Free The Priest by Monica La Porta Page A

spend talking
to her from the safe haven of his cell. Now, it was all too sudden.
He followed the guard back to his cell, putting one foot in front
of the other automatically, so it came as another unpleasant
surprise when he realized that he was somewhere else entirely.
    “Get in,” the guard commanded him with a gun
aimed at his head.
    Mauricio thought that it was uncalled for
since the collar on his neck was already stinging painfully, and he
wasn’t even tugging at it. He climbed two steps and found himself
inside a small room, about the size of his cell, with two rows of
seats facing each other. There were two more men sitting down,
strapped to the seats and firmly shackled to the floor. His guard
pushed him into the first free spot and briskly anchored Mauricio
on the seat like the other two slaves. From the painful expression
on their faces, their collars were giving them hell, too. A
metallic shutter rolled down and walled the space where the bars
usually were.
    The room was humming. Mauricio felt the roar
vibrating under his feet and spreading though his body. The guard
sat on the opposite row facing the three slaves. She, too, strapped
her body to the seat. The roar became louder and the seats moved.
Or, was it that the whole room moved with the seats? Mauricio
didn’t have time to speculate further about what was happening
because the most excruciating pain exploded in his neck and
traveled up to the roots of his hair and down to his toes. He
couldn’t help but scream as the pain spread to his teeth.
    “Shut the collars off!” the guard yelled and
banged on the wall. A metallic sound resonated in the room. She
repeated the order twice and kept banging on the wall until someone
from the other side shouted back.
    Mauricio noticed that the pain was gone, but
his brain wasn’t responding to outside stimuli. He kept
twitching.
    “I thought you had shut them off already!” A
window on the wall opened, or more precisely, a section of the wall
went down, and the face of a woman bathed in a bright glow
appeared. Mauricio’s eyes were offended by the sudden luminosity
and he shut them tight.
    “No. That was your job, not mine,” the guard
answered. “You better hope that these slaves didn’t suffer
permanent damage. The manager at Tarin is going to demote you as
soon as she finds out,” she added, almost gleefully.
    “Why should she? Nothing happened. It was
just an oversight. Nobody died,” the woman behind the window
replied, ignoring the tone of the other.
    “Tarin’s manager doesn’t like damaged
goods,” the guard kept pressing the subject.
    Mauricio hoped that they would stop talking.
He was still in a considerable amount of pain, and the room was
moving, making him even more uncomfortable.
    “They’re still in one piece,” the sitting
woman proclaimed with a shrug and disappeared behind the
opening.
    Mauricio felt the urge to throw up. His
stomach heaved and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. In a matter
of seconds, the food he had eaten with such abandon was cast on the
floor. The man closer to Mauricio cringed and tried to move his
shackled leg away from him. The guard, whose boots had been soiled
by his breakfast binge, howled in fury.
    “Great! That’s the last thing I need today,
a carsick slave.” She slammed her right hand on the wall behind
her. “Stop the van. I need to open the door for few minutes to let
some fresh air in.”
    At her words, the roar ceased and the room
stopped moving. Mauricio raised his head and turned around in time
to see the guard standing up and pushing a button next to the
metallic shutter.
    “Much better,” she murmured under her breath
when the wall rolled up with a clattering sound and the room was
filled with bright light and crisp air.
    Mauricio wasn’t sure what he was looking at,
exactly. The quality of the light and the scent in the air were
completely different from what he was used to. When his eyes
finally focused beyond the brightness,