The Bear’s Mail Order Menage

“Right, well, maybe that’s so. I’m just moving on, that’s all. I’ll be out of this area soon enough and nobody will have to worry about me anymore. Sound good?”

“No, sweetheart, I’m afraid it don’t.”

Alina’s skin went cold and clammy. She knew that voice. She had only heard it one time, but she knew it all the same. It was the man who had been in the bus station the day she had first arrived from New York. She was positive that she would recognize it for as long as she lived. It had frightened her badly because she had been so sure that he was going to hurt her then.

Never in her wildest dreams would she have imagined that six months later she would be wracked by the same fear all over again. And if she needed any confirmation that he was the man she thought he was (which she didn’t), she was about to get it.

As she began to back into the forest holding her like a pen, he climbed out of the back of the truck. The first speaker was most definitely not alone. From the sound of the snickers coming from the parts of the truck she could not see, there were three or four other guys in there waiting for her, should they actually get her into the vehicle.

“You!” she said desperately, trying anything she could think of to buy time, “I remember you. What are you doing out here in the middle of the night? I thought I had already passed your town. Actually, I didn’t think I had even headed in that direction.”

“You didn’t. The town is where I work. That don’t mean it’s where I live. Ain’t you ever heard of a commute?”

“Yes, that’s true, that’s a thing I didn’t think of.”

“Seems to me there’s a whole lot of things you didn’t think of, else you wouldn’t have wound up where you are.”

He and the other men he was with began to laugh, but there was no humor to it. There was nothing but malice and absolute threat. God, if only she could see them. The unknown adversary felt so much worse than the known one and she couldn’t stand being their sitting duck.

“What do you want with me? If I’m not in the way, not bothering anyone, can I just be on my way? I’ll be out of this area just as quickly as I can and then you won’t have to think about me again.”

The man walked towards her slowly, taking his time and enjoying the lucky situation he had stumbled upon. She felt pure adrenaline surging through her blood, every limb ready to either fight or flee. But there was nothing she could do. The space between her and this awful man was too small for her to get away and she was almost certain that any fight she put up was one she would lose.

She would still defend herself, however, regardless of how futile the effort seemed. She would kick up such a fuss that if there did happen to be a person around, any kind of person that was even marginally better than the ones she was dealing with, she would catch their attention.

The man lunged forward and made a grab for her, locking his big meaty arms around her waist and lifting her easily up into the air. He lifted her so quickly and so high that she was momentarily disoriented. It was just that everything was so black outside, the kind of black that made you feel like you were drowning in the deep nighttime ocean, only this was an ocean where there would be no bubbles to indicate which way was up. Even so, she kicked her legs out as hard as she could, thankful for every time she made fleshy contact.

The only problem was that as hard as she kicked, and she was doing so with all of her might, it didn’t seem to elicit any kind of real response. All he would do was grunt and then hoist her up even higher. Because of his impossible indifference to the beating Alina was trying to deliver, her assailant easily threw her over his shoulder. She could smell dirt and sweat and something a lot like rot that must have been building up for quite some time. This was a man who hadn’t given a lot of thought to showering. She fought him as hard as she could, even though the scent of him was filling her face and making her gag, but in the end she could not break free.

 He, with depressing ease, manhandled her into the car where she was promptly hit across the back of her head. For a moment, everything went blissfully dark and she did not have to worry about thinking anymore.

“What? What is this? Where am I?”

Alina woke up in a place she didn’t recognize after an amount of time she could not determine. At first everything was still dark, but gradually, very gradually, little bits of light began to seep into her line of sight and her eyes began to adjust to her new surroundings. She had been driven to what appeared to be a sprawling, run down house that smelled of stale smoke and dead animals. She had been thrown callously on an old stained mattress in the middle of an otherwise empty room.

She sat up carefully, looking around her with a head that was throbbing and tears in her eyes. She put her fingers gingerly to the back of her head, wincing at the searing pain that resulted from the contact. When she pulled them away she saw dark, sticky blood on her fingertips. Great. So they had definitely injured her, it was just a matter of how badly.

She had to hope that the cut wasn’t too deep because she had a feeling that, after whacking her in the back of the head, her captors weren’t going to be too keen on driving her to a hospital to get her wound stitched up. At the rate things were going, she would be lucky if they even allowed her to clean the cut out. She knew with complete certainty that they did not care at all what happened to her in the end. She could not say why it was that they had brought her here in the first place, wherever “here” was, but she knew it wasn’t coming from a place of care or concern. Whatever it was they wanted from her, once they got it she believed wholeheartedly that they would leave her in a ditch somewhere to die.