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Chapter 1: The Ride-Along2,815 words
Chapter 2: The Face of a Human2,382 words
Chapter 3: Shelter3,724 words
Chapter 4: A Thousand Sleepless Nights3,246 words
Chapter 5: The Crimes of Chrysalis1,457 words

Chapter 2: The Face of a Human

Author's Note:

WARNING: This chapter alone warranted the sex and violence tag.

I am not proud of this.

On a lighter note, the title was inspired by a line from Matthew West's "My Own Little World." I seem to draw a lot of inspiration from Matthew West songs for some reason.

Ten to 20 women from their mid-teens to their late twenties stared back at Flash and police from the back of the moving van. Some of them were dressed in casual everyday clothing; others were in tatters. However, quite a few were dressed so provocatively that Flash had to cover his eyes a few times out of a need to preserve their dignity. Every single one of them wore an expression of complete and utter terror.

An officer radioed for a transport vehicle while another, a woman in her thirties, coaxed the girls to come out of the truck’s cargo area. As more women stepped out of the truck, Flash got a better view of the far corners. He could just make out a group of three girls, much younger than the rest, huddled together on his far-left corner. The three of them stepped into the light together, giving Flash a better look of their faces. He gasped in recognition and quickly undid his seatbelt.

“Hey, hey!” Shining Armor yelled, pushing Flash back into his seat. “You’re supposed to stay in this car.”

“I know those girls!” Flash argued back, pointing at the group of three. “I know you told me not to get out of the car, but gosh! I have to know if they’re okay, and I can’t find out if I just sit here.”

Shining Armor turned to where Flash was pointing and looked at the trio intently. The oldest was about thirteen years old with black and blonde hair, tan skin, and icy blue eyes. The youngest looked about between eight to ten years old with long brown hair, light gray skin, and the most expressive gold eyes Shining had ever seen. The middle girl had pastel purple skin, her hair was brown striped with cream, and her eyes were gray.

“Just sit here, okay?” Shining reiterated. “I’ll bring them over and offer to take them to the station with us. Then, you can ask them whatever you want to ask. Capeesh?”

Flash let out a growl as he complied. “Fine.”

Flash watched as Shining Armor approached the officer who was watching over the three girls. Shining Armor and the officer exchanged some words that Flash couldn’t hear for a few minutes, and then, Shining began walking back to this cruiser with the three girls following.

The youngest saw Flash from a distance and began running towards the cruiser. Flash opened the door, and the little girl threw her arms around him.

“Mr. Flash!” she cried in joy and relief.

The middle girl caught up soon after, and Flash also pulled her into the hug.

“Gale, Gypsy,” Flash cried, glad to see that, as far as he could tell, the girls were physically unharmed. “What happened? What were the three of you doing in the truck?”

“Would you believe us if we told you?” the oldest girl caught up with the rest of the group and retorted.

“Bee, are the three of you okay?” Flash replied. “Did anyone try to hurt you guys?”

“A suspicious man gave us suspicious Kool-Aid, and we suddenly woke up on the back of a moving vehicle, but other than that we’re fine.”

“Ladies, Flash,” Shining Armor interrupted. “You’re going to have to continue this conversation on the way to the station. We’d have a little more privacy in the car. Also, is it okay if I record you guys? What you have to say might help us bring to justice whoever did this to you.”

Flash and the girls agreed, and the girls got into the back of the car.

“Yow!” Bee exclaimed, shoving Gypsy hard. “Scoot over, Gypsy. This squeeze machine on wheels is tight enough without you in my space!”

“Sorry,” Gypsy apologized.

“Oooh, yeah, I probably should have warned you girls that the back isn’t very comfortable,” Shining realized as he turned on the cruiser’s recording camera. “Sorry about that.”

After Shining Armor drove away from the crime scene, the girls began to tell their story.

“A few days ago, two men came to the home and asked to see Ms. Chrysalis,” Bee began. “Then, Ms. Chrysalis sent Mr. Thorax out to buy groceries and told everyone to leave the three of them alone.

“She said that anyone who interrupted her was going to have to clean the bathrooms,” Gale added, “twice.”

Bee gave her a glare and continued, “Anyway, they were in Ms. Chrysalis’s office for quite a while. About twenty minutes later, the three of us get called in her office, and she tells us that these guys are adopting us.”

“Wait. Just like that?” Shining Armor asked, several red flags going up in his mind. “She didn’t even have you meet them first?”

“No, not at all,” Gypsy answered, “which is weird because whenever Mr. Thorax sends us off with a potential forever family, he always has us meet them first.”

“Yeah,” Bee agreed as her face twisting in thought. “The weirder part is back before Mr. Thorax started working there, Ms. Chrysalis used to let the kids meet their potential forever families too except…”

“Except what?” Flash asked.

“This is going to sound crazy, but whenever Ms. Chrysalis had a teenaged girl living at the home, she’d have her sent to a forever family within a month,” Bee finished.

“Without meeting her potential family?” Shining asked.

Bee nodded.

Shining Armor and Flash shared a look, their mental red flags now accompanied with figurative flashing lights and sirens.

“Girls, what happened after she told you that you were getting adopted?” Shining asked.

“I asked her why Robby wasn’t with us,” Gale answered. “Then, she says that our new dads didn’t want Robby, so then I said, ‘I’m not going anywhere without Robby!’ Then, she said that I had to go without him because she already gave me to them, and I said, ‘I can’t just leave Robby here. I’m his big sister.’”

“Long story short,” Bee interrupted, “She made a scene, so Ms. Chrysalis kicked us out of her office to talk with the two creepy guys some more, and she managed to convince them to take Robby too.”

“Robby was with you guys?!” Flash exclaimed as he mentally scanned the faces he saw in the truck for one of a 7-year-old boy. To his dismay, he couldn’t remember seeing a boy of any age come out of the truck.

“He was when those guys took us home with them,” Bee replied. “I didn’t see him anywhere in the truck when I woke up.”

“Oooooh,” Gale shifted in her seat, looking like she was about to cry. “What do you think they’re doing to him? I hope he’s okay.”

“So do I,” Flash and Shining thought to themselves.

“Don’t worry,” Shining Armor reassured the little girl. “I’ll get your story to the rest of the police, and we’ll do everything we can to find him. Now, what happened after the two creepy guys took you home with them?”

“They took us to this rundown building in one of the seedier-looking parts of the city,” Gypsy continued. “They took us into an apartment that smelled like smoke and whatever was in those bottles on the dining room table, put us in a room that only had a mattress in it, and gave us cold pizza and water from the sink. After that, they pretty much left us alone.”

“Robby was about to eat some of the pizza, but then, Bee was all ‘Don’t touch it, you idiot!’ So, Robby says, ‘But I’m hungry.’ Then, Bee says, ‘Listen, whoever those guys are they’re really bad people. Don’t ask me how I know. I just do,’” Gale added. Then, she turned to Bee and asked, “By the way, how did you know?”

Bee bit her lip and huffed, “I’d rather not talk about it. Anyway, we overheard our so-called dads talking on the phone with someone. I can’t remember everything they talked about, but I did hear one of them mention someone named Verko.”

Shining Armor’s eyes went wide at the sound of that name. He had heard that name thrown around several times at the station, mostly from frustrated detectives trying and failing to get evidence on him for a crime more serious than a traffic violation or having the wrong kind of license for a business that many in the force suspected was just a front for something less legal. The look did not go unnoticed by Flash.

“The next day,” Bee continued, her breathing getting faster, “they brought three pasty, bald men into our room. The leader was wearing coke-bottle glasses and a red three-piece suit.”

“Actually, it was a little more maroon than red,” Gypsy corrected.

“Whatever!” Bee shouted, elbowing the 11-year-old roughly. “Anyway, the guy in the suit looked us over, and he got real mad when he saw Robby with us.”

“He was all ‘What am I supposed to do with the boy?’” Gale interrupted. “Then, the guy Ms. Chrysalis gave us to says, ‘She says figure it out and that it’s not her problem.’ Then, the bald guy told Bee to get up, and he looked her over again. Then, he touched her face all icky-like and told her to take off her clothes. Robby and I got really, really scared because Daddy told us that we’re not supposed to take our clothes off in front of anyone except for when he’s helping us change or if the doctor needs to look at something. Gypsy looked scared too, but Bee just looks at the bald man all tough and says, ‘Are you a doctor?’ The bald man said no, so she said, ‘Well, then tough nuts.’ So, he slaps her across the face and says, ‘That wasn’t a request. Take off your shirt and pants, or I rip them off you.’”

Flash looked at the girls through the grate as Gale told her part of the story. Her eyes were glistening, and she was wringing her hands as if she was trying to squeeze her emotions back inside of her. Gypsy was rubbing her forearms and shaking, and Bee had her eyes squeezed shut and her teeth clenched.

“Bee looked really mad and embarrassed when he did that, so I covered Robby’s eyes and shut mine,” Gale finished.

“He looked over each of us one at a time and made us take off everything but our underwear each time,” Gypsy continued. “He even looked under Robby’s underpants, and when he did that, Gale got up and screamed at him not to touch Robby there. Then, he kicked her in the stomach.”

“It really hurt,” Gale exclaimed, some tears finally leaking out of her eyes. “Then, he got mad at the guy Ms. Chrysalis gave us to and said that Robby was too small to do anything with, and the guy Ms. Chrysalis gave us to says that they’ll figure a way to make money off him somehow.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Flash thought to himself, trying to imagine the horrors that the girls had experienced in such a short amount of time.

“Then, Baldo leaves and doesn’t come back,” Bee continued as she stared out the window. “A couple of hours later, New Legal Guardian #1 comes in with what he says is Kool-Aid and tells us to drink it. I told him no.”

“And then?” Shining asked. The whole time the girls had been talking, he had been trying to hide his ever-growing disgust. Despite his otherwise professional demeanor, his white knuckles gave away his emotions.

“He starts choking me and said that if I didn’t drink it, he’d find another way to get it in me,” Bee finished, rubbing her neck uncomfortably.

“We thought he was going to kill her and the rest of us,” Gypsy added, “so we drank whatever he gave us.”

“I managed to get away with only taking a few sips,” said Bee bitterly. “It was still enough to knock me out long enough for them to load us in that truck.”

“I’m assuming you were the first one to wake up,” Shining Armor replied.

“Probably.”

“What was the first thing you said when you woke up?”

“What any normal human would say if he or she woke up in a strange place, ‘Where am I?’”

Shining Armor nodded as he mentally pieced together all the information he gathered from the girls’ story.

“The two men Ms. Chrysalis adopted you to, do you three remember what they looked like?” Shining questioned.

“I do,” Gypsy answered. “The one that did most of the talking was big and fat with puce skin, greasy white hair, beady little eyes, and a face that reminded me of a pig. The other one was long and thin with dull silver skin and a dark blue mohawk, and his eyes were even beadier that the first guy’s. His face was so thin that his nose stuck out of it like Pinocchio’s. They were also both wearing black leather jackets with an insignia that looked like the mouth of a bug.”

“Hey, Mr. Flash, Mr. Policeman, what’s a [censored]?” Gale asked innocently.

The two young men’s eyes widened when they heard the last word come out of the sweet little girl’s mouth.

“Okay, first of all, where did you hear that word?” Flash demanded, forcing himself to stay as calm as possible.

“The fat man called Bee that when she wouldn’t drink the Kool-Aid,” Gale replied.

Flash sighed, explaining, “It’s a word meaning girl dog, and you should never ever use it on a girl human or any other human for that matter.”

“What does it mean when people use it on a human?” Gypsy asked.

“Well, it depends. Sometimes, it means that someone is being mean and nasty like a dog. Other times, it means that someone is helpless and easy to hurt like a dog. Either way, it’s a way of saying that someone isn’t worth being treated like a human being.”

“Like how those awful people were treating us?” Gale asked, hugging herself.

Flash felt his heart break as he looked at each of their fearful and shamed faces. He looked away from them, trying to force down the lump forming in his throat, and nodded.

“Yeah.”

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