by R. B. Schow
“You suck at this,” Cira told Leopold when the attendant went back into his booth.
“We’re a bit off the reservation here,” Leopold said quietly, “but it’ll be fine.”
“Sure it will,” Atlas said. “Except for Kiera, the drugs, and the mass-murdering ex-cop, we’re all good. I mean, what else could possibly go wrong?”
“You’re not a mass murderer,” Leopold said.
“To be a mass murderer, you need to have committed four or more murders with a no cooling-off period,” Cira said. “At least, that’s according to the FBI.”
“And you know this how?” Atlas asked.
“Leopold has me learn things so that I can do things,” Cira said cryptically, “and that’s all you need to know.”
“She was like you,” Leopold said. “But much better looking.”
Atlas turned and looked at her. “No kidding?”
“That was for me to share and not you,” Cira said to Leopold. “We talked about this.”
“Be quiet,” Leopold said as the supervisor made his way toward them. “We can’t cause a scene.”
“Too late,” Atlas said.
“Paco tells me you are trying to bribe him,” the supervisor said. He was an older man with a round belly, a big Texas handlebar mustache, and a belt buckle so ostentatious it almost deserved its own reward. “Do you know the kinds of penalties that come with bribing a CPB agent at the border?”
“I didn’t know that Paco was an agent,” Leopold said.
“Did you try to bribe him?” he asked.
“Absolutely not,” Leopold said. “I merely told him that if he searched us, which he said that he intended to do, that all he would find would be five hundred in cash on the back seat.”
“Do you realize that you have an eight hundred dollar exemption for gifts and personal articles right now?”
Now he felt like a donkey. “I wasn’t aware of that,” Leopold said, sheepishly.
“I’m going to need you to open the back doors and when I tap the trunk lid, please open that for me,” he said. He then addressed his subordinate. “Paco, let Esteban know I’ll be tied up here for a few minutes, please?”
“Si,” he said, still hitting Atlas with the stink eye.
“Open the back doors,” the supervisor said.
Leopold unlocked the doors and Kiera quietly turned in her seat. When the man opened the door, he looked at Atlas, turned away at the smell, then held his nose and looked at the seat between Atlas and Cira. He then shut the door, walked around back, and stood there for a while. When he tapped the trunk lid, Leopold said, “We’re totally screwed.” The fear hit his eyes like a hammer to the skull. He opened the trunk lid. Leopold clenched his sphincter at the sound of the lever’s release.
The man looked inside and there was no way on God’s green earth he could miss that weed. He then closed the lid, walked up to Leopold’s door, and gave it a knock.
“You’re clear, sir,” he said. He turned to Paco and said, “They’re all good.”
Paco let them through, and then after a moment, they were on the move.
From the back seat, Atlas, ever the untimely comedian, said, “I think I smell something funny. Leo, did you just soil your pants?”
“I think maybe I did,” he said. “Did he take the cash?”
“Sure did,” Atlas said.
“Now that we’re through,” Cira asked, “where are we going next?”
“Independence Avenue,” he replied, still short of breath. He wiped beads of sweat from his temples and reminded himself that they made it. “There’s a sewage treatment facility nearby. Degremont Planta Sur.”
“Your underwear will fit right in,” Atlas mumbled.
“Yeah, well, the way you smell,” Cira said to Atlas, “you two can be shit brothers.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
CALLIE FOX
Guillermo woke Callie up to the nightmare that was now her life. She was sleeping on a sweat- and blood-stained mattress in a room with a boarded-up window, a pot meant to pee in, and a blanket that looked as though many different fluids had stained it.
“It’s time to go,” Guillermo said.
“Where am I going?”
“Home I think,” he said.
She started to shake with joy and then he laughed and said, “Ah, I’m just kidding. I think you’re going to Prague.”
When he left, she started to cry.
Later that morning, she was driven to an airfield where she met a rather boisterous man with a large belly, lots of gold rings on his fingers, and a pair of sunglasses too gaudy and encrusted with diamonds to be worth anything less than a small fortune. She hated him already.
She boarded the plane, then quickly ran to the bathroom and threw up. The tears that started came on fast and they wouldn’t stop. She continued to retch and puke, her stomach purging itself until there was nothing left but hot, bile-smelling air.
There was a slight knock on the door.
“Almost done,” she said, wiping her eyes, although it was no use. Now, to add to the misery, her mouth tasted sour and acidic.
“Let me know if you need anything,” the man said from the other side of the door.
“Okay, thank you.”
She finished in the bathroom when the jet started to move. With no choice but to get to a seat, she emerged from the bathroom and sat down as far from this man as she could.
The jet taxied down the runway, swung right, then came to a stop and waited. She had been on commercial airliners before but never a jet as nice as this one. When it was their turn to go, the jet entered the runway then put on a burst of speed. She felt her fingers grip the end of the armrest while the rest of her body clenched tight for the takeoff.
The engines were powerful and loud, and before she knew it, the wings caught the air and the jet pushed hard into the sky, the nose tilting north for a short time. When they reached cruising altitude, this creature who had procured her unfastened his seatbelt, walked down the aisle, and sat beside her.
“My name is Mohammad Jawahir and you are the girl I bought,” he said in a thick accent, with a passable command of the English language.
“I wasn’t aware I was for sale,” she said, biting back more tears.
“You women are not aware of a lot of things. That is why, in my country, you do as you are told under penalty of death.”
“Well, I’m not from your country and we don’t have those rules in America.”
“You are not from any country right now,” Mohammad said with a sick grin. “Now that we are alone and heading to Prague, you may lie down and relax before the excitement begins. I have a room I think you will like.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant when he said she had a room in which she could relax. Was she going to be in the room alone? Or would he try to join her? The way he said they were “now alone” not only scared her, it flat out terrified her.
“What kind of excitement do you have planned for us?” she asked, wiping at the pools gathering in her eyes. She didn’t want her tears to spill over and make her look weak, especially now that he confessed to having such a low opinion of women.
“I will show you the room first,” he said. “Stand up, walk to the back. The closed-door on the right is where you will lie down and relax.”
She got up, walked back then opened the door to a room that was not much bigger than the bed it held. Mounted around the room were four small video cameras, like Go-Pro cameras, and various sex toys on display. She started to back out.
“No,” she said, panicking.
“Yes,” he replied, pushing his belly into her.
She tried to turn, but a meaty hand pushed her inside the room. Filled with fear, she knew she was stuck on the plane with him, but if there was one place she could not go, it was in that room.
She fell forward on the bed, which allowed the creep a chance to grab her ass. But the second he tried, she drove her heel straight up into his balls. He fol
ded forward and let out a groan. She pushed herself up, cracked him under the chin with the point of her elbow, and scrambled for a way out of there.
The guttural cursing started instantly, and though she bought herself a little breathing room, the man filled the entire doorway and he wasn’t budging.
She spun in the tight space between them and then she kneed him in the nuts, this time from a different angle. He still wouldn’t move so she raked her nails down his face until he palmed her head and shoved her sideways into the wall.
The impact slowed everything down and she found herself stuck in some sort of disoriented haze. Was she going to survive this? Fighting for her life, her virginity, and her virtue, she went after him with everything she had, and though she’d drawn first blood, it was not enough to slow him down and certainly not enough to stop him. She was but a tiny mouse standing before a lion.
Standing there gasping for air, her head aching from where she’d hit the wall, this demented wildebeest simply looked at her, all of his good-natured boisterousness gone.
Before she knew what happened, he pulled something out of his jacket then jammed it into her side. The electrical charge that hit her ribs had her muscles grabbing the bones hard, her guts practically sucked together and overheating. She fell over on the bed, stiff and scorched inside.
And then she was out cold.
When Callie felt herself coming around, she tried to move but found a sharp pain in her wrists. Blinking her eyes, her body heavy and hurting, she shook off the effects of having been hit with a stun gun. That’s when she found her arms and legs were bound together with heavy plastic cuffs, the kind cops sometimes used in the movies.
The man was on the phone. She turned her head to look at him. He was sitting in his white underwear, his big body brown and carpeted with hair. The phone’s volume was up loud enough to hear the other person talking to him in English. It sounded like a woman.
“The bidding will start at twenty-five thousand,” he was saying. “This is one day only where everyone wins.” He paused then said, “Yes, it is the same as last time. The highest bidder gets her first, the second gets her second, and so on. The only rules are that you cannot beat her face, and you cannot kill her.” Another pause, then, “Yes, I know that twenty-five thousand is a lot of money, that’s why you will announce that this is a US congressman’s daughter.” A further, short pause and then he said, “Yes, of course. Yes, she is white.”
The horror of the situation set in with such ferocity, the tears practically sprang to her eyes, spilling over her cheeks and down the side of her face. He didn’t know she was awake so he continued to speak plainly.
“Yes, she is a virgin, but don’t put that. I am about to change that. She will be in pristine shape though, so make sure you let the bidders know.” Another short pause, then, “Yes, I’m going to take pictures now.”
He opened up his laptop, logged onto a website, then entered a passcode and said, “I will upload the pictures in just a few minutes. Let them know that this one is a fighter.”
He turned and saw that she was awake. “Oh, hello,” he said, “how was your nap?”
“That was hardly a nap. Why are you doing this to me?”
“She is awake,” he said to the woman on the phone. “I’ll get those pictures to you soon.”
“Why is anything done to anyone?” he asked, the sing-song tone back in his voice. He took his cell phone off the dresser, activated the camera, and then began taking pictures of her. When he was done, he said, “Wow, there are some good ones here.”
“You disgusting pig,” she said.
He laughed as he uploaded the photos to the internet. “Do you know how many names I have been called? Hundreds, thousands. As a kid, I was the product of a tremendous amount of abuse, but that only made me strong. It only fortified my resolve.”
“You still turn my stomach.”
“This I know,” he said with a smile. “But do you know something?”
She turned away. He grabbed her face, jerked it back around to face him, and then put a smile back on his face.
“I know that you will be with me and there is nothing you can do about it,” he said, almost like she had no choice in the matter. “The only question you have to ask yourself is if you want it the hard way or the easy way.”
He said this with a chuckle, almost like being cute would excuse him from raping her and selling her off to other men who would pay to do the same.
“The easy way,” she said.
“Suit yourself.”
And with that, he hit her with another burst of the stun gun. When she woke, it was under immense physical pressure, but the stun gun jolted her back to sleep. This happened several times until when at last she came around, the weight was not there. Instead, there was a new pain, the hot, fuzzy discomfort of having her body fried over and over again, and the sharp sting of burned flesh where the stun gun had seared her skin.
Her eyes fluttered open and she didn’t feel well. Her head was full of electrified cotton, her hips and pelvic bone ached, and she felt sticky below, like when she’d had her period.
Looking over at him, almost like she was stuck in the loftiness of a dream, she saw him sitting naked on the bed. He was looking at the laptop again.
He turned and saw her, and then he smiled. “Judging by the way the bids are coming in, it looks like you’re going to have a very bad day tomorrow.”
“Your name is Mohammad,” she said, her own voice sounding so far away. “Are you…a Saudi?”
“Persian,” he replied. “My father hates your government, as does most of the Iranian government. I don’t hate the government, though. They do business with us, business like this. Do you know how they butcher a cow?”
She nodded, her soul feeling out of alignment with her body, her limbs agitated and uncooperative.
“They sell as much of the cow as they can, hoping to maximize profits,” he said. “When we get girls like you, we do the same thing. We maximize profits.”
“How much can you really get selling me to a bunch of fat pricks like you?” she asked, hazy, her brain still slipping gears.
“Enough to offset the costs of travel and of buying you, but selling you to horny diplomats who cannot get a girl without buying her first…that is pocket change.”
“For who?”
“For all of us,” he said.
She lay back down on the bed, aware now that she was naked. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she already knew that though. The room seemed to fade in and out of her vision, her brain trying to take her from this dark, terrifying place. She felt another part of herself wanting to emerge, but that could only happen if she were able to sleep. Then she thought, What has happened to my head? What did he do to me? Did he drug me? Oh my God, have I been drugged?
“When the men are done with you, we kill you on film, and then we will sell copies of that film over and over again for years to come.”
“Snuff,” she said, so drowsy she could hardly keep her eyes open.
“The west believes so deeply in profit. Well, we believe in profiting from the west as well, and you are the tool by which we will do that.”
“My father will come after you with a vengeance,” she said.
The man laughed, and laughed, and laughed, each chortle more offensive and demeaning than the last. “My dear, who do you think gave you to us?”
This one statement staved off the mental slide just long enough for her to say, “He wouldn’t do that.”
“He is in politics, is he not?” Mohammad asked.
“Yashshr,” she said, her voice now sounding so syrupy and lost.
“You know how slimy American politicians are these days. They can be bought for a dollar, broken by a leaked story, or compromised for an idea.”
“What idea?” she asked, the words slurring even worse, the question nearly impossible to ask.
“The idea that you can get in bed with vampires and resist their bite,�
� he said in that same jovial voice. He sounded a thousand miles away, but somehow she could still hear him. “At first, the rewards for being in the right crowd are tantalizing, but then, after you’ve been compromised, you are the thing they will suck dry. Everyone knows how this works. You take too many bites of the forbidden fruit while each taste is filmed, witnessed, recorded.”
She mumbled something, but even she didn’t know what she was saying. It was something about her being drugged.
“Your father took a bribe, and in return, you were given to us. Soon, we will have you on tape, dying. And your screams? Oh! They will be the last sounds your father hears. We will send him a tape. It will be you crying out for him, looped over and over again in ninety-minute segments.”
“Why Prague?” she managed to ask.
“You know who shits in their backyards? Dogs. We are not dogs, so we shit in other people’s backyards. Besides, Prague is lovely this time of year, and I have friends there, friends with deep pockets and rather unusual obsessions.”
She could no longer talk. The boisterous man now leaned forward and pulled open her eyes then he smiled and said, “Soon you won’t even know your own name. Not until it is time. Do you know what Vampire’s Kiss is?”
She grunted something, unable to feel her arms and hands, or her legs and feet. Even the feeling of her face was starting to escape her.
“This is the adrenalized blood of children. Drinking it is supposed to bring you youth and vitality. You are too old to provide the purest sample of such a drug, but we’re going to drain you and sell you anyway. Any good feelings our buyers get will be additives, not that we’ll tell them that. Let those vermin think what they will, so long as they pay me my money.”
And with that, she fell down that very dark well, a well so deep and suffocating she couldn’t scream, let alone form a single word. She just fell, and fell, and fell, too weak to slow her descent, too far gone to escape the inevitable.
Chapter Thirty-Three