Chapter 17
The sounds of chaos rattled the communal cell, but Deb hardly noticed. There was gunfire and explosions going off all around them, but since the abduction of her baby, everything around her seemed artificial.
The prisoners she shared the space with were reacting more than enough for all of them. They screamed and rattled the chain-link walls, trying desperately to escape their confinement lest a stray bullet or explosion find them with nowhere to go.
But Deb didn’t care about any of that. She simply sat in the corner of the cell, in the dirt, with her back against the chain link.
Her eyes were wide, and her face expressionless as she stared off into the distance.
The sounds of chaotic battle might as well have been going on in her imagination for all the care she gave it.
At the moment, the thought of a bullet ripping into her couldn’t match the pain she already felt.
The pain of seeing her child ripped away from her, of hearing his screams of terror, and being completely powerless to save him.
That was a hellish pain that made all other pain seem like nothing at all.
And she was already feeling a lot of pain.
The beating she had endured at the hands of those soldiers left her body feeling harried and spent.
Her ribs ached with stabbing pain with every labored breath she took.
She could still taste blood in her mouth, still feel the pounding ache of her head as her brain pressed against her skull in throbbing agony.
But all of it was meaningless. It might as well have not existed at all.
Because in this chaotic maelstrom of pain and panic that surrounded her, all Deb could think about was the horrid unfairness of it all.
All she could hear were Jimmy’s cries. All she could see was his face, so full of terror as those soldiers pulled him from her arms.
She had been angry, so very angry at this turn of events.
She had wanted to tear this cage down with her bare hands.
She had wanted to find the soldiers who had taken her child and rip out their throats.
She had wanted to tear the entire world to shreds stone by stone and would if that was what it took to find her baby again.
But that anger was fleeting. It soon gave way to an even more debilitating emotion. Complete and utter despair. A black void of darkness so all-encompassing that Deb felt as though she could never pull herself out of it. She felt as though she would never even want to.
It was easier to just sink into it because with the sorrow came a chilling numbness that somehow made the pain of the moment feel just a little bit better.
Deb knew this was surrender and that in her heart of hearts, she was better than that.
But she wasn’t sure she even had a heart to speak of anymore.
So, she sank into the darkness, unable to move, unable to speak, unable even to cry. It was as though her tears had simply dried up and expired, leaving her an empty shell of numbed-out misery that would feel the pain of this horrifying experience for the rest of her days.
And part of her wished those days would be short.
Who knew what those soldiers were doing with the children they abducted?
Who could fathom the depths of cruelty and malice it would take to commit such an atrocity?
And in the souls of those who were depraved enough to rip a child from its mother’s arms, what more might they be capable of?
These uncertain flashes of a potentially horrifying future were the only moments where Deb felt anything.
That fear was a stab in the heart every time she considered the possibilities.
In those moments, she was almost able to rouse enough will to stand, to fight, to try to find some way out of this, if only to hold her baby for one more precious second.
But those moments were fleeting, and the darkness that surrounded her heart and mind would consume Deb once more with renewed vigor, dragging her down into the depths of crushing depression and leaning on her with all of its force to keep her there, drowning in the shadows of despair.
The world was cold, cruel, and wicked. It was the antithesis of what her father had preached.
All of his talk of love, acceptance, and kindness had been so incredibly na?ve.
It was maddening to even think about. She hated him more than a little bit at that moment, that kind man who had raised her and cared for her, who had left her everything he had to give.
She tried to focus on all of the good he did—the love he had shown and the gentleness he embodied on a daily basis.
But all she could see was the here and now.
All she could feel was the pain and loss eating her alive from the inside.
It was the compassion he had instilled in her that had led her to try to help that man in the street.
It was that compassion that led to her arrest and that compassion that led to the single most horrifying and traumatic experience in her life.
She blamed her compassion and naivete for her current predicament, and all of those things were birthed into existence by her father and his view of the world.
“You were wrong, Daddy,” she whispered, though no one around her could hear the sound of her voice over the bursts of gunfire and booming explosions that were tearing the camp apart.