TAKEN

[5]

     Days went by and I'd already been on two more missions. More girls had joined the camp, some as little as six years old.

I observed that they kidnapped more teenage girls than boys.
The new girl, Sandra had been crying since she was brought to the camp. Mama had done everything to pacify her but she seemed inconsolable.

The wickedness of these people was something else. Who would kidnap a child and expect her to keep still?

"Ogwu!" Mama's voice snapped me out of the little courtroom in my head.  I was standing face-to-face with her in her hut.

"General has asked for you again." A whimper left my mouth and a whole basin of tears quickly flooded my face.

I'd been pimped to other men, but none of them had been half as brutal as General.

         "What are those things I see on your face?" She asked harshly.

I fell to my knees and began begging this woman." Please send me to other men but not General, please. "I even held her legs, pleading. She pulled away from me with those lines of disdain on her face.

"Well the General had requested for you, and General gets whatsoever he wants."

         "Mama, please."

She scoffed. "Why are you begging as though you didn't enjoy it?"

The rage within me couldn't be contained as I involuntarily scowled at her.

         "He raped me!" I yelled.

  Mama scoffed and twitched her lips. "So? Are you the first? Go and get ready!" Her fingers snapped, which was my cue that she was done with me. Frank dragged me back to Ifechi's hut.

I rushed into my clothes while Frank kept screaming at me to hurry up.
We passed the back way through the numerous smaller huts. Screams of women came out of those huts.

It wasn't new around here that among drugs and arms deals, Mama made prostitution her side gig, which surprisingly got the business moving.
Men of different colors, smells, height and trooped into the settlement every night and even during the day.

Frank hurried me past an open hut, a child of not more than twelve was whimpering near a very old man. I clasped my hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming.
Before I could triangulate my brain back to my mission, I found myself in the room.

The terribly-looking old man was snoring away while the girl was weeping by his side.
Rage shut off my reasoning, and I grabbed one of the empty bottles of beer and smashed it on the sleeping man's head.

Frank ran Into the room but the deed was already done. I pulled the little girl into an embrace. Her cries erupted something in my heart. She reminded me so much of my sister Jidechi, the one who died after a very short illness, reducing our number to three siblings.

Why would anyone find a twelve-year-old attractive? I held the girl as she hung onto me for dear life.

Frank was pacing the room after he'd checked on the man who hadn't moved an inch since I hit him with the bottle. "What did you do that for?" He yelled.

The guy was one of the rational men around here. He did everything diplomatically. Never truly on any side. My eyes shut as the little girl held me firmly.

          "They will kill you!" She whispered in my ears.

I nodded. "Then so be it."

If wasting one of these predators was all I'd achieved in my fifteen years on earth, then so be it!