by Paula Cox
I kick the stand of my bike, set it to resting, and then walk across the concrete to where the guard kneels.
“Are you a Wraith, boy?” I say. “Or are you just a hired contractor?”
“I’m a Wraith,” he says proudly, or as proudly as a man kneeling on the ground can.
“Then let me ask you. Why the fuck are your people just sitting around inside the warehouse with us out here? Are they scared to face us or something? I don’t get it. I always knew the Wraiths were a bunch of weak bastards, but I never took ’em for a bunch of weak cowardly bastards.”
The kid just stares at me.
I almost sigh, before remembering I’m the President and the President doesn’t sigh in front of his men. I chew on the toothpick some, and then say: “Listen, I don’t have a fuckin’ problem if you all wanna sit around in a warehouse playing pin the tail on the fuckin’ donkey or whatever it is you’re doing in there. The thing is, your boss, Silvertongue, owes me a lot of money. And your boss, Silvertongue, has been dodging my calls. And now your boss, Silvertongue, has to face up to what he owes and be a man. Alright? So I’m going to go in there and get your boss to pay what he owes. Thing is, I don’t like going into situations where I don’t know the ins and outs. You get it? So I need to know from you what the hell is going on in there.”
The lad sniffs, shakes his head. “I don’t want to tell you that,” he says.
I nod at Ogre, who backhands the kid across the face and then hauls him back to a kneeling position.
“That’s not really your choice,” I say, and as I look at the kid I remember the kid I was, just as young and naïve and brave and foolish. I remember, and I think about what could’ve happened, wonder if I’m hurting this kid in anyway similar to the way I was hurt, or almost hurt. And then I chew on the toothpick and I push that shit down, where it belongs. A man doesn’t let stuff like that get in the way of his business. He just doesn’t. “It seems your friends don’t wanna come out here. So it seems we’ve got all the time in the world to get the truth out of you, kid. Now, me, I’m not really the fingernail-pullin’ type, but that big fuck there is called Ogre, and he most definitely is the fingernail-pullin’ type. Just take a look at him and tell me he don’t look the type, kid.”
He looks up into Ogre’s squashed face, at those emotionless eyes, and swallows. “I can see that he is, yes.”
“Yeah. So I’m going to ask you again, one last time. What’s going on in there, kid?”
“Would you tell, if you were kneeling where I was?” the kid asks, voice shaking. Ogre makes to hit him. I lift my hand. Ogre stops, but his muscles strain at the leather of his jacket. I can tell just by the way the man’s face becomes even more squashed that there’s a lot he’d like to do to this kid.
“No,” I say, though who the fuck knows. I hate hypotheticals like that. In this life, you deal in real things. Real bullets, real blood, real cigarettes. Real money. “But I’m not the one kneeling on the concrete. Tell me now, kid, or I’ll let the giant go to work on you.”
The kid licks his lips, and then nods. “There’s a woman in there,” he says, staring down at the ground, shameful. Shameful, but doing the smart thing. “I don’t know who she is. One of the new guys kidnapped her. I never met the man, no one has, except Boss, but he tells us that he’s a good man for getting hold of women. I don’t know. They’re going to sell her, I think, sell her to some Russian dealer. They got her in this special room, one of the walls a big window so they can record her. They’re hollering and drinking and getting wasted and getting geared up to have some fun with her. That’s why they’re not out here—”
“Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him.” Ogre speaks the words loudly, trampling on the kid’s words, with his arms at his sides, hands twitching. “The words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools!”
He is quoting the bible again. Ogre often quotes the bible. A scare tactic, or maybe he really believes in it. Either way, now is hardly the goddamn time for it.
“Ogre, shut up,” I say.
Ogre nods, falls silent, but as soon as the kid starts talking, he starts spouting more quotes.
“I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak! Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth! There let your words be few!”
“Ogre,” I say, my voice with some edge in it now. “Shut the fuck up.”
“This man is a tongue-waggler and I cannot stand tongue-wagglers.”
Before anyone can do anything, Ogre takes his pistol from the waistband of his jeans and fires a shot into the back of the kid’s head.
The bullet explodes red mist and hair and brain and bone splattering the concrete and the kid falls on his front, dead and bloody. The men flinch, hands going instinctively for their own guns, but when they realize what’s happened, they just watch. Watch as I pace across to Ogre and grab the front of his leather, bringing my face to his. My toothpicks in my mouth so my words would be already slurred, but anger makes them into a ferocious growl.
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” I slap him across the face. He just takes it, head snapping, and then eyes returning to me. “You fuckin’ lump. The fuck are you doing? He was tellin’ us what we needed to fuckin’ know.”
“I do what is best for the club,” he says vaguely. “No more and no less.”
“What is best for the club—”
Suddenly, a few of the windows in the warehouse blow out, glass shattering onto the parking lot, flames licking from the shattered holes where the windows had been.
A fire, and a girl. A girl, and a fire.
I think of the girl in there, the girl they mean to sell, and I think of the worm-fingered man and what he’d intended to do with me.
And as I think, I sprint faster’n than the devil toward the burning building.
Chapter Three
Kayla
“Oh, yeah, yeah, oh, do it. Look at this little sweet thing. Keep going—no, you will keep going or my boys will come down there and do it for you. Where do you think you are, sweetheart, the fucking Ritz? No, no, you will do as we say or something bad will happen. Keep. Going.”
I am humiliated—humiliated that all this man has to do is order me to undress and here I am, doing it—but more than that, I am ashamed. I am ashamed that several, maybe even a dozen, men are now watching me. I am ashamed that I know they are watching me and yet I am still taking off my clothes. We tell ourselves we will fight until our last breath if anything like this happens. We tell ourselves we will die before we debase ourselves like this. But I know better than most how easily several men can overpower a woman. I know better than most how simple it is for them. I am slight, have always been slight, and short, and so it was easy for the men at the Compound to pin me down as they force-fed me the strange-smelling herb, a hallucinogenic, which was meant to increase your connection with Master. Yes, it was easy for them, and I fought, and I lost. That day I realized that you cannot overpower men. It is a bitter truth to admit, but it is one I, as a slight woman, have to admit. And so you find other ways to survive, one of which is doing what they say until an opening presents itself.
I pull my hoodie over my head, and then my T-shirt, and finally my bra.
“Nice tiddies,” the man groans. That’s how he says it. Tiddies. “Very nice tiddies. Oh, yes, nice and perky. How about a suck on them, eh, boys?”
A round of laughter. A couple of them even clap, as though I am just a part of this man’s comedy routine.
“Now the pants, girl.”
I clear my throat. I hate what I’m about to say. But survival is important. Survival is the most important thing.
“Oh, baby,” I say, cringing internally, hating this woman’s voice, thinking that this woman’s voice is not mine. “Oh, honey. Why don’t I just play with these
for you? You don’t want to rush, do you?”
I bring my hands to my breasts and touch them in a suggestive way all the while feeling sick rise in my throat.
“Hear that, lads?” The man laughs, and then coughs. “Hear that? The little girl is up for it! I knew she was a whore!”
“Yeah, but I wanna see that cunt,” another man says. “Why don’t you tell her—tell her to get that cunt out.” The man burps. “Go on. Tell her to get that cunt out.”
I look down at the thorny flower and wish the thorns were knives, enough knives so that I could stab each of these men in the throat, enough knives so I could end this right now. But wishes don’t really care about girls like me. Never have.
“Alright, calm down,” the first man says. “Listen here, sweetheart. I’m goin’ to need you to take off your cargo pants, alright?”
“Maybe if I just—”
My words are cut short when a fire alarm tears through the building, a repeating scree-scree which blots out all other noise.
“What the fuck—”
The speakers cut out, and then:
“How did that start—”
“Get out of here—”
“The girl? Fuck the girl—”
The speakers cut out again, and then I hear, quiet through the reinforced glass but still audible, the sound of raised voices. Men roaring at each other, drunken men unsure about what to do. Men demanding to know what happened. Men accusing each other. Men furious with each other. Men who are still trying to comprehend that a few minutes ago they were looking at a bare-chested young woman and now they’re running for their lives. I am trapped, I am trapped in a burning building, and yet I mutter to myself: “I hope every one of you burns.”
Then it’s time for me to do what I do best: survive. Try to, at least.
I hear the flames eating through the building, hear rafters crumble, hear walls collapse, hear big crashes and bangs which scare me down to my core because the crashes are loud now, loud even through the reinforced glass.
I pace around the room, touching places in the wall and under the bed, searching for levers. I know it’s ridiculous to assume that there would be a lever in the room, but I don’t see what else I can do. But then I’ve gone around the whole room and found nothing. Panic threatens to seize me; I fight it down. I did not panic when I sneaked into the guard’s office and took the keys from his sleeping hands and opened the main door and jogged into the night with nothing but the will to survival in my heart. No, I panicked later, but not then, not in the moment. And I will not panic now. I go to the glass and punch it with my fist, hard, almost as hard as I can. My knuckles crack and my wrist throbs and a dull ache moves up my arm. The glass doesn’t move. I punch it again, again, until both my fists ache, but nothing happens. The glass wobbles slightly, but that’s all.
“Dammit.”
I go to the bed, kneel down, and work at the bolts of the mattress with my fingernails. Nothing. I claw at them. Ow! One of my fingernails snaps. I grit my teeth and take off my belt, a simple black belt with a simple buckle, and bring the buckle to the bolt securing the mattress to the floor. I twist, and the buckle skids along the metal without turning the bolt. I try a different angle, and this time the buckle catches, but though I use all my strength, the bolt will not turn.
I lean back, panting, body aching all over with fear and exhaustion and rage. I was walking from the supermarket to the bus station. Just walking with a bag of groceries wanting to get out of public as quickly as possible, wearing a hoodie even if it is spring, pulled down low over my forehead, one arm around the brown paper bag of groceries, the other at my side, hand near my pocket where I keep my mace. And then—a thick arm around my chest, dragging me back, and some drug being rubbed coarsely into my gums, fingers invading my mouth. Hand clawing uselessly at my pocket. And then blackness.
But that’s life. One second you are walking with groceries, the next you are half-naked in a dank room. That’s my life, anyhow.
I stand up, glancing around. I think about praying. Master would advise that I pray to God and ask for His forgiveness, only God was not God as most people knew Him, but a real man living a few light years away on a space station speaking through Master. He would tell me this fire is His work..
I go to the glass and look down the hallway. The lights cut out as the fire reaches the building’s electrics, dropping me into total blackness. No—not total blackness. There, at the end of the hallway, comes a flickering, licking, spitting light. A moving light. An approaching light. It licks onto the wood in the structure, hissing down the hallway at me. I back against the wall, glancing about. The sprinklers cough into life, spraying water down onto the fire, but the fire continues as untouched. It comes at me like it has a mind, a will, determined to eat through this glass and the walls and destroy me.
This is it. This is how it ends. I claw at the wall, my broken fingernail screaming in agony, or is that the agony of a life ended too soon? But my life must always have been destined to end this way. Not in any mystical sense. It’s just that Kayla Pearson has always been running, first running from the realities of Compound life, running into Sandra’s arms, and finally running away from everybody. Running from friends and family, from security; the Movement people would say running from God, too. Running, and when you spend your life running like that, eventually something will catch up with you.
As the fire rips down pieces of the walls, tearing down wood, surging ahead despite the too-weak sputtering of the sprinklers, I think about how this fire is not just a fire, but everything I have ever run away from. I am going to pay the price for a life spent in flight.
I remember backing against a wall once before, when I was a girl, when I only knew in a hazy sense that I was not happy with the things around me. I backed into the wall and I clawed at it and I stared at Master’s door as he and Sandra were in there. Mom told me I had to come because Master had ordered it. He’d only been convinced to let me wait outside instead of joining them because Mom promised to serve him faithfully. I remember clawing at the wall as I listened to them grunt and groan and curse, and I remember being disgusted because I knew Mom was faking. Knew, even at that young age, she was doing something she did not like and she was doing it for me. I wanted to claw through the wall, through the world, and fall into the hole and stand up dusting myself off in a new place, a safe place, a place that made sense. I was in flight then: flight from my mind, my senses, reality. I just hadn’t started running. That’s all.
Here it is, I say to myself, as the fire gets closer. Here it is. Here is Master. Here is the Movement. Here is the Compound. Here is my life, a monster of flame, flickering toward me, preparing to finally stop my fleeing.
Chapter Four
Dante
I’m not one for feeling, not usually. In this business, you try and keep that shit to a minimum. You don’t flinch, or wince, or shiver, or any of that. You just stare and keep on staring. Maybe that’s why I haven’t kicked Ogre out on his irresponsible ass yet—though I will be having words with him later. No, I’m not one for feeling, but as I charge through the door to the warehouse, barging it with the shoulder of my leather, I start feeling a few things. My men charge in around me, Dogma at my shoulder.
“Pan out,” I tell them. “Find the girl, and find Silvertongue if you can. If not, get the fuck out.”
“Yes, Boss.”
Yeah, I reflect as I sprint down the hallway, the sprinklers coughing out weak water onto my hair, I’m feeling a few things. The first is that I’m damned pissed somebody has stolen my chance to get to Silvertongue. No doubt, when this fire started, most of the Wraiths started running like chickens from the coop. That’s the sort of shit I don’t stand for, having my money casually stolen like that. The second thing is that I keep thinking about this woman, this woman they’re going to sell. Goddamn Wraiths into women-selling, now; sick rises in my throat and I swallow it down. The third thing is that as I think of this woman, I start think
ing about that night, a long time ago, with the worm-fingered man and the first life I took.
I round a corner as rafters crash around me, fire and water spitting at my face. I push through it, ignoring the pain of the flames, and keep on. Everything is dark and yet light, as though the flames are struggling to transmit their light to the shadowy corners of the warehouse. Rooms lay each side of the corridor, old offices and storage rooms, crates piled high, desks thick with dust and grime. I run, and my mind runs, only I run forward and my mind runs backward.
I think of him as worm-fingered ’cause the first thing I saw when I woke up were his fingers, worming, wriggling, above me. He was messing with a needle, carefully inserting some chemical into the injector, pressing it, squeezing it, preparing it. I had no clue what he was doing, and then he brought the needle to my arm and complete exhaustion fell over me. I didn’t know where I was, only that I was moving—bouncing down some road—but when I woke again, there were the same wormy fingers, wriggling around a same needle, and then came the exhaustion. And on and on and on.