Awakened

by C. Steven Manley

  Erin struggled to breathe, to think past the pain, to concentrate. She felt the tears and the nausea that always came when this happened. This was Tiko- the brother who had taken care of them and kept them fed after mom had overdosed. This was Tiko, her brother and her provider and the only person who loved her. She’d known he’d get like this, known her being gone would make him mad. She should’ve called him. She could’ve done that in Georgia and then it would have been better. This was her fault for not calling when she had the chance and-

  In the initial moments of the assault, the computer had been disturbed and had spun around so that she could see the screen over Tiko’s shoulder. A small face stared out from that screen. The girl in it was glassy-eyed and couldn’t be more than fourteen. If she was anything like Erin, she’d lost her innocence years ago to a man just like the one in front of her.

  Somewhere in her memory, behind the lack of breath and throbbing pains, she heard Israel talking about what decent people do.

  Erin turned her tear-filled eyes to her brother and nodded her understanding. He studied her for a moment before nodding back and letting her go. He stood over her while she got her breathing and sobbing under control.

  When she started to rise, he said, “Oh, no. While you’re still on your knees I think you need to give me the very best apology you can.” With one quick motion he unzipped his fly and pulled out his semi-erect organ.

  Erin looked away even though it was nothing new. “You’re my brother,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

  “What?”

  “You’re my brother!” she screamed, glaring at him.

  Tiko raised his hand to slap her, but she held his eyes with hers, ready to pull to the other side of the room if that hand dropped even an inch. Instead, he just grinned. “Yeah, I am. I’ve carried you for years and this-” he lowered his hand and grabbed himself, waving it in her face, “this is how you thank me, remember? You’d be doing five-dollar blowjobs in an alley somewhere if not for me.”

  Erin flinched away and said, “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, Tiko. You aren’t supposed to treat people like this, especially not your family.”

  Tiko laughed. “Whatever. End of the day, you’re just more product and us sharing a mom don’t change that. Now how about you stop talking all this bullshit, baby sister, and work this cock like I know you can. Or do I need to make you?”

  Erin had been slowly focusing. She could pull to anywhere in the room, but there were no windows for her to see the outside. The face on the computer seemed to be watching her. Slowly, resolutely, she started shifting her focus to the ground beneath them. She tried to imagine the dark and the dirt and the stones. Then she felt a point below them crystallize in her mind.

  “You’re my brother,” she said to Tiko, looking up at him with his cock in his hand, “and I just came to tell you goodbye, but you aren’t a good person. You don’t love anything but yourself and I’m not gonna let you hurt anybody anymore.”

  The hand he was holding up to slap her slowly closed into a fist as he said, “And what are you gonna do to stop me, baby sister?”

  “Goodbye, Tiko,” Erin said through tears and blood. She touched his knee and pushed.

  Tiko vanished.

  There was no sound at all for a few seconds. Erin knew he was down there, though. Deep below her feet, buried alive and trying to scream with no air to do it with.

  So, Erin did it for him.

  She wasn’t sure how long it was before she stopped. Most of the mirrors were shattered. The photographs were all torn from the walls and shredded into so much gray scale confetti. She had vomited again at one point, but only vaguely remembered it. She sat with her back to the wall, looking out over the ruins of Tiko’s office. She hurt from the beating and the wailing, but her tears were gone. They were gone like her brother was gone. She sat, breathing in and out heavily. She told herself it had to be done. She told herself there was no other way. She told herself he had it coming. None of it helped.

  There was a flicker as the screen-saver on Tiko’s laptop activated and the Visions logo started scrolling across the screen. Erin got up and went to the computer. She tapped the keys and the picture of the girl looked back at her. Erin struggled to get her feelings in check and then looked over at the door. She knew where the Primm warehouse was. Erin went behind the desk and pulled back a small rug that concealed Tiko’s floor safe. She’d figured the code out long ago but had never told him. She tapped in the numbers and it popped open. Inside she found several stacks of cash, various documents, a set of car keys to the company van, and a nickel-plated Colt 1911 along with three spare clips. Erin hefted the pistol and looked it over. Tiko said he’d had it custom made with a pearl handle that was inset with a queen of hearts. He called it his suicide queen. Erin put the weapon in her waistband and pulled her blouse over it. The extra clips went into a pocket.

  She knew where the warehouse was but figured it was too far to teleport. She grabbed the keys and the cash. She had one more stop to make before putting Las Vegas behind her forever.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Visions company van was a Honda Odyssey with the company name and pictures of a couple of Tiko’s favorite girls plastered along both sides of it. Though it was a particularly dark desert night, it still bothered her to have the van be so memorable. There was little she could do about it, though, and she figured when all was said and done it really didn’t matter. She was driving fast on the southbound interstate 15 toward Primm. A sign flashed by signaling the exit for Jean and the 161. Another fifteen minutes or so, and she’d be there.

  Then, she wasn’t sure what would happen. Her first thought was to simply call the cops and have them raid the place, but then she remembered Tiko saying these guys had an in with the police. She’d never dealt with guys like this but you didn’t work in the life without hearing about human trafficking. She’d heard more than her share of stories about cops showing up to lock up some traffickers and finding a bunch of dead girls instead. To these men, that was just cutting losses.

  Anger, something like madness, bubbled inside her but she clamped down on it. She knew she would need it later more than now. She drove on, the only light streaking through the hard, chill night. Before long, she slowed and took the Primm exit.

  Primm, Nevada was a small town that was just a few miles east of the Nevada-California line. It boasted a permanent population of just over a thousand people, but did a brisk tourist business thanks to a half dozen or so casinos and resorts that were the lifeblood of the community. A lot of businesses had come and gone over the years and, at one time, Tiko had bought one of them for a song. His plan had been to use the warehouse space to start some kind of Internet business. It had never gone any further than that. He had taken Erin there on more than one occasion to talk about his big plans, so she found her way back with ease.

  She pulled the van into an alley a few blocks from the warehouse and shut off the engine. Out of habit, she checked her face in the rear-view mirror. A thick, purple bruise underscored her right eye and her lower lip was split and swollen. Her ribs ached, though she didn’t think they were broken. She looked and felt like hell, but this wasn’t the worse beating she’d ever taken. Erin shook her head at that and quickly pulled her red hair into a pony-tail. She secured it with a bright yellow scrunchie that she found in the glove compartment.

  Erin checked to make sure the gun was still in her waistband and the clips in her pocket. She wasn’t sure why she was bringing them; it wasn’t as though she needed them, but she figured in a situation like this it was probably better to have more than she needed. She got out of the van and pulled herself to a nearby rooftop. Two more pulls and she was on a roof overlooking Tiko’s warehouse.

  It was a large structure, larger than she remembered, and lights glowed from within the high windows. The street-level windows showed no light. Erin figured whoever was inside had covered them up to keep anyone from spying on them. From what she
could tell, the gathering was already underway. She didn’t have a clear line of sight into the building, but she knew there were glass skylights on the warehouse roof. The problem was there were no working streetlights on the block and the roof was shrouded in darkness and moonlight cast shadow. She could see well enough to teleport over but she didn’t know if there was a lookout hanging out in one of the darker spots.

  Erin thought about it. If she was the one setting up the kind of thing that was going on in that building, she would want guys on the street keeping an eye out for trouble, but not so many that it looked out of the ordinary. A guy on a roof would probably look weird, so she wouldn’t have put one there.

  Erin thought back to Israel’s words at the funeral about how Matt had died just doing what good people do. She nodded at the memory and pulled to the warehouse roof. As soon as she appeared, she turned a slow circle, searching for gun-wielding guards or anything else that might give her away. Nothing crept out of the shadows at her so she moved to one of the skylights and looked in.

  The building was laid out in an ‘L’ shape. One of the legs was half again as wide as the other and had one wall dedicated to a small, elevated office space. The skylight Erin had chosen was above the point where the two parts of the L met. Below her, strong floodlights mounted on thick, bright yellow poles were shining onto a group of scantily clad young women who were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder. There were about eighteen of them and Erin recognized a few of the faces from Tiko’s computer. They all looked haggard and worn. Some of them were gagged, some had their hands tied together with thin cord. There were two men in the pool of light with them. One of them was a big guy in a black suit. He walked behind the girls slowly, obviously waiting for a chance to use the big cattle prod he held. The other man was smaller and walked in front of the girls with his back to them. His suit was so gray that it was almost silver and shimmered in the light as only silk can. He was talking and gesturing to the group of shadows that was gathered behind the lights, out of sight and unrecognizable.

  Erin swallowed hard. There were a lot of guys down there, and most of them were probably armed. That didn’t bother her so much, but the point of all this was to get those girls out of here and getting them shot while she teleported all over the warehouse floor wasn’t the kind of out she had in mind.

  She kept studying the scene while she mulled it over. The guys behind the lights were, without a doubt, the buyers. In her terms, these were the Johns. Most Johns, in her experience, had one thing in common: They generally wanted to get off without getting caught. That meant that if you shined a light on them in the act they would run like hell.

  A plan started forming in her mind. She would have to be fast which, honestly, wasn’t a problem, but she would also have to make sure she didn’t get disoriented. The ache in her side reminded her that her amazing new abilities would not keep a bullet from taking her out if she got shot. Still, though, her plan could work.

  Erin took a deep breath, focused on the nearest floodlight, and pulled.

  She appeared next to the light exactly where she’d wanted. The man with the silver suit was in the middle of explaining that the girls were all disease-free. Since she had appeared on the buyers’ side of the lights, he hadn’t noticed her.

  Erin heard a whispered “What is this?” from one of the buyers before she spun the light on its adjustable mount and shouted, “Smile for the camera, boys!”

  She would have given anything to have actually had a camera at that moment. A dozen shocked, bewildered, and suddenly angry faces stared and blinked into the unexpected brilliance. Erin pulled to the light farthest from the one she had spun and repeated the process, shouting, “Come on! Show me some hot and sexy!”

  That was all it took. Hands went to cover faces and everyone ran for the door. Erin smiled. They were like roaches when the kitchen light comes on. She heard the man in the silver suit shout something. She turned to face him.

  The look on his face was something she would never forget. His expression was some jumble of rage, disbelief, and terror. He stared at her with wide eyes and said, “What the fuck is this? How did you do that? Why did you do that?”

  Erin had a comeback ready to go when the big guy pushed through the line of girls and said, “Mr. Silver? What is it?”

  Erin looked at the smaller man in the gray suit. “Mr. Silver? Seriously?”

  “Luis! Kill this pinche puta!” Silver reached into his jacket.

  Erin smiled and pulled past the twenty feet that separated them. Silver froze when she suddenly materialized. She could’ve touched him and sent him flying around the room. Instead, she collected every ounce of rage and frustration that she’d collected that night into her right foot and kicked him in the balls hard enough to lift him onto his tip toes. The man grunted and fell in a heap on the floor.

  Erin wanted to take a second to enjoy that moment, but the one called Luis came rushing toward her bellowing like an angry bull. He came in too fast; there was no time for her to pull away. He hit her hard enough to lift her off the ground and knock her flat onto her back. Her head bounced against the concrete floor hard. The blow dazed her momentarily and the air rushed from her lungs.

  If there was one thing that had come out of her relationship with her late brother, though, it had been her ability to take a blow and shake it off to save her ass. She ignored the pain and gasped in a breath while rolling to one side. The cattle prod stabbed into the floor where her face had been with an electric hiss. Erin rolled onto her back in time to see Luis’s heavy boot coming up to stomp on her head. Erin looked out the skylight, focused, and caught the bottom of the boot as it came down. As soon as it touched her hand, Luis disappeared.

  Erin climbed her feet. The pain in her ribs was a throbbing reminder that she really shouldn’t pick fights with people who were two feet taller than her.

  Mr. Silver had rolled onto his knees and was struggling to rise. Erin walked across the floor. The kneeling man looked up and started to reach inside his jacket again. Erin was quicker. Tiko’s Colt came to bear before Silver’s hand was clear of his jacket.

  “Don’t bother,” Erin said. “I’m not that good of a shot but there’s no way I’d miss from here. Take it out and toss it.”

  Silver did as she said and sent the pistol sliding into the shadows. The rage in his expression had taken a backseat to the disbelief and terror. “What the fuck are you? What did you do to Luis?”

  Erin sighed. The adrenaline was draining away and a heavy fatigue followed in its wake. She half-laughed. “That’s a really good question, Silver. The first one. As for Luis, he’s probably on the ground by now. Not really sure where, though. Want to find out?”

  Silver’s head shook in a terrified, stuttering motion.

  “Didn’t think so,” she said. She nodded toward the girls. “So, what’cha doin?”

  “This isn’t what it looks like, chica’.”

  Erin hurt all over. She was exhausted. Despite these facts, though, Silver’s response irritated her to the point that she vanished, reappeared next to the man, and slapped him across the side of his head with the pistol. It wasn’t hard enough to knock him out, but she opened a deep cut above his left eye.

  “Really, Silver? Because what it looks like is that you were about to auction off these teenage girls to a bunch of rich sickos. I don’t see a whole hell of a lot to contradict that. The real question is,” she pointed the pistol at his head like an executioner, “why shouldn’t I just blow your sick fucking head right off?”

  Silver had raised his hands to protect his head as though they could stop the bullets he was certain were coming. Erin thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.

  “Are you an angel?”

  Erin’s head snapped up at the words. They’d come from a girl who had stepped away from the group and was watching her exchange with Silver. Though haggard and wearing a dirty set of lingerie, she had strong, dark eyes and hair the color of dark chocolate. She looked like sh
e might be the oldest among the girls, eighteen or so.

  “Are you?” the girl repeated. “An angel, I mean?”

  Erin smiled and felt an unbidden and confused tear in her eye. “No, honey. I’m a long way from that.”

  The girl nodded and seemed to consider the statement. “Then you must stop what you are doing.”

  Erin blinked at her. “What? Look, whatever your name is, he is an evil man and deserves what he gets. Just don’t watch, okay?”

  “My name is Malena and I know he is evil. He raped me.”

  Erin turned a gaze toward Silver that could have frozen a river. “Well, that makes this easier,” she whispered.

  “That is not for you,” the girl said. “I am his victim. His punishment is mine to choose.”

  Erin thought about that. She thought about Tiko and the end his choices had led him- and her -to. She looked up at Malena. “You know what? You’re right. Do you want to do this?”

  She shook her head. “No, but he deserves to be punished.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  Malena held up a finger for her to wait and then disappeared into the light beyond the flood lamps. A few seconds later she returned holding a length of metal re-bar about two feet long. “I saw this when they were bringing us out,” she said. She nodded at all the girls, her eyes carrying all the meaning she needed.

  Erin half-smiled. “All right, then.”

  And so they came, one by one, and took turns giving back some of the pain that they’d been given. When it was over, Silver was lying on his side, alive but bloodied, and alternating between groans and sobs. His gray suit was torn and spattered with dark stains. The last girl walked away and dropped the dark re-bar. It clattered to the ground in front of Erin and Malena.