Highway to Heaven by Harley McRide

stitches.
    “How long have you been here?” Sadie gasped,
feeling the weight of the girl’s anguish slam into her. She’d been
through what Tami had just endured over and over and over again.
There was no surviving. It was disconnecting yourself to accept
what you knew was coming.
    “I don’t know. I used to try to count the
days, but there are no windows here. We go by when the guards come
to take one of us back. Usually, it’s only one or two of us at a
time, and about the same time each day. I’ve been here for over a
year. I can’t tell you exactly.”
    “ A year ?” Sadie whispered.
    “Or longer. I don’t know. They came into my
room and took me when I was almost sixteen. It was January 15,
2014. I’d just gotten home from my sophomore school dance. Mom was
at work, and my little brother over at the neighbors.” She drifted
back in her memories, shutting them off before she could use them
for comfort. Sadie assumed that remembering her life would only
make it harder being here and pull her out of that ‘nothingness’
she spoke of. “We’ve felt the cold air rush in and the hot summer
heat, so I guess it’s been a full year if not more.”
    “We will get out of here. Somehow, some way,
but you will see your mom and brother again. What’s your name?”
Sadie wanted to give her hope. She needed to see the girl who had
been battered and broken so badly rise again with vengeance. If she
could get as many girls as possible back to thinking there was an
end to this, maybe they could join forces and help when the time
came. The time would come.
    “I’m Shea.” She stuck her frail, bony hand
through the bars for Sadie to shake. They were ice cold to the
touch. Sadie could feel every bone and tendon through her paper
thin, almost transparent skin. Damn she’d been stuck in this hell
for a long time. Looking at her, she could almost envision her
lean, toned teen body sitting in a lawn chair on the edge of a pool
with her golden hair shimmering in the sun. She’d have tawny tan
skin, the kind of bronze that the movie stars yearned for. Even
with her decrepit state, the girl was still beautiful.
    “I’m Sadie. My friends will come for us,
Shea. We are all gonna get out of here, just hang in there,
okay?”
    “We all thought that someone would come for
us too. The best thing you can do is try to find a place in your
mind to go to and stay there. Block everything out, Sadie, or
you’ll end up like Chrissy.”
    “Chrissy?”
    Shea let out a deep, shaky breath and shook
her head. “Chrissy was older than me, and had been here two months
before I came. At first, she still tried to come up with plans to
escape and gave us all hope.” It looked like she might cry, but no
tears came out. Either dehydration or just the fact she had cried
out her despair a long time ago kept her eyes dry, but the sadness
was still there. “They chose her a lot…because she had spirit.
They’d laugh and joke about breaking her. She’d spit in their
face,” she said, a faint smile at the memory. “Then, little by
little, they succeeded. Instead of giving up, she ended up going
crazy. She’d scream and beat her head on the bars trying to kill
herself. You get a lot of that here—girls trying to end it all. The
guards always stop it. They don’t get a paycheck for a corpse.”
    “Paycheck?”
    “Yeah. We are all waiting for the next
auction. I’ve picked up enough Spanish since I’ve been here to know
a little. All of us are going to be sold.”
    Sadie’s eyes went wide. “Human
trafficking?”
    She nodded. “From what I’ve overheard the
guards laughing about, most of the buyers make this place look like
Disney Land.”
    “Oh my God,” she gasped. Tami let out a gasp,
her body thrashing around some on the floor. “Sssssh, baby.
Shhhhh.” She soothed her hand over the small area on her cheek that
wasn’t injured, willing her to go back to sleep. She didn’t need to
be awake and feel all of the pain that would