With a drive time of over two and half hours, but a flight time of only twenty minutes, Shauna asked me to pick her and Diane up along the way so that they could start getting everything organized. Ten minutes later, having taken a few moments to shed by Roger outfit, I was landing in a field and Shauna opened the door with a huge grin.
“I love your new toy!”, she said as she helped Diane strap in and get ready for takeoff. “I haven’t been on one of these since I left the army. Thanks for picking us up.” We bumped fists as she took her seat up front with me.
Diane, not having ever been in a helicopter, was uncharacteristically quiet. In deference of her fear, I brought us up gently and took longer than usual to get us up to speed. Fifteen minutes of flying brought us to the MTC ranch and after checking in with Kevin, we landed not too far from where I’d landed before.
Kevin met us as soon as I’d powered the Chopper down and took Shauna and Diane over to the barracks to meet with the survivors right away, while I finished up my shutdown checklist. As Mickey had mentioned, my abilities wouldn’t do me any good if something failed in the helicopter and so I wouldn’t cut any corners with the safety standards of the helicopter.
Despite my being a few minutes late to the party, there wasn’t any shortage of work for me. Soon, I was helping Shauna, Diane and a group of five FBI agents get the survivors sorted out and finding out where they were from, how they had gotten taken and if they had anyone that they needed to reach out to. It was a long process, with many of the survivors still being shellshocked from their sudden change in status. No longer were they slaves or property. They were free people again, with names and families and lives to get back to.
Organizing the survivors would have been much harder without the help of the natural leaders among the survivors that had been instrumental in keeping their fellow captives sane and as safe as possible over the years. For the women, that person was Marta, a woman of eastern European decent, with strong features and even stronger arms. Her strength had kept her at MTC, working the fields with the men, long after most other women who aged out of working in the house were shipped off to other facilities or simply killed off. She knew every one of her fellow survivors, knew their stories, their fears, and their shame. She was the one that helped them stay sane. She helped them stay focused on the day that they would be free again.
Her counterpart for the men was Danny, a wiry African-American man from Cleveland. The son of a pastor, he used God’s words to ease the degradations of the field and the house and kept many of the men from killing themselves. He gave them hope and reminded them that someday the Lord would set them free, just as the Israelites had been freed from their slavery.
As the hours went by, time and again I would see these two celebrating with their fellow survivors or sitting with those that couldn’t stop crying. When the rest of the Hannah Foundation crew arrived, Marta and Danny stood alongside them to hand out blankets and food. They helped set up an orderly rotation for the showers in the fortress building and handed out the toiletries and new clothes that the foundation had brought.
However, their hard work that day was eclipsed by their presentation to Shauna and Keven of a stack of papers, covered from top to bottom, with thousands of license plate numbers. Over the years, the slaves had kept a careful watch out and had secretly recorded the license plate of every car and truck that had entered the facility. Next to each plate, they’d marked off if it was owned by a customer, an employee or a ‘delivery’ truck that brought in or took out slaves. If they’d known the name of the customer or employee, they’d included that as well. Many of the plate numbers had stars next to them, indicating how violent and sadistic the customer had been. The slaves kept duplicates of these lists hidden in several places around the ranch, often in the offices of the very people that were keeping them as slaves.
Kevin gratefully took the list from them and had his team start running the plates. The list would allow the FBI to take down every aspect of the MTC network, including their customers.
Somewhere in the midst of all this organized chaos, Senator Daniels and his wife showed up to pick up Renni. It was strange to think that it was only this morning that she’d been taken. Renni had only been away from her parents for a total of seven hours, yet the joy of their reunion was no less than if she’d been gone for years. When Renni was finally allowed to breathe, Kevin was given fierce hugs by her grateful parents and thanked profusely. Looking very embarrassed, Kevin quickly accepted their thanks and brought them over to meet with Shauna, Marta and Danny to help to them the horrors of human trafficking. Having a sitting U.S. senator and his wife become better acquainted with the good work that the FBI and Hannah Foundation were doing on behalf of the survivors wasn’t an opportunity to be squandered.
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Hours later, the last of the survivors had been loaded up on our chartered buses and they began their trip back to Hannah’s Home. Diane and Shauna left on the buses with their new charges and I flew back ahead of them. With almost the entire staff away, I had the perfect opportunity to sneak Shari and her brother Mickey into one of the back cabins without being noticed.
I lay them each down in their own rooms and shifted them to reality. Both were still asleep and while I waited for them to wake up, I brought in the boxes of Shari’s things. Shari woke up first and I had to take her over to her brother’s room to prove to her that I wasn’t one of her captors. Letting her open the door and look outside helped as well. She hadn’t been outdoors for almost five years. When she calmed somewhat, I explained to her where she was and told her that Roger had brought her and her brother here. I explained that he often rescued people from captivity and that we at the foundation helped them get their lives back. Shari was amazed that she could have been rescued without even realizing it.
Mickey woke up a half hour later and I learned that his real name was Jeremy. He was overjoyed to see his sister freed and had lots of questions. As I’d done with his sister, I brought him up to speed.
“Roger wanted me to give you a message. I don’t know what it means, but he said that you would. He said to tell you, “You’re normal now. Better luck this time.”
I watched Jeremy’s face turn from confusion to realization and he and Shari shared a look that I couldn’t interpret. Sensing that they needed some time to digest this new revelation, I told them that I had to register this cabin as occupied before everyone else got there and that I’d be back soon to give them a tour of the facility.
I closed the door behind me as I left and shifted to R2 to get back inside without being noticed. Eavesdropping isn’t very nice, but I had to know how Jeremy felt about losing his powers. I wasn’t expecting to hear Jeremy laughing and literally jumping for joy.
“It’s gone! I can’t phase anymore. Oh my God! Thank you, Roger!”
“Are you sure, Jeremy? You know how much trouble you have controlling it.”
“No Shari, I’m sure. Even though I couldn’t control it well, I got to the point where I could turn it on with a thought. There’s nothing anymore. I’m normal again. Just like Roger said.” Jeremy said this last part with awe in his voice.
“Are you sure that you’re not going to miss it?”
“Not even a little bit. The only good thing about it was that I was able to keep you out of that house. For that, I’ll always be grateful for having the power. Other than that, it was awful. I always thought that having powers would be cool. This power though was tailor made for a villain or some sort of vigilante. There’s no way to use it for good. It could turn you into an excellent thief or kidnapper or assassin. I’m sure that eventually MTC would have tried to have me use it to murder someone. I don’t know what I would have done, if they had. Now, no one can force me to do those things again. I feel free for the first time in years!”
“What about this Roger guy? How did he get rid of your power? Is he the guy MTC was so scared of?”
“Oh yeah, he’s the guy. I have no clue how he got rid of my powers. He’s very creepy and scary like you wouldn’t believe. He has the power and he knows how to fully control it. You should have seen how easy it was for him to phase in and out. When he talked to me, I felt like I was being interrogated by a pissed-off Batman. I don’t think that we should talk to anyone about his abilities. No one would believe us anyways. More importantly, he could be here right now and we wouldn’t know it. Better to be safe than sorry when it comes to Roger or the European ones that Randy told me stories about.”
European ones? What did that mean? Jeremy hadn’t mentioned them when I was interrogating him earlier. I’d have to look into that later, but I didn’t think that Jeremy would tell me anything about them unless I showed up as Roger again. That would require some thought. In the meantime, there was a lot of work to do and I put that matter aside.
As I headed for the administration building, I though about Jeremy’s observation that Roger reminded him of Batman. He wasn’t that far off of the mark. Like Batman, Roger worked with the law, but wasn’t a part of it. Both moved silently through the night and hunted bad guys that preyed on the weak. However, Roger was just my alter ego. As Abby, I saw myself more as Wonder Woman, with a few updates. Instead of an invisible plane, I had a sometimes-invisible helicopter. Instead of a golden lasso that forced people to tell the truth, I had a field that could sometimes tell me if someone was lying. Other than those small differences, and the fact that I wasn’t super strong, we were both warriors who fought for those that couldn’t fight for themselves.
With Jeremy’s stunning pronouncement that he wasn’t upset about losing his powers and his intention to keep Roger’s powers a secret, I left them to their conversation and went to prepare for the large influx of survivors that Hannah’s Home was about to get. Over a hundred survivors would be here soon and they would seriously strain our capacity. Some would be picked up by their families over the next day or so. However, while I was interviewing the survivors, I could tell that many of them weren’t ready to rejoin their families, if they even had families to return to. A high percentage of them had been runaways before they’d been taken. They had nowhere else to go and Hannah’s Home wasn’t set up to house so many of them long term.
Fortunately, that was what the next evolution of Hannah’s Home was all about and it was finally time to put the last part of my plan in place.