by R. B. Schow
“Do any of them work here?” Zoey asked.
“No,” he said quickly. “And I hope they never do.”
“Is it bad to work here?” Zoey asked.
“It is very bad to work here.”
“What is this place?”
“A maquiladora, or a textile factory. We assemble jeans that we export to other countries. Knockoffs of American jeans that can be sold for half the price in American dollars and produced almost as low as those made in the Chinese factories.”
“Will my sister and I be working here?” she asked.
“For a little while.”
She looked at Maisie, who was starting to tear up.
“Don’t cry yet, little one,” the man said in a compassionate voice. “You can do that when I’m done questioning you or when we’re done with the photographs. After that, you’ll be working, so maybe you’ll have to wait until after you’re done with work to cry. It’s okay, though. You’ll have all the time you need.”
“Are you going to ask her the same questions that you asked me?” Zoey asked.
“As embarrassing as they are, yes, I will ask her the same questions.”
“Then the answer is ‘no’ to all of them,” Zoey said. “She is only eight years old.”
He looked over and asked Zoey’s younger sister, “Is this true?”
Maisie nodded then looked at her sister. Zoey worked extra hard to keep her chin up and her eyes dry. She couldn’t think of how they’d escape but she knew one thing for sure, her father was coming for her, and sooner or later, he would make them all pay for what they were doing.
“Okay, then,” the man said, standing up.
He put his hands to his lower back and pressed his belly out in some sort of stretch that old people do. He didn’t look that old, but he was pretty fat when he arched his back.
He picked up a camera from his desk and said, “Zoey, you need to go stand against that wall. Face me and give me a half-smile.”
“Are you going to take my picture?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Who will see it?”
“Rich people,” he said. “Be a good little girl and do what I ask.”
Zoey liked this man much better than the others so she did as she was told. She wanted to smile the way you were supposed to smile when your picture was being taken, because her father once said, “Who knows, maybe that will be the picture they use one day when you’re older and powerful like me.” She barely smiled for this man, though, because that’s what he’d wanted her to do. If rich people didn’t want her smiling big, then she wouldn’t smile big at all.
The man took photos of her when she was facing the camera, when she was turned sideways, and when she had her back to the camera. As long as she got to keep her clothes on, she was happy to let him take as many pictures as he wanted. It turned out he only wanted three photos of her and three photos of Maisie.
When he was done, he said, “You two were terrific. Now I want you to follow me onto the factory floor. I will have one of the women teach you to sew and you can begin making pants. Isn’t that fun?”
“Where will we sleep?” Maisie asked.
“You will work until midnight then we will take you to an offsite location where you will sleep in your own designated spot. In the morning you will shower, we will feed you, and then you will come back tomorrow and do it all over again. Doesn’t that sound grown up?”
Maisie’s eyes started to water and she said, “Can you please take us back to our mommy?”
The hunched man knelt down before her, took her little chin into his hand, and tilted it toward him so that they were looking eye-to-eye. “Don’t you remember what I said? I told you that you would never see her again. Now, don’t be a little asshole or I will kill you myself and throw you away like we throw away all the bad little girls.”
Maisie started to cry now, so the man grabbed her face, and that’s when Zoey stepped forward, took her sister’s free hand, and said, “I will help her learn. And we will sleep in the place you want us to sleep, and eat the food you want us to eat. We won’t be bad little girls.”
With Maisie’s face still gripped in his hand, he looked deep into the eight-year-old’s eyes and said, “Your big sister just saved your life. For now. If I see any more tears from you, I will cut out your eyes.”
Maisie nodded her head as much as she could in his grip. He then let go of her face, stood up tall, and in a cheery voice, said, “Your time here can be as easy or as hard as you make it.” He looked down at Maisie. “It will be easier for you if you do what your sister is doing, and that’s doing exactly what I say. Soon you will be somewhere else, wishing you were back here. But by then someone else will have taken your place and I will have forgotten all about you.”
Throughout the rest of the day and well into the night, an older woman named Olina showed them their part in making the jeans. When they got the hang of it, Olina left them to their work, checking on them less and less.
Their tasks were not that hard, but Zoey’s feet, legs, and back hurt just as much as the raw ends of her fingertips. And it was boring work. When they weren’t served dinner, her stomach started to growl and hurt. It had never felt so hollow before. When Maisie asked Olina about dinner, she said, “Only breakfast.”
“One meal a day?” Zoey asked, floored.
Olina looked up toward the man’s office they had come from, then shushed them and made the finger-across-the-throat sign that likely meant they would kill you for talking. Based on what the man said before, Zoey was pretty sure Olina hadn’t made the gesture halfheartedly.
When the man finally emerged from the office hours later, he whistled and all the children put their tools down and followed him.
“Zoey, Maisie, you as well!” he called out in English.
She and Maisie followed several other kids into the back of a large pickup truck. The kids draped blankets over themselves, then two of the girls waved Zoey and Maisie closer, sharing their blankets with them.
In the grip of a midnight chill, they drove for a short time before turning into a large dirt lot with another building similar to the one in which they had been working all day and night. They followed the other kids’ leads and got out of the truck. When they walked inside the giant warehouse, there were hundreds of other kids already asleep on their cots.
The group they had arrived with had their own section of cots which was where the girls had taken them. Zoey introduced her younger sister to a man overseeing them. He had asked for their names, studied a list, then nodded and pointed to two nearby cots. Zoey and Maisie crawled into their scant beds then lay there trying to get comfortable.
“I miss Mommy,” Maisie whispered.
“I do, too,” Zoey said.
Zoey reached out with her hand and Maisie found it. She wasn’t sure if Maisie was crying or sleeping but it didn’t matter. The man who had taken their pictures said there were times to work and times to cry, and right then, Zoey realized it was time to cry.
Chapter Fourteen
CALLIE FOX
Guillermo Calderon looked over sixteen-year-old Callie Fox, smiling at what he saw. He stepped forward and sniffed her hair and her skin where it wasn’t covered with clothing. Satisfied, he said, “Show me your teeth.”
She did.
To Callie, Guillermo was not an attractive man, but he wasn’t ugly either. Not physically. What tightened her skin into goosebumps—the bad kind of goosebumps—was that he was looking at her like a predator and sniffing her the way a dog sniffs another dog’s asshole.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked, low like she wasn’t confident in saying anything at all but offended enough that she couldn’t keep her mouth closed.
Despite her instincts to be quiet and remain small, her father always told her that when a dog growls at you, you stand your ground and growl back harder.
“Plus,” her father had said, “you never turn your back and run. That’s how you
hold your power in front of a savage animal.”
Would that work with Guillermo? She prayed to God the way she treated this mutt would yield her the results her father promised. But then he responded to her and she knew, almost immediately, that the move she made with this particular dog was the wrong move altogether.
“When a little girl stands before me knowing she is not where she is supposed to be, knowing that the strange man in front of her is having illicit thoughts, they do not presume to think they can talk, let alone ask questions.”
He leaned toward her and spoke both softly and quietly, so softly and so quietly, in fact, that Callie had to lean forward as well just to understand him.
“I am going to ask you some questions you will not like,” he said, his breath smelling like cooked cabbage and raw meat. “They are invasive and impolite, but you need to answer honestly or I will do things to you that you cannot comprehend. I will start by putting cigarettes out on your tongue.”
She leaned back, her heart jolting to a full gallop, her chest pulling so tight she could hardly gather a breath. Callie was scared before; now she was terrified. It wasn’t just the cruelty he promised as much as how he promised it. He spoke delicately, his voice slight and unrushed, his eyes bright like he was happy in spite of the cruelty he promised.
When he started asking her questions about her sexual activities, her period, if she minded other men seeing her naked, she was overcome with revulsion. But when he asked if she was interested in being with older men or how she would feel about being tortured for pleasure, revulsion turned to sheer terror. She was so scared hearing the things he was saying that she had to clench her bowels just to keep from soiling herself.
When he was through with his vile line of questioning, there wasn’t a nerve left in her body that wasn’t raw. Her fight or flight response was off the charts. But there was no way she could run from these men or take them on in a fight. The worst part was that no one was there to help her. She was on her own, which meant she would have to save herself.
“What are you going to do to me?” she finally asked.
“Very, very bad things.”
She started to cry at that point.
Guillermo snapped his fingers, prompting one of his men to turn and leave. The man returned a moment later with a clean shot glass he handed to Guillermo.
Leaning close, Guillermo the quiet talker pressed the shot glass to her cheek and began collecting her tears. This perversion of her pain caused her to cry more, producing for him an even greater amount of tears.
She pulled away, saw the shot glass filling, but then yelped a little when he grabbed the back of her head and smashed the glass into her cheek once more. He had a grip on her hair now, which was both painful and humiliating.
“The ones who cry the hardest make for the best actresses,” he whispered. “There was a girl just last week, she cried so hard before they soaked her in gasoline and set her on fire, it actually made me cry. I did not shed tears of pain for her, nor was I overcome with the sadness of her death. I cried because fear like that—sadness and despair as deep as that—you can almost smell it in the air. It is the most powerful aphrodisiac I have ever felt and it is oh so very rare.”
“What do you want from me you deranged asshole?” she barked, her outburst tempered by an unsettling combination of hiccupping and sobbing.
“Only everything,” he purred.
She tried to back away from him, but he strengthened his grip on the back of her head, keeping her pressed against the shot glass. She knew he wanted to capture every last tear. When he was finally done torturing her, he shoved her head away and looked longingly into the shot glass. It was half full with her tears.
“There is a pureness to you that I don’t normally see in girls your age,” he said, smelling the inside of the shot glass. “You are virtuous, clean, and respectful. Do you keep a diary?”
She was so scared that it took her a moment to nod her head, yes.
“I bet you have a crush on a boy.”
She looked down, not meaning to confirm his statement but doing so anyway.
“I bet that little boy has no idea the depths of your feelings for him. He does not know how ripe you are for the taking. But I do. So many of us do. That’s why you’re going to bring me to tears once more.”
To the man who brought him the shot glass, Guillermo snapped his fingers once more. The man left only to return moments later with what looked like a decorative wooden box and a clean shot glass.
“Are you a drinker?” he asked.
“I’m only sixteen.”
“So, maybe?”
She shook her head. All she’d ever had were a few sips of this apple pie moonshine some guy named Boyd from Michigan brewed up in a whisky still that was supposedly legendary. She kept this detail to herself because it seemed irrelevant to the conversation.
“This is a Gran Patrón Platinum,” Guillermo said, opening the case. Inside the velvet-lined box was a bottle of Patrón. “The thing about this particular tequila is that it goes down smooth and naturally sweet. Usually, it takes the addition of sugar to reach this level of sweetness but not the platinum. The timing of the agave harvest is everything. If the crop is harvested too soon or too late, the agave’s sugar content is much lower. I see you the same way I see this particular bottle of tequila. You are ripe, so sweet, and perfectly aged. Any later in life and you’d have been run through by some arrogant little shit not aware of the virtue he has taken from you. And if taken too early, for some men, you would have looked like a boy with a vagina, which is no way to enjoy a child as far as I’m concerned, but to each their own.”
Inside, she swallowed a bit of vomit. She could not listen to this, could not hear it, nor could she even begin to understand what was happening to her or what exactly this pervert wanted from her.
“I am going to sell you to the highest bidder, young lady,” he said as if reading her mind. “The man or woman who purchases you will spend a lot of money. When they get you, it is customary to sell your virtue to the ten highest bidders. These men will make you into a woman. After that, they will film you being killed. This is called a snuff film. Copies of the film can be sold over and over again to men and women of distinction, people who understand the value of a secret kept. In other words, I’m going to make you famous.”
Right then she fell to her knees and threw up all over the floor. She expected him to punish her for such an infraction, but instead, he poured a drink of the tequila, lowered it into her face, and said, “You do the honors. Trust me. You’ll like it.”
Sitting up, snot drizzling from her nostrils, her stomach still upset, she took the shot glass with shaky hands. Callie studied the clear liquid for a moment and then she wiped her eyes and tossed it back. She swallowed hard, cringing at the incredible warmth then she let out a long sigh. He was right. The drink went down warm, but the finish was as smooth as it was sweet.
She glanced up, handed him the tiny glass, and watched as he poured another shot. Before enjoying this shot of tequila, however, he stared deeply into her eyes, almost like he was desperate to see the girl she was or all the secrets she kept hidden from him. When she answered his terrifying gaze with a frown, he answered her rebuke by taking a shot. But it wasn’t the tequila he threw back and swallowed with a euphoric sigh. It was her glass of tears. When he was done, when he had sufficiently allowed the taste of her to marinate within him, he chased the drink with a shot of Patrón.
“When you die screaming,” he said with such carnal delight, his voice just as low and unrushed as before, “I will pray that your soul goes to heaven if there is such a place. You do not deserve an eternity with men like me, not after what we’re going to do to you.” When she began to cry again, he leaned down, roughly swiped her tears away, and said, “Save those tears for later, young lady.”
Chapter Fifteen
ATLAS HARGROVE
Atlas didn’t know how many days or nights had passed
while he sat in solitary confinement. He was exhausted from being exhausted, his circadian clock was all screwed up having been sleep deprived for God knows how long, and now he was getting just plain aggravated. The meals came and went. He ate them, crapped them out, and then he drank water only to piss in the bucket, go back to working out, sleeping, and eventually to talking to himself. This led to him singing old Lynyrd Skynyrd songs.
He knew the classics by heart—“Sweet Home Alabama,” “Free Bird,” “Simple Man,” and “Tuesday’s Gone.” But he also knew parts of some of the lesser-known tunes. Well, lesser-known in these times. He sang, “The Ballad of Curtis Loew,” “Swamp Music,” and parts of “Call Me The Breeze.”
But then he changed bands and started to sing Credence Clearwater Revival because CCR had some seriously catchy tunes that had long ago been lodged in his mind. For some reason, maybe because he had no other form of stimulus, all of these classics started floating into his mind like a bouquet of balloons some kid let go on a sunny day.
He personally loved “Bad Moon Rising,” “Proud Mary,” and “Susie Q,” but when he got to “Down on the Corner,” he started to get pissed off and something in his brain suffered a spell of glitching. He couldn’t stop singing that song. Even when the guard outside started hitting the metal door with his baton, or whatever, Atlas belted that song out so loud his voice turned gravelly and hoarse, but still, he sang.
Finally, the door opened and a guard said, “If you don’t shut your bitch ass up, the boys and I are going to put you out of our misery.”
Atlas was up in a flash, grabbing the man by the collar even as he backed up and tried to shut the door. His hands were strong, his mind focused on one thing: pull the guard inside the room, beat him to death.
He wrestled the guard inside before other guards could assist. Four elbow strikes to the guard’s mouth and they all heard the sounds of teeth skipping on the cold concrete floor.