by R. Lee Smith
Maria smiled and nodded, basking in whatever admiration she felt she’d received. “I felt a little bad about it, afterwards. I mean, he was that scared. So when he woke up, I told him that I blew out the candle to break the spell and put his soul back into his body. But he just better treat me right. After all, you don’t mess with the mojo woman.”
Tina folded her arms with a derisive snort, loudly terminating the little murmurs as the other women discussed this. “You realize this is why none of the rest of us know anyone’s name?”
Maria shrugged.
Ellen sighed and sat down. “At least you had a plan,” she said. “I was so high, I didn’t even know what I was getting. I just woke up the next morning and found a suitcase full of the most random crap you can imagine. We’re talking my Halloween cookie cutters, a pair of earmuffs, two boxes of breakfast cereal, the package of crazy straws I keep for my niece, a feather duster…oh, and the thank-you notes I’d been meaning to send ever since my wedding. And here I’ve been divorced for six years!”
“At least it’s finally off your To-Do list,” Cheyenne said, kicking at the floor.
“It is now. I’ve been so bored, I went ahead and filled them all out.” Ellen shifted her gaze to one of the gullan, her Bob, and shook her head. “I didn’t even have a pen, so he brought me a brush and a little pot of paint.”
“Yeah, that completely makes up for the whole kidnapping thing,” said Cheyenne.
Ellen either didn’t hear or pretended not to. “I tried to tell him what they were for. I think it made him uncomfortable when he realized I was married. I know he felt better when I burned the cards.”
“Burned them?”
Ellen shrugged. “What else was I going to do, mail them? It was actually pretty symbolic. You know, seeing his name and mine and ‘thank you so much for sharing our happy day’, and then watching it go up in smoke.” She tossed a glance back at the gullan and fetched out a dry laugh. “My shrink would call that cathartic. I think it was the first time I really sat down and stared that mistake in the face. I mostly try to pretend I was never married at all.”
“I’m married.”
Everyone turned as one to see the speaker, a dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties. She looked embarrassed at their attention, but no amount of casual shrugging could disguise the naked pain in her eyes. “Just dumb luck that they came the night they did. He’d left on a fishing trip with his brother. We had such a fight about it. We’ve only been married two months.” She began to cry. “What did he think when he came home and I was gone?”
“Have you told him?” Ellen asked in a low voice, nodding at the gullan.
“No, what would I tell him?” The dark-haired woman wiped her eyes and struggled to get herself under control again. “I cried and cried for about a week. He’d try and touch me and I’d just lie there and cry, and he’d slink off. Then I realized he was just as miserable about the whole thing as I was, and I thought he would put me back if he felt he had to, so I asked him to take me home. He kept saying he couldn’t, there wasn’t any way, and finally he said I was going to die here. I’d live a long time, but I could never leave.”
The other women murmured, looks of disquiet coming and going across all their faces. They’d all heard the same thing.
The dark-haired woman wiped her eyes, took a series of deep breaths, and composed herself. “So then I was afraid that if I didn’t, you know, he’d kill me. He didn’t seem like the killing type, but I was scared anyway. So I learned to lie there and not cry. He…tries to be nice to me. He talks to me, but I just can’t…can’t listen. What am I supposed to do? Read magazines? Play with their stupid toys? David must be out of his mind, and how am I supposed to eat and sleep and h-have s-seh-hex with these monsters knowing what he came home to?!” She covered her face and gave in to tears again.
They stood around her, avoiding each other’s eyes while the soft crying sounds hung in the air. Olivia glanced toward the gullan and saw her captor watching very closely. They all were.
“And where are the others?” Tina asked at last. For the first time, her tough, clinical exterior cracked, showing the worry beneath. “I know there were more of us out in that parking lot. Are they all right? Does anyone know?”
And they all turned and looked at Olivia.
“I don’t. I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “But I do know why it’s just us talking here today. See, the thing is…oh God, this is going to sound horrible.”
“Just spill it,” Cheyenne said bluntly, watching from the shadow of her bangs. “It can’t be any worse than it already is.”
“The thing is, my…mine wants me to talk to you about…about how important it is to…” She let them stare at her for a while, then sighed and said, “There’s no good way to say this, so I’ll just be the good slave and spit it out. You’re here because you’re not playing ball.”
Some of the women looked surprised, but not all of them. Maria laughed. Cheyenne and the older woman who’d insisted nobody but Africans caught measles both looked furious. Tina didn’t look like anything at all.
“I guess that’s true enough,” Cheyenne said after a moment. “Unless you count the balls I kicked when he came at me. And I’ll kick them again, I can guaran-damn-tee it.”
“That’s a mistake.”
“Oh really, Uncle Tom? You don’t say!”
“Look, you can call me what you want,” Olivia said. “But if this is really it, if this is what there is for the rest of my life, I’m not going to spend it shut up in his bedroom. He wants us to come out and be seen and be one of the tribe, but the only way he is going to allow that is if we are the sort of people he feels good about letting other people see. If he’s got to worry about us stealing people’s souls or kicking them in the nuts every night, you’re never going to see another human face again. It’s not easy to stand here and say this,” she said, throwing out her arms to put all her unhappiness and shame on display for them. “But I have to say it, because if I don’t, then I’m pretty much saying nothing while you’re all locked up for the rest of your lives. Is that what you want?”
Cheyenne shoved herself off the wall and stalked away, her hands drawn up in fists.
“No,” Tina said, and threw the gullan across the room a black stare.
There followed an awkward silence, broken at last by the young blonde’s forced laughter.
“Well,” she said, “I guess I know what I’m doing here.”
They all immediately looked at her.
She seemed surprised by their attention, tried to shrug it off. “Oh, it’s nothing serious. It’s just that I’d been having, like, the worst day of my life…and I guess I went a little crazy that night with, you know, with the booze.”
Maria snorted. “You picked a helluva night to get ‘faced, amiga.”
“Didn’t I?” The blonde laughed again, less forced but still self-conscious. “I don’t remember a damn thing after the first few shots, and only a little of what must have been a truly epic hangover. I mean, I got sick like I don’t think I’ve ever been sick in my life. I’d open my eyes and see these bat-people hovering around me, and man, I just thought I was hallucinating. Only the drunk-feeling eventually went away.” Her brow puckered, just the tiniest bit. “And he didn’t. So I sort of freaked out for a while.”
“Well, I’m still completely in the dark,” announced Ellen, also frowning at the gullan. “What the hell did I do? Bob?”
Tina put a hand on her shoulder and sat her back on the bench. “In light of recent statements made by freakin’ idiots among us—” She gave Maria a pointed glance and the other woman flipped her the finger. “—I think maybe giving him a name was a bad idea.”
“Oh, you dope,” Ellen said, exasperated. She jumped up and strode across the cave, grabbed a retreating male by the arm, then reached up and popped him lightly on the forehead while all the other males frowned at her. “I have to call you something, don’t I? Look,
I’ll go first: Me, Ellen. You, idiot!”
“And you need to be making more of an effort to learn their language,” Olivia said, addressing Tina now since she was the only one still looking at her.
“Oh, believe me, I am,” she replied, once more in her calm, steady, bottom-line voice. “I may not show it, but I am learning.”
“Having them think they can talk in front of us is the only advantage we have,” Cheyenne added furiously. “Just why the hell should I throw it away?”
“You absolutely cannot treat these people like the enemy,” Olivia said.
“They are the fucking enemy!” shouted Cheyenne, and all the gullan looked at her.
Olivia gave up on her and turned back to Tina, who wasn’t a whole lot less hostile, but who at least made an effort to look like she was listening. “Whether you like it or not, this is how it is. These people are a lot stronger than us, and in addition to climbing sheer rock walls with the claws on their bare hands and feet, they can fly! They also outnumber us by at least five to one, and while math was never my strong suit in school, taking all of that into consideration, I have to say we’re stuck here!”
Tina frowned. That was all.
Olivia looked around, including the rest of them in her quiet, impassioned speech. “We treat them like the enemy, and maybe, just maybe, they start treating us like the enemy. Do you honestly think we’re going to win in that situation?”
“Okay,” Tina said. “You’ve made your point and it was worth making. What I want to know is, where’s my carrot?”
Olivia, and quite a few others (including her captor, watching from across the cave), blinked at her.
“Say you want a donkey to pull a cart, and all you have is a stick,” Tina said. “You can hit the donkey all damn day and he isn’t going to move, but you tie a carrot to the stick and tie that over his head, and he’ll walk to the ends of the earth. So fine. These guys have all the sticks, but all they’ve done with them so far is smack us around. If you want me to hitch up and pull, I want a friggin’ carrot.” She shifted her steady gaze to include the gullan, although she didn’t raise her voice. “I want to see the rest of us, all of us. I want to know they’re safe. And until I do, I’m not budging.”
One of the gullan murmured something in a questioning tone. Olivia’s captor answered in a low growl.
Olivia lifted her arms and dropped them. “I don’t make the rules here. I can’t make any promises. All I can say is what I was told, and I was told that this would be our last meeting if I couldn’t convince you all to start behaving. To me, that implies that more meetings are definitely in our future.”
Tina nodded, looked away, and nodded again. And then she said, “You need to face a hard reality here, lady. We’re never going to be one of the tribe, you know that, don’t you? We can talk like them, we can play nice in the bedroom, we can do everything they ask us to, but none of that changes the fact that it is medically impossible to make them a baby. And they aren’t going to shrug their shoulders and say aw shucks and go on taking care of us for the next ten or twenty or fifty years. They’re going to kill us and try something else.”
“That’s not true,” said the young blonde before Olivia could even open her mouth.
“It is. I’m sorry, but it is.” Tina looked at them, that same distracted, clinical look. “When this Murgull person was telling you about the fever, what was it she said? They knew they were supposed to kill the people who caught it. Their mistake was letting the wasted ones live. They’re going to kill us,” she said quietly, without heat, almost without emotion. “They’ll give us a year. They may even give us two. And then they’re going to kill us all.”
7
The words dropped like lead and lay there, uncontestable. Tina refused to take them back, refused even to look sorry she’d said them. She stood there with her arms crossed over her solid chest and said nothing more, just daring them to argue, but what argument was there to make? In the end, it was the young blonde who stepped up, not Olivia. She raised a shaking, pointing finger and every one of them looked at her (even the madwoman with her pot appeared to be watching, but only because she’d always been staring in this direction), waiting to hear what she had to say that could possibly take away the calm, factual, irrefutable sentence of death.
She burst into tears.
Sudden booming cries of alarm from the gullan made a bizarre harmony to the sound of women gasping and stepping back as the blonde crumpled over and sobbed on her knees on the floor. She did it like a child, loud and graceless and unpretty, all flushed cheeks and snot bubbles, braying into the open, unfeeling air.
“Good one,” Cheyenne said disgustedly, but she was looking at the blonde, not Tina.
And then they were all shouldered roughly aside by one of the gullan. He crouched close to the blonde, his wings curling around them both as he nuzzled and crooned at her. She hugged his neck and cried harder.
“What happened?” Olivia’s captor asked. “Is she hurt?”
She didn’t like the way he looked at the other women when he said that.
“No, no,” Olivia assured him. “But these are difficult words for her to hear and the excitement of being with so many humans again after so long has exhausted her. Perhaps she should go back to her chambers. Let me go with her. I think I need to speak with her more.”
The gulla cradling the young blonde looked anxiously from Olivia to her captor.
Olivia’s captor thought about it briefly, then nodded. “Go. I will come for you later.”
The gulla bounded to his feet, bearing his female with as little effort as he would carry a toy. He took off down the dark tunnels with Olivia running at his heels. Behind her, she could hear the strong voice of her captor ordering the other women back to their chambers.
Olivia ran after him a long time, following the sound of the blonde’s fur-muffled weeping down the candlelit tunnel. They ended up in a narrow passage with a narrow chute similar to the one outside the chambers she shared with her own captor. He went up first; she could hear him murmuring at the blonde while she waited below, until finally she coughed into her fist and he came back to get her.
The first thing she noticed about his chambers was how much simpler and smaller they were than the ones she lived in. The chute opened directly upon the sleeping room, his only room. His pit, where the blonde sat wet-eyed and curled small, had only a few musty sleeping bags and an old canvas tent in it. He had no fireplace and no private flow of water to be his bathroom; there were no mosaics on his floors, no relics from the human world on his walls. If she needed more proof that her captor was the leader, it was here.
Olivia went to the pit and settled herself beside the blonde. She had stopped crying, for the most part, but just sat there, staring desolately into nothing and sniffling now and then. Her mate hovered anxiously by the chute, shifting from foot to foot like a small boy who needs a bathroom. The blonde wasn’t exactly being forthcoming, so, in English, she said, “What’s wrong?”
The blonde rolled her eyes and wiped her nose on her arm. “I don’t even know how to answer that.”
It was kind of a stupid question. Olivia picked at the edge of her sleeping bag/tunic and wished she could think of a better one. “I know how that all sounded,” she said at last. “I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed, too. But no one’s going to kill us.”
The blonde pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around them, drawing herself into an even smaller and more miserable-looking huddle. “You know, I don’t know what it was like for you guys, but I’m actually a great big nothing. The week before this all happened, I lost my fry-dipping job and my purse on the same day. By the time I got home, someone had cleaned out my bank account and maxed all my credit cards. I was already behind on the rent and I had nowhere else to go! I was out every day looking for work and the only offers I got was fifty bucks for a blowjob.” She uttered a high, angry laugh. “I actually had to think about it before I told him to fuck off, yo
u know? When I got kidnapped out of that, I was glad! I mean, I’m aware that I was, like, plastered at the time, but still!”
“Is she all right?” called the gulla in his own language. “I don’t speak her words. Tell me what she’s saying!”
“She thinks you’re angry with her,” Olivia improvised.
“Angry? I’ve never been angry with her, never! Tell her not to be afraid of me!” he cried, both arms outstretched and pleading. “She’s my mate!”
Olivia touched the blonde’s knee. “He’s worried about you.”
“I know.” The blonde looked at him and swiped at her cheeks. “Look at him,” she said dully, staring at the gulla staring anxiously back at her. “He’s been nothing but nice to me. When I got here and I was, you know, sick…he took care of me. I could like him, you know? If that makes me a traitor or whatever, I don’t care! It’s like you said, if this is it, I don’t want to live the rest of my life just hating someone!” And then she started crying again, not as hard as before, but hard enough to bring the distressed gulla several steps forward and back again in an anxious dance. “I’m trying, okay? I’m trying to figure all this out, I’m trying to fit in, but I can’t have babies!”
“It won’t be so bad as that,” Olivia said in what she hoped was a soothing manner. “Tina’s wrong. No one’s going to kill us. Look at him! Look how worried he is!” She tried to gesture back at the male, but the blonde shook her head furiously and pulled Olivia closer.
“I can’t get pregnant,” she insisted. “I don’t mean I don’t want to or anything, I mean I can’t! I…I…oh God, I had an abortion! And not, you know, not by a real doctor. I’m all messed up now.” She pulled away, looking wetly into Olivia’s stunned eyes. “What will he do when he realizes I’m no good to him?” She started crying harder, but Olivia could not think of a single comforting thing to say.
“What did she say?” called the gulla. “Why is she still crying? Did she hurt herself when she fell?”
“Listen to me, you’ve got to get a hold of yourself,” Olivia hissed. “What’s your name? Talk to me.”