The building is completely isolated, the forgotten outpost of a long-extinct community – a tumour that has been excised and left to rot.

Car doors open and close as it seems they have been doing all night.

The bodyguards both get out, the girl still between them. She stumbles but they have her by the arms in what must be a vice grip. She continues to cry but it’s muted.

Once more Alex thinks of the wrench.

Klaus leans into the back seat and tells Dietrich to get out, ignoring Alex entirely.

The girl is held by the two guards, her feet barely touching the ground, as Klaus approaches her. She is slightly taller than he but her slumped posture and collapsing legs mean that he looms over her as he speaks. Though they are only a few feet away, Alex can’t quite make out what is being said but isn’t sure he wants to.

The girl’s sobs increase in volume. “I’m sorry,” she. “Please…”

“She needs a hit,” Dietrich says and begins towards the girl but Klaus blocks her with one red-gloved arm.

“Does she?” he asks. Then, to the girl, “Do you?”

She seems unsure of the question at first, looking to each of those gathered in turn as if they will answer for her. She nods.

“Of course you do,” Klaus tells her but his hand remains in Dietrich’s way. “So where do you think you’d get it, out in the plains?”

The girl’s lip quivers. She wriggles within the bodyguards’ grasp minutely. “I’m sorry,” is all she says.

“I know,” he tells her. He reaches out and strokes blood-clotted hair away from her face. “Look at the mess you’ve made of yourself. You were so beautiful and now … this.”

The girl smiles awkwardly at the obtuse compliment despite herself.

“It’s okay,” Klaus says. “It’s okay. I forgive you.”

Crucified upon the arms of the bodyguards, teh girl goes tense until the needle is pushed into her wrist and the drug fed into her ...

He drops his arm and Dietrich pops open her metal box and removes a fresh needle. Crucified upon the arms of the bodyguards, the girl goes tense until the needle is pushed into her wrist and the drug fed into her. She shudders, arches, then her legs go loose again and the bodyguards have to hold her steady to keep her from slumping to the ground.

Her lip curls, her eyes rolling back in her head momentarily.

“Better?” Klaus asks but she doesn’t hear him, a captive of the sudden chemical bliss.

He nods to the bodyguards and they lower her to the ground. She gratefully accepts the dust and the rock fragments as if they are pillows, almost ready to curl into a sleep.

Klaus reaches into his jacket pocket and takes something out, glancing back at Alex in the same moment.

A blade.

Behind him, Dietrich stiffens. “Klaus…”

One of the bodyguards turns the girl onto her stomach and she murmurs, almost giggles, as if he were a lover repositioning her post-coitally. The other straightens her legs out.

Again, Dietrich. “Klaus.”

“Get back in the car,” the little man tells her.

“This isn’t …”

“Get back in the car,” he snaps.

Her hands flex as if she is about to do something then settle for returning the used hypodermic to her box.

Klaus kneels next to the girl, pinned to the ground beside him. He leans over her, strokes her hair with a rubberised hand. Whispers.

Then stands, walks back towards the car. Dietrich is now seated across from Alex, where the girl was moments earlier. Klaus gets in beside her. He tugs on his gloves to tighten them around his fingers.

“It’s not her fault,” the man explains to Alex in an almost fatherly way. “She just doesn’t realise … what is out there. Do you understand what I mean?”

Alex says nothing. A few feet away, the woman yelps and he sees her wriggling in the grip of the bodyguards as if she’s been in a fugue from which she has only just emerged. One of them has a knee on the small of her back, holding her steady.

“These girls – they are the lost, the abused. They drift here. They are found. Without my protection …”

His words are cut off by a sudden shriek from the girl and one of the bodyguards is wielding the blade that Klaus had removed from his jacket. It flashes once in the dusty light and the girl begins to scream.

“There are people out there who do such terrible things you would not believe. Such horrors.”

A sound escapes Dietrich’s lips. She breathes in deeply to steady herself, staring at her own face reflected in the lid of the needle box so fixedly it is as if she wishes to be drawn into it, a vicious Alice-world or sharp edges and clouds of brief elation.

Klaus looks out the car to his men and Alex feels compelled to do the same. The girl is struggling frantically but worthlessly. She kicks up dust around them as one of the bodyguards grabs her foot and raises it. The other one moves along her body, gripping her by the waist and leaving her hands free. She attempts to reach back, lashing out at him but can’t get enough leverage.

Her eyes find Alex’s, lock on to him. They are wet with tears and black with terror made worse by the fact that she can’t properly tell what they are doing to her. The guard tilts her foot downwards, exposing the muscled cable of her Achilles tendon and now she knows.

She batters the ground because it’s all she can do, shrieking madly, and Alex feels emotion well within him at the sight of this abuse and his inability to do anything about it.

“But I forgive her,” Klaus says, just as the bodyguard draws the blade across the girl’s leg, slicing into the tendon, sawing at it and her cries escalate into a manic frenzy, something that is more animal than it is human, the sound of a slaughterhouse when a door is left open. Her body judders, the guard having to work hard with the blade to break through the wiry cartilage as blood flows out around his hands and across them, making it harder and harder for him to maintain the necessary grip on the blade.

Suddenly it pops out and drops to the ground, the job still incomplete.

He fumbles around for a few moments, the dust feathering the tar of the girl’s blood as she kicks out with her damaged leg, now free from his ownership, splattering all of them with bright, fresh blood but her foot, her foot is limp and awkward on the end of it.

Finally the man wields the blade again, taking a fresh grasp of her leg and her struggles are weakening, her cries growing hoarse. He snatches her foot and then slices once more, rocking the blade back and forth, grinding it against her.

The girl arches her back, eyes wide, mouth open. The guard moves to her other leg but she offers no resistance when he tips her foot as he did before and this time he moves with a single, more definitive slicing motion and the tendon snaps with ease. The job done, he rolls away from her, his colleague letting her go.

They catch their breath then stand and leave her as Alex had earlier discarded and left his oil rag and thinking of that moment he realises he has no concept of how long this has been going on. It feels as if he has been in the back of the car for hours, trapped within a warped carnival ride.

The girl is gasping for air, unable to draw breath through the panic and adrenaline surging through her. Blood pools around her, mixing with concrete dust.

“It’s almost a hundred miles to the nearest city and five to get back to the complex – to her home,” Klaus explains to Alex, as if the choice were his own and not the girl’s. “She’ll probably be needing another hit in about four hours time and she knows it.”

He sits back into the seat as the guards get into the car, sweaty and bloody and dirty. One of them sits by Alex, the other taking the passenger seat. The engine is started.

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