They couldn’t have left without the keys. I rubbed my eyes and wondered briefly if I was having some sort of vivid nightmare but knew I was wide awake and there had to be a simple explanation for Megan and Callie to be gone. Callie must’ve woken in the middle of the night and had to pee. Megan probably did too. The two of them must’ve gone to the restroom. My own bladder protested and told me it was a likely situation since I myself had to urinate badly.
A long low noise came from far off and my gut told me there was something very wrong going on. I turned toward the open door and stared at it. The girls wouldn’t have left it open if they’d gone to the restroom. Callie and I had pushed our beds together and she would’ve closed the door so no one could pass by and spy on our sleeping arrangements.
I pulled on my shoes and struggled to keep from falling over. For some reason I had the sensation I’d been drinking or maybe I was sick. I noticed Callie’s shoes at the foot of her bed and checked to find Megan’s also had been abandoned. Why wouldn’t they have put on their shoes? Why wouldn’t Megan have taken her phone? She surely would’ve checked the time and knew it was close to the time for us to leave and would’ve at least shut her alarm off. And Callie’s purse was here so they both had to be in the building.
I gathered the others’ shoes, retrieved my knife from Callie’s purse, and crammed Callie’s shoes, the keys, and Megan’s cell in the bag. Megan’s boots were too big to fit in the purse so I loosely knotted the laces and rested them over my shoulder with the purse. Knife in hand, I stepped out into the dimly lit hallway. My head spun and I grappled to focus as I gripped the wall to regain my balance.
I lifted the hem of my nightgown and tiptoed to the restroom closer to the end of the hallway. The door to the single toilet was cracked. Afraid to make any noise I pushed the door open slowly. The room was dark. I stepped inside and found it empty.
A resounding thud came from the far end of the hallway. I carefully checked around the corner of the doorframe, hoping I wouldn’t be spotted or I would see Megan or Callie. Instead I caught a brief glimpse of Sister Frances pulling a door shut at the end of the hallway. She was facing the door and I slipped back into the darkness of the restroom. My heart raced and my bladder felt like bursting. Under normal circumstances I would have relieved myself in the toilet. The jolt of terror cleared the fogginess from my brain. But the fear of the unknown, and the terror of not knowing if Sister Frances had seen me, kept me rooted and frozen.
I held my knife at the ready, constricted a Kegel muscle as if my life depended on it, and covered my mouth. I listened intently to the nun’s footfalls as she approached and covered my mouth as she passed the restroom, unaware I was standing in the darkness. After she was out of eyesight I pressed myself against the far wall and listened.
About ten seconds passed. Ten seconds that felt like an eternity. And then hurried footsteps and Sister Frances bolted past the restroom door, heading back in the direction she’d come from.
My mind raced and in a split second I knew the girls were wherever she was running toward like a bat out of hell. I didn’t have time to think or question myself. I couldn’t let the rules of a normal world, a world that no longer existed, stop me from doing whatever it was that needed done to get me and Callie to safety. And surely there was no safety here.
I grabbed the hem of my nightgown again to keep from tripping and bolted after her. I met up with her as she opened the door and took a couple steps down. She spun in a flurry of robes and was about to shut the door but I put my hand out to catch it and raised my knife with a trembling hand. I pointed the blade directly at her face as a muffled scream came up from the bowels of whatever was at the end of the spiral, stone stairwell below.
Sister Frances stared at me in terror and I noticed an amber glass bottle in her hand along with a rag. She tried to shut the door and I pushed back with all my weight and advanced down the first step. The knife came dangerously close to her face and she pressed her back against the stone wall of the stairwell and descended a step to get away from me.
In a low growl between clenched teeth I said, “Don’t even fucking think about it or I’ll stab your fucking eyes out. Where’s Callie?”
Her flawless face contorted into a mask of rage. A man’s ecstatic voice echoed off the stone walls of the stairs and the nun nodded in the direction of the noise.
I snatched the bottle and rag from her hands and said, “Give me those,” before depositing them in the purse. I flicked the blade in front of her face, motioning down the stairs. “Move your fucking ass, you fucking cunt.”
My body was vibrating with fear and rage and I knew something very sick was happening down the stairs and I didn’t want to see it or know but I had to get Callie and we had to get out of here. It took all my willpower not to shove the Sister down the stairs and hope the fall broke her fucking neck when she began to descend the stairs. She was complicit in this. And it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know what was in the glass bottle I’d confiscated from her and why I’d felt so sick and dizzy when I woke up.
The only light in the stairwell was the light emanating from the area below. A high-powered stench of vagina and feces and unwashed bodies wafted up to assault my sense of smell as we stepped into the room. It was also at that moment the scene of what we’d stepped into set in. I grabbed Sister Frances and held the knife to her throat before anyone noticed we’d arrived.
There were four naked women bound with rope and gagged in all sorts of compromising positions, posed for easy sexual access. Three women were bound to cots. One woman was bent over a heavy wooden table, unmoving, with a pillowcase over her head. The woman on the table had blood and feces smeared around her anus and down her thighs. A couple of the women cried softly against their gags. The others seemed to either be silenced by shock or resignation. Two women were hogtied with their heads covered, lying by the far wall where Sister Catherine watched the proceedings.
A naked man covered in sweat wore a chain with a padlock around his neck. The chain ran to a rafter in the ceiling and he was fucking a brunette woman who’d been tied face down on a cot. The woman tried to twist and turn away from him as much as her restraints would allow. She screamed and cried against her gag and it took only an instant for me to recognize it was Callie.
A fury so powerful flooded through me in that moment of recognition and I was hit with a sensation I could only recount later as something akin to clairvoyance. I became calm and my hands steadied and it all happened in a slow and deliberate way without hesitation as if I were on autopilot. Essentially, I gave myself over to something larger than my puny human brain could understand. Something animalistic and instinctive. Something survivalist. Everything happened so fast that I let my body do what it knew to do without any thought and I saw it all so clearly, almost like I was a spectator.
I reached forward and grabbed Sister Frances’ forehead and pulled her head back against my shoulder and slit her throat. A hot spray of her blood shot forward and soaked my arm as she let out a wet and garbled sound. I shoved her away from me and she hit the floor with a wet smack before heaving and clutching at her throat.
Megan’s head snapped toward me. She lay face up on the cot next to Callie and was tied spread eagle. The man either was not aware or didn’t care about what happened and continued to rape Callie.
Sister Catherine let out a scream of protest I couldn’t decipher. I bolted toward the man and the nun lunged toward me, screaming. I made it to the man first and drove the knife into his back, below his shoulder blade. The blade twisted in my hand as it bounced of his ribs and slid in between them. The knife slid in all the way to the handle.