Chapter 42: Auction
The light switched on in the room and Cam barely had a couple minutes to blink before she was shaken roughly, presumably to wake her. She'd been trying to reach Charlie on the dreampaths, to let him know that she had Shana, but her need to stay partially awake and vigilant had interfered with her ability to do that, and she had slipped into deep sleep without realizing it. She cursed herself for her inattention as she waited, docile, for them to unlock the chains on her wrists and free her arms.
Soft. I'm getting soft. I've forgotten all those lessons I learned when I was fifteen. Stay vigilant. Do whatever they tell you. Be perfect, or they win. And if I lose, this time, it's not going to be just me who loses, Shana will lose too. And that is unacceptable. I made a promise to Snake Eyes—I will get her out. Whatever it costs me, I will get her out.
She followed the guard meekly into the hallway, where they were met by another guard with a wheeled cart carrying plastic bowls of rice swimming in thin broth. Her stomach rumbled hungrily, but she kept her eyes lowered, didn't react. Control, her mind told her. Control. Be the perfect slave.
"You." The guard pushed her forward until she was standing next to the cart. "You'll take this in to them." She obediently pushed the cart forward, through the door, into the next room.
The guards unlocked the chains for the other four women and Cam quietly handed them their bowls. The guard, however, shook his head when she stopped in front of Shana. "Not that one. Don't leave that one's hands free. Take the gag out and feed her."
Cam wanted to shout at him. From the looks of it, Shana was just on the edge of a drug haze; past the initial sleepiness, she was just now coming out of the drugged sleep, eyes blinking, her mind still fuzzy. As Cam released the air from Shana's inflatable gag and pulled it out, then untied the thongs that held the metal ring behind her teeth, she realized that they had carefully timed the doses given so that Shana would not be drugged-sleepy when they got her to the auction block but would still be uncoordinated and therefore easy to control.
"Shana. Shana, food." She gently patted Shana's left cheek. Shana moaned, her eyelids fluttering; her glazed eyes studied Cam for a moment without recognition, then her mouth opened.
Cam patiently fed Shana the watery soup in small bites; careful not to spill anything and careful not to give her friend so much at one time that she would choke. Other than the drugs, Shana didn't appear to be harmed, and she didn't seem to be in much pain at the moment, but Cam couldn't be certain that she didn't have non-fatal injuries under the skin; with the drugs running rampant through her system, it was entirely likely that Shana wasn't feeling any pain at all. She thought, briefly, about using sign language to try to communicate, but with Shana drugged to the gills she might not recognize it—and even if she did, she might not have the mental faculty to know to stay silent. They hadn't asked, not yet, but eventually someone was going to ask how they knew each other and Cam knew, with bone-deep certainty, that if they knew she and Shana were both active-duty US Army officers, neither one of them was going to see another minute. Death would be instantaneous.
She finished giving Shana the last of the food in the bowl silently as she pondered various alternatives. Finally she settled on a cover story; they had been childhood friends, when she was growing up in New York. She knew Shana had grown up in Georgia, but was certain she knew enough about the New York area from being posted at Joe Base that she could pass for a resident of the city. She'd have to keep an eye out for an opportunity to tell Shana the cover story, urge her to stick with it. If you were going to have to lie, keep it simple enough that you could still remember details even if you were being tortured, and the best way to keep it simple was to make it partially true so that you didn't have to make up too many details.
The guards were watching both of them carefully, so Cam had no way to tell Shana of her intentions by the time she finished giving the redhead the last spoonful of broth. As she put the plastic bowl back on the cart, the guard shoved the ring gag back in Shana's mouth and tied it behind her teeth, then pushed the inflatable into the ring and inflated it again. Shana gave an inarticulate sound of protest but by the time Cam turned around, she was slipping back in the drugged haze again.
The guards unchained one of the women, yanking her up roughly, then one held her chain as the other grabbed Cam's wrist and chained her roughly to the wall beside Shana. Then they left, tugging the other woman with them, and Cam was, finally, alone with Shana.
They had only confined one wrist; they hadn't chained the other, and she took advantage of it now to stretch her arm out as far as she could go and touch Shana's arm. "Shana," she said quietly. When Shana didn't respond, she said, louder, "Shana!"
Shana's eyelids fluttered open, and she looked blearily at Cam. Cam quietly tapped her fingers against Shana's arm in sign language. :Don't talk aloud. I don't want them hearing us:
Shana's fingers moved, sluggishly, slowly, but the sign language was unmistakable. :Drugged…can't focus…:
:I know. Look, we probably don't have much time until they come back. If anyone asks you how we know each other, we both grew up in New York:
A long moment while Shana's brow furrowed, her drug-fogged mind trying to absorb what Cam was saying. :Grew…up…New…York. Okay:
Cam hesitated over her next words. She wanted so badly to tell Shana that they would be rescued, that she was wearing a tracer and the Joes knew where she was and as long as she could stay with Shana, it would all be okay, but she didn't know if Shana would understand the 'tracer' reference, or if she would accidentally let slip the fact that Cam had a tracer during one of her drugged fits. No one was questioning her now while she was drugged, but it didn't mean that someone wasn't going to think of it eventually, so she settled for a simple command. She'd explain to Shana later when Shana was lucid and calm and rational, not fogged by drugs. :We have to stay together. No matter what. We have to stay together. I'll fight, Shana. You have to fight too:
:Fight. Okay: And then the door opened, and the guards came in.
"Stupid idiot!" One of them saw Cam reaching for Shana's hand and ran across the room to grab her arm. "Tie both hands down!"
"She's tiny. Can't do nobody no harm." The other guard snickered. "Besides, she seems to have a thing for the redhead." But the first guard secured Cam's free wrist to the wall, then got the second woman unchained and they took her out.
An unknown time later, they returned. "Didn't sell that one for as much as we hoped."
"Yeah, well, why bid on the Spanish and Africans when you can have the Testarossa? I guarantee you she's who they're waiting for, white skin, red hair, green eyes…she's the main reason all those owners are sitting out there. That last African slut we dragged out there hardly raised an eyebrow."
"I guarantee you that redhead will raise them." The guards snickered as they left the room with the fourth woman, another African.
And then they came back empty handed, and Cam screamed and went wild as they reached for the chins on Shana's wrists. "Shana! SHANA!"
Shana must have remembered Cam's signed directives…because she started to fight them, her screams for Cam lost in the gag still stuffed into her mouth, but her intention was obvious as she broke away from the guards and ran to Cam, wrapping her arms around the younger girl. Then lashing out with her feet when they tried to drag her away. Cam screamed too, kicking and fighting.
"Enough!" One guard finally panted. "Jesus, bring them both, we can't keep the bidders waiting!"
They unchained Cam's wrists from the wall and locked them together in front of her, then did the same to Shana. One stepped forward, leading Shana, but Shana refused to move until the second guard started moving too, bringing Cam with him. They stumbled down a long, dimly-lit hallway that terminated, quite suddenly, in a massive rusty iron door, and then the guard holding Shana's chain pushed the door open and led her through it. Cam's guard followed.
Both women stood blinking in the almost painfully-bright light. They were standing at the far end of one room, a floodlight on a pole rigged to shine directly down on a rough wooden warehouse pallet sitting on the floor. Even as their eyes tried to adjust, Shana's guard removed the gag, then gave her chain a hard jerk, yanking her forward off her feet and across the floor toward the wooden 'auction block'.
"Cam!" her eyes were still glazed from the drugs but she was definitely aware. She struggled, yanking back against the chain, digging her heels into the floor and trying to avoid being dragged onto the auction platform.
From out of nowhere a guard they hadn't seen before ran up with a cattle prod, and even as Cam screamed Shana's name, the end of it contacted Shana's right shoulder blade. She screamed in agony, her body convulsing, legs suddenly weak, but she never stopped fighting, not even when they shocked her again. Cam grabbed the chain around her wrists in her hands then gave a huge yank and jerked the chain from her own guard's grip, and ran to Shana, weakly convulsing on the concrete floor, crying in agony. She dropped to her knees beside the redhead, her own head dropping as she caressed Shana's shoulder with her still-bound hands, trying to help her calm down after the two punishing shocks she'd just taken.
That was when the guard with the cattle prod hit her with the electricity.
She heard herself scream as she fell forward over Shana's body, twitching. They had gotten her at the base of her spine, the small of her back where the nerves were closest to the skin, and dear God, it wasn't the first time she'd ever been hit with a cattle prod but it had been so damn long that she'd forgotten just now much the things hurt! She writhed, howling.
Beside her, Shana cried her name weakly and threw her arms out to protect Cam just as the prod came down to deliver another shock. The electricity hit the shackles around Shana's wrists instead.
Screaming, Absolute white-hot agony. Like someone was cutting her hands off, every nerve in her hands, wrists, and arms firing off at once, she heard a high pitched screaming and didn't realize it was herself until she heard Cam sob, "Shana…oh God, Shana…"
Shan couldn't speak, couldn't respond. Couldn't even coordinate her movement enough to protest as the guard who'd dragged her to the auction block tried to drag her up to complete the journey. That was when Cam lashed out, flicking the chain still wrapped around her wrist shackles across the guard's face. He stumbled back, howling as blood gushed from his nose, and the next second Cam was screaming as she was hit by the cattle prod again, but she was clawing her way across the floor, trying to reach Shana.
"Stop," came a cool voice from the front row, and Cam raised tear-blinded eyes to see who'd spoken. Tall, thin, blue eyes, sandy hair, a spotless perfectly-tailored suit-he looked absolutely normal except for the wheelchair he was sitting in.
"I have never seen such spirit from any slave here. These two must be remarkable indeed. Are you that determined to stay together?"
"We're friends. We knew each other growing up." Cam said defiantly, praying he would swallow the lie. "We were practically sisters."
"Well. Then." The man looked at the guards, smiled thinly, a cold, slightly reptilian smile that chilled Cam clear down to the bone. "Since the scarred one is just so much damaged meat, why not allow the two of them to stay together? Sell them together. It might even be amusing to pit these two…sisters…against each other." He turned to the small audience, mostly well-dressed men, behind him. "Am I right?"
A chorus of yes's answered the man, and then one man, just behind the wheelchair-bound suit, ventured, "Such spirit. It would indeed be a challenge to break them. I bid twenty five thousand euros for both!"
"Thirty thousand!"
"Forty thousand!"
"Forty-five thousand!"
The man in the wheelchair spoke more quietly than the other bidders, but his voce could still be heard. "Fifty thousand."
The first man who had spoken glared at him. "You always bid on the best ones, Damien. Leave some of the good stuff for us. Sixty thousand!"
"Seventy-five thousand." The man called 'Damien' didn't bat an eyelash; his cool demeanor didn't crack a bit.
"Eighty thousand!"
"Ninety."
As the bidding war went on behind them Cam dragged herself painfully to her knees. Every muscle and nerve in her body was firing at once, and she shook uncontrollably from the electrical impulses that still sizzled down her nerves, but she managed to crawl to Shana's side. Shana managed to sit up, clinging to Cam's arm, and the two women leaned against each other, still sobbing a little as they hugged, able to finally touch each other, hug each other, take comfort in the fact that they weren't going through this alone.
The man called Damien studied both of them intently; Cam hugged Shana tighter and glared at him. She didn't like him; there was something in him that reminded her too much of her uncle, something cold and cruel and merciless, and she fervently hoped that he wouldn't be the ones to buy them. She didn't like the way he looked at Shana. Didn't like the way he was looking at her.
As if he'd read her mind, a cold, cruel smile bloomed across his thin lips, and he said coolly into a momentary silence as the bidding faltered, "Two hundred and fifty thousand. American dollars, not Euros."
Silence descended in the auction room; neither Shana nor Cam could dare breathe. That was an astronomical sum of money, you could buy a house with that much money, and here he was buying two girls?
The auctioneer, who had been tracking the bids, cleared his throat nervously. "Master Damien. Sir. Are you sure…?"
"Yes, I am sure! Two hundred and fifty thousand American dollars! That is exactly what I said, and I mean what I say!" Damien snapped imperiously.
"Uh…uh,.. two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Okay, sold to Master Damien Kennedy for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" The auctioneer cleared his throat. "Uh, sir, if you would like to step over here we can conclude the transaction—"
"Just a moment." Kennedy held up a hand. "I came here out of curiosity; I didn't come here expecting to buy a slave, much less two of them. You will have to warehouse them here for a couple of days while I make arrangements to take them with me. I will pay the storage and warehousing fees, but I want to lay some specific rules for your guards. One. They are now mine. No one is to hurt them sexually. I don't want the Testarossa even touched; if she refuses to do something, hurt the scarred one. The scarred one you can hurt as much as you need to in order to get the Testarossa to comply." He rolled his wheelchair up next to Shana and grabbed a handful of her hair, "Do you hear me, slave? I am allowing you and your sister to stay together but if you step out of line, she will pay the price, and since she was free, I don't care if she dies. If you don't want her to die you'll obey the guards. Do you understand?"
Shana nodded weakly, and Kennedy studied her for a moment before he allowed her head to fall back onto Cam's shoulder. "She is drugged. Did she come in addicted or did you give her drugs to keep her compliant?"
"She came in drugged and dependent. We continued it because it was easier to handle her that way." The guard sounded almost apologetic.
"Give her maintenance doses of whatever you've been giving her so far. Don't raise it, don't lower it. I will take care of any dependency issues she may have when I get her home. Now take her back to wherever it is you've been holding her and let me sign the paperwork."