Glancing at Kelly, he saw the pan was now empty and set to the side. Spork evidently abandoned, the boy was wiping his fingers against the ground when he caught Owen’s gaze and nodded, then lifted the bottle of water—now missing a couple of inches at the top—and drank again. Thinking ahead to walking out of the woods, Owen winced at the idea of the kid setting his bare feet on the trail. He dug through his backpack again and brought out a fresh shirt and set of socks, all he had to offer. Kelly took the clothing with a muttered, “Thank you,” and somehow managed to pull everything on under the cover of the sleeping bag.
“Okay, now that we’ve got you on the way to being warm again, let’s hear it. Tell me everything, Kelly. What happened, how did you wind up where you were?” Owen glanced around the clearing and decided he needed some distance to clear his mind, because his instincts were to pull the boy close and reassure him, let him sleep, keep him safe, and not to stress him even more. Debriefing him would definitely be stressful, so Owen used the fire as a barrier and settled across the small space. Close enough to reassure, far enough away to allow himself to be effective. “Tell me how you came to be with your owner.”
“We were in a big building but stuck inside a tiny room. They took us to a bigger room and there were a bunch of men. They…they touched us. Some of them in bad ways. Our owner pinched our muscles and had us get down on all fours. There was this one guy in charge, and he started shouting things, but not like he was mad. The men shouted back, but nothing made sense. Then it was over, and they took us to another tiny room, but there were plates of food waiting, cups of water.” He glanced over at the bottle of water, set aside so he could dress in the poor selections Owen’d provided. “We were so hungry. It had been days since they’d given us anything. We ate it all.”
“It was drugged, wasn’t it?” Owen scowled at the ground, the ease with which he understood the traffickers’ methods making him nauseous. I’m not like them. “You can’t feel bad about that. I’m sure they planned everything down to the last detail. It’s what they do, Kelly. They’ve got it down to a science.”
“Yeah. I don’t remember anything after that for a long time. When I woke up, I was a box in the back of a truck. I could hear the wheels on the highway, and we were going fast. The wind was whistling through the holes in the top of the box. I freaked out, because I didn’t see Shiloh. I…I started crying and screaming, because I’d promised her I’d find a way to save us.” He shook his head, and Owen was humbled at the idea of the loyalty that had driven this boy—a child in fact—to try to keep his sister safe, even in unbelievable conditions. “She was in a box next to me. It was really hot and the metal sides burned, but then after it got dark, the wind was so cold, I could hear her teeth chattering.”
“What happened next? Did he stop anywhere or drive straight to where he kept you?”
“He didn’t stop except for gas. That was when he heard us whispering to each other. I had put my fingers through the holes, trying to reach Shiloh. She was so scared, Owen. I just didn’t want her to be scared anymore. He hammered on the top of the box and shouted at me.”
The man had probably picked the most remote fueling station, worried about the kids calling for help. Intimidation and isolation would have been effective tools in keeping the kids cowed and quiet. Fucker.
“His house was at the end of a long road, rough because it had a bunch of holes I guess. When we got there, I saw a bunch of other kids, all like us. We weren’t supposed to talk, not to each other and not to him, but at night or when he went away, everybody did it anyway. Just whispering, you know?”
The skin of Owen’s arms pulled into gooseflesh. “He has a bunch of kids?”
Kelly nodded. “Uh-huh. We were numbers fifteen and sixteen. He didn’t let us use our names. We were just the pack. The dogs had names, but we were numbers.”
“The dogs?” Owen fed another branch into the fire, gritting his teeth when the flames flared up, throwing sparks into the air. He hated fire with a passion, and here he was making this one bigger.
“Yeah, they were part of the pack, too.”
“When you say pack, what does that mean? Did you live with the dogs outside? With the other kids?” Every detail added onto the image Owen had in his head, every nuance of Kelly’s story a building block for this unexpected mission.
“Yeah. There was a shed we slept in at night, in piles.” The kid gestured around him, as if indicating bodies strewn all around. “It was open on the front, so the more dogs you could talk into sleeping with you, the warmer you were. The older kids were their favorites. They’d been there so long and had slipped them so much food, the dogs loved them.”
“How old were they? How old are you, Kelly?”
“I’m…I don’t know. I think thirteen? Shiloh is ten. I keep track of her birthday. It’s September third. She’s always real good, Owen. The other kids were a mix. Some older and some younger. The oldest probably a couple years older than me, and the youngest was five. He did okay for himself. I think the pack might have been all he knew. He didn’t talk at all, ever.” Kelly’s expression was strained, earnest anxiety dragging furrows in his forehead.
“When you talked at night, did the others tell their stories? How they came to be part of the pack?” It killed him to speak about the kids’ living situation in such a way. Echoing the known taxonomy was the quickest way to keep Kelly on track. “Did the man own them, too?”
“Yeah. Everyone who told a story was kinda the same. Some of it was different, but mostly the same. One of the boys, Dominic, he really helped us out the first few days. If it wasn’t for him…I didn’t know the rules, and the man was always after me about something because I kept messing up. Dom helped a lot. The other boys were more likely to steal our food or push us out of a good sleeping spot than they were to help with anything.”
“Was Shiloh the only little girl?” He didn’t have a good feeling about this. At ten, if she were as underweight as Kelly she would appear asexual in nature, but if all the children were kept naked, then her physical differences would stand out like a beacon.
Kelly’s face twisted with remembered anger. “Yeah.” That was nearly a growl, rattling up through the boy’s chest and throat, a sound of such rage Owen became empathetically angry for him. “She was the only female. The rest of us were male.”
God bless. The man had stripped even the more common human terminology from the kids like calling them boys and girls. What could possibly have been the reasoning for forcing the kids to live as dogs? “Were they mean because of that?”
“Yeah, that’s what made the man mad. The others kept picking on her. She was so much smaller than everybody except the youngest kids, and those all had their protectors in the pack. After a while, all Shiloh had was me. The older boys kept picking on her, especially if I wasn’t right there. They’d force her to fight. Made me sick. I hate them. I hate the man, too.” Kelly’s bottom chin bumped a couple of times, and Owen watched the struggle as he fought for control. The boy dragged his bottom lip into his mouth and bit down hard to force the emotion away.