Jenna butted in, “You tell me all the time how you are not that girl! How could you be so stupid? You knew what was going on out there. Why would you trust some guy?”
She turned her body and moved her shirt to reveal her shoulder so they could see the scar. “The man who burned this into my skin is someone I’ve known all my life. He lived down the road from us—“
“What? Who?” Sean interrupted.
She looked at Sean then back at Jenna, “He was friends with my brother and was at our house all the time. Yes, I trusted him. You would’ve too. In fact, last time I was here, you said you wondered what happened to him and instead of getting into it I ignored it. Well, Jen, I know first hand what happened to Ethan Mancuso.”
Jenna’s eyes widened, and her mouth hung open. “Ethan?”
“What? That son of a--” Sean said. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Maia could see Sean was fuming, but he wasn't the only one. Tony looked like he was ready to boil over.
“Where is he?” Tony asked her.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Where is he?” He demanded, shifting his focus between Maia and Kat.
“He’s got a nice little set up in Central at one of the schools. They use the rooms for—“
“They’re not there,” Maia said.
“Well, when did they get you because right before I got here I was with them, and that’s where they were,” Kat said.
With even more assertiveness in her voice, she said, “I assure you they’re not there.”
Tye and Jason listened intently while Caleb and Tony both leaned in towards her. “Then tell us where they are,” Caleb said.
“No.”
Big Al jumped in, “Why not? Just say where they are. Why are you protecting them?”
Everyone was yelling at her at once. She couldn’t take it. She closed her eyes and clenched her fists. “I’m not protecting them. They’re dead, okay,” she screamed. “You happy now? I killed the mother fuckers.” As soon as she said it, she buried her hands in her face and wished she could disappear.
Shock and awe lingered in the room. All eyes were on her. “What happened?” Jason asked.
It took her a while to respond. She went back and forth trying to decide if she should run or tell them what happened. She knew they wouldn’t stop asking until they knew so she chose to get it over with.
“Two of the guys tried to rape me. I fought them, so they beat me good. Ethan stopped them. He told them he knew me, so he got to have me first. He’s the one that branded me then he put me in the room and said he couldn’t wait until I was better. The girls there, they took care of me. They tried to be encouraging; telling me what the guys did to them and how they got over it; all the best ways to survive while I was there. They said it wasn’t bad because they had food and water and the guys protected them. They were so stupid. There was this one little girl though; she was only eleven.” Her eyes glossed over and her voice cracked. “Her name was Nola.”
“I know her,” Kat said. “That sweet little curly haired girl, she was there when I was there.”
Maia acknowledged Kat by shaking her head. “I’ve never met a more loving and courageous soul. She would dab my face with the wet rag, and she told me that if I just do what they tell me to do, then they won’t hit me again. She said we have to wait until it’s safe then we can run away.”
Ty’s heart was racing. He pulled her closer to him. He wanted to fix it; to make it go away. He wanted to kill every man who’d ever looked at her wrong. She didn’t deserve this. On the verge of rage, his senses calmed as he felt her hand on his leg.
Maia rubbed Tye’s jeans between her fingers until the friction caused the material to heat up. This was becoming somewhat of a security blanket to her. “The ladies there told me they’d raped and beat her too; eleven years old. They told her not to fight them anymore because she was so small they didn’t think she’d survive another beating. I think that’s when my sanity started to fade.” Tobi put her arm around her head pulled her a little closer then whispered that she was here for her.
“Later that day I learned the guys played cards every evening at the same time. They only left two guards to watch us.” Kat shook her head in agreement. “I got one of the women to act like she had a fever and when he came in to check on her, I jumped on his back and started choking him. He was fighting me, and all the other women just stood there watching, but Nola got up and charged him. He grabbed her by the hair and flung her into the wall.” Maia’s face went blank. “Then he stomped her head so hard I heard her skull crack. And her eyes, I saw the life go out of them…that’s when I stopped caring.”
Immediately, Kat began to cry, "Nooo!"
Maia continued, “Finally, two of the other women got involved, and one was able to get his knife and stab him in the shoulder. I pulled it out and stabbed him a couple more times. The other girls finished him off. I hid around the corner, and when the other guard came, I stabbed him in the neck and took his gun.” She stared at the floor and drifted off, remembering that night. The emotions overwhelmed her.
“What about Ethan?” Sean asked. Ethan had been one of his best friends when they were younger. For years, Sean, Maia’s brother Mark, and Ethan were inseparable.
She looked up at him and shook her head no. She didn’t want to say anything else. Tye touched her arm. “What happened, sweetheart?”
Sobs bullied their way out of her. If this wasn’t her rock bottom moment, then it was pretty darn close. No one wanted to push her, but they knew that until she got it off her chest, she couldn’t start to heal. Besides, they wanted to know the answer.
Tye rubbed her shoulder and kept reminding her it was going to be okay. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s not okay. I can’t. Don’t make me tell you.”
“Why?” echoed throughout the room but the only voice she heard was Tye’s.
"Because I don’t want you to know.”
He was aware that she was talking to him. He grabbed her with both arms, holding her in such a way that, for him, there was no longer any doubt how he felt about her. “Nothing you could ever say or do would change how I see you.” He touched her face and looked at her adoringly. As swollen and bloodshot as they were, his eyes still gleamed. “Listen to me. I’m proud of you. I am so damn proud of you, mami.” He took her hand and put it over his heart. “I wish I could make you see what I see in you.” It could’ve been the alcohol or the smoke, but she hoped that gleam was because of her.
She only broke her gaze with Tye long enough to glance up at Caleb who nodded his head in approval, urging her to answer. She buried her head in Tye’s chest and in between sobs she told them. “They were all in a t-building getting drunk, talking about who they were going to rape that night, and who they were going to trade, and which ones they were going to beat or kill because they had given them STDs or whatever. I saw the cans of gas by the generator…” she paused and her body shook, slowly at first then faster as more tears bubbled up.
Tye rubbed her back and told her it was all right.
“I set it on fire. I could hear them scream. I hid behind a tree and shot the ones that tried to get out. I can’t believe I did that.” She sobbed in Tye’s arms. “I can’t believe I killed them like that.”
Tony motioned for Kat to let him up. He walked over to Maia, pulled her up from the sofa and hugged her tight. They both cried. “You shouldn’t have had to deal with that by yourself. I should’ve been with you. I would’ve killed that little bastard myself. I never should’ve let you leave here alone. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Tears fell heavy from Sean’s eyes, “It probably wouldn’t have made a difference if you were there.” He looked around the room, his sorrow replaced with anger. “The whole world’s gone crazy. Y’all keep asking what everybody went through. You want to know what it’s like out there. Ethan was our friend; someone we thought could never do something like this. If he can do that to a
girl he grew up with, his best friend’s sister, imagine what other people can do. I don’t think most of you want to know. It’s probably better if you don’t know.”
He looked at Tobi who seemed to be begging him to keep quiet with her eyes. “Until you watch your wife, the mother of your children, being repeatedly raped in front of you, your kids begging you to save their mommy, then watching these sadistic bastards slap your babies around telling them to shut up, and there's nothing you can do about it…” He pulled his leather wristbands off and held his arms up revealing the grotesque scars he’d acquired trying to escape to help his wife. “…until then you can’t know what it’s like.”
Tobi sobbed, hitting his chest with her fist. “I couldn't have felt less like a man if I’d been the one they bent over. I get the conflict she feels about killing them. You start to become warped. Your mind, it plays tricks on you. I'm ashamed to admit it, but for a minute I considered,” his voice cracked, and suddenly grief bellowed out. “I thought about killing my own family just to save them from what’s out there. I’m glad I came to my senses before I did it but, let’s just say what happened to those men once I got loose was worth going to hell for.” He got up and hugged Maia, tears still falling. “Don’t feel bad for doing what needed to be done. Who knows how many people you saved because of what you had the guts to do. We have to think about it like that. We have to.”
After a minute or two everyone got up and exchanged hugs with everyone else. Speaking words of affirmation and love to each other over and over again as they moved from person to person.
When Jenna stood face to face with Maia, she couldn’t stop saying how sorry she was. They hugged it out and cried it out, and finally, Jenna asked her, “With all you've been through, why do you keep going out there? Why don’t you stay here or where ever it is that you claim to be so safe?”
Maia looked at her, puzzled almost. “Because nothing they've done to me is worse than the helplessness I feel knowing my child is out there somewhere, having God only knows what done to him, and not being able to do anything about it.”
Tye heard what she said. He walked over to her, put his arms around her and promised her once again, “I’m going to find them. I’ll bring our babies home. And no one, and I mean no one, is ever going to hurt you again.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Eventually, everyone took their seats. Some tried to lighten the mood with jokes. It wasn’t working. Jenna remained standing. Seemingly confused. “I don’t understand. How did we get here? I know there was a lot of crazy stuff going on but how did it come to this? Women dying and becoming property? I just don’t get it.”
Since Judgement Day there had been lots of speculation about why so many more females than males perished. Caleb wasn’t too proud to admit he’d been arrogant in many instances when recounting the human behavioral predictions he’d been right about, but this was one thing he wished he’d gotten wrong.
“Part of my job was studying social media trends and viral media to market our upcoming projects. A couple of days before the disaster I noticed several studies gaining traction. The studies focused on reasons females perish at higher rates during natural disasters.” He took out his notebook and flipped to a dog-eared page.
“The tsunamis that hit Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Japan, Hurricane Katrina, the 1991 cyclone disasters in Bangladesh, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the Nevado del Ruiz volcano eruption were just a few of the disasters they studied. It talked about how the 1991 cyclones in Bangladesh caused the deaths of 140,000 people; ninety percent were women.” He had the attention of everyone in the room.
“Hurricane Katrina statistics showed most of the victims in New Orleans were black women with their children. To say more women die during disasters seemed accurate and if a person only read the headlines of those articles, then that’s the information they’d take away. And herein lies the problem. Most people didn’t read the whole study. If they had they would have known when it came to deaths; gender differences are directly linked to women’s economic and social rights.”
“The links people shared with the pictures and videos of those dead women, that was all a bunch of bull?” Big Al asked.
“It wasn’t all bull. Some of it was misinformation, but the rest was out of context. Think about it, the pictures and video came from places or events where the majority of the people there were women. You can’t use something like that to prove the study. The facts are, of all the people there, less than ten percent were men. Of course, more women than men died.”
Caleb went on to clarify that some of the photos and videos were taken at a women’s anti-rape rally in Ontario where thousands of women became trapped or were asphyxiated by raging wildfires ignited by the impact of an asteroid. There were over five thousand people there, but less than two hundred of them were men. The numbers were too far off to attempt to use it to support the study.
More footage was captured in Tennessee after an earthquake caused the collapse of a hotel where, cue the irony, a social media conference for women was held. Hundreds of women were trapped inside. Video footage removed from the security cameras showed the severely injured women huddled together in the center of meeting rooms. All of them were believed to have perished because no one was able to dig them out in time. There were too many incidents in too many other places causing emergency responders to be spread thin.
Still more footage from the Philippines where a Tsunami had wiped out entire neighborhoods with mostly the elderly, women, and children at home. Logic would suggest men died in those same areas but at that point who needed truth in journalism when they were trying to feed a storyline and capitalize on clicks?
“I got so frustrated every time a new Judgement Day meme came across my feed. Five minutes of digging online for the truth or a simple ‘search Google for this image’ would’ve shown that some of those stories and photos were from past disasters or stills from movies and TV shows, but instead, these fools just shared them over and over without verifying anything.” Caleb exhaled and slapped his notebook on his leg.
Allen listened intently. “Are you saying everything that hacker group 'S@squ@tch' posted is right?”
“Pretty much. From the beginning, they tried to prove it was faulty journalism and hoax postings on social media. No one gave a crap.” Pointing his finger he aggressively stated, “If, and it’s a big if, people had kept their wits about them and looked at things strategically then this disaster, even as widespread and devastating as it was, could’ve resulted in much less loss of life…and humanity. But, nooo, we had a generation of people who thrived on sensationalism and Judgement Day was their perfect storm.”
“Unbelievable. The telephone game? The world is going to end because of the telephone game?” Jenna paced the floor trying to grasp the revelation she’d just been given.
“Something like that,” Maia interjected. “At first it was a bunch of misinformation spread around and that caused people to believe women were perishing at a much higher rate than they were. That’s when some men decided to start kidnapping them and keeping them for themselves or as something to trade.”
Tony’s mind attempted to process all he’d just heard. “That’s crazy, man; how it all snowballed like that. What kind of work did you say you did before?” he asked Caleb.
They were knee deep in a conversation about everyone’s life before Judgement Day when Jason snuck over and whispered to Maia, “Why don’t you come sleep at my place. You’ll have more room. It’s not stuffy. And if you want you can even sleep in the guest bed.”
“I’m good. But thanks.”
He threw his hands in the air, “C’mon, sweetheart. I just want to talk to you…” He looked at Tye, who still had his arm around her. “Alone.”
“First, I’m not your sweetheart and second, why can’t you just say that? Why do you have to beat around the bush? I mean, if you want an ic—“
“I know, I know…if you want an Icee, say you want
an Icee. Look, can we just talk?” He grabbed her hand and gently squeezed, “Please?”
“I’ll talk to you in the kitchen.”
Tye exhaled as she moved his arm. He wasn’t thrilled about her talking to him about anything. He watched as she shuffled over to the counter, taking a seat on the barstool next to Jason.
She leaned on the bar. “So talk,” she said, nearly gagging at the thick smell of years worth of rancid frying grease embedded in the natural wood cabinets.
He scratched his nose, “Why won’t you stay here with me?”
“Not this again,” she said, swiveling on the stool about to get up.
He grabbed her seat and turned her back toward him, “No, please listen to me. I want to be with you. That never changed. I’ve always wanted you. I know you want me too. Why is this so difficult for you?”
“Are you serious? Can we finally air the dirty laundry? Can we finally talk about this or are you going to dodge the conversation the way you’ve done for the last twenty years?”
He turned his head up and stared at the ceiling. “Talk, let me have it. Go ahead.”
“Okay, Brent died because of you, and you have yet to take any responsibility for that. Regardless of who he was, you knew what would happen when you brought him in—“
He looked at her with shock written all over his face. “So did he!”
“Well, he paid for his mistake by dying. You won’t even admit yours. And you just walked away. You weren’t even there for me while I was cleaning up your mess. I’m the one who had to lie to his parents and siblings. I’m the one who would take his daughter, the one he didn’t even know he had, to visit him in a graveyard. I sent presents to her on Christmas and her birthday because her daddy wasn’t here to do it.”
He cocked his head, “Brent had a daughter?”
“You’d know that if you’d bothered to stick around.” She stared at the granite countertop, tracing the pattern with her fingertips. “About a week before we found him, the girl he’d been seeing called me because she couldn’t get in touch with him. That’s when she told me she was pregnant.”
Amitola: The Making of a Tribe Page 25