kerigrannis

I submitted this story to the Library, but I thought I'd post it here as well. Leave a comment with your thoughts, criticisms, suggestions, etc. I totally welcome everything.

The World On Her Knees

This story is about an FBI agent who gets caught up in a snuff slavery racket in Iran. There will be lots of twists and turns, hopefully.

Chapter 1

I’m watching a video. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
Picture Jesus on the cross. Picture him out in the sun writhing in agony twenty feet in the air. Picture his feet and hands bloody and dusty from the iron nails. Picture the defeated look on his face.
What I’m watching is sort of like that, except instead of Jesus it’s a woman, and instead of a defeated look on her face she has a mouth full of semen. Her skin is dark brown. She’s Muslim, but instead of being completely covered, she’s naked. Disgraced. The crusty white filth is slowly dropping from her mouth onto her naked body. This poor girl, her body is half skin, half whip marks. The crisscrossed red lines on her body, they look like the American flag. The semen is slowly drooling down from her mouth, on her breasts, her stomach, and dropping fifteen feet to the ground. Some of it stays attached, falling down her legs, reaching the iron nail in her feet.
“You noticed the American flag resemblance too, huh?” Dean says. My partner on the case and commanding officer of our unit, Dean began showing me these videos yesterday. This one, of the crucified woman, is the seventeenth video. There’s eight more to go.
It’s so fucking hot in the break room, I can feel the sweat on my neck. My blouse is sticking to my skin, and my skirt feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.
“Amy?” Dean says. “You okay?”
It’s because I’m breathing deeply. Fucking heat. The video is disturbing me on a thousand levels and I can’t take it.
“Turn it off, please,” I say.
“Okay,” he said. “You want a break?”
“Yeah,” I say. “More than anything.”
Dean shuts the VCR off and we leave the room. Air conditioned bliss hits us like a Mack truck and everyone in the office sees the relief on our faces.
“Poor bastards,” Tom said, when he heard we got this assignment. “Wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”
I follow Dean outside and he hands me a smoke. I put it in between my lips and I tie my hair back. My mom always said I should be lucky I’m blonde. Thin-haired girls got it easier in the summer. I couldn’t imagine what girls with big hair felt like.
“So she was alive?” I ask, lighting up.
Dean looks at the cement beneath us and says “Yeah. For a while.”
“They’re all alive,” I say. “For a while.”
The first tape we got, a naked woman knelt in a cage barely big enough to hold her. It sank in an empty tank that slowly filled with water. I heard her scream until she drowned. Another video, a woman was leashed by the neck to a pole out in the desert. She froze to death overnight.
None of the tapes showed anyone outside of the victims, and none of the tapes had any markings on them.
This was not a typical assignment. They don’t teach you how to deal with serial snuff films in the academy.
A few days ago, Dean brought me into his office and said I’d be working with him for the next few weeks.
It seemed like an honour at the time.
He told me, “You won’t like this one, so get any ideas of fun out of your head right now. I picked you because you’re the smartest woman here, but I picked you mostly because you’re a woman.”
It seemed like an insult at the time.
The job was, we had to look at these videos that were being sent in. We had to figure out why they were being sent in, who was doing it, and why they were doing what they were doing.
As in, why they were killing women in horrible ways in the Middle East.
“We’re going to have to go, you know,” he says, finishing off his cigarette.
“I’m sorry?”
“These tapes,” he says, “They’re just receipts. The crime is being committed weeks before we hear about it, and the only people telling us are the criminals.”
He says, “Absolutely no fucking way we’re going to catch them this way.”
I ask him, “Are these tapes being sent anywhere else?”
“We sent emails out yesterday to every major bureau. We don’t know, but we don’t think so.”
“So, you think they’ll let us go?” I say. I think about the way I say the words, as if I want to go or something.
“It’s probably inevitable,” Dean says, dropping his smoke to the ground and squishing it with his shoe. “I figure the rate we’re getting these tapes, they’ll send us pretty fast. Once we have a shipping address, anyway.”
“I’ve never been to that part of the world,” I say, feeling small. I’ve never really been anywhere outside of Los Angeles.
“I’ve got to be honest with you,” Dean says, not knowing nearly the weight these words would eventually hold. “This is probably going to be the worst vacation you ever had.”