Free The Missionary by Jack Wilder

arms around front and shook them to erase the numbness. Blood sprayed from her cut palm, dotting her captor’s face.
    He reared back, wiping at his face and cursing in Filipino. “Hey, watch it, bitch,” he said in English. He slapped her with his empty hand, knocking her sideways. “I don’t want your blood on me.”
    Wren couldn’t sob, couldn’t breathe. Pain was a vise clamped around her ribs and lungs as her cracked rib protested the way she’d slammed into the ground. Her palm stung as dirt caked on the open cut, but that was a distant twinge in comparison to the agony of her ribs.  
    She felt her feet being freed, and then an iron-hard hand latched around her arm, just beneath her armpit, and yanked her to her feet. Her arm socket joined the chorus of aches, but she ignored it, focusing on remaining upright and drawing air into her lungs. Tears leaked down her cheeks, but she kept silent. She forced one foot in front of the other, up the stairs and into relative brightness. She squinted. It was still dark, she realized, but after the total darkness of the pit she’d been in, any light was blinding. He mounted the stairs behind her, pushing her into a corner and lowering the trapdoor, laying a thick square of cast-off carpeting to hide it.  
    Around her, the walls were bare, the roof low, not even two feet over her head. There was no window, nothing except a tiny card table in one corner with two folding chairs, an electric camp lantern shedding blue-white light. Each chair held a man, both short but muscular Filipinos, one with a nasty scar pulling his left eye down. They both had guns across their laps, black machine guns with tan wood stocks, the kind she saw terrorists on the news holding, and army men from third-world countries. The one with the scarred face had a cigarette pinched in the corner of his mouth, the smoke curling around his nose and narrowed eyes. They both watched her in silence, until the scarred one spoke in Filipino, gesturing at Wren with the barrel of his gun. It sounded like a question, judging by the tone of his voice.
    Her captor responded with a single syllable, a harsh negation. He pushed Wren by the center of her back, sending her stumbling toward a doorway. Each step made her ribs scream and stole her breath, but she forced herself to walk anyway, gasping and trying not to cry, trying to keep her wits about her. She was still dizzy and foggy from whatever drug he’d given her, and she felt a hot, needy ache in her belly, deep down. A kind of craving, a desperation. For what, she didn’t know. For something. She needed it, her body needed it.  
    She moved through another room, this one empty but for a stained blue and white mattress on the ground, and then another one identical to the last, except a Chinese girl (or was she Japanese? Wren didn’t know) lay on the mattress, naked butexcept for dirty white underwear. Her ribs showed, expanding as she drew a deep breath and depressed the plunger of a needle stuck into her forearm. A blissful expression swept over her features as Wren watched, and then the needle went slack, tumbling to the mattress beside her. A man Wren hadn’t noticed scooped up the syringe and vanished, nodding at Wren’s captor.  
    Through another room, this one larger, wider, with a higher ceiling. Couches lined three walls, an ancient TV flickering on the fourth wall. Except for the TV, she hadn’t seen any other sign of electricity. A clear plastic liter bottle hung down from a hole in the ceiling, fastened in place, filled with water. Sunlight refracted through the water in the bottle, shedding light into the room.  
    Wren had assumed it was nighttime, since every room she’d been in was dark or dimly light, but now she realized it was daytime, there were simply no windows to let it natural light.
    In the center of the room was a long, low table littered with bottles of alcohol, ashtrays, needles, packets of various kinds of drugs, bongs, pipes,