Chapter 16

Friday early evening

SODO area warehouse

Seattle Washington

This was beginning to look like one of the worst ideas Maria had ever had.

Maria could hear girls in other cells moving about restlessly on the grimy concrete floor but no one was talking. They were too terrified to speak. About an hour ago one of the girls had started crying and cursing hysterically and refused the attempts by the others to get her to quiet down.

One of their jailers, a short hairy brute of a man, slammed open the large metal door to their enclosure and grabbed the ranting girl carefully by the throat, led her out of her cage, and then threw her into a wooden chair placed deliberately in the center of the main room. He then bound her to the chair with padded restraints and proceeded to shock her repeatedly with a low voltage taser in her breasts and thighs and feet.

Maria could tell that he was being careful to administer the maximum amount of pain he could without leaving any marks. Maria watched as the girl’s bladder and then her bowels loosened as the shocks were just too much for her system to handle and the poor girl stopped screaming and passed out.

“Anyone else?” the brute said. “Good. Now everyone shut the fuck up. You two clean her up and get her back in the cage.” the brute said as he opened their cage and pointed to Maria and another girl.

Maria moved hesitatingly toward the unconscious girl on the chair along with a tall, skinny dishwater blond wearing frayed jeans much too short for her. The girl helping Maria couldn’t have been more than 14. They found the cold water hose along the wall and carefully rinsed off the girl as best as they could. The girl in the chair came to well enough to sit up and with their help shakily made her way back into her cage and onto her pallet of stinking blankets.

The brute slammed the welded wire cage door shut and then followed Maria and the other girl back to their cage and slammed their door shut as well

For just an instant Maria thought about killing their jailer. Maria probably could have taken the brute down herself. She wasn’t a Sarah or even a Mei but she was enhanced by the ‘Ben effect’ and she had been training for months. Her capturers had dosed her and her cell mates with some sort of tranquilizers but Maria’s augmented metabolism had already filtered the drugs out of her system.She was only pretending to be sluggish.

Mariah considered it, but knew that if she broke the captives out, all that Nexus had worked for would be for nothing. Lizzy had figured out where the shadowy group of traffickers were keeping their “assets”, but they needed more information if they wanted to bring down the entire network and those who took advantage of it. Nexus needed her on the inside.

She so wanted to kill that asshole though. This must be what Sarah felt like when someone was a threat to any of them. She did have a panic button sewn into her clothes as well as a tracker if she needed it. Ben and the rest of the team were within a block, and she could feel Tom prowling around the area immediately outside of the warehouse. Mei was also somewhere close by and might even be inside the outer part of the warehouse.They had considered using her invisibility as a way of getting inside where the girls were being kept, but Mei could only keep hidden for little more than an hour at a time.

Yes, she was a little scared, but a call for help and these bozo’s would wish they’d never been born Maria thought to herself with a tight grin.

Ben fidgeted until finally Sarah smacked him on the back of the head.

“Quit it! She’s going to be okay.” said Sarah.

“I know, I know. She can take care of herself and we can be there in minutes but dammit she didn’t have to do this.” said Ben.

“Ben, she did have to do this. I’m so sorry. I followed every digital trace I could But everything dead ends here. Without being able to track Maria we could lose the thread when they move the women and miss everyone responsible for this horror show,” said Lizzy apologetically.

“No, no Lizzy. I didn’t mean it was your fault you did amazing work and so quickly!” Ben said as he leaned over the back seat of their rented van to give her a hug and a kiss.

“It really helps having Athena driven bot’s to run down digital tracks. I just can’t figure out yet where all the money is coming from. But I will.” said Lizzy with a determined look.

“Tom, how goes it out there?” asked Ben psychically.

“Mei and I have been able to get inside the warehouse and it’s pretty quiet right now. They’ve goot two guards oot an’ two inside wit the wee lassies. Aye ‘tis a sad sight indeed sair. The wee lassies cannae be more than 12 to 16 yairs old some mightn’t be youngair still.”

“Thanks Tom, stay safe and get some rest, I bet they’re going to move them some time tomorrow...”

“Aye aye Cap’n. I have some local reliefs coming on to help in a bit” said Tom

Ben made a mental note that they were going to need to bring some nice tins of premium cat and dog food with them on the nex trip to pay Tom’s irregular stray militia for their sentry and patrol duties. The assorted half dozen dogs and cats that volunteered to help them keep an eye on the warehouse had been an enormous help. The location of the warehouse deep in the SODO (South of the Dome) industrial area was really hard to surveil around the clock.

Ben knew there was nothing left to do for now. All the most difficult pieces to put in place were ready. The hardest had been getting Maria planted. Lizzy had figured out from statistical analysis and surveillance camera footage the areas of Seattle that were the kidnappers’ primary hunting grounds. From that she extrapolated the logical hangouts for them to abduct runaways from.

Ben also had known that they wouldn’t have long to wait as the traffickers were going to have to make up the shortfall for the girls that Ben and the girls had intercepted. So they watched and waited until they tagged the vehicles that the abductors were using.

From that point it was simply a matter of disguising their brave, beautiful Maria as a 14 year old runaway. She may be 18 but with her face and figure it was pretty easy to make her a much younger target. They then dropped her along a likely route and just waited. Ben was concerned that she would be drugged but with Jill’s help as a nurse they had done some testing and discovered that the ‘Ben effect’ would clean her system out really quickly with no lasting effects.

Ben had also been concerned about Maria being sexually assaulted but as a group they determined that it was unlikely since the abducted women’s ‘untouched’ state was likely a primary selling point.

Now it was just a waiting game.

Saturday morning

SODO Warehouse

Seattle, Washington

Maria hadn’t had much sleep and all they had been fed the day before was drugged sandwiches but looking around her she realized she was in much better shape than the rest of the 20 or so girls that she had spent the night with. Some of them had been in the warehouse for over a week. Most of the girls were wearing nothing but filthy rags and hadn’t been able to bathe or have a decent meal in days.

Between the lack of food and sleep and the constant intake of drugs Maria thought she could see what their kidnapper’s goal was. They wanted compliant bodies who would do whatever they wanted without complaint or attempting escape.

Maria was stretching in the limited space and doing some of her Krav Maga warmups before the other’s woke up when she saw the almost blond girl from the night before watching her with wide eyes.

“What ... what are you doing?” the girl asked in a whisper.

“Just some yoga to get the kinks out.” Maria hated to lie to the girl but she couldn’t let anyone give away what was going to happen later.

“Oh.” said the girl with such a small sad voice that Maria just couldn’t stand it.

Maria slid next to the girl, put her arm around her and whispered into her ear.