This story is mine and it's true. I reserve all rights to it. Please don't repost or do anything with it unless you get my permission. If you have feedback, be it a question, comment or just to point out a typo, drop me an email at twylamarie @ ymail.com. I appreciate all feedback positive or negative. ######## He pointed a gun in my face and said "You'll take your last breath tonight." Obviously, it wasn't true or I wouldn't be here, but a thug in a black ski mask said this to me when he and a buddy were robbing the grocery store I was working at. They had us (there were four of us) in the back room and one had a gun pointed at us at all times. It was about 2AM and they were trying to get us to tell them the combination to this stupid little safe they had and none of us knew it. It said so right on the door of the safe - "Employees do not have combination." We also told them so. They didn't believe us or were just sadistic assholes, so they decided to torment us and see if anyone would give up the goods. They had already beaten a bit on Barry the night manager before they started on me. He was all of about 22 and looked like a pimply stock boy - I don't think they even knew he was the manager. He was bleeding from his ear where they had hit him with the side of a gun grip and it tore his skin His eye was black and swollen. (Later, when they took him to the hospital, they found a crack in the bone around his eye socket.) I think they actually beat him first just to scare me. I was the oldest looking one there and I think they thought I was actually the night manager. If they were trying to get my attention it worked - I was scared to death and shaking like a leaf. I would have given up the combination to the safe if I had known it. I'd have given up anything to get out of there alive. No doubt. I was taken into a different room by the big mean one - an office where the owner's wife did the bills during those rare times when she wasn't reading movie magazines off the shelf. Once there, the robber slapped me in the face repeatedly - so many I lost count and almost lost my consciousness. Then he threw me into a wall by my hair. (Some of it came out in his hands and I still have a small bald spot near my right ear though only I probably notice it.) Next, while I stood there stunned, he started adding molestation to the violence. He grabbed at and rubbed my boobs roughly and ran his hand down the front of my panties after unbuttoning my fly and unzipping the zipper. When he tore my blouse and tried to get it off my shoulders, I realized what was happening through the fog of pain. I recovered enough to resist him and pull away at least temporarily. That really got him mad and he started whispering while he hit me, telling me he was going to "take what he wanted" and then kill me for being uncooperative. He called me a lot of ugly names - told me ugly things he was going to do. He pushed me back into the wall again and stood back - I think to enjoy his handiwork. I was a mess. When I moved my hands up to block him from seeing into my torn blouse, he told me not to bother to be shy because the `fun" was just beginning. Then he pinned me to the wall with his body and started pawing around on me again. I resisted and squirmed when he was trying to shove his hand down my pants. I even tried to bite his nose since his face was so close that I could. I screamed at the top of my lungs and spit at him and swung my fists though he took the blows like they were nothing. (I wasn't very strong.) In return he hit me hard with a closed fist into my stomach and when I bent over from the blow he kicked me so hard one cheek of my ass was black and blue for weeks. It took my breath away and I sat bent over crying until his demands for me to stand up got too loud to ignore. When I straightened up, he put the gun right up to my mouth - actually slightly into my mouth - and calmly told me to stop fighting or I would be dead. That simple. He waited for that to sink in, and then gave me instructions to take my pants down and bend over the desk. He stepped away to make room and I could tell he expected me to comply. I really do think he was capable of murdering me because he was so violent, but I was crying and irrational and just refused to do it. I didn't say no. I just didn't move. It wasn't bravery at all. It was anything but that - I just wasn't thinking clearly. If I had thought about what I was doing I probably would have done exactly what he said and who knows what would have happened. Instead, I just became his punching bag again - this time with closed fists into my stomach and slaps to my face. I had been with my attacker for about 10 minutes - being beaten and bullied the whole time - and thought for sure he was going to eventually rape me and probably beat me to death too when his partner called for him. My molester grabbed me by the hair on the back of my head and pulled me back to the group. When I got back to where they were holding the others, all my coworkers saw my torn blouse and that my pants were open and my panties were ripped at the top. (The robber didn't rip them - they had got tangled up in the dryer and I just couldn't afford a new pair.) Also I was crying pretty hard and so they put two and two together and figured I had been raped. The look on their faces was somewhere between panic and rage. (At the time there was a dark joke going around that if you raped a girl it was better to kill her after since the Iowa laws gave greater penalties to rapists than killers. I know - not funny, right? But that's the way it was. Rapists got life and killers got out after about 20 years.) I think the guy's partner thought he'd raped me too, because at first he looked pissed at my attacker. It was very intense and felt like something really bad was going to explode between them. It brought up the fear factor considerably because now we had two guys with guns mad at each other - but after some whispers between them and some sour looks nothing more was said. A few minutes later, the other robber - the one who hadn't molested me - started saying things about getting his turn maybe. (In the end he never even touched me - but every time either one of them moved my direction I flinched and feared the worst.) They finally left after about 50 minutes. I think they were getting nervous because they had been there for a while and it was a 24 hour store. They didn't know it but we only really stayed open 24 hours because we stocked shelves at night and so we were staffed up for that anyway. We saw maybe 30 customers on an average on our shift and most of them towards the morning around 6AM when they were awake but the big chain grocery store on the highway wasn't open yet. They could have taken their time and tortured us all night if they had wanted to. During the time after my beating, the one guy who had tried to rape me went back to menacing us while the other cleaned out the register and filled some bags with cigarettes. (The cigarettes were certainly worth more than the change money we kept in the register at night.) Periodically he would hit one of us for no reason hard and constantly told us we were going to die if we didn't give up that safe combination. For his sick fun, he also repeatedly told me to get on my knees and blow him (I didn't) and also grabbed my bra and tried to tear it off me right in front of the others. It was a support bra that was built like armor, but it hurt so bad when the straps tore into my arms that they left welts and he did manage to get it far enough off my chest that I was exposed completely a few times. I was hanging out of my blouse when the other robber came back, and he said some pretty crude things to me that I could never, ever repeat to anyone - not even the cops when they took my statement. What I will say is that he was going to take me with him when they left so he could "fuck him some white girl ass" and that I would never want to leave once I'd gotten a taste of his big cock but that was okay because he would share me with his buddies (If that's the part I'll share - imagine what the rest was like.) When the time came, they actually got out of there quickly and made no attempt to get me into the car, which I was so relieved about I actually thanked them. Once they were gone, all of my co-workers surrounded me like I was the only victim, though they were all beat-up pretty horribly. I was crying so badly that it took a minute to let them know that I hadn't been raped, though I really don't think they believed me. (The cops didn't either and repeatedly requested I submit to a medical exam - which I didn't do for a lot of reasons. Mostly because I had so many illegal drugs in my system it probably would have set off alarms.) The asshole thug had been fond of using his fist on the guys mostly and all of them had black eyes, broken teeth and bloody noses. I was actually less hurt than they were, but they didn't know that and couldn't stop repeating how sorry they were that they didn't protect me more. Barry was crying and I felt so bad for him and all of them really. None of us made a move to call the cops immediately - we were really all in shock - but eventually one of us got worried they might call back so he found a working phone. (The ones in the office had all been torn out of the wall and this was before cell phones were common.) The most awkward part of the story was that we had to call the cops, and all of us had been smoking a joint about 10 minutes before the robbers stormed in. (Manager included. We would never have won "employee of the year" awards any of us.) We all swore that we wouldn't tell the cops about being high before they got there, but they questioned us separately and we were all worried the other people would tell. Instead, we all just said we were very, very frightened which was true - though the cops knew Barry and I by reputation and actually asked us if any "drugs were stolen." (This store didn't have a pharmacy nor stock anything stronger than aspirin - but we were already suspects because of our history with the cops.) Yes, we were beat up, but in the end there was nothing very serious. Other than Barry's cheek, everything healed pretty well on all of us. (Barry had a scar which actually improved his appearance since it helped to re-arrange his baby face.) A few of the guys got some dental work done that also improved their smiles. It could have been a lot worse. During the robbery and abuse, my co-workers saw by breasts and heard the horrible things the robbers said to me. For some reason that felt like rape in a way and I took it very hard at the time. I had been "date raped" before - basically by guys who took advantage of me when I was too drunk or drugged to say no - so I was no stranger to the feeling of having been sexually used I guess, but this was just completely different. It was so violent and ugly. I felt so violated. I had actually been pretty good friends with a few of these guys, and the way they cared for me in the wake of the attack should have drawn us closer, but after the hold-up we drifted apart pretty quickly. I felt so bad about that, but it was impossible to see them and not think of the attack and all the pain and humiliation. One of the other stockers on the job that night was an older guy and acted all tough and superior all the time because he was "more mature" than us. We found out he peed his pants during the attack which we teased him about even in the police station and hospital. He left and we never saw him again ever - not even at the follow up questionings at the police station. Truth be known though, I would have peed mine too but had just gone and hadn't drank anything. I felt bad when he left. I think we all did. Barry quit the store, moved back in with his parents and I hear he went back to college. He was one of the last people that I saw before I left town for good and he seemed like he'd been "scared straight." I know he never got high with us again after that night - I think he found God or something too. The last stock boy was a younger guy named Clyde who kept working for the store but got awful quiet after the robbery. He was probably the least hurt of all of us, but seemed to take it the hardest of all the guys. I know he started hitting the bottle hard but they never fired him when he got to work late or not at all, at least not while I still lived in town. That owner had a little class (very little) anyway. I tried to keep the job, but there were just too many memories so I quit the store and went back to living on my savings which were pretty substantial actually. (My boyfriend would always peel me off a few hundred dollars whenever he had done a big drug deal and I almost never spent the money. It added up after a while.) With my new freedom from employment I took up cocaine and narcotics as a full time profession for the next few seasons. I think that night and a few trips I took to the police station for follow-up questions were the only times I was close to sober for months. I buried the pain and memories under a pile of blow and pills and that worked after a fashion. They never caught the guys who robbed the store. I often wondered if they were people we had seen before, or maybe even knew us. But if they had "cased" the store carefully we probably would have been hostages back there for hours as they would have known the store didn't get much business. I doubt we would have lived though who knows. They could have killed us any time. I might have "only" been raped - "only" being a word that a detective used when explaining that most robberies don't end in murder - and I don't know how I would have handled that. I've had friends that were victimized and it leaves scars that no one can fix. I probably would have killed myself. I really think I would have. I don't like to think about this much, but did so I wrote it down. Sometimes that helps me when I have bad memories I want to erase from my mind.