silently waiting for some indication of what was expected of her. The uncertainty was the most difficult to deal with. Each day was like living with a manic-depressive family member. One minute things were calm and serene, but the next, shouts and screams and brutality would explode with very little advance notice and even less time for the victims to mentally prepare.

  Opie didn’t say anything as he knelt and unlocked the bracket that surrounded her ankle. The metal clanked when it hit the ground, an indication of its heavy weight. The place on her ankle where the metal rubbed was barely noticeable. Her body had compensated for the constant friction by developing a hard callus.

  He grunted something that Kelly wasn’t able to understand, and with a poke in her side with his rifle, she was moving. Three times a day she was forced to tend to the ill or injured rebels in the camp. She wasn’t sure if the rebels had raided her clinic and kidnapped her because they needed her and their medical supplies or that she’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Either way she was a nurse, and whether she liked it or not, she had a job to do.