Who Will You Run To?

"No," I said. And he just smiled. Then he slapped the shit out of me. I opened my mouth and sucked his dick. The next one fucked me roughly. He bit and mauled my nipples as he did. The third one fucked me and then pissed on me. The last one fucked me in the ass and I was sure that I was bleeding back there. None of them had ever treated me like that before. Then they just laughed and got back in their truck. They turned the truck around and I stopped them.

"What?" said one of them, who obviously spoke English.

"Aren't you going to take me with you?" I asked.

"Why? We're not pimps," he said. "We don't know anything about the care and feeding of whores. We can barely feed and put a roof over our own heads. We can afford to go to the whorehouse once or twice a month but that's about it."

"Well can you at least take me to the border?" I asked. He started laughing.

"What's so funny?" I asked.

"You're lucky we came along," he said. He said something to the other guys and they all laughed.

"Why am I lucky that you came along and raped me?" I asked.

"Because you were going the wrong way," he laughed. "Now instead of having to walk a hundred miles, you have to walk a hundred and twelve miles. We were on our way to the whorehouse. Now we can go home."

"Hey," I said, as they started to drive off again.

"Why were you so rough with me?" I asked. "You were never that way in the house." He just shook his head.

"If we treated you that way in the house, we'd have been beaten or killed. They don't allow anyone to mistreat the girls in that house," he laughed. "But out here on the road, we could have done anything we wanted to you, and for free. You're lucky to be alive, lady."

It wasn't my night. As the night got darker, it got colder. I was also raped again about an hour later and the men the second time around were even rougher. Suddenly I understood the expression, "Ridden like a rented mule."

I was tired bruised battered and hungry when I saw the lights of a familiar place in the distance. I started to walk even faster then. I walked through the gate and up on the porch. The two men that had been guarding the gate were stationed on the porch. They refused to let me in. They told me to go. I slumped down onto the porch and they pushed me off of it. Then I remembered the kitchen door in the rear. I walked back out of the gate and around to the back. I stacked a couple of trash cans and leaped up to the top of the wall. I shinnied and scooted myself over the top of the wall breaking several fingernails and skinning my knee in the process. I dropped heavily onto the ground and limped up the back porch and into the open kitchen door.

I was never so glad to be any place in my life. I snuck up the back stairs and found my room. I opened the door and saw the skinny little woman who'd been working in the kitchen asleep on my bed.

I was pissed. I grabbed her and dragged her off of my bed. As she awoke she started yelling at me in Spanish and scratching at me.

I heard the sound of a voice behind me and I knew it was him. I turned and glared at him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. He kept laughing as he gestured for me to follow him.

"Can't we talk in my room?" I asked.

"It's not your room anymore," he laughed. "She worked out of that room last night, so by all rights it's hers. You quit."

"What are you talking about?" I asked. He opened the door to his office and I was amazed. The office wouldn't have been out of place in any fortune 500 company. There was rich leather furniture and old wood. There were three huge banks of LED video monitors that dominated one wall. He pressed a key on the computer on his desk and they sprang to life.

"Watch this," he said. I watched myself sneaking through the house until I came to the kitchen. I'd somehow believed that I'd been stealthy and ninja like but the video showed that at least eight people had seen me sneaking through the house. None of them had cared. In short, I had escaped mostly because I wasn't being held prisoner. Then I remembered that he had given me the key.

The girl in the kitchen had "Helped me Escape," because she wanted my room. Whores make more money than cooks, a lot more.

At that moment I realized that the elephants had it over me in terms of intelligence. Perhaps the elephants don't break free, not because they don't know that they can, but because they know they're better off.

"I want my room back," I said quickly.

"Can't do it," he said. "I've been working on something lately and it came through for me. You have to have noticed that most of my customers have gotten used to you, right?" I nodded. I didn't have nearly as many customers as before.

"The draw for unusual women is still there waiting to be tapped," he said. "But you're not unusual anymore. I got two Asians and a Russian woman from a pipeline in New York. I have a deal with them where they willingly work for me for a year then they get to go to America. All I have to do is drop them off inside of the border and we're good. They know what they're coming here for, so they won't be a pain in the ass like you were. It's a win/win situation."

"But what about me?" I asked. He handed me my wallet and ID and held the door open for me. "Let me give you a bit of advice before you leave," he said. "You know which way to walk now right? It's the opposite direction from where you went before. Be careful because there aren't any signs. Stay near the road but not on it. There aren't any towns between us and the border. Most of the people in town here work for the marijuana growers so they're very suspicious. You're lucky to be alive. If a truck or car passes you, you're going to be raped and maybe killed so avoid traffic. The temperatures can be over a hundred degrees in the daytime so I'd probably walk at night."

I left the house and dragged my feet every step of the way. "Fucking elephants," I thought as I headed for the road.

I hadn't gone very far when a car pulled over and two men jumped out of it. I couldn't believe they were going to rape me in broad daylight. They didn't. One of them held me while another one pressed a cloth over my mouth. I was out like a light.

When I woke up a huge dirty man was fucking me. I was in another room and this time there were other women being fucked on other beds in the same room. No one said anything to me. This time the place was not nearly as nice. Even when I did as I was told there was hardly ever any food. The men treated me a lot rougher too. Being punched and kicked was a normal occurrence.

Once, a man punched me in the mouth so hard that I lost two teeth. I had to try to find someone to try to explain that I had a burning sensation when I tried to pee. And there were drugs. I was in and out of consciousness for a lot of the time. Once I thought I was crazy because I heard someone talking and it sounded like they were speaking English. Even crazier still was the fact that the person giving all of the orders sounded like a woman.

I didn't care, I was an elephant. I didn't want to break that rope and end up somewhere worse. I think I actually turned my brain off. I just fucked anyone who came near me and ate when I could. I had a habit of calling any man I fucked, Ted.

"Oh, fuck me Ted," I screamed out every time. "Teddy, are you going to give me a baby?"

I was lost in my own little world most of the time. I my world, Ted and I had gotten married. He'd become an Engineer and after a few years I was just a housewife taking care of our kids Ted Jr. and our daughter, Spring.

One day a snatch of a conversation snapped me out of my world though. "...Been here three years," I heard. "She's so boney that she looks like she's fifty. Her teeth are missing and fucked up. It would be more merciful to put her out of her misery. No one wants to fuck her and I think she's got another dose of the clap."

"Okay, do it," said the woman's voice. "Then dump her somewhere but not in this neighborhood."

Some forgotten part of my brain realized that they were talking about me. My survival instincts kicked in as I sorted through the facts. They'd said that I'd been here for almost three years. That would make it four and a half to five years that I'd been gone. That didn't seem possible. I had to get out. But a part of me was afraid that I'd end up somewhere even worse. But shit, what could be worse than death?

I never got to find out. There was a huge splintering sound and suddenly men in riot gear were running all over the house. They took me and all of the other girls. They asked all kinds of questions that my drug addled brain couldn't answer or couldn't answer quickly enough. They looked in my eyes with a flashlight and loaded me into an ambulance.

I was in and out of consciousness for a few days. I found out later that they'd kept me sedated while they did some type of rapid chemical detox on me to clear my system of the drugs.

That was followed by six months of therapy in a rehab facility. My brain didn't work the way it was supposed to any more. I kept saying Ted. After a second six months of therapy and some retraining, I began to think again. I didn't think nearly as quickly as before but I was thinking.

For all of the time in therapy, they'd given me a name. They called me Teddy. They thought that since I was always saying Ted and Teddy that it had to be my name.

"So how are you today Teddy?" asked the shrink who was my therapist. I think he was more shocked than I was when I answered him.

"I'm pretty fucking tired of everyone calling me Teddy, when my name is Summer," I said. Things progressed petty quickly after that. I didn't remember my address or any phone numbers, but remembering my first and last names were enough for them to start searching for my family.

They were able to track down my parents and they were able to fill in some of the blanks for me. The second whorehouse, though it had been brutal was responsible for saving me. I hadn't been in Mexico. For the last three years I'd been in Texas. I'd been saved in a raid that had shut the house down.

As soon as I was able to function normally or close to it, my parents would take me home. As of yet, my parents didn't know anything about my ordeal.

Over the next few weeks we slowly bridged the gaps between us and they learned what had happened to me. Then they came to Texas for a visit.

It was strange seeing them for the first time. They seemed to have grown happier during the time that I'd been gone. I later found out that it wasn't that they were happier, just that they'd grown closer together from their shared grief over losing me.

I also noticed that there were certain topics that they wouldn't discuss with me. I was sure that my shrink was controlling what I could learn and what I couldn't. As a matter of fact, I'd noticed in therapy that my therapists, all of them, never allowed discussions on sex. I think that they thought that since I'd been forced to have sex almost daily for five years or more, talking about it might set back some of or all of the work they'd done to repair my tenuous emotional and mental stability.

Not only did we not discuss sex, we didn't talk about relationships, or love either.

But I was dying to tell my parents to have Ted call me.

A big shock for me was seeing myself. I was still as tall as ever, but I was even thinner. And I walked kind of hunched over. The long beautiful black hair that I remember Ted running his fingers through and pulling while he made love to me was long gone. In its place was a short, dull, lifeless, boyish cut mane of thinning hair. My nose looked different. The doctor told me that it had been broken and never set properly. There was also a small scar on my left jaw line. My hands trembled sometimes when I reached for things. I was told I had a limited amount of nerve damage.

A few months after I was reunited with my parents came the question, I'd been waiting for.

"Summer, Honey, do you want to come home with us?" asked my dad. I just stared at him and nodded.

My parents and I got a whole list of things I could and couldn't do. There was also a new team of doctors in Michigan to set up appointments and therapy with. I also had to fly back to Texas when the trial against the woman who'd run the house and her associates came up. I wasn't sure how much help I could be on that subject since I'd never seen her, but I was fine with it.

As soon as I got off the plane in Michigan, I wanted to track Ted down. But my parents reminded me that we had to take baby steps for everything. First I needed to get my life set up with somewhat of a regular schedule. I needed some sort of routine to give me normalcy in my life. Then I could start to establish and re-establish friendships.

For the first few days they hovered over me but then they gradually began to give me some room. One day while we were in the yard relaxing, I heard a song on the radio. It was one of those eighties bands made up of two sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson. The band was called Heart. The song was called "Who will you run to." The words cut me to the quick because they were the exact words that Ted had used when I told him I was breaking up with him.

The song and Ted had been right on the money. I'd been a fool. I'd found a new world and I'd thought I'd wanted to taste it. I had realized that my new world had been based on being drugged.

And when that new world had fallen apart, I'd had no one to run to. I had chased away the person who loved me the most.

I needed to see Ted badly. I wanted to see what his life was like. And I hoped that we could get back together. I knew that my parents were purposefully avoiding the whole subject of Ted, so I knew I'd have to do it on my own. But I got lucky. I'd run into a few of my old friends from school and although none of them knew where Ted lived, most of them were sure that he still lived in the area.

Then I heard about something that I knew Ted couldn't miss. There was a big Car rally coming up that weekend. Ted had loved his car second only to me. That Mustang had been his pride and joy. I was sure that he'd want to show it off.

That Saturday, I dressed in some jeans that weren't too terrible looking and a T-shirt. I told my mom that I was going out for a walk. I didn't actually lie. I did walk to the bus stop. And from there I took a bus to the car show.

Once I got down there it was like being in a totally different world. There were all kinds of beautiful custom cars all over everywhere. People spoke a different language there. It was festooned with terms like horsepower and torque. Then I heard a voice calling my name, tentatively.

"Summer, is that you?" she asked.

A chunky woman with glasses, walking next to a fat guy with a receding hairline was looking at me strangely.

"It's me, Beth," she said.

"You look different," I said.

"Two kids and too many cookies will do that to you," she laughed. Strangely enough the man next to her patted her on the ass.

"You're still the most beautiful woman I know," he said. "I love every single pound of you."

It seemed really weird but he meant it.

"You've uh...changed too," she said.

"Yeah I went through some stuff," I said.

"Beth, do you have any idea, of what happened to Ted?" I asked. "Please tell me that he didn't marry Lisa."

"Summer, Lisa died in a car wreck about a year after you left," she said. "And I haven't heard much about Ted, except that he's the head of Engineering for some car company. He lives in a huge house out in the boonies."

"Honey, are you talking about Ted Grant?" asked her husband. "He's going to be here. But he'll be about three blocks over, with the Mustang club. This is all Chevy stuff."

"Can we go over there?" I asked. They both shrugged and nodded.

We walked the three blocks and made conversation as we did. I didn't say too much about my experiences partly because I didn't want to shock them. But I also kept it to myself because I wanted to put my bad choices and the results of them, behind me and concentrate on my future.

We saw a lot of beautiful Ford cars and trucks and were talking about some of them when we heard the sound. You could feel the sound as much as hear it. It was a loud low growl that was almost a constant rumble.

As we looked down the street in the direction of the sound we saw them. There must've been forty or fifty Mustangs from different years in a line. They all pulled into one huge reserved parking lot.

"That's where he'll probably be," said Beth's husband whose name I didn't know. It was awkward because she called him, "Honey." I didn't think that I should.

I think I saw her first. She was parking a red Mustang convertible and there was a spot next to her. A guy tried to pull into the spot and she waved him off.

"That spot is reserved," she yelled. She looked familiar to me. She was short and the years had been kind to her. She had kind of a glow about her. She pulled a tiny young girl, who could have been her clone, out of the Mustang. She started to polish the car while the little girl stayed right next to her mother. I was sad when I thought about that. My reproductive organs had been damaged to the point where it was unlikely that I'd ever have children.

"Do you remember her?" asked Beth. "That's Melissa Wynters. Ted took up with her after you left."

"She's really hot," said Beth's husband. "I mean...her car is."

Then we heard another rumble. Even from across the street I noticed that both Melissa and her child snapped their heads in the direction of the sound.

"Daddy," said the little girl and her mother's already glowing face gained even more luminescence. It's a strange world when a girl who was probably four or five can recognize her father by his exhaust note.

As a striking Blue Mustang pulled into the parking lot, most of the other owners stopped to look at it.

"Holy shit," said Beth's husband. He let out a whistle. "That's a Boss 302 Lacuna Secca." His eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his head.

"Should we buy one, or do you just want to go and jack off over that one," asked Beth. She was still pissed over hearing her husband say that Melissa was hot.

"Do we have fifty five thousand dollars and two years on a waiting list?" he asked. "Oh wait, since they aren't going to make any more of them after this year, we'd still be out of luck."

"If we had fifty five thousand dollars, we'd probably live in a better house," said Beth. "And we certainly wouldn't..."

I could tell that the two of them were about to go for each other's throat when the door opened and a man got out of the car. It was Ted. He'd grown a little bit of a Mustache but other than that he hadn't seemingly aged at all. He walked with a confidence that he'd never had with me. He opened his arms and Melissa flowed into them. It was evident that the two of them belonged together. I don't see how anything could ever separate them, but the little girl tried. Her daddy, the man I loved, scooped her up in one arm even as he kissed her mother.

As I watched the two of them helped each other wipe down their cars. They talked to others in the parking lot too. They were obviously in some kind Mustang group. They were never very far from each other and even when near each other, they touched. I remembered the way Ted used to try to hold my hand at every turn. And it wasn't about sex or ownership. It was about love. They clearly adored each other and their child. As far as Ted and I, that ship had sailed and I was the one who'd pulled up the anchor.

I felt a tear roll down my cheek, but I had no one to blame except myself. I loved Ted still. Just thinking about him and our time together had gotten me through the worst ordeal that anyone could ever face. Maybe he hadn't come to my rescue in a physical sense. But in my mind he'd been the one I'd run to when it all fell down. My fantasies of him had been the thing that picked my world up off of the ground and I was grateful for that.