Crisis Event: Jagged White Line

by Shows, Greg

  Callie was naked and standing in a line next to five other women. Her arms were zip-tied behind her at her wrists, and a chain had been looped twice around her ankle and its links bolted together so that it was tight against her flesh. The other end of the chain led to a metal ring resting on the dusty ground. The chain was linked to the ring with a Masterlock.

  The women next to Sadie were of various ages. One was a blonde, middle-aged mother. Her blonde twenty-something daughter stood next to her. A brunette with a sad dragon tattoo stenciled in black across her emaciated belly slouched next to a middle-aged black woman with short hair and two latina sisters—one of whom couldn’t have been more than thirteen.

  Six feet from the women was an aluminum prefab lawnmower shed like people had once put in their backyards. This one had been painted black. In front of it stood a rectangular, white wooden box. Sloppy red letters had been painted across the front. They spelled “Auctions—12:00 pm and 6:00 pm.”

  Sadie felt like vomiting.

  She’d seen photos of confederate slave markets when she was in college. Now here was a slave market in front of her, looking as brutal and disgusting as its ancestors.

  The lawnmower shed’s door was cracked open six inches, and Sadie could see the glow of a lantern inside.

  A small cluster of men and teenage boys and a few young women stood in front of the posts. They were staring and laughing, pointing at each girl in turn.

  “Is one of them your girl?” Blakely asked as he checked his watch.

  Sadie nodded.

  Callie was chained to the post farthest from the shed. Her head was down and her hair was over her face and she looked as if she was about to collapse.

  “Which one?” Blakely asked.

  Sadie ignored him.

  “Stay here,” she said, “I don’t want anyone to see you.”

  “Fuck that,” Blakely said. “We need to know who’s got that Geiger counter. That’s all that matters.”

  “Callie matters,” Sadie said. “And if you’d stop and think instead of just shooting people and blowing shit up you’d realize it’s best if they don’t know there are two of us. The element of surprise and all that. I assume you learned what tactics are when you were off playing G.I. Joe.”

  Blakely ground his teeth, but he knew Sadie was right about splitting up, just not about what mattered and didn’t.

  “Okay,” Blakely said. “You find out what’s up. I’ll go shopping.”

  “Give me a smoke grenade,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “You know I’ll need it.”

  “Which is why I should go. Just tell me which one she is. I’ll get her out of there.”

  “No way,” she said. “You’ll go after the Geiger counter and leave her.”

  He took a step toward the slave market, and Sadie grabbed his arm.

  “I’ll shoot you in the back if you try it.”

  “Then maybe I’ll just take back those bullets.”

  Sadie jumped away from him and said. “I’ll yell ‘rape’ and offer to blow the first man who shoots you in the head.”

  Blakely looked around and saw people staring at them. He wasn’t going to get his way unless he wanted to kill Sadie or knock her out. So he unslung his pack, dug into it, and pulled out a smoke grenade. Sadie transferred the cylinder into her own pack.

  “Here,” she said, and handed Blakely four MREs. “Be a gentleman.”

  “But I’m not a gentleman,” he said as he took the MREs and stuffed them into his pack.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Sadie muttered as she re-slung her pack and rifle, remembering what had happened on the pool table the day before. She pulled her parka hood over her head and stalked away, entering the crush of people in the market zone. She didn’t go directly to the auction area, but instead wandered from stall to stall, pretending to browse. Even though most of the men shopping in the open air market were probably okay human beings, she felt alone and vulnerable

  A few men said “hi,” but they were her age or not much older. She got a few whistles and a catcall, but at least no one ran up and tried to rape her on the spot. Most men would stare at her and move on, too interested in guns or food or vicious attack dogs to interact with her, most figuring she must belong to someone who would fight to keep her.

  The only women she saw not chained to a ring were making it obvious they were under the protection of a male. Most of them were matronly and past child-bearing years, though she saw several younger ones who seemed to relish the attention being a rare commodity brought them. They’d dressed to show a lot of skin—despite the cold temperature and stormy weather.

  As she got closer to the slave market she became more surreptitious in her movements, pretending to look at knives and maces and flails. One stall was selling armor—used police vests and riot uniforms, surplus Dragon Skin military vests, paper armor—obviously homemade—that had been folded and laminated and decorated with a New York Times headline about the volcano across the front of the chest piece.

  The vest Sadie was really interested in was the silk one. Someone had sewn thirty layers of silk together to create a chest protector.

  “It’ll stop a .44 slug,” the merchant selling it told a young bearded man who was looking at it.

  “How do you know?” the bearded man asked.

  “I tested it myself.”

  “You put this on and let someone shoot you with a .44?” the bearded man asked. His mouth hung open and his eyes were wide.

  “Are you crazy,” the merchant said. “I made one of my slave bitches wear it.”

  “And?” the bearded man asked.

  “Three broken ribs.”

  The bearded man laughed.

  “Hey, at least she lived,” the merchant said. “Couldn’t hardly fuck her for a whole week on account of all the crying and squirming she done when I climbed on her.”

  The bearded man burst into laughter, and the merchant joined him. Sadie suspected the story was a made up joke, but who could tell? She was standing twenty feet away from a slave market.

  “How much?” the bearded man asked.

  “Twenty thousand calories,” the merchant said.

  “Pffff—suck it,” the bearded man said.

  Sadie glanced at Callie, who was only twenty feet away. She hoped Callie had noticed her presence, but she hadn’t.

  “Two ounces of gold,” the merchant said.

  “One ounce,” the bearded man offered.

  “You suck it,” the merchant said. “You know how many hours went into this?

  “So buy you another slave bitch to do it, limp dick,” the bearded man said. “That little one over there can probably sew you a hard-on.”

  The merchant laughed.

  “Shit,” he said. “I been hard since they chained her up this morning.”

  The men laughed some more, and Sadie frowned and moved closer to Callie. The people who’d gathered to yell insults and threats and offers of sexual violation at the six women were still there, in Sadie’s way. They were, however, keeping their distance from the women, standing behind a white line someone had painted on the ground. The line was jagged and imprecise, as if the painter had been drunk while working, or was trying to draw a lightning bolt instead. The line was ten feet in front of the women. It ran across the front of the slave market, then turned in a sloppy half circle and ran behind the women and stopped at the lawn mower shed.

  Sadie walked to the jagged line.

  “Callie!” she said in a soft voice she hoped projected from beneath her hood.

  It didn’t.

  “Callie!” she said again, a little louder. With her peripheral vision she saw a teenage boy next to her turn to look. He was wearing a black hoodie and black jeans. Sadie didn’t acknowledge him. Instead she kept her face down and her hood pulled low over her face.

  Sadie saw that Callie crying. Tears had dripped down onto her chest and washed away the gr
ay dust and ash clinging to her skin, leaving a thin white trail of flesh.

  Sadie heard a drunken voice say, “Waaatch this, Joe.” Then she heard someone snort and spit. A white gob of phlegm flew through the air in a high arc and descended to splatter over one woman’s belly.

  “That’s where I’m gonna put my baby!” the drunken voice yelled.

  The men around the drunken spitter burst out laughing. They began to snort and spit as well. Even some of the girls joined in, though the boy in the black hoodie moved back and pulled the hood of his coat over his head and mumbled something Sadie couldn’t understand.

  As the spitting continued, Sadie had to fight the urge to go for a gun. A helpless rage swelled in her chest—the kind of helpless rage a child feels when faced with some unjust accusation or terrible affront to fairness.

  But Sadie didn’t count on the fight left in Callie.

  When the spit began to fly, Callie looked up. Her face was composed and proud, though her eyes were blazing with anger, and she stared at the men spitting phlegm her way. One at a time, she made eye contact…held their gazes…tried to make them see her as a human being whether they wanted to or not. Even when a wad of spittle splashed over her chin she didn’t falter. She kept looking from man to man, shaming them each in turn until all but the first spitter stopped. He redoubled his effort, sending gob after gob at Callie, each one splattering her face or chest or hair. But Callie wouldn’t look away from him. She kept her eyes locked on his, sending a clear message—if you’re looking to break me, this won’t even come close to doing it.

  Finally the man gave up on spitting. He growled something incoherent and stepped over the white jagged line. Everyone stopped laughing. All was silent except for the hum of voices behind them in the market zone. The men next to the line shifted back from the line and began to glance back and forth between the drunken man and the black lawn mower shed.

  “You bitch!” the drunken spitter yelled. He was about to take another step when someone reached out and grabbed his arms and jerked him back behind the jagged line. The man wobbled on his legs.

  Callie said nothing, but didn’t look down or away from him.

  “I’ll fix you, cunt!” the man said and tried to step forward again. This time two men pulled him away. Another man spun him around.

  “Come on, Arch,” he said, and glanced at the shed. “You know not to cross the line.”

  The man he’d called “Arch” glanced at the shed and nodded, suddenly realizing he’d gone too far.

  “Let’s get a beer,” Arch said. “Then we’ll see who buys that bitch.”

  Callie looked at Sadie. She gave a small smile and shook her head.

  “Don’t try anything,” she said, “He’ll kill you.”

  Sadie felt a shiver run through her, and knew she couldn’t abandon her.

  “Where’s your stuff?” Sadie asked, her voice low but loud enough to carry to Callie.

  Callie looked at the lawn mower shed.

  “Geiger counter?”

  Callie nodded.

  Sadie smiled at Callie. She had an idea forming in her head, based on her grandfather’s opinion of most men, and Callie having said “he” instead of “they.” Though she wasn’t sure the idea would work, she didn’t want to give herself time to think about it. She shrugged her pack off and set it on the ground. Then she dug deep, her fingers snaking through the jumbled items inside until she found a small white plastic canister with a label that read “Calcium Oxide.”

  Sadie loosened the canister cap three quarters of a turn and tucked it into her parka’s right pocket. Then she zipped her pack and put it on her shoulders. She looked at Callie, but she was looking at the boy in the black hoodie.

  “It’s okay,” she softly. “Not your fault. Go on.”

  The boy in the black hoodie shook his head and remained where he was while Sadie moved down the jagged white line, avoiding the jeering, leering men and teenagers still eyeing the chained women. When she came even with the shed she stepped over the line and moved to stand a few feet away from the lawn mower shed doors.

  Sadie peered through the gap between the shed doors, moving left and right to see deeper inside. She didn’t see much. Not until the shed doors slid open and a man in dirty, dust-caked jeans and a gray wife beater t-shirt stepped out. He shrugged his muscular shoulders like a boxer ready to fight, and said, “Hello there.”

  The man was ten inches taller than Sadie. He had a bent nose and his right cheek showed the scarred jagged pucker of an old, badly stitched gunshot wound. Like so many of the people she saw, he had a holstered pistol on his right hip.

  “You a free girl?” the man asked. “Been a long time since I seen a free girl hot as you. That tramp you was talking to was free this morning, but she ain’t now.”

  Sadie stared blankly at the man and he reached for her breasts. With both hands. It was as if any sense of restraint he might have felt before the Crisis had been removed now that the official law and order were gone, now that most people were only concerned with keeping themselves alive.

  “You like them?” Sadie asked as he brushed his thumbs over her chest.

  “A little small,” he said. “But they’ll do.”

  “Let me show you what my mouth can do,” she said.

  “Damn you’re eager,” the man said. Then he laughed. “Whatchew you want in return? You want me to let blondie go if you fuck me? Some dumb shit like that?”

  “Nah,” Sadie said. “I only want her pack and everything that was in it.”

  “Well, it just so happens I got that pack right inside,” the man said. He smiled, but his eyes shifted left, then right, then came back to her breasts. “You want to come on in and talk about what exactly it’s going to cost you?”

  “Let’s get to it,” Sadie said, giving the man the best sexy leer she could manage, though she had her doubts about how sexy it actually was since she’d never given a sexy leer before in her life.

  Sadie glanced at Callie and saw her shake her head. She wailed, “Don’t go in there!”

  “You shut up!” the man yelled, and the crowd in front of the naked women laughed.

  Sadie clamped her jaws closed and stepped inside the lawnmower shed, followed by the man, who stopped long enough to turn and pull the two sliding doors closed behind him.

  Chapter 12

  The shed doors had two eye bolts screwed through them, one higher than the other, and they allowed the man to drop a screw driver down through them at a steep angle and “lock” the door.

  “Lose the pack,” the man said when he turned around. He pointed. “Over there. I don’t like guns in reach unless they’re mine.”

  Sadie shrugged the pack and rifle off her back and looked around as she put them down where he’d pointed. The shed was an 10 X 10 square, low-ceilinged, and cramped. A lantern hung from a hook that had been screwed through the aluminum roof at the top of the ridgeline. A wooden chair sat in one corner, next to a fold-up card table, and a mound of pillows and blankets piled atop a dirty mattress made a sort of bed in another corner. Across from the mattress and chair lay several backpacks whose contents had been spilled out onto the floor. Sadie saw the sawed-off shotgun instantly. It lay among the debris of Callie’s belongings, next to the Geiger counter box and the belongings of whoever else had lost their backpack to this man.

  Sadie’s eyes lit up when she saw boxes of ammunition stacked up against the wall.

  “How do you keep people away from the women without watching?” Sadie asked.

  The man laughed.

  “Last time someone stepped over the line I chopped his foot off with that machete,” he said. He pointed to the wall next to the door. A machete with a black, crusty blade hung from a leather strip tied around the base of the handle. Beneath it lay a long gray metal rod connected to a cable with a ring on it—the same kind of ring Callie’s chain was attached to. She knew instantly getting Callie free might be a big problem. The ring Callie was chaine
d to was connected to a trap anchor, and it wouldn’t be easy to pull out of the ground.

  “What you want that pack for anyway? Ain’t nothing in there worth a damn.”

  “What about the methamphetamine?”

  “Oh, you know about that?” the man asked. “That’s long gone. It’s what cost her.”

  “Is it illegal?”

  “Ain’t nothing illegal,” the man said. “‘less someone can keep you from getting away with it. Naw...some biker dude took it off her and rolled across the bridge. She shot at him and hit a guard. Didn’t kill him or she’d be dead already. But people around here don’t take kindly to women shooting people. They get sold to compensate the victim.”

  The man paused long enough to open the canteen on the card table and take a long drink.

  “Now that’s enough talking. Let’s see what that mouth of yours can do.”

  “Yes sir,” Sadie said. She dropped to her knees in front of his crotch. “And the truth is there’s only one thing I want of hers.”

  “What’s that?” he asked as she leaned toward him.

  “That Geiger counter.”

  She reached out and took the man’s gun hand into her own. Gently and slowly she folded down all his fingers except for his trigger finger. Then, while grinning up at him from beneath her half-closed eyelids, she slid his finger between her lips, sucking softly as she drew him into her mouth all the way to the second knuckle.

  The man grinned.

  “I think that’s a fair trade,” the man said.

  Sadie fought to keep from gagging as she wondered when the man had last washed his hands. His finger tasted like copper and salt and fireplace ash, but the thought of what would happen to Callie if she didn’t do what needed doing kept her focused.

  “Is this a dream?” the man asked as Sadie sucked harder. She made an O of her mouth and slowly slid the man’s finger back out of her mouth.

  “A dream come true,” Sadie said as his finger popped out of her mouth with an audible “smack,” and hung suspended in front of her lips. She reached for his pants, tracing her fingers across the bulge forming inside them, then rubbing her whole hand back and forth across him to see if he had a set of keys in his pocket. Without them, she doubted she could get Callie free.