Opening her eyes Skye Johnson knew who and where she was for the first time in days.
She was in Africa, in a small village working as a missionary. And she had caught some horrible bug.
The room in her private hut was dark and she felt hollowed out, but she was happy to feel whole and sane.
Lying still for a moment she reviewed her body and found she could move. Finally she had the strength to sit up. Pulling back the covers she smelled the stench of her illness wafting up at her. She had been confined to this bed for a week and was rank with sweat and vomit and other fluids she didn't want to think about.
She needed to bathe. Desperately.
Feebly she dressed herself and set off in the predawn gloom to go to the river and clean herself.
She had been here in Africa for a little over two weeks and had two more to go. Her great rebellion before going off to college.
Skye was eighteen years old and had been home-schooled by her overly protective parents. She had never had a boyfriend and never been kissed. It hadn't been a priority for her. She was focused on becoming a doctor and changing the world.
Her parents had thought her insane when she told them her plan to come to Africa to be a missionary. But Skye knew this was where she belonged. The privilege she came from meant she owed the world some true humanitarian work. At least that was how she saw it.
Today, however, she was regretting her decision greatly, she felt terrible.
Keenly aware that her white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes were a novelty here, and that as an American she was considered sexually promiscuous she made great pains to walk a long way from the usual bathing areas the locals used.
Her mother had raised Skye to be modest, yet part of her was aware that she was pretty. She wasn't blind. She saw the way men looked at her, and her fearful mother had been terrified that Skye was going to be raped the second she landed in Africa.
Now that Skye was here in the village she smiled to think of her mother's fears. There were almost no men in the village. Old men or young boys were all that remained. The rest were off fighting in the endless war.
The rules were that she should never leave the village alone, but no-one else was even awake when she finally found herself clearheaded after six days of delirium. She had been sleeping so much and sick for so long that all she wanted was to wash the filth from her skin. So she had gathered her things and wandered down the river to find a secluded spot to wash the stench of illness from her skin.
The sun had been creeping slowly over the horizon as she slipped into the cool refreshing water. Skye knew enough to choose a spot with fast moving water, so no unwanted parasitic visitors would invade her body. The water was cool from the night, but the air was already growing warm and the sun was not yet fully over the horizon.
The bliss as she scrubbed her skin and washed her hair had been heavenly.
Days of illness had carved the baby fat from her limbs and torso and her already athletic frame seemed too skinny to her now.
Skye shaved her legs and had the urge to go running, her favorite self-indulgence, and one she had been unable to do for the last week, but she was still too weak.
She shaved her armpits and gloried in massaging soap into her skin. Using tiny scissors she trimmed her golden pubic hair back to a manageable level. Her illness left her abdominals showing through her skin, and she could feel that her breasts, already small, were even smaller. Skye hated how small her breasts were. They had been a B cup, barely, but now she thought them to be an A. She had sighed as she rubbed her diminished mounds with soap.
Then she heard gunfire coming from the village.
Panicked she stayed in the water, huddled under the surface, her face only out because she had to breath.
The gunfire went on for a little while, sporadic bursts of automatic weaponry, screams and painful cries splitting the air.
Then profound silence.
Skye knew next to nothing about the politics of the situation in this region of Africa, other than there were numerous tribes here who were all fighting for supremacy over the rich resources available in the mountains.
There were so many little tribes grouped together in ever-changing allegiances that even those from America who did try and follow the political lines were confused. Skye however made no such attempt. She was here as a good Christian girl to lend aid to the women and children whose lives were being torn apart by this war.
Shivering from fear and cold Skye badly wanted to put some clothing on, but that would mean scrambling naked out of the water while enemy soldiers were nearby.
Skye had scoffed in her head at her mother's fears of Skye being raped, but now that she was near a battle, naked and so very alone she suddenly worried that her mother might have been right.
Slowly Skye got out of the water and tip-toed to her clothes. She quickly dried off and put on her panties, bra, shorts, t-shirt and with great relief her socks and hiking shoes.
Fully clothed she felt infinitely better.
She pulled her long blonde hair back into a ponytail and gathered her towel and toiletries into her bag and crept back toward the village.
The ominous silence that blanketed the area terrified her. Even the many strange animal cries and insect hums she was starting to get used to were missing in the wake of the gunfire.
Skye crept back along the road that meandered through the thick jungle, back toward the village when she suddenly came face to face with a group of armed men.
She didn't know them, but she didn't know any men of fighting age. These men were armed with a motley collection of rifles and machine guns, dressed in all manner of clothes from t-shirts to fatigues and she had no way of knowing if they were hostile or friendly.
The two parties stood staring at each other for a second, eyes wide, then one of the men raised an empty hand and gestured toward Skye while speaking in the musical, but unintelligible to her language of the land.
The men all began to surround her, guns held low. They were glancing outward assessing the threat in the surrounding jungle. Skye was terrified. Who were they and why were they surrounding her. She stepped to one side as if to let them pass, but they adjusted to keep her in the middle of the group. There were six of them and she felt flushed and sweaty thinking about them caging her in their midst.
Impulsively, before even she knew she was going to do it, Skye bolted.
She ran away from the village down the road deeper into the jungle.
Skye was fast. She had been an avid runner her whole life. She loved the feeling of her body moving through space as fast as she could make it go, but today there was no pleasure, just pure fear.
Sprinting through the dark jungle she forced herself to hit a pace much faster than her illness-ravaged body wanted her to go. Her lungs protested, her legs trembled and her head swam with the urge to faint. She hadn't eaten anything solid in days.
Before she had gone a mile she fell down exhausted.
There was no-one immediately behind her.
As soon as she could Skye crawled into the dense verge beside the road and hid herself in a thick covering of shrubs and drooping leaves.
Seconds later she heard someone running down the road.
A man sprinted past her hiding place, his pace excellent. He was a runner too; she could see that right away.
Soon another passed. Then two more.
Then came a pause and finally the last two men jogged along the road her way.
Skye had found some strength now and hoped they would move past her so she could jog back to the village and see who was still alive.
But they didn't.
It was her bright golden hair that gave her away. It was too foreign here and one of them spotted it gleaming in an errant spill of sunlight as the day dawned bright and clear.
He shouted for his companion to stop and pointed right at Skye.
The two men stood on the road and looked where she hid. One spoke firmly and gestured for her to come out. She was too terrified to comply. The other one came in after her.
He gripped Skye's arm in a tight hold and helped her to her feet, then pulled her from the jungle and out onto the road.
Then the two of them stood looking at her with blank stares. What were they thinking?
Skye had no actual sexual experience to draw from, just the Romance novels she had read all through her teens. Tales of women being taken as prisoners and forced into compromising positions with handsome roguish pirates or thieves.
Held in the grip of an ebony man in the hidden depths of a primeval jungle had her mind racing with unformed ideas of what rape would be like.
Skye understood the biology of intercourse, and had seen a few pornographic videos online and so she had a mental picture of a man's penis entering a woman's vagina, but in actual fact she couldn't imagine an actual live penis going into that tiny opening she had between her legs. It was so foreign and unlikely that she simply couldn't wrap her brain around it.
Except it was suddenly all she could think about.
Looking at her two sweating captors, dappled sunlight glancing off the hard planes of their faces as they stared at her, she felt faint. Their stoic glares made her uncomfortable. The emotionlessness of their expressions filled her with dread and a warm flushed feeling.
What were they thinking?
