Marla Simmons - Backstory cut from manuscript
As Marla watched, children swarmed over the playground while older children shot hoops. She grew up in a town smaller than this, in Kansas. It was a cookie-cutter small mid-western town full of people with small minds. She didn’t have parents who acted like these parents, and she never considered this type of life was an option, not for her. In the town she grew up in, being a lesbian or bi was a sin according to the god-fearing rapists in charge. Two men, both fathers with six children between them, decided the best way to sort out her sexuality was by raping her. ‘Showing her a good time’, they had explained. They knew she wouldn’t complain, one was a police officer. No one would’ve believed her anyway, the townsfolk, her parents included, were neanderthal in their thinking.
She escaped as soon as her age let her join the army. She served in several theatres with distinction but her technology prowess allowed her to become an information systems operator-analyst. IT specialists who could also handle a gun were rare and she was shoulder tapped to join a covert branch of a covert agency. She had worked for them for over seven years and, although they hadn’t terminated her, they had terminated her contract.
Fourteen years after she left that small Kansas town, Marla returned. She wasn’t in uniform, her medals pinned proudly on her chest. She returned on a greyhound bus, dressed as a vagrant taking a cheap room in a cheap motel. As she expected, nothing had changed except everything looked older and tired. She didn’t visit her parents though she saw them from a distance, sitting on the porch of their dilapidated home. The town, part of Trump’s Make America Great Again fantasy, was dying along with its inhabitants.
She left two days later, on a similar bus. When the police, acting on a tip-off, raided the homes of two prominent townsfolk they discovered thousands of pornographic images, much of it illegal. As Marla suspected, they kept pictures of their victims as trophies and the photos contained images of local girls. If they ever got out of jail, they would be torn apart by redneck vigilantes. She took no pleasure from what she did; it simply needed to be done.
