Hush

She eventually discovered that all the pain she felt as a child—her father’s temper and cruelty, her mother’s apathy and complete disregard—was all practice, training for the years she’d spend in a twenty square foot concrete cell, in the basement of an unassuming house, twenty miles from her home.

The first night was little more than a blur. Being thrown into the van, her head throbbing, her vision blurry, the pain immense. Voices gruff and cruel. She remembered begging, pleading. And the smell. Like body odor, cheap booze . . . like her father. But worse than that. Like something was decaying from the inside out. She’d smelled it on their breath. Hot on her face. Terrifying.

Her bladder let go at some point, she remembered that. The smell of her own urine mixed in with the filth of the van, a smell that would stay with her forever.

She didn’t remember the specifics of the van ride, apart from the wetness between her legs, the shame, terror, and pain mixed in. She remembered them speaking, threatening . . . the Things. She’d learn that all the girls called them Thing One and Two. They didn’t have names, didn’t deserve them. They were monsters. That’s all.

She didn’t consider them monsters at first because she was too afraid. Disorientated. Confused. There wasn’t enough clarity to understand what was going on. Maybe she didn’t want to understand. If she didn’t understand, didn’t force herself to face the facts, then she could pretend this wasn’t happening. That somehow she’d strayed into a nightmare like The Twilight Zone. She’d wake up soon.

But she didn’t.

The nightmare wasn’t in her head.

The nightmares had become reality.

She didn’t hear much of what they said, but one sentence stuck out to her, carved itself into her soul.

“Hush now, girl. You belong to us now . . .”

Reality became stark, lucid and inescapable with the first rape in the back of the van that first night.

A girl always remembers her first time.

She was kissed tenderly, lovingly, and amazingly on a perfect summer day by the boy of her dreams. On that nightmare summer night, her virginity was torn from her, painfully, violently, and terrifyingly in the back of that smelly van. Their sweat-soaked hands kept her screams bottled up inside and her arms clamped down at her sides. She fought until she could fight no longer. Her tired muscles gave out, she closed her eyes, and she used Maddox then for the first time as a sort of trance, a meditation . . . his beautiful smile, his tender kiss, his loving touch.

The other times, they weren’t as stark. Weren’t as memorable. Was it because the horror became monotonous? Or because her brain could only handle so much trauma? Maybe the drugs. She’d gotten used to the drugs.

They gave them to her that first night when they dragged her into the house. She was fighting again at that point, screaming, clawing at them. After the injection, they dragged her down the basement steps. Her vision was hazy, her body going limp, but she did see the cockroaches scuttling across the floor as one of them flipped the lights on. She saw the stained mattress, chains, and a large door in front of her, like the gateway to hell.

At some point she passed out, her eyelids too heavy to fight. She thought she saw other girls, thought she smelled blood, but she no longer could distinguish what was real and what was a dream.

The smell caught her a few hours later, like the roadkill she and April had found once when they were younger, poked and prodded the thing until the smell became too much to bear, the iron-y scent of dried blood, the musk of decay. Its pungency yanked her from unconsciousness, or maybe it was the pain. She felt it then in her side. Her ribs screamed with every small movement, every breath. It brought visions of the van, and the car she collided into, the fists that rained down on her and the clunk of her thin body against the basement steps.

It wasn’t dark. She thought that was cruel, on top of it all. To show her where she was, to light the bloodstains on the floor. Harsh fluorescent lights illuminated the concrete walls aged with filth. The floor—which served as her mattress—was cold, the concrete dirty. She observed the stains again, all various shades of crimson. She didn’t want to think about what they were.

She did anyway.

Wants didn’t mean anything in a place like this.

Ri tried to sit up, out of habit more than anything. She didn’t know why she should want to sit upright, be conscious, move from the stained, smelly floor. She wanted to try and lapse back into unconsciousness. She should just close her eyes and drift back to sleep . . . perhaps she would wake back up in her own bed. She’d never thought of home as home before, never wanted to spend any time there, dreamed of escaping and never returning. But now, now she begged God to be taken back, to be told this was all some horrible nightmare. She’d never spoken to that being, that thing people worshipped at the small church in town. Orion had thought it was all bullshit. But she was desperate right now, so she pleaded God for this to be a nightmare.