Think of the Children

Mari was tired of waiting. The sun was setting and the transit station was closing. The recruits were the only ones left in the parking lot, and they were starting to wonder if they were forgotten.

Suddenly, several windowless vans made their descent onto the parking lot. Assuming it was the military training office there to pick them up, the recruits got into an orderly formation.

Unknowingly it made them all easier to be kidnapped.

Masked men in all-black tactical gear jumped out of the vans and chased all of them. It was easy to pick them all off. Many of the boys tried to defend the girls first but the masked men went for their group first. When the girls tried running towards the transit center, the vans circled around, blocking them all in.

Mari tried to escape, but she was grabbed from behind by her long, black hair. All their belongings were thrown into a separate van, and they were whisked off into the air through the hyper-way.

The girls banged on the sides of the van frantically but none of the other drivers could hear them outside from the sheer speed they were travelling at. There was a bulletproof see-through glass partition separating the captives from the criminals. One of them kept an eye on the girls while the other kept his eyes squarely on the hyperway.

Mari panicked. The girls who all ten minutes earlier seemed so cool and confident were now crying and screaming. She started to cry heavy, hot tears as well until she took one look at Tiffany.

Tiffany was not crying.

She was furious.

"I am going to kill every single one of you," Tiffany said. "You think you're cool going after a bunch of unarmed people? Eat dirt."

She spat at the bulletproof glass, and one of the captors just laughed. Mari stopped crying once she heard him laugh. It reminded her of the laugh that her old classmates and teachers at the Royal Academy. Seeing the defiance of Tiffany and the cruel, psychotic laughter of this man finally made Mari snap.

"I didn't leave that horrible place to end up in another," Mari shouted. "My siblings and parents didn't suffer for me to end up like this! Let me go!"

The man stopped laughing and went back to his passive duty of watching them. Most of the girls sobbed or cried quietly but a few were starting to fight back. They took off their shoes and threw them off the wall. One of them tried picking the lock of the van door with her bobby pin but realized she'd kill them all at that height if she succeeded and stopped.

Tiffany continued hurling colorful insults at the man watching them, and when that got no reaction, she started insulting the driver instead. Mari tried appealing to any shred of humanity they had left and begged them to let her go.

"We won't tell anyone. I just want to go home to my family. Wouldn't your family be destroyed if you disappeared? And they never knew what happened?"

The driver's shoulders jumped a little bit at the idea of it, but that was the only reaction he gave. At her wit's end, Mari decided that she would rather die than suffer whatever fate these men were taking her to.

She looked at the girl who earlier tried to unlock the door using the bobby pin.

"Give it to me," Mari commanded.

"No! Are you crazy? That stuff only works in the movies. And even if it did, we would all die this high up!"

"Do you want to die trying or do you want to suffer through what they're going to do to us," Mari asked all of them.

Tiffany stopped shouting once she heard what Mari said. Some of the girls sobbing in the corner sat up and started paying attention. They heard stories of what happened to girls in the city, and how they would disappear if they were caught alone at night. Rumors of what would happen to them.

Stories from the few that escaped.

"I never had any choices my entire life," Mari said with tears in her eyes. "But I am going to choose how I die. They are never going to take that from me."

The girl near her gave an intense look and thrust the bobby pin into her hand.

Mari opened it up and tried to pick the lock. The lock was all that existed between her and sweet freedom. The guard leaned forward curiously and chuckled at her attempts in vain to open the door.

Mari dropped the pin and let out a feral scream, slamming her fist against the door.

Faster and faster, with an inhuman speed, Mari focused all her strength on destroying the door. The driver suddenly turned and panicked, not sure if he should go faster or slow down. The guard started shouting and the girls started cheering as Mari took her life into her own hands.

The cheers and shouts evaporated into terrified silence when a dent was now evident in the door. Mari could not stop now that there was a feeling, an instinctual feeling of what to do next.

Everyone's hair in the room started to rise, the pressure dropped, the van rattled, and Mari screamed as her mind went blank. Pulses of electricity seeped into the door and fried parts of the electrical wiring, making the engine fail, and slowly, the van came to a halt. 

"You idiot, you put a Weaver inside of here," the driver shouted at his partner. "Be more careful!"

"I can't know if someone is a Weaver by just looking at them!"

The girls cheered as the van slowed down, but the cheers turned into screams of terror as the van began its descent down to the ground.