by Noire
Tears were in her eyes as she brushed past people on the side-walk. She’d heard Mello calling her name as she ran down the steps of his building, but she had igged his ass and kept on going. Her phone was vibrating in her purse and she ignored that too. Let him blow it up. She wasn’t about to answer that shit.
She was turning down Lenox Avenue when she heard a horn honking. Eva looked over her shoulder and saw Mello’s whip pulling up alongside of her.
“Eva!”
“Fuck you!” she said, turning her head and dissin’ him. She walked faster, her ass bouncing hard under her little pink skirt.
He honked some more.
“Eva! Yo, your aunt been tryna call you! Rosa is sick!”
Oh, that was some dirty-ass shit.
“That’s low, Mello!” she screamed over her shoulder. “That some low shit even for a fuckah like you!”
“Check your phone, Eva. Something ain’t right with Rosa. Your aunt was crying. She wants you to come home, baby. She needs you.”
Eva stopped in her tracks. There was no way in hell Mello would lie about something like that.
She turned around and looked at him. He was leaning across the front seat with panic in his eyes. Eva pulled her cell phone from her purse. She had six missed calls. Five of them from Milena.
“Get in,” Mello urged, and Eva jumped her ass in the ride quick and fast. Her heart was pounding as Mello pulled out into traffic and headed toward her crib. She tried to call her aunt back but the phone just rolled straight to voice mail. She checked her messages too, but all she could hear was Milena screaming and crying into the phone. In fuckin’ Spanish.
“Oh, God,” Eva prayed out loud as Mello wove the ride in and out of lanes and around sharp corners. She couldn’t remember praying this hard since that cold dark night down in the Howard Houses laundrymat. But on that night she was high and terrified and alone. This night she was with a real man. Somebody she knew loved her and would always have her back, no matter the cost. Everything was gonna be all right. Her crib was right up ahead. Not even five minutes away. Eva put her hand on Mello’s arm and held on.
“What the fuck happened in here?!” Eva shouted the minute her aunt opened the door. The apartment had been wrecked. Shit had been tossed all over the place. Dishes, clothes, curtains. Somebody had dragged all the cushions off the sofa and cut them shits wide open.
Milena sank into Eva’s arms. She looked raggedy. Her face was bruised and swollen and alcohol was heavy on her breath.
“He beat me,” Milena moaned. Eva looked into her mouth and pulled back, horrified. Her aunt’s two front teeth had been fist-cracked. There was nothing but jagged little shards left sticking out from her gums.
“Fiyah?” Eva said in disbelief.
“No. Fuego is in jail! His parole officer arrested him on a violation. It was Brody! He wanted me to tell him where you were.” Her face broke apart again as she cried loudly, “But how the fuck was I supposed to tell him what I didn’t even fuckin’ know?”
Eva felt her blood run cold.
“Auntie,” she said quietly. “Where’s Rosa?”
Milena nodded toward the bathroom and sobbed. The door was closed. “She’s in there. Brody put her in there. He was terrorizing us. Torturing us. Me and Rosa. He came here to kill Fuego, but Fuego got away. Me and Rosa was left here by ourselves and Brody almost killed us!”
Eva felt feverish. Like all this shit couldn’t be happening. She glanced toward the bathroom just as Mello was backing up out of it.
Rosa lay limp in his arms as he called out her name. “Rosa! Wake up, baby girl. C’mon, Rosa. Open your eyes.”
Eva crossed the room in a panic.
“Lemme see her,” she said, her eyes scanning Rosa’s small body for some sign of trauma. The girl was dressed in a short pink nightgown that smelled like vomit and old pee. Eva cried inside as the smell triggered memories of her own rank days.
“Rosa?” she said softly, patting the little girl’s cheeks. “Can you hear me?”
Rosa was in and out. Her eyes would open for a few moments, and then fall closed again as her head slumped to the side and drool slid from her mouth.
Eva got closer. “Rosa?” she said, her voice shaking. She slapped the girl’s cheeks harder, then lifted her eyelids and stared at her pupils.
“Rosaaaaaa!” Eva screamed. She shook the little girl’s shoulders as the child opened one eye and grinned at her. Rosa scratched her arm weakly, then fell off into oblivion once again.
All the signs were there, yet Eva still didn’t wanna believe it.
She turned to her aunt. “What the fuck did you give her!” she demanded, rage burning in her entire body.
“It wasn’t me,” Milena cried weakly. “I didn’t give her nothing. I swear. It was Brody.”
Mello looked puzzled.
“Eva, what’s up?” he asked. “What’s wrong with her?”
Eva cried from her gut and her knees wobbled with grief.
“She’s high, Mello,” she gasped. Anguished tears ran freely down her face. “She’s fuckin’ high! Rosa’s nodding!”
Mello sat down and stared at the limp little girl in his arms with disbelief.
He sat her up. “High? On what?”
“Smack. Heroin,” Eva moaned.
Mello was quiet for a quick moment. Rosa’s chin had fallen to her chest. Her lips were turned down at the corners and she bobbed slowly downward, then got it together slightly and sat back up.
“Nah,” Mello said, shaking his head in denial. “Duji? How you know it’s that?”
Eva pushed Rosa’s braids over her shoulder. She touched a vein in the girl’s neck that appeared swollen and red, and said in a soft, hollow voice, “Because I used to shoot that shit myself.”
They didn’t have time to wait for no ambulance. Paramedics wouldn’t come this deep up in the hood without a police escort anyway. And that could take all day to arrange.
Mello ran to his car with Rosa in his arms. He buckled her into the backseat then he sped off, honking his horn at the city traffic as he tried to make other drivers get the fuck outta his way. Even at the rate of speed he was driving at, he couldn’t stop himself from taking quick peeks at Eva. What she’d said upstairs in the apartment had fucked him straight up. Rosa was sick. Eva said the girl was so high it could kill her, and getting her to the hospital was his primary mission. Even though Mello knew it wasn’t the time or the place to get with Eva about her past, he couldn’t get that shit outta his head. I used to shoot that shit myself. Those words had come straight outta Eva’s mouth. Out of the mouth of the girl he loved.
He ran a red light and slammed on the brakes as a young boy walked his pit bull puppy out in traffic. Mello had no choice but to wait, and he couldn’t help but glance at Eva.
She sat there with her eyes screwed closed and her fists clenched tight. Her lips were moving and he knew she was praying her ass off. Praying for Rosa.
“Eva,” he blurted, unable to keep his mouth on lock. “You used to get high?”
He nosed the car back into traffic and resumed his high-speed drive.
“I was a junkie, Mello,” she said, sounding miserable and empty. “I was a ho too. I had a baby when I was fourteen and I left him in a laundrymat.”
Mello was struck down. His whole body went numb and his stomach lurched violently. His head was buzzin’. He felt physically sick. But the moment he looked over at Eva…at his baby…at the fine-ass chick who had won his heart, nothing else mattered except her.
“T-that’s cool, Eva,” he said. She had been a kid when all that shit happened. It was in the past and she didn’t owe him no more explanations neither. “I don’t care what you been through, baby girl. I still love—”
The sound of screeching tires cut the air. A burgundy Expedition came hurling toward them. A loud crash and the cracking of breaking glass. Suddenly the windshield was flying toward him in shards, and all Mello could do was lunge across the seat for Eva
and duck…
The impact ripped the hood off Mello’s car. The engine block was thrust toward the steering wheel. The smell of burning oil was in the air, then Mello closed his eyes and his thoughts drifted skyward with the smoke…
The first person on the scene was an elderly Asian man named Daniel who owned a fruit stand on 125th Street. He saw a young black woman crawling out of the mangled car through the shattered passenger window, then lost sight of her in the thick smoke as she ran toward the back door of the car.
Immediately he went for the driver. It was a young black man, and he’d been knocked unconscious by the impact. Even with all the blood on his face, Daniel recognized him. His name was Ramel. He worked a vendors’ table on 125th Street and he came into Daniel’s store to buy Fuji apples almost every day.
Ramel was trapped in the wreckage. He must have been leaning sideways in his seat when he was hit because the left side of his body had absorbed a lot of the impact in the crash. The kid had probably been lucky, Daniel knew. The steering wheel had been driven forward, and it would have gone right through the young man’s chest had he been facing the dashboard at the time of the collision.
A woman’s screams cut into his haze, and Daniel ran around to the other side of the car. To his horror the young woman who’d climbed out the window was now getting out of the backseat. She was screaming into the air and clutching something in her arms.
Daniel caught a quick glimpse inside the back of the car. A little girl was in there. She was slumped over, laying across the backseat. Still strapped in her seat belt. She looked just fine. Except her head was missing.
The screaming young lady was carrying it in her arms.
What happened next was so graphic that it scared the piss outta Daniel. He was a sick old man, and he’d long been considering returning home to the peace of his own country. What he was seeing right now was giving him the best damn reason to leave sooner rather than later.
A black Escalade pulled up next to the car. Two men jumped out and were joined by the three occupants of the crashed burgundy Expedition, one of whom appeared to be a sizable girl and had a large, bloody cut on her forehead. Together, they rushed the screaming young lady, grabbing her so roughly that she dropped the little girl’s head. It rolled toward the gutter and came to a standstill at Daniel’s feet.
As the crowd on the street watched in disbelief, the screaming black lady was dragged into the Escalade. The little girl’s blood was all over her clothes and still dripped from her hands. All five of her kidnappers jumped into the Escalade with her as she fought and screamed, and Daniel covered his toothless mouth in fear and horror as the big SUV spun its tires and sped its occupants far away from the scene of their ferocious crime.
Black Girl Lost…Again
Hands were all over her in the back of that Escalade. It was wide open like a limo back there, and a series of punches and kicks rocked down on her that were so brutal that Eva prayed for death.
But anything, even taking a beat-down, was better than the image that was frozen in her eyes. Eva balled up on the black carpet and screamed. Far more from the heart-stopping sight of Rosa’s decapitated head than from any physical pain that Brody’s goons could inflict upon her in this crazy life.
The whip sped down the streets of Harlem, and they talked shit and beat Eva until the car came to a stop. A fist landed hard on her right eye and she was dragged from the car by her hair. She cried out as her bare back scraped across the floor, and then banged against the vehicle’s metal step-up. Eva twisted herself back and forth and flailed her legs, until she realized that her right ankle was flopping around like it was boneless and hurt worse than anything else on her body.
Eva had no idea where she was. They tossed her into a big room with a cement floor and concrete walls. The room was cool but damp. There was cardboard on the floor and several machines that she’d never seen before. But there was something there that was real familiar to her. CDs. Thousands of them. Some in printed covers, others stacked two to three feet high on small tables.
She was inside one of the print bunkers that Brody ran. Mello had called them press and kills.
Eva stared from the floor as Brody walked in. He was dressed in a black wife beater and some jeans, and his bald head gleamed under the bright light.
He squatted down beside Eva and grinned.
“Hey lil bitch,” he said softly. “So you finally decided to come check me out, huh?”
Eva just shivered. Her body was a ball of agonizing pain, and the craziness in Brody’s eyes scared the shit outta her.
He reached out and touched her hair and Eva yelped like a small dog.
“You scared of me?” he asked, grinning. “Why?”
Eva just lay there on the cold floor.
“I remember the first time I saw you,” Brody whispered. “You was visiting Fiyah on The Rock and I knew you was something special. You was wearing these little jeans that were so fuckin’ tight… I promised myself, one day your fine ass was gonna be sittin’ right on my face.”
He reached out to touch her and Eva flinched again. With-out warning, he ripped her earring from her earlobe, and warm blood cascaded down her neck as her flesh tore.
“So I got down on a little sumpthin’ with your cousin,” Brody kept right on talking like didn’t shit happen. “You know, a little business got handled between men. Fiyah was all for that shit. A dick up the ass will make a niggah cool with a whole lotta shit! But when it came time for that bitch to show and prove…he did every fuckin’ thing he could think of to keep us apart. Now, why do you think that is?”
The pain in Eva’s ear was practically unnoticeable. She hurt so bad in so many other places that her earlobe didn’t mean shit. She knew she was going to die in that room. This wasn’t the fuckin’ movies and wasn’t no hero gonna blast up in there and save her ass. Eva felt her own death coming, and after the miserable life she had lived, she was cool with it.
“Is it because your cousin thinks I’m too hard for you?” Brody said, his fingers playing in the bright blood that was running down her neck. “Or could it be because you walk around with ya ass in the air like you too fuckin’ good for me?”
Eva didn’t answer. She’d made up her mind. No matter what this beast did or said, he couldn’t hurt her. Eva thought back to all the miserable days of her childhood. She remembered how she used to be able to make herself float and go limp. Become invisible and impenetrable. She tried that now. As she lay defenseless under Brody’s evil glare, she let herself go limp and willed her soul to break free.
She felt the transition. The act of her spirit separating from her body. Eva felt light. The worst had already been done to her. There wasn’t shit else this bastard could do to hurt her. At least that’s what she thought until she saw what Brody was holding in his hand.
He laughed as Eva’s eyes grew wide. He was loving her terror. Getting off grand on that shit. “Oh, yeah,” he said as she stared at what he was holding out toward her. “Your cousin told me about that monkey that used to ride the fuck outta ya back. He said you liked that shit so much you used to do all kinds of nasty shit to get it.”
Brody held Eva’s fear up in the air. He pushed the plunger and released a few air bubbles, then he smushed her face into the ground with his big, rough hand, and kneeled with his knee pressing into her temple.
“He said you liked to hit that main vein. The one in ya neck.” He guided the tip of the needle toward Eva’s jugular. “Rosa liked it there too, ya know. She liked it there.” Brody reached under her skirt. He dragged his hand between Eva’s legs and dug around in her pussy. “And she liked it right there too.”
Short bursts of panicked air were all Eva could squeeze from her throat. She lay there panting, terror clogging her chest. Her worst nightmares were about to be repeated and there was nobody who could save her. She squeezed her eyes closed tight. And when she felt that old familiar sting, and then that powerful rush of fear as it coursed through her
veins, she screamed.
There was no day and there was no night.
There was only darkness and pain. Twisted anguish and joyous fear.
Eva lay on the cold cement floor naked from the waist down. Her broken ankle was cuffed tight. A chain had been looped over a ceiling beam and her injured leg was suspended in the air, way over her head.
Brody had brutalized her. Every time she moved, she hurt. Deep lashes had cut into her pretty brown skin, laying open her flesh in some places down to the bone. He’d pumped her up with fear too. The fear that she’d once both despised and adored was now an ever-present specter in her world. Eva nodded and she drooled. She picked at her open lacerations and let her soul fly free.
Sometimes she was alone, and other times she was not. Rosa spoke to her often, and India did too. She heard other voices in the darkness. The cries of a small baby and the drunken curses of a long-lost mother.
Time passed by in a haze. She was violated painfully. With objects, fingers, and other body parts. Brody fucked her in brutal, degrading ways. He inserted himself into every part of her body that he could, and he made sure he hurt her each and every time. Eva rode the pain and bore it well. She had suffered much worse before and she comforted herself with the fear that suspended her in a stupor, dulling her senses. Brody was generous with his fear. At least in the beginning. Eva’s mind stayed in a tunnel. In the darkness of a project clothes dryer she prayed to God and suffered for her sins. There were some clear moments too. Moments where she fully understood that Brody controlled her fear. And once more, after so much fuckin’ time, fear had gained control of her body.
It didn’t take long for her to start jonesing for it.
He made her cook it herself now. And find her own damned vein too.
Brody liked seeing her squirm on a string. The first time he left her alone for too long, sickness gripped her and Eva shit all over the floor. He hosed her down like a dog. He laughed hard as fuck as she begged for that shit. He grinned as she spread her lower lips offering him pussy, top, ass, anything. Then he left her there sick and alone, wet and trembling in agony, begging for that fear.