Chapter 9

The doorbell was insistent and ungraceful, someone pushing the button over and over again while simultaneously hammering on the door, rattling the security chain. She dropped her phone in surprise at the suddenness of it, but recovered it quickly and slipped it into the pocket of her pajamas. She cracked open the door, security chain still fastened.

The next few moments were a blur, motion and pain and disorientation happening too quickly for her to understand the sequence of events. She had barely turned the handle and opened the door the inch or two that the chain allowed when it was forced open completely. The corner of the door narrowly missed catching the side of her head, but the security chain’s anchor, ripped free from the doorframe, slashed a line of pain across her forehead.

She stumbled back a few steps, lifting a hand to her burning forehead, but a burly figure reeking of stale cigarette smoke had already shoved through the door, and pushed a cloth soaked in solvent against her face. The world went fuzzy before she could register anything beyond a fragmentary thought of fucking again??.

Whatever chemical was soaked into the handkerchief didn’t knock Valerie unconscious, but it felt like she had downed a flask of vodka, and she couldn’t even speak, let alone resist. The man forced two small white pills into her mouth and made her dry swallow them; by the time the solvent haze was clearing from her mind, whatever drug he had forced on her started to take effect.

–

She couldn’t remember how much time had passed when she finally felt her mind clear and reassert itself. It had been nearing midnight, she thought, when the doorbell rang, but she wasn’t entirely sure even of that.

She was in darkness, and her ankles were locked together with steel cuffs. They were tight enough that just trying to flex her feet straight made the cuffs dig in to her tendons. It didn’t take much guessing to figure out that she was locked in the trunk of a car, given the engine sounds, thrum of tires on pavement, and the thin, scratchy carpeting she was laying on. By the time she noticed her phone was still in the pocket of her pajama pants, the battery had drained low enough that it only had enough power to light up the screen and show shutting down when she tried to use it.

Her hands were unbound, and she tried to find the emergency release for the trunk, but either the car was never made with one, or it had been removed. She couldn’t feel anything else in the trunk with her; if there was a tire iron under the floor board, there was no way she could get to it from inside.

She didn’t know where she was being taken or who had taken her. She hadn’t even really gotten a look at the man’s face. She only knew that the minutes stretched into what must have been hours- alone, in the dark, occasionally rattled by the otherwise mostly smooth road. She cried off and on, her brain repeating a litany of the worst things she could imagine that were waiting for her.

She cried, knowing that nobody would notice she was gone, nobody would come looking for her. The next day was a company holiday, so they wouldn’t even notice she was gone until Monday, when they’d probably just summarily fire her for not showing up.

Valerie didn’t know how long she had been spiraling when she felt the car slow, and with a thump, pull off the paved road, and roll through what felt like dirt or grass for just a few seconds before coming to a halt. The engine cut off, and she could hear a car door open. A moment later, the trunk lid was opened, and a helpful courtesy light within blinked into life. It was dim, but she’d been in pitch black for so long that it still blinded her for a few moments.

As her eyes adjusted, she could make out a man, dimly. He stood somewhere around six feet tall, and looked to be in his forties or fifties. He had a scraggly beard and a receding hairline, and he was wearing a clean white polo shirt over a noticeable beer gut, with a logo that Valerie couldn’t quite make out. It tickled something in the back of her mind, but the familiarity refused to resolve into anything specific. Behind him were dark trees and a stretch of two-lane highway. In the few moments she was taking this in, an electric car hummed by at high speed, just a flash of headlights.

Valerie started crying again, huddling as far back in the trunk as she could, as though she could melt through it and somehow get away.

“Aw, shut your snivelin’, boy.” The man growled at her. He didn’t sound angry, he sounded… bored. Maybe annoyed. “I ain’t gonna hurt you none.”

Valerie didn’t immediately register the misgendering, and she didn’t make much of an effort to suppress her sobbing.

“Now, see. I’m just gonna get you home, in another four or five hours, and we’re gonna get you some help and get you right back on the right path.”

The man casually lit a cigarette as he talked, cherry glowing red as he took a drag on it.

“Well, I was gonna let you ride up front, but I can see you ain’t in no state to be normal and I don’t need you tryin’ to draw attention while we’re driving. So you’re gonna have to roll around back here for a while longer.”

He exhaled a cloud of smoke, and some of it drifted down into the trunk. Valerie never touched the stuff, but the smell of tobacco smoke brought back memories from her youth, when it seemed like the only people at her high school that didn’t smoke were the ones that chewed dip.

He frowned at her as she shrank back.

“We been lookin’ for you for a while, you know. Been a pain in the ass tryin' to find ya.”

He pauses, expectantly, but when Valerie doesn’t respond he mutters something that Valerie can’t make out. It isn’t complimentary. He draws on the cigarette again.

“I’m only gonna say this once, boy, so you best listen to me. I gotta stop for gas up here in..” he frowns, calculating the distance, “..fifteen, twenty minutes. Now I promise you, ain’t nobody there gonna help you. But, if I hear a single noise from back here while I’m fillin’ her up, you better believe you’re gonna regret it.”

He took a final drag on the cigarette, eyed the glowing red cherry meaningfully, and then flicked it out onto the pavement without bothering to extinguish it.

“Now, you be good ’n quiet, and maybe next time we stop I’ll grab you a bite to eat.”

With that, he slammed the trunk lid shut, closing Valerie back into the darkness. Her sobs subsided but did not entirely stop, and she felt the car pull back onto the road and resume driving.

Chapter 10

Dana was giddy while she waited for the typing indicator to resolve to the first of the girl’s questions. She expected some pushback, some negotiation. She didn’t plan to shift her position much, but if some clarifications or maybe even an extra constraint or two would get Valerie to sign, she would not be totally uncompromising. That part could come later.

This situation wasn’t what would normally pass for risk-aware consensual kink; but the rituals of negotiation were useful nonetheless. Dana meant for this to be more real than any simple consensual non-consent scene could ever be; serious and long-term. The contract left her a lot of latitude, and while it’s true that Valerie’s alternatives were fairly dire, the girl would still be making a choice, and she would have the ability to revoke consent.

The first question never appeared. Initially, Dana suspected, that the girl was organizing her thoughts, that she was unsure where to start. Dana was puzzled when, ten minutes later, the tracking software she had surreptitiously installed on Valerie’s phone pinged a notification that it was leaving the two-mile geofence around the girl’s apartment.

She thought maybe the girl had gone for a drive to clear her head, but her concerned puzzlement deepened into worry as she watched the tracking proceed over a bridge across the bay, and then turn north. The battery died an hour later, with the phone fifty miles toward the California/Oregon border.

Dana started to panic as she pulled video from her cameras- in the dim lighting, she caught some blurs of motion, a figure; a camera outside showed what looked like the same figure, a car trunk, and then the car leaving the frame. Dana uploaded the data onto rented servers, heedless of the cost, to run more complex image enhancement algorithms.

She still didn’t get much- a white sedan pulling out of the parking lot, but only a partial fragment of an Oregon license plate and a clear shot of a bible verse bumper sticker. The camera pointed towards Valerie’s living room captured footage that was more chilling: someone— a man— in baggy jeans and a white shirt at the edge of the frame, looming over Valerie. Valerie, crumpled on the ground, and then carried or dragged out of frame.

Dana had no clear idea of what had happened, but between the Oregon plate and the tracking heading north, she felt certain about where they were going. She chewed on “why” for a few minutes before her attention landed back on the bumper sticker, the only other clue she had. It was a sloppy modern translation of some bible verse about the shepherd’s duty to tend their flock.

She remembered from her research that Valerie’s parents were die-hard christians, members of a particularly hateful and anti-queer sect of small town protestants. Dana knew, as any trans person did, that churches like that had been known to “save” members of their congregation that had “fallen to sin,” disappearing them into a shifting network of conversion camps. Many of those camps were just christofascist covers for human trafficking, duping even the religious fanatics they purported to serve.

Dana called Lucca on their personal number.

“Back for more, sugar?” Lucca answered on the second ring.

“I need help, Lucca.” There was no playfulness in Dana’s voice.

“What’s the situation?” Lucca’s voice had dropped half an octave, and they were immediately serious.

“I think.. a.. friend’s been kidnapped.” She was keenly, bitterly aware of the irony as she spoke. “We were texting, just now, and she dropped off. Like mid-sentence. I got a location ping from her phone heading up the eighty, then the five. Then it died. Her security cameras show a stranger in her apartment, a car with jesus stickers and Oregon plates.”

Lucca was not the kind of person to do half-friendships; they were all-in or all-out. If Dana asked them to help hide a body, they wouldn’t even ask whose it was; they’d just grab their go-bag and the quicklime. They likewise didn’t ask who this friend was, or why Dana was getting location pings from her phone or video from her cameras.

“Tell me what you need.” Lucca didn’t hesitate.

“I need to find out where they are, they’ve got about 70 miles on me but if I get going now I think I can catch up. That tracking vulnerability…”

“I’ve got a better idea. Head here-”

“They’re heading north, Lucca. I can’t go to Nevad-” Dana immediately started to protest. Lucca lived three hours east, over the mountains. Three hours in the wrong direction.

Lucca cut her off, gentle but firm.

“Trust me. I’ll start on the tracking code, you can finish it when you get here.”

Dana did not argue again; she quickly changed into more rugged clothing, and started driving East.