Chapter One
The girl lay in strict stillness, trussed hand and feet, a tepid pool of water soaking the jeans that had been pulled down around one ankle and muddying her skin. She was naked from the waist down except for the cuff of the jeans still impotently clinging to her. Her brunette hair floated in the oil stained water in which she lay.
Her pink panties had been thrown across the floor, left as they were when ripped from her body. She hadn’t moved in some time and her breathing was shallow. A trickle of blood seeped from her genitalia into the puddle of water in which she lay.
Blood also pulsed from a savage would to the side of her head, a gash so vicious it would suggest to any attacker that it alone would have taken her life. The skull beneath the shattered skin had been broken, depressed by the force of the blow, or blows inflicted. But her neck was badly bruised as well, the marks of powerful fingers which had constricted her throat in an act of assurance that this was to be final.
She lay there unmoving. The puddle of water mixed with blood grew slowly but surely as she was drained.
The early morning air was cool but already contained in it a hint of the cloistering humidity which would build during the day. As the heat in the room grew with the rising of a relentless tropical sun, it drew from her more of the moisture she needed to stay alive. But she was oblivious to the rapidly deteriorating condition of her body, the blood loss, the dehydration and the shock. Mercifully for now.
As the heat built and her irredeemably damaged body pleaded for more air, she started to quiver, her breathing quickened but the rag stuffed in her mouth left only her nasal cavity as the means to provide it. Sweat built up on her skin, mixing with the blood still flowing and the muddy water. Her breathing increased in intensity in its need for volume.
When the need for oxygen became too much her body’s defence mechanisms performed the most unkind act they possibly could. They woke her up. By leaving her in peace she would have been spared the panic. She would have been spared the choking realisation that her smashed nose was only good for the provision of oxygen while she was breathing the shallow breath of coma. And they would have spared her the pain. She would have died in peace.
But nature is nothing if not indifferent. She woke with a nasal gasp and snort which just ejected a wad of blood onto the concrete floor on which her head lay in the tepid water. She fought for another breath through the blood and mucus clogging her nose and her dry rasping tongue tried in vain to force the rag from her mouth. It failed and she realised she was asphyxiating. She gagged at the dryness at the back of her throat and almost brought up the contents of her stomach which would have surely have choked her, killed her. But she managed to swallow it down, force it down against the power of her retching stomach, and concentrate again on breathing. It was as though she had plugs in her nose. The only way to draw in any air was with an agonising and energy sapping snort that provided only a part of the air her body now required.
In her panic she thrashed around in the water but her hands and feet were too tightly bound for her to free herself. And the rag in her mouth remained jammed tightly.
Air. She needed air. The dried blood in her nose would not move. It felt to her as though no more than a syringe of air was being injected with each increasingly laboured breath and through an opening no more than a needle’s width.
And now the panicked thrashing revealed in new levels of pain just how badly her body had been abused. Her panic had conspiratorially hidden from her the searing pain of a knee badly buckled in the attack.
She screamed a muffled yell through the rag in her mouth when the pain hit her and pathetically without the purchase of her hands or feet tried to drag herself instinctively away from the pain as a badly injured sportsperson will on the field. But the pain came with her the few centimetres she was able to slither her body through the shallow water. And she moaned and screamed anew. The knee was shattered and the pain as excruciating as the worst break of a leg could be.
Each scream meant new, elevated efforts to draw in the air she needed. Her chest felt like it was bulging towards bursting, building to a point where it would no more take in the meagre air supply.
Her stomach again threatened to disgorge its contents, end her breathing for good. But somehow she held it down and moved instinctively again.
She screamed and screamed, pointless and muffled, until the mercy of unconsciousness enveloped her again. Her body could bare it no more and she lay there again. Her breathing gradually returned to a level manageable though the syringe like opening in her nose. By now she was bathed in sweat, and losing more vital fluid.
Like a victim of the inquisition, respite was short lived.
Only minutes later her eyelids fluttered open again and she felt the throbbing, stabbing pain in her knee and involuntarily howled again. Sweat ran into her eyes and stung them viciously. Her need for oxygen increased again with the added activity of a body woken. She had learned a lesson from before and this time lay where she was without moving her hands tied behind her back. That simple expedient meant she could just about bear the pain. But panic was a fine line away as her breathing became more laboured and the syringe like opening in her nose refused to open further.
She tried to think instead about how she came to be here, tried to keep her mind off the breathing problem, off the pain.
She only now could realise the pain in her groin. It had been dwarfed by the pain in her knee but now she felt it with the sticky gluey sensation of the blood she was losing from her vagina.
They had said they would pound her and they did. Three of them in their American navy uniforms, with their swaggering arrogance and vicious language.
“We gunna pound your pussy, honey,” one of them had said with a leering but humourless smirk. He’d hit her across the face then. She couldn’t remember if that was the blow which broke her nose. There had been so many other punches, kicks, knees, anything to weaken her resolve, degrade her.
She knew nothing of American accents but thought his sounded like a drawl. He had said it as a sneer and remembering it she came to realise something. That she was not meant to survive the assault. They made no effort to cover their faces or that fact that they were American sailors.
Maybe they didn’t fear an Australian judicial system. Maybe in some dumb way they thought they had diplomatic immunity. No. She had heard that in briefings by American officers to their personnel, they emphasised once American personnel came ashore in a foreign country they were subject to that country’s laws just as the locals were.
But anyway she had survived. She had beaten them she told herself though the pain was no better and the breathing through her nose still very restricted. She lay perfectly still letting the water cool her and she turned her head so that the part of the rag protruding from her mouth lay in the water. Maybe trying to soak the rag in her mouth might allow water to migrate through to the back of her parched throat.
“Keep calm,” she told herself but it was an act of extreme will, extreme courage to do so. She might at any moment choke on her own vomit if she didn’t get moisture to the back of her throat. Or she might suffocate unless the blockage in her nose cleared a little or the rag could be dislodged from her mouth.
“Keep calm.” When she managed to free herself she would go straight to the authorities. Investigations would be launched. She certainly had the DNA of all three inside her, as disgusting a thought as that was. They could be identified quickly and easily. And they would see she had beaten them.
The thought then occurred. What if they came back to check. Make sure she hadn’t survived. In this situation she would be helpless again to resist. They’d make sure of it as she tried in vain to protect herself from their blows a second time. And perhaps a still living warm body might be temptation too much again and she’d endure their thrusting, their pounding as they put it, their leering comments, their encouragement of one another as they performed their violent perverted acts. They’d force her legs apart again and inflict that same savage, merciless pounding, and again they’d force her to use her mouth and strain her jaw bones and muscles as two of them help her tight and the third thrust his pelvis in her face.
No, it was too much to contemplate.
She had to get out before that happened.
She noticed then that breathing through her nose had improved imperceptively. A little of the dried blood had dislodged from her nose and she snorted it out into the water with more blood and mucus. She could finally get something resembling a breath, no more than half a breath but it was a great improvement. It was a small victory but the panic over her breathing subsided. She now just had to avoid evacuating her stomach and choking that way. But the dryness at the back of her throat was threatening at all times to drive her gorge ... she made the effort to put that thought out of her mind.
The idea that soaking the rag hanging out of her mouth had begun to pay dividends too. She felt moisture on her tongue which had been forced into the floor of her mouth. Very soon that moisture would make its way through the entire rag and wet her throat. She squeezed her mouth as tightly as she could and felt a small trickle of water around her tonsils. She sighed with relief. A bone dry throat always made her gag and possibly throw up, a certain choking death in this situation.
The pain in her shattered knee was receding to, but at times she still felt that she might pass out with the intensity of it. She had experienced episodes of blacking out and coming to immediately again during the time those animals were at her and had been unconscious and barely breathing when they left thinking she was dead.
With the easing of the pain and improved breathing she could now take a look around. From her position lying on her side, head in the water on the floor, she gained no more than a distorted and out of context view of the room. She slowly moved her body in an arc to get a sweep of the entire place. It was a depressingly dull and ageing room with literally nothing in it except a nineteen year old badly beaten girl lying in a pool of water reddened by her blood and blacked with oil.
But she was alive.
Now was the time to try to free herself, notwithstanding the pain that she was likely to endure. Her hands were bound behind her back and she needed firstly to slip her legs through the loop of her arms to enable her to work with them to free herself. The ligatures were of a common form of nylon rope and their soaking in water had had the effect of tightening them. But first things first, manipulate her hands to the front.
Still lying on her side she bent her legs tentatively but was unready for the explosion of pain from the knee and groaned falling back into the semi-foetal position of before. A wave of nausea swept over her and again she feared vomiting with the rag still plugged in her mouth.
She lay there breathing heavily, gulping down her gorge and sweating profusely. She would have to bend the leg incrementally before she could slip both through the loop of her bound arms. She rested and tried again. Slowly. Slowly.
The gurgling noise suddenly began. Softly at first, like water trickling over the edge of a full bucket. She paid little attention as she brought the damaged knee up slowly, gritting her teeth against the pain. She could see the knee properly now. It was swollen, bruised and badly misshapen where the brute called Cal had kicked it laterally. She had screamed with an agony she had never before experienced, collapsing to the ground.
Another thought then crossed her mind.
She had screamed then yet they hadn’t yet bothered to stuff her mouth with the gag.
Why? Perhaps because wherever they had taken her was so isolated they were confident no-one would hear her screams. The thought made her shudder and forced her to take a closer look at the room.
Grey concrete with broad vertical streaks here and there of rust where old pipes ran with water staining the walls. And there were discoloured holes around the base of the walls as though the concrete had been dissolved over time. One closed old steel covered door with a rusting lock. And a stench wafting into the room from those holes, an odour of rotting vegetation, sea water and mud.
She started now to notice that odour increasing as the gurgle of the water outside did so too. What did that mean?
A new fear took hold and she felt a return to panic.
What if this room was below the high tide mark. What would that mean? The room filling up with water while she struggled to free herself from an impossible binding with damaged leg, the slightest movement of which meant a new experience in the depths of pain.
Water started then to run into the room from the holes in the deteriorating concrete at the base of the walls and she knew she was right. They hadn’t cared if she was no yet dead. The tide would ensure that outcome. And the reason for the gag became obvious. She would drown quicker, sooner, in a greater panic.
Breaking out in a panicked sweat, she thrust the damaged knee upwards in another attempt to slip her legs through the loop of her arms. This time she almost made it but the busted knee could bend only so far. It was mutilated and swollen to the point it could only move mechanically so far. It was impossible to get her legs though.
The tide was rushing in now and she could not even sit up and certainly not get to her feet. Then it was rushing around her body, gurgling quickly about her, soaking what clothes she had on and chilling her.
She tried to sit but the combination of hands bound behind he and a knee incapacitated to the point of uselessness meant she was soon inundated.
As the water rose, so did she to some extent at least. With a little effort at treading water, moving her body as a fish would, she could in a fashion keep her head above the rapidly rising water. It was rushing in now and not only from the deteriorated concrete at the base of the walls, but through holes higher up. The room was filling up.
Panicking properly now for the first time she tried again to scream but the rag was too tightly jammed in her mouth. What little air she could get was via a smashed and swollen nose and as she started to float above the floor it became increasingly difficult to keep her nose out of the water.
The water was a torrent as the tide raced in and she knew then, suddenly that she was going to drown.
She writhed harder, ignoring the pain in her leg.
But the roof was coming closer and as the water rose and she with it, her nose alternatively submerged and then when she had the strength she thrust it above the surface. She bobbed desperately for survival. She was floating on her back, using the last of her strength to lift her nose above the surface until in her last attempt, her nose hit the concrete ceiling of the room. The two centimetres of remaining space took only seconds to fill.
She held her breath as long as she could, thrashing in her panic but knowing this was death. Eventually she involuntarily had to take a breath. The inrush was not air, but water. She filled her lungs and moments latter blacked out, her chest bursting. She died two minutes later.
The tide eventually receded leaving a water soaked corpse of a young ravaged woman lying on a wet and old concrete floor. She would be missed by her roommate that night but police would not be contacted until the following evening. The dead lady sometimes stayed with friends or met someone new at one of the nightclubs in Darwin and the flame of a new romance might flare but die the next morning.
But when her flatmate had not heard from her by the next evening, and she hadn’t shown up for work that day, good time girl or not, they knew something was wrong. The police were not so convinced and waited another day before starting some half hearted enquiries.
