journey had taken. Bart had either slept or passed out. His head was thumping and there was blood crusted on his forehead and down his cheeks. The memory was vague, but at some point his body had assumed control of his brain and apparently tried to break through the walls. He was paying for it now. Bart tried to stand and failed.
From the far end of his prison box came the squeal of metal then something else, and for a moment he couldn’t identify the change. The quality of the blackness changed. Not dramatically. No one switched on a light, but there was a new duskiness to the dark, shifting from black to the deepest of greys. Particles of light were invading his atmosphere. He’d assumed the space was completely sealed. Not so. Crawling on hands and knees, he made for the wall closest to the noise.
‘Open it up,’ a man shouted. Someone answered with an accent Bart recognised as French even if he couldn’t speak the language.
He stared at the walls, as if by concentrating hard enough he would be able to see the faces that lay beyond. Were these his rescuers? His assailants? Raising one bruised and shaking hand, he paused before knocking. He had no idea how long he’d been trapped inside – days, he assumed – but already his prison felt safer than the unknown beyond. In the outside world he’d been kidnapped and removed from everything and everyone he loved. He had no idea why or by whom. He’d never expected to fall victim to such evil. Now it was all he could think about. Every face he saw would be a mask, every word a lie. He would never be able to trust anyone again.
A scraping-crunching came from one upper corner of the cell before Bart found his courage. He backed away. The first clear light pierced the gloom to reveal a scene that had him cringing with embarrassment in spite of the horrors he’d endured. A blast of fresh air only served to intensify the stench of human waste that Bart had become used to, but now he could see it. The bucket he’d been using had overflowed with the journey and the floor was awash. He held his filthy hands in front of his face. Now he could smell himself, too, and felt a desperate urge to vomit as the end of his prison was crowbarred away to the sound of ripping wood. Beyond the opening it was too bright for his eyes to focus.
‘Help me,’ he whispered.
‘Pick him up,’ a man said. Heavy boots crossed the wooden cell. Two men took an arm each in gloved hands, dragging him out into the daylight.
Bart breathed deeply, his eyes closed, feeling weak sunlight on his face and doing his best to muster some strength in his legs. His eyes were taking their time adjusting to the brightness. After a few steps, the men lowered him to the ground and he sank gratefully to his knees. An open bottle was thrust into his hands. He sniffed it, registered nothing but cold water, and swallowed the bottle in one go. A car park appeared in blurred patches. A few vans, gravel, brown grass around the edges, no buildings in sight – nothing that gave him any indication where he was. Behind him, on the back of a massive lorry, was a cargo container. He blinked, made an effort to keep down the water, and rubbed his sleeve over his eyes. Inside the container was a thick-walled wooden cell, the end wall prised off. A second bottle of water was handed to him.
‘Slowly,’ a man said. ‘Then eat.’ A loaf of bread in a tatty brown paper bag was thrown down to him. The tone and the treatment were all the confirmation needed of his status. His vision was clear now, as was his sense of smell. He stank. Not like he imagined a human who’d been incarcerated would, but like an animal. All filth and sweat, the sort of smell found in farms and abattoirs. The men around him seemed not to notice. They weren’t surprised by the state of him. Which meant they’d done it before.
He grabbed the bread, which looked like a gourmet offering compared to the box of stale snacks that had been left in the container for him. Even so, he’d consumed it all early in the journey and been left desperate for more. Once you realised what true hunger was, seizing food no matter what position you were in was more instinct than choice. As he ate, men wandered into his former home with buckets. The sound of sloshing water hit the floor and streams of filth ran out. Another brought several heavy-duty plastic cartons from the back of a van, with boxes of what must have been food supplies, similar to those he’d found.
‘I can’t go back in there,’ he told the man closest to him through a mouthful of bread. ‘Can’t do it.’
The man ignored him, and barked orders to others, tapping on his watch. Faster movement followed, guns were drawn and men approached the backs of two vans.
‘Head down,’ Bart was ordered. When his reaction time wasn’t fast enough, he was assisted with a slap to the back of his scalp.
He kept his head angled down, but his eyes up. The van doors opened slowly. The men reached in, pulling out the occupants of the vehicles. One by one, women appeared, hands tied, moving slowly, blinking at the sudden change in environment. Their faces were dirty and their clothes shabby, but they weren’t in the same dreadful state as Bart. Not yet, but then they were ushered towards the container. One woman began to cry, and it spread through them like a virus, the women either side succumbing to tears, another going straight into a wailing sound as if she had only been waiting for a prompt. Bart kept count. Four women from one van, five more from another. He hoped for their sakes that they were given several more buckets for the journey.
One woman fell to her knees, then let herself go to the floor face first, sobbing, begging in the universal language of terror and desperation. A guard gave her an order. She didn’t move. That earned her a kick. She reached out for the man’s ankle, grabbing it, pulling herself towards his feet. He leaned down, snatching a bunch of her already matted hair, wrenching her face upwards to look into his eyes. He spat, waved the gun in her face. She sobbed some more.
Bart wanted to say something. In the dim recesses of his mind he imagined a braver man, a stronger male specimen who had not been so broken by his ordeal, springing up, wrestling a gun from one of the men, shooting off a couple of bullets to show he meant business, before taking command of the situation and freeing them all. What he did was let his face fall to the dirt. What he didn’t see couldn’t hurt him. Instead, he heard all he needed. In spite of the constant mechanical noise of the previous days – he wasn’t quite sure of the time period – his ears were as alert as ever. He heard another kick, that soft whoosh of air as foot contacted stomach. More crying. Laughter. Another man’s footfall, heavy, slow, deliberate. Then the unmistakable sound of a zip being lowered. Liquid hitting skin in a constant stream. The woman let out a howl that was end-game hopelessness. The reduction to nothing more than disposable goods was complete. As Bart opened his eyes, the woman was crawling away through the dirt, following the others into the black hole that he’d just escaped. The men picked up the wooden end wall of the cell, took nails from their pockets, gathered hammers, and began to seal it up. The hammering from the outside was matched blow for blow by the sound of fists hitting the inside of the wood. Bart had time to wonder if the men had bothered to replace the batteries inside the lamp. As pathetic as it was, that tiny spark had been everything to him in the endless dark.
He looked past the man standing over him.
‘I need to pee,’ he said. ‘Where do I go?’ The bottles of water had run through him like fresh rain off dried mud.
The man pointed at the ground where Bart sat. He was going nowhere. If he needed to piss, it was right there or not at all. He did what he needed, watching as the enormous container door was swung shut. A wooden cell within a metal prison. Enough noise externally that no one would ever be heard within. He wished vaguely that he hadn’t bothered ripping his vocal chords to shreds for nothing. With one hand taking care of business, he used the other to dip into the rear pocket of his jeans, clutching his most treasured possession, loath to sacrifice it, but who knew where he might end up next? If this was his only chance to leave a note, a record of his passing, then he had no choice. He waited until all eyes were elsewhere, then dropped the photo of his father behind him in the dirt as he zipped up his jeans.
Ten minutes later and the container was gone, driven away on the back of a lorry by three of the men. Two others climbed into the unmarked white vans from which the women had disembarked, leaving one final van and a car. The women were obviously being trafficked, presumably for sexual exploitation or into slavery. What he had no understanding about whatsoever was why he was there.