Helpless under the guns of their kidnappers, Denise and her three friends, Shannon, Megan and Katy, were marched off the wooded path into the isolated clearing to which they had been led. The four teens had been stripped completely naked. Their hands were pulled behind their backs, lashed together at the wrists with rope. More short lengths hobbled their feet. Finally, each girl had a ballgag strapped tightly between her teeth.
The clearing held two buildings. The first was a small, single story cabin of rough logs. Beside it was a small shed made of rusty sheet metal. It was to this second structure the captives were ordered, stumbling and whimpering through their gags in terror. The shed had no windows and only a single metal door at the front, secured with a large and sturdy looking padlock. While her partner kept the girls covered with their guns, Blondie fished out a key and unlocked it.
“Mmpphh!” The opening of the door was accompanied by a chorus of muffled moans of distress from inside. As they were herded through it, the girls couldn’t make out the source at first. The shed was unlit, save the thin sliver of light that came through the open door, but after a moment their eyes started to adjust to the gloom and they moaned in horror at the sight before them.
The shed’s interior was a single room with no furniture, nothing at all, besides the sheet metal walls and roof. The floor was a solid slab of dusty concrete. Waiting for them inside was a group of about eight people, men and women. They were spaced around the perimeter of the shed in two distinct groups.
The first, directly ahead of the door, consisted of four teens, two boys and two girls. One of the girls was a blonde, the other a brunette. Both the guys were dark haired. To their right was another group of four, likely a family, consisting of a man in his mid-forties, tanned and muscular with short blonde hair, a woman a few years younger than him with shoulder length sandy brown hair and two girls in their late teens, both blondes.
All of the captives had been stripped naked. Each sported a ballgag strapped tight in their mouths and ropes binding their wrists and ankles. They sat or knelt a little ways away from the walls, looking miserable. Around each person’s neck was a leather collar, locked on with a small padlock. Running from a ring on the front of it was a chain, some three or four feet long. The other end of it was fixed to rings bolted to the wall a foot or so off the ground.
The four newcomers were lined up along a free section of wall and ordered to kneel. Baldy disappeared for a moment and returned with four sets of collars and chains for the four teens. In short order, the girls were tethered to the wall of the shed like the rest of the captives.
“Don’t go anywhere!” Baldy teased, clipping the final padlock closed. “We’ll be back soon, I promise!” The two kidnappers laughed, savoring their victim’s distressed moans. They filed out through the door, shutting it behind them. Inside, the captives heard the sound of the heavy padlock being clicked shut once more, trapping them in the makeshift dungeon. With the door shut, the inside was almost completely dark, only faint bits of light slipping through cracks around the doors or between the roof and walls.
Left to themselves, there was nothing the girls could do but wait until their captors returned. Struggling was pointless, they knew. Even if their ropes hadn’t been tied fiendishly tight, the girls were chained to the wall by their collars. And if by some miracle they got free of that, they were still trapped in the locked shed. Despite its ramshackle appearance, it still looked sturdy enough to hold them easily.
After a few, awkward attempts, the girls found it was possible to communicate, to an extent, with their fellow captives. They had to speak slowly, carefully enunciating around the rubber balls filling their mouths, but within a short time they were able to discover the identities of the other prisoners.
The two teenage boys were Blake Jones and Mark Smith, both 19 years old and seniors at the local high school. They had planned a weekend drive up to the mountains to spend the day in the park with their respective girlfriends; Catherine Dawson, age 19 and Valerie Adams, age 18. Instead, they had been waylaid, much the same way Denise and her friends had been: forced from their car at gunpoint, stripped, bound and gagged and brought here by the trio of kidnappers.
The family were the Henderson's: Alan, his wife Wendy and their two daughters: Becky, age 19 and Nancy, age 18. They had just wrapped up their annual family camping trip and were driving back down the mountain when their car developed a sudden flat. Mr. Henderson had got out and was changing the flat when someone hit him on the head from behind. When he came to, he found his family being held at gunpoint. The Henderson's were then forced to march off the road and all four bound and led back here.
As to the reason for their capture, all three groups were in grim agreement. It was by now quite obvious to all that they had fallen into the hands of a band of ruthless slavers. If they couldn’t find some way of escaping here, barring a miraculous rescue, they would soon be trafficked abroad and sold into the miserable life of an abject bondage slave. Unfortunately, given how careful and methodical their abductors had behaved so far, how ruthless they had been in capturing and binding them, there didn’t seem much of a chance at all.
As the minutes turned into hours, the captives sank into a quiet, wretched stupor. It soon became swelteringly hot in the metal shed. The girls quickly discovered why their fellow captives sat well clear of the walls. Baking in the hot summer sun, the bare sheet metal was hot enough to burn whatever bit of bare skin touched it. Not that avoiding it spared them much. The closed, dark space had next to no ventilation and it was soon like an oven inside. The four sweating captives wondered if they would be cooked to death before their abductors had a chance to sell them.
A few hours after they had left, the slavers returned, bringing some relief for their miserable prisoners. The sound of the key in the padlock roused the occupants of the dungeon from their torpor and they let out another chorus of muffled pleas and moans as the door swung open, bringing a welcome gust of cool, fresh air from the outside. It also left them blinking in the brilliance of the late afternoon sun, unbearably bright after they had been sitting in darkness for so long. Through the spots that danced in their vision, they saw bound figures stumbling into the shed.
While the girls had been suffering in their prison, their captors had been busy. Another car had been hijacked, the luckless occupants taken prisoner. At the head was a tall, curvy redhead in her 30s. She was followed a moment later by a younger woman who closely resembled the first, with shorter auburn curls, then a boy a bit younger with dark, reddish brown hair and a girl about the same age, with reddish brown pigtails. The four had been stripped, gagged, had their hands tied behind their backs and their ankles hobbled. They looked around at the other captives with expressions of stunned disbelief.
Once they had been collared and chained to the wall of the cell, the slavers saw to the other captives. Baldy left the shed a moment and returned, carrying a metal pail filled with water and a metal dipper. One at a time, each captive had their gag removed and were given a couple ladlefuls of water. It was lukewarm and had an odd taste, probably from a well rather than a tap, but as hot and sweaty as they were, those few mouthfuls were an immense relief to the prisoners, even if they were promptly regagged as soon as they’d drank. When the last of the teens had been watered, the slavers left, locking the shed up as they went.
Once again, the captives were left alone to their misery. The newcomers “mmpphh’d” to one another and to their fellow prisoners and introductions were awkwardly made. They were the Michael's. The mother’s name was Helen, age 38, Paige, age 20, her eldest daughter, then Rebecca and Josh both recently turned 18. They’d been taking a road trip, planning to visit a few colleges Paige had been accepted to before she decided which one to attend that coming fall. Unfortunately, they’d made the fatal decision to make a detour and break up the long, monotonous journey with a day of hiking which had brought them into the slaver’s trap and this hellhole.
Meanwhile, the captives imagined, the slavers had returned to the side of the road, to await their next victim. Having experienced it firsthand, they could picture the scene in their minds: the lookout, a mile or two down the road, hidden in some hunter’s blind scans cars as they pass, deciding if the occupants meet the slaver’s criteria. When such a car comes by, he radios his confederates.
The car continues, occupants blissfully unaware of the trap being prepared for them up the road. Caltrops are thrown out on the roadway, unseen around a bend. The car rolls over them, one finding a wheel. It flattens and the driver pulls over and stops. Suddenly, the two slavers spring from their hiding places, brandishing guns. The stunned occupants are forced out of the car and marched away from the road, out of sight. The whole thing takes scant minutes. Anyone coming along after sees only a car abandoned on the side of the road with a flat tire.
The slavers, meanwhile, hustle their latest victims to the clearing where the awful order is given: strip! One at a time, the captives undress, faces red with shame, tears in their eyes. Then the ropes and gags come out. Hands are pulled behind backs and lashed together at the wrists, ballgags jammed roughly between lips and strapped tight. Helpless, the prisoners begin the long march to the slavers’ base of operations and the shed…
This sequence of events, imagined, soon proved real. After a couple more hours had passed, the shed door was unlocked and three more stunned, horrified captives shoved inside. The trio were a group of women in their early 30s, one a petite woman with full, dark brown hair, another a taller, athletic woman with a black side fade, the last a short curvy woman with a light blonde bob. Naked, bound and gagged, they were knelt down between the teens and the Henderson’s and soon collared and chained to the wall.
With this fifth set of captives, the slavers seemed to decide they’d gotten enough for the day. For a long moment, the trio stood, surveying the results of their work. Nineteen captives, four men and 15 women and girls knelt: stripped, bound, gagged and collared before their abductors.
“Oh man!” Slim said with a whoop! “Haven’t had a haul this fine since we hijacked that busload of cheerleaders a couple years back!”
“Tomorrow, we’ll take them down to the market.” The female slaver said, drawing whimpers and moans from the captives, particularly their latest trio as they realized the true horror of their predicament. The grunts of complaint only intensified when she continued, “Let’s get them fed, then we’ll pick out a couple and have some fun!” Grinning, the three slavers left the shed.
They were gone for maybe twenty or thirty minutes, long enough for the captives to learn the newcomers were Sarah Parker, Fiona Brown, and Gina Thompson. That last girl had to be introduced by her friends. During their capture, she’d gotten a bit too mouthy and so, like Katy, had been punished. Behind the ballgag, her cheeks bulged revealingly, where her panties had been stuffed as extra packing. The trio were coworkers at a large accountancy firm. Having just wrapped up a major contract, the three women had thought to celebrate with a quiet getaway. Now instead, they would soon be changing careers.
The slavers then returned with the water pail, topped up much to the captives’ relief and a large pot with a wooden spoon sticking out of it. Inside was food: a simple dish of rice and beans, bland but quite welcome to the prisoners, most of whom hadn’t eaten anything since that morning, before their capture. As before, the slavers went around the room, slowly and methodically, ungagging the captives one at a time. Each was allowed a couple spoonfuls of food, washed down with a long drink of water before being regagged. It was a slow process, and by the time the last of the newcomers had her wadded up panties shoved back between her teeth and the ballgag strapped back on it was late evening and the sun was sinking behind the mountains.
“Well now…” Blonde said, eyeing the ring of captives around her. “Who wants to join us for a little fun tonight?”