Daniel’s management crew started showing up at a few minutes after 1am and thirty minutes later all four of them had arrived. Daniel was the last to show up and he stayed in the warehouse, sitting in the shipping office, playing Candy Crush as he waited for the truck to arrive.

I spent the time checking to make sure that all the cameras were working and that I’d gotten good pictures of every guard and every one of Daniel’s crew. I uploaded those pictures into a separate folder on the Dropbox account and labelled it “These are the Bad Guys”.

With ten minutes left until the truck was supposed to show up, I changed into my outfit. Shoulder pads, arm guards, and shin guards covered with oversized black sweatpants and Howie’s Kevlar hoodie. I completed the outfit with the voice changing lower-face mask and a pair of black, steel-toed workman’s boots. The ensemble hampered my ability to move a little, but it helped ensure that if I was caught on an any of the cameras, no one would be able to easily identify me by gender or body type. I had no intention of shifting to reality at any point, but I’d rather be prepared since plans didn’t always work out the way you expected them to.

I unstrapped my baseball bat from the side of my camping backpack and returned to the warehouse in time to hear Daniel shout “Everybody get ready. They’re at the gate.” The guards all got into positions, a few of them smiling in anticipation. These were not nice men and I made a mental note not to hold back with them.

The sound of a truck backing up could be heard from outside and the loading dock door was opened by one of the guards. The back of a truck was visible, but there were no markings on it. It was just a white roll-up door with a heavy lock at the bottom. A few seconds later the driver entered from the side door and unlocked the door. I pulled out my phone and took a few pictures of him, just in case my cameras didn’t get a good view of his face.

With the door unlocked, a guard came over to lift the truck door and I shifted my focus from the driver to the back of the truck. I saw pallets of boxes stacked almost to the top of the truck. Where were the women and children? What the hell was going on? I started to question everything that I’d learned about Serpentine, but the basement cells and the videos told me that I wasn’t wrong.

Two guards, each driving a forklift, drove up and started unloading the truck. They stacked the boxes neatly to the side and once the second row had been removed, I could see that the rest of the truck had been walled off, with only a pair of grey steel doors allowing access. The pallets had been cover in case the police stopped the truck! I breathed out a sigh of relief that I hadn’t been wrong about all this.

The doors were unlocked and opened, exposing a poorly lit area where gagged women and children sat huddled on the floor, shackled to metal rings welded to the floor. For a few seconds, I just stood there, watching the guards move in to unlock the shackles from the floor rings. It was so hard to believe that this was really happening, that slavery still existed in the freest country on the planet. The blank looks in the children’s faces and the resignation and despair of the women froze me into inaction. Then one of the guards shoved a little girl out of the truck and anger flooded through me, waking me from my shock. I mentally noted which guard it was and I got to work.

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I used my camera to record the guards getting the prisoners out of the truck and I went outside to get more information on the truck and its driver and to call the police. Almost as if he was trying to make my life easier, the driver had left his wallet in the console next to his seat. I took pictures of his license and of the truck registration papers and called Captain Stevens. As the phone rang, I made sure that my voice changer was turned on and I pressed send on the email that I’d prepared for the captain.

I didn’t wait for the captain to say anything. As soon as he answered the phone, I gave him the address and said, “Serpentine Logistics Services. The forty women and children just arrived and are being brought to the cells in the basement. If you check your email, you’ll see that I sent you a link to a live feed of the cameras that I was able to set up inside the building. There’s also a link there to a Dropbox folder with some videos and pictures of those slavers. There are twelve guards and four others there. The person in charge is Daniel Larimar. He’s a really sick piece of work, as you’ll see in the videos.”

Captain Stevens responded that they were on the way and proceeded to ask me questions about the layout of the building and where the guards would be. I answered him and hung up quickly. I wanted to make sure that the captives would be safe until the police arrived.

Returning to the warehouse, I saw that the last few women were being brought through to the office side. I shifted to R2 and followed them right after the door closed. I could see the line of captives being prodded to move faster as they made their way into the ‘Electrical Panel #4’ closet and down to the jail cells, where they were shoved into the cells by the guards. As the last woman was about to move into the cell area, a guard grabbed her by her a hair and pulled her back. He was the same guard that had shoved the little girl earlier.

“Brando, if you’ve got everything here covered, I’m gonna take this one back upstairs for a bit.”, he shouted across the room.

“Sure thing. They’ll all be locked up nice and tight. Take your time.”, Brando answered.

The woman started struggling, but she had no chance. The guard was huge, and she was in chains. Even if she managed to get out of his grasp, there was nowhere for her to go, but she kept struggling until the guard smacked her hard across her face and she slumped over with a dazed look on her face. The guard half-carried her out of the room and up the stairs where another guard joined him, and they walked down the corridor to an empty filing room.

The police were minutes away, but they wouldn’t get here in time to save this woman from more abuse. After all she’d been through already, there was no way that I was going to let anything else happen to her. I followed them into the room in R2, the bat held firmly in my hand.