Ahmet stretched back from the front seat, held the bottle above her head, and poured the alcohol into her mouth—it burned like wildfire.

The flaming liquid fell onto her tongue and flowed down her throat. The nasty liquid warmed her from the inside. A surge of heat suddenly enveloped her like a cozy blanket.

The voices faded and started drifting somewhere far away. She felt much better. Strange waves of sensation were already carrying her into the darkness.

Again.

* * *

They were alien to her—men with blurred faces, framed by dark hair and beards. She did not understand what they were saying, and she did not care—she was beyond caring. She felt herself floating in the air like a balloon—so light and indifferent.

She could no longer think, or feel. She did not belong to herself. Her life was to be decided by strange and scary people. She could not resist anything. She could not say anything. She could not speak at all.

One of the blurry faces spoke to her in English. His voice seemed to echo from far away. “We’re going to be in the open for a moment,” he said. “Don’t cry out or say a word. No one will help you.”

Was she hallucinating? The men all seemed to have the same facial features. They were just blank faces, washed out, pixelated, devoid of any specific characteristics, as if they did not have faces at all. The dark framing of their hair and their thick beards made their heads seem disproportionately large. They were men with gigantic heads, and faces that all looked identical.

She was out of the car now.

Suddenly, the darkness enveloped her again. But this new darkness was different. It was not the kind of darkness into which you fall instantly, and disappear into a deep abyss, and which doesn’t give you a chance to get scared for even a split second. It was not the same kind of darkness that she had already experienced.

This time it was a darkness where you realize that the worst is just moments or even seconds away. It was the kind of darkness the condemned man experiences when he is brought to the scaffold to be executed.

They had covered her head with a black hood.

One of the men carried her. She felt herself become like some boneless deep sea creature, a jellyfish, but a jellyfish made of bread dough, malleable and light. Her breathing slowed down, her heart was barely beating, her muscles became limp and formless, and her body was slung over someone’s shoulder like a bag of rice.

She knew it was the beginning of the end. Soon she would be killed. There would be no explanation of anything—just darkness, confusion, and then death.

She saw her father again, looking for her, very scared.

Her father…

The President of the United States.