When he finished, I could smell the stink smell of his saliva on my upper lip. I was racked with sobs by then and my body shook all over.

  He was breathing hard, like an animal, clearly excited by his sick acts. As he continued his assault, I screamed loudly and bucked my body so hard that I became dizzy.

  Again, he seemed amused. He started laughing hard, like he’d been told a joke. Dr. Clemons got so turned on that he reached down and stroked himself. Then he got up off the bed and got a long black whip from his torture table.

  “Please! No, please. I will do anything!” I pled, pulling my arms and trying to lift my legs. I could feel the arm restraints cutting into my wrists as I continued to fight hard against them.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t care if you scream,” he said. He picked up the whip and slapped me across my bare thighs with it.

  “Arg!” I belted out in sheer pain.

  He hit me again, and this time, I could feel welts rising on my skin. My legs shook from the sharp pain.

  “Please!” I was sobbing and begging him for mercy. I screamed and begged countless times. But I quickly realized that the more I screamed and pled, the more turned-on he got, so I stopped. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction anymore, so I just bit down into my jaw and took the pain.

  When his sick ass realized that the whip wasn’t doing any more damage that would get a reaction out of me, he moved to his next form of torture. I saw out of the corner of my eye when Dr. Clemons picked up a huge oblong object. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but he brought it over to the bed and put the object between my legs. He forced it into me so hard that I had no choice but to scream out. Nobody that was human would’ve been able to take that kind of pain.

  “Help me!” I hollered.

  It felt like whatever he was using to abuse me would come through the top of my head. That’s how far he was ramming up in me. I was in excruciating pain. My abdomen felt like it would burst. No amount of disease he could’ve injected me with would have been worse than this sexual abuse.

  I screamed some more as he grinded the object, stretching my vaginal walls to capacity. He was smiling and grunting as sweat dripped from his body onto mine. He was clearly highly aroused by all of this. As he did everything that he could to bring me pain, I bit down on my bottom lip until I drew blood. But again, I muffled my screams, because the screams were fueling his satisfaction. He finally took the object out of me.

  I felt relieved, but I knew he wasn’t finished with me yet. By then, my thighs were shaking uncontrollably, and I just knew I’d go into shock any minute.

  Dr. Clemons came and straddled me. I could barely breathe. He slapped me. It was so demoralizing. I think something inside me died forever. A piece of me that I can never get back died inside me. Dr. Clemons slapped me in my face again.

  “This was more fun than I expected, Heiress,” he said, and then he slapped me again.

  My head was pounding. He slapped me, side to side, over and over again. Blood was on my nose and lips, and my legs and arms were burning with pain. I was so weak I couldn’t even control my head. I felt like dying.

  * * *

  When Dr. Clemons was finished with me, he left me there. My wrists and hands were numb from being tied and my body burned all over. As hard as I fought it, I could not keep sleep from overcoming me. Within a matter of minutes, and before I knew it, I was knocked out.

  I don’t know how long I slept before I felt Lisa slapping my cheek softly to wake me up. When I opened my eyes, there were three people in the room. I moaned, which was all I could really do.

  I could tell I looked a mess by the way Lisa gawked at me. She untied my hands and I immediately started flexing my wrists because they hurt so badly. She helped me sit up, and I swear I felt like I was a newborn baby. My back was just so slack and weak. I was too fucked-up to even think about getting that cell phone out of the pillowcase.

  My mind was muddled. I didn’t remember, but I believed Dr. Clemons had given me something before I went to sleep. I couldn’t remember if I had been injected again.

  “Are you all right?” Lisa asked the obvious question.

  Of course, I wasn’t all right. I was being tortured, abused, raped, and experimented on, with no hope for it to stop.

  “Let me help you clean up a little before they move you,” she said. She started washing me with some sort of sweet-smelling soap. She even brushed my hair back into a neat ponytail and put ointment on the cuts I had sustained. “You’re going to be okay. I’ll make sure of it,” she whispered.

  “What happens to me now?” I asked. My throat was so dry that the words came out sounding gravelly.

  “You go back,” one of the men in the room answered before Lisa could say anything. I guess he wanted her to know not to try anything funny to help me.

  “Back where?” I asked. I looked at Lisa with pleading eyes. “Please don’t let them keep doing this to me. I don’t think I can take much more.”

  I didn’t know if they were taking me back to the high-tech experiment room, the hole, or the other rooms where I had been moved through, tied down, and injected with drugs and diseases. It was all too much. My body was in a weakened state; it was so bad, even my teeth and fingernails hurt.

  “Back wherever they say you go,” the man told me.

  Well, that didn’t help. My heart sank. I’d been beaten and tortured in every way possible. I knew one thing for sure: I had to get out of there. Who would know if I got killed in this place? I really still couldn’t believe this whole human-experimentation thing. It seemed more lucrative than the drug game. Woman after woman had been put into this unit by pretending to be suicidal or having some other psychotic condition.

  After I was cleaned up, Lisa must’ve noticed how weak I was. She gave me some water and it hurt going down. It landed in my stomach like a ton of bricks. When I finished gulping down the water, I could tell it was time to go. Tears started coming out of my eyes. I was urgently thinking, Misty, you have to get the hell out of this shit.

  I grasped the cell phone under the pillow and held on to it for dear life.

  * * *

  It would be a challenge hiding the cell phone. I knew I’d have to get creative, and I’d have to call someone before the battery died. I didn’t know where my mother was, and wasn’t sure if she even still had the burner phone I’d given her when everything was happening.

  I had memorized Sandra’s number, which she gave me when I was getting transferred. Thank God I had taken her advice and committed her phone number to memory. She was my last hope for some help. So, when I was left alone and they thought I had been drugged enough to be knocked out, I made the call.

  As I dialed Sandra’s number, my heart almost pounded out of my chest. I thought my hands were so sweaty that I’d lose my grip on the small device. I didn’t know why I didn’t just call the police first and tell them what was happening. I guess I had lost faith in the whole criminal justice system. Shit, imagine receiving a call from some crazy-sounding woman saying she was locked in a prison and they were experimenting on her with diseases and drugs and now raping her. The 911 operator would’ve probably thought it was a hoax and hung up on me.

  My hands were trembling so bad, I could barely hold on to the phone. It started ringing on the other end of the receiver and I was praying silently that Sandra picked up soon. After the third ring, I started getting very nervous that she might not answer.

  “C’mon! C’mon, pick up the phone,” I mumbled under my breath. Finally, just as I thought I would hear her voice mail, I heard Sandra’s deep voice come through the receiver, instead.

  “Hello,” she answered.

  My shoulders slumped down with relief, and for a few seconds, I was at a loss for words. I still felt like my escape or any help was all a dream.

  “Hello?” Sandra whispered into the phone.

  I was crying so hard. I shed tears of relief and joy.

  “Sandra. It’s Misty. I need your help,” I whispered in desperation.

  “Misty! Where the hell are you?!” Sandra yelled.

  I could hear the mixture of excitement and concern in her words.

  “I’ve been waiting to hear from you. You a’ight?”

  “Shush,” I told her. I couldn’t afford for anyone to hear. “I need you, Sandra,” I said breathlessly. I was crying again so hard that I was out of breath. “I need your help now or I’m going to be dead. This is no joke. They’re going to kill me.”

  “Okay, Misty, but I need to know what the hell is going on and where the hell you’re at. The last time we spoke—” Sandra started, but I quickly cut her off.

  I didn’t have time for all of the small talk. I needed to deal with this present situation and the fact that I needed to get out of it.

  “I am in a prison somewhere, and they are doing things to us here,” I explained. The sobs wouldn’t let me get my words out effectively, though. “They . . . they’re doing things . . .”

  “Oh my God! Things like what?” Sandra asked, urgency lacing her words.

  “They’re experimenting on us and raping us. It’s the medical-testing unit. I’m going to die if you don’t find me. Look up state prisons that may be contracting to private companies,” I relayed as fast as I could.

  “Fuck! I’m going to work on my end to come and find you,” Sandra promised.

  “You don’t understand. I will die if you don’t come soon. I can’t take much more of this. They will kill me,” I cried. I knew to Sandra I sounded crazy.

  “I am going to find you and send help for you. I promise, Misty. I won’t leave you for dead,” Sandra said.

  “Please hurry. I don’t have much more time,” I said with finality. “I’ll be dead soon.”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll make sure of that,” she said.

  With that, I ended the call and hid the phone again. My mind was going crazy with thoughts. I couldn’t rest thinking about getting out of this place. I tried to use the phone to call my mother, but I couldn’t get her. I started praying in earnest that she was safe and sound. But, with the way my life was going, I wasn’t hopeful about anything good.

  14

  THE SECRET ROOM

  Over the next few days, Dr. Clemons did it again and again. I always knew when he’d taken me back to his secret room, because that clock ticked loudly and I’d come to recognize the smell in that room. It was a mixture of medicine and sex. That led me to believe I wasn’t his only victim.

  It only took a few minutes before the thump of my heartbeat matched the loud tick of that wall clock. I shook all over and my vision was blurry. I moaned. It was a little trick I had learned to stay conscious whenever he drugged me up. I was being moved; I could feel myself being shifted around. My consciousness was becoming harder to hold on to. He’d used something much stronger on me this time, because I’d grown immune to all the shit they were putting in my body now.

  Little squirms of light flashed through my eyes and I had to concentrate to make myself blink them away. My eyelids felt as though weights had been put on them. I knew this feeling always came right before I usually succumbed to the drugs.

  I had been drugged so many times, I felt like a drug side-effects expert. I’d come to know that if I blinked and moaned and forced myself to move any muscle on my body, the medicine took longer to overcome me.

  I moaned again; this time, I became painfully aware of a throbbing pain in my scalp. I lifted my hand in slow motion and attempted to place it on top of my head. It took a few tries, but finally I was able to touch the source of the pain. My heart rate sped up when I realized

  Dr. Clemons had a tight grasp on a fistful of my hair. He was sick—that much I had learned by now.

  “You won’t remember shit,” he grunted lustfully, clamping down harder on my hair.

  Then I heard his zipper being undone. My head felt more wavy than it had in the past. It had to be a new and even stronger medication than I had been forced to ingest this time.

  Immediately, the funky, musty smell of Dr. Clemons’s dick caused the acids in my stomach to bubble up into the back of my throat. I gagged. I didn’t know how long I could take the strong odor. I couldn’t believe what was happening. This motherfucker was about to do some dirty shit to me. Thinking about it made me mentally and physically sick. I was tired of this. I wasn’t going to stand for it anymore.

  Forcing myself to swallow caused my head to spin a little bit. I gagged again.

  “All you have to do is be a good girl. Don’t fight or you’ll make this worse than it has to be. Be a good girl and get it hard,” Dr. Clemons ordered, a lascivious smile spreading across his face.

  Then he swiped the head of his flaccid, nasty, moist dick across my tightly clenched lips, like it was the tip of a lipstick. The feeling of the moist, clammy skin on me caused another swirl of nausea to invade my stomach; this time, I locked my jaw tight.

  Even with my head swimming, I felt emotional and tears leaked out of my eyes. My entire body felt hot, like I had a fever. Darkness had tried to creep up on me several times, but I fought the effects of the medication by moaning and blinking. Dr. Clemons lifted his limp noodle and beat it on my lips this time. This was his sick attempt to get me to open my mouth and give in to his demands.

  All I could think about was, where were Lisa and the other doctors? How could this bastard be getting away with this, over and over again, and they didn’t know or didn’t help? My eyes started to close again, and Dr. Clemons yanked on my hair to make sure my eyes didn’t shut. He’d given me just enough drugs to make me too weak to fight, but not enough to put me completely out. This way, I could continue to complete his sick requests. I’d heard about rapes happening in prison, but never did I think I would be a victim like this.

  “Open your fucking mouth,” he whispered through labored breaths.

  I still refused to open my mouth. My tears fell in streams. I don’t know if that gave this sick bastard a thrill, but I couldn’t help it. So much ill shit had happened to me, and it had become so regular now, that I had conditioned myself to go numb, but it hadn’t worked this time.

  I had been practicing how to fight against the effects of the medication they always forced on me too. This was a skill that had proven more valuable than anything else I had learned during my time locked up in that medical-testing unit.

  It’s mind over matter. Mind over matter, I chanted to myself. Mind over . . . But my thoughts kept slipping away.

  Dr. Clemons dragged me down to the floor, and my burning knees were what let me know I had been on them for too long. He held my head in an awkward position and my neck ached from it.

  “I said open your fucking mouth, you bitch! Don’t act like you don’t know how to do this. You ghetto bitches probably learn how to do this at ten years old,” he hissed, forcing my face farther into his musty crotch. “Open your fucking mouth, I said,” he grunted, frustration and lust lacing his words.

  I grunted as my body jerked forward from the force of his shove, causing my face to scrape against Dr. Clemons’s coarse pubic hairs. This time, vomit came into my mouth. I was forced to swallow the acidy fluid, because letting it out would’ve meant I would’ve had to open my mouth.

  “If you don’t open your mouth, you can guarantee your time here will be worse, and you won’t be guaranteed to make it out of here alive,” Dr. Clemons threatened, frustration evident in his tone.

  Thinking about being injected with more disease, bound to a bed for days straight—left with no food or water for those days, left to grow sicker and sicker, and having those glaring, heated lights shining down on me as they injected me with ten different drugs that made me violently ill—finally prompted me to open my mouth.

  Dr. Clemons smiled evilly. “I knew you’d come to your senses,” he said softly, pulling my head toward his now-halfway-erect, tiny dick. “Prove to me you don’t want to go back.” He closed his eyes, waiting to feel my mouth on him.

  I couldn’t control the tears now. And these weren’t the involuntary ones that came from the medicine either. These tears came from the white-hot ball of anger that sizzled like hot coals inside me. I was so angry, even that medication couldn’t calm me down. It was a high that didn’t last this time. Who knew that all I had to do to really overcome the effects of the drugs was to get angry enough?

  I inhaled, closed my eyes, and, with the swiftness of a bear trap, I turned my head to the side and snapped my teeth down on a mouthful of Dr. Clemons’s inner thigh. I bit down so hard, sharp stabs of pain traveled from my locked jaws up to the center of my face. I felt like a rabid dog on attack.

  “Agh!” Dr. Clemons shrieked. “Agh! Let me go! Let me go! You bitch! Let me go!” he wailed, the shriek of pain streaking through his screaming insults.

  I continued to clamp down with the force of a great white shark. Fueled by Dr. Clemons’s cries for mercy, I ground my teeth into the thick muscle of his thigh until I tasted the sharp, metallic sting of his blood on my tongue. It didn’t last long, though. Dr. Clemons not only beat me in my head and face, but he called in his helpers and they beat me too.

  “You’ll regret the day you did this” were the last words I heard him say before everything went black around me. This time, I prayed that the darkness was death. I knew in that moment, if someone didn’t come help me soon, I’d be dead in no time. And maybe, just maybe, that was what I deserved, due to all the shit I’d done in my past.

  God would have the last say-so.

  15

  USED AND ABUSED

  Days and nights fused together in my clouded mind. I didn’t really know how many days I was locked up in a different dirty dungeon-like cell, where there were no windows for me to see whether the sun was coming up or going down. I was living in hell, which was the only conclusion I could come to about my condition. I could tell you I definitely wasn’t back in the high-tech hospital rooms, where I’d been taken before. I wasn’t in Dr. Clemons’s chambers either, because there was no clock ticking and no windows.