Ophelia Immune: A Novel

by Mattson, Beth

  The man in the top hat stood before me. The Boss bent down to cut the leash that still connected me to the girls behind me, but he left my feet knotted close to each other, so that I would have to hobble.

  “You did well. Good luck,” he said and gestured for the top-hatted man to take me away.

  Top Hat guided me to the alleyway with one hand on my lower back. I glanced up and saw Swan against the back wall, tied to the end of her line of girls, feigning light-headedness but staying firmly on her feet. Jeff pushed her up against the wall. My tears stopped flowing. I needed to focus on not tripping and locating the trash bins in which we had stashed our weapons and supplies two days ago.

  And where was Uncle Donnie?

  The Weaselly Man was standing shiftily near a valet stand full of keys, waiting for us. Top Hat showed Weaselly his receipt, and Weaselly scurried away. The trashcans were exactly where they were supposed to be, exactly where we’d left our bottle bombs and bigger blades safely out of sight, all eyes drawn to the bright paper flyers on every wall, advertising our purchase.

  Weaselly returned after leaking more hot tears, parking my new owner’s yellow van at the front of the line, exactly as planned. Behind us was another Buyer holding the arm of the girl who had been sold after me. Weaselly darted away with the new set of keys to retrieve the second vehicle of the caravan while Top Hat gave me a boost into his. The valet would line up the other Buyer's vans as they purchased their Wives. Luxury parking for those who bought Humans was going to be their downfall.

  I looked over the soft mattress and blankets of Top Hat's van. There was a table full of water bottles and fresh fruit. There was no screen between the back and the driver’s seat. I eyed the path to the front. It was going to be easy to highjack his van and trap all of the other Buyers' vans behind it.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he slammed the doors to go purchase another girl.

  Fresh fruit? Swan would kill for a taste of some. I would try to steal a nice apple for her on my way out, but first I needed to get myself unbound. I needed my tools.

  I steadied my legs against the mattress. I stretched my fingers away from my wrists and wiggled the tips back at myself. I overextended my elbows stretching and flexing my forearms. I felt one of the scalpels slip under my skin. It pressed outwards slightly. The skin spread thin around the sharp point and then broke into a short tear. I eased it out and used it to cut the other razor free. I dabbed my dripping arms on my horrid dress and pressed the torn skin together until it held.

  I heard a second van parking behind my owner’s. And then a third. The caravan was lining up. If Swan was sold last, we'd have them surrounded in flame. Where was Uncle Donnie? I hoped he was in the crowd and just didn’t recognize me. I pictured him burning.

  I swiped through the rope tying my feet. I squatted against the wall and arranged the rope around my ankles to look to any casual door-opener like I was still tied. I took huge sips from a free water bottle. When Top Hat returned with his second girl and lifted her in before leaving again, I handed her a fresh water as well. She sipped it greedily. She ate an entire apple, seeds, core, stem, and all.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She frowned at me.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She scowled, not willing to speak even out of The Boss’ cells.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her, “I’ll get you out of here.”

  She settled into the soft blankets, facing away from me.

  “Come here and hold still,” I said leaning over her with my scalpel posed to cut her ankle ropes. She screamed.

  The back van doors rattled and then opened. I squatted meekly. Top Hat appeared, arms first, and then his face, grumpy.

  “Everything ok?”

  “Yes, sir,” the now quiet second girl bowed her head to her feet.

  He hoisted a third girl into the back and slammed the doors on us again. How many was he going to buy? Looked like as many as he could stow. The girls and I glanced at each other uneasily.

  “I’m just going to cut your ankle ropes,” I held up the scalpel again.

  “Why?” asked the third girl, “The Master told you to?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I nodded and leaned for her ropes.

  Once freed, they stretched their legs out in front of them and munched contentedly on the fruit that they dipped luxuriously into the water.

  “We did real good,” one of them said to the other.

  “I know,” the other chewed an orange slice, “He must be Hella Rich.”

  When Top Hat brought the fourth girl, he handed her to us and then announced,

  “Get comfortable. Auction’s almost over. We’re going home.”

  He shut the back doors and plodded around the outside to get into the driver's seat. I waited on the balls of my feet as he slid in and patted his pockets for his keys. He dropped them to the floor like an amateur, picked them up, fumbled for the correct one. He found it and held it to the ignition. He would never have survived on The Road. He was terrible at Driving. Just as he slid the key in, before he could give it a turn, I raised one my blades to his throat and pressed it there. I slithered into the front of the van.

  “That is just about far enough,” I growled, hunching my back against the van ceiling, the biggest, meanest cat I could be, “We’re not going anywhere. Not in your van.”

  He was stunned and held his head awkwardly high to avoid the sharp point of my scalpel. The girls in the back were baffled.

  “You sit still. Completely still,” I ordered the full-grown man, twice my size, “Come here,” I motioned to the newest girl, “I am going to get rid of your ankle ropes.”

  She scooted hesitantly towards me and let me cut her ropes with my left hand, while I kept my eyes trained on my right at our owner’s throat.

  “What is she doing?” one girl whispered to another.

  “I don’t know. She’s crazy. Don’t help her or you’ll get a beating too.”

  I rolled my eyes and moaned again. My torso rattled with zombie noises that I had stifled all day. Top Hat’s eyes got wider. The girls in the back stared even more intently at the mattresses and blankets around their feet.

  A horn behind us blared, then another. The other vans behind us were full and ready to go. A few more minutes and Swan would be ready to threaten her driver in her van as well. Top Hat’s fingers itched to turn his keys and elbow me in the face, but I bore my stare into the side of his face. I broke his skin ever so slightly with my knife to show him that I was serious.

  “We’re getting out.”

  He sighed, almost as resigned as the girls in the back of the van.

  “Ok,” he took his top hat off of his head and set it on the dashboard, “What would you have me do, My Lady?”

  “I would have you open your door, very slowly. We are going to step around the back, open the back door, let the girls out and then you are going to come with me while I step over to the trashcan at the side of the alley.”

  The girls in the back looked at me, for just a second, horrified to be suddenly implicated in my plan. But they kept quiet. And still. Always placating, finding other things to put their eyes on.

  The man reached for his door handle without moving his neck a centimeter.

  “Go ahead. Open it.”

  He nudged the door open with the toe of his un-scuffed shoe. We slid out onto the pavement as one. He stepped more quickly than I thought he would. He slipped swiftly to the back of the van and unlatched the doors. The girls huddled as far from the open doors as they could.

  “Ok,” Top Hat spoke quickly, “Where’s this trashcan of yours?”

  I guided him with the tip of the tiny blade under his adam’s apple, nicking the skin again ever so slightly.

  “Watch it,” he murmured, striding rapidly where I had pointed.

  I reached behind the trashcan and grabbed a glass bottle filled with rubbing alcohol and stolen kerosene and siphoned gas. The fluid soaked rag hanging off of
the top slimed my fingers. A bulky and irate man stepped out of the second van and banged on his hood with his fist.

  “What the hell is going on? What is this?”

  I lit my Molotov cocktail and held it aloft. Top Hat stood calmly behind me, watching. He ran one hand through his hair, readjusting those silken waves, and cleared his throat while he tucked his white gloves into his breast pocket.

  “I think that we are being ambushed by two little girls.”

  At the other end of the alley I saw another flame spike high into the air. It was Swan. Her cocktail splattered against the roof of the last van in line. Girls stumbled out of it, screaming and staggering in all directions. I held my bomb above my head and grinned slyly, showing the men my rotten gums. Stallion fast, Top Hat grabbed my wrist and held it tightly.

  “I am a Good Guy,” he said, “I was going to take you and these girls to a Safe House that I own. Hit the second guy’s van and load all the girls into mine. I’ll save them.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “I’ll prove it.”

  He took the cocktail out of my hand, lit it with a match from his own pocket, walked it over to the owner of the second van, and dropped the Molotov cocktail on the hood of his vehicle.

  “What are you doing?! You bastard!”

  The man took a swing at Top Hat. Top Hat grinned, ducked and clocked him squarely on the jaw. The flabbergasted man stumbled irately backwards and raised his fists. Top Hat pulled a blade out of his inside jacket pocket and removed the silk cloth that was covering it. It glinted as the man charged him. Top Hat easily dodged a hasty punch and knocked him soundly with the butt of the knife. The man sat down dizzy, oozing red blood onto his cashmere sweater, which Mom would have hated to have seen ruined.

  “Stay here,” Top Hat instructed the girls who were still sitting in the back of his van, “I’ll take care of you.”

  They nodded. No other hope had ever crossed their minds.

  I reached for my hammer and my next Molotov.

  “Have anymore of those?” Top Hat smoothed his dark sideburns against his unblemished cheeks.

  I gave him another and took up my last. It was cold against my palm, but cast a large shadow of heat as soon as it was lit from my own pack of matches. Top Hat paced up one side of the van line and I the other. He punched another van owner in his round belly and launched the cocktail at the roof of the third van. Stepping around the doubled over owner, he reached for the van’s back doors and wrenched them open.

  I used my hammer on the next owner’s hand and then the lock of the fourth van. I stuck my head in. The girls cowered.

  “Ok,” I said, “All clear. Hop out of this van and into the first one – the yellow one up front!”

  “You heard her,” an older girl in the back piped up, “Pile out.”

  They trusted me ever so slightly more than the flames after I had fed them bread, and they crept toward the opening – slowly at first, then as quickly as if they had eaten every day of their lives. None looked back at the girl who had given them their orders to listen to me. The other girls ran off, but she moved like a seasick snail. She waved me away and strained to roll onto her hands and knees.

  “I can crawl, go save the others.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Flames shot out of the vans behind us, and I could hear Swan whooping in a high, happy pitch. Girls were running every direction, dodging their new Owners to crawl into Top Hat's nicer, yellow, cage on wheels.

  “Come on,” I insisted, grabbing the snail's arm, “Let’s get you out of here.”

  Top Hat helped another girl who couldn’t walk anymore, much less sprint, even with her adrenaline pumping. We left the exhausted girls slumped in his van, panting together like one big litter of puppies. I counted them, only thirteen. Where were the other three?

  A mangled Owner who had already been punched by somebody tried to waive his receipt at us, shouting about which girls. He offered me ten coins to return just his Wives. I laughed and stepped out of his reach.

  I felt a hand on my rag dress. It spun me around. I expected Donnie, but a large woman with golden dentures shook me by my collar. I tried to stop laughing, but the harder she shook me, the harder I laughed. I could see Swan standing on the roof of a van that wasn’t burning yet, dueling with the Boss, her fire poker against his shiny cane. She slashed furiously and his cane shattered. I snorted. The woman shook me harder.

  “Stop laughing, you little wench! Stop laughing!”

  I could feel my arm rattling with the last cocktail in my grip, wobbling the fluid inside dangerously close to the burning rag on the outside. Her jowls rocked with the same tide of the fleshy pistons that held me.

  “I’ll keep you! I can kill the things that I own, You Little Bitch!”

  Always a Bitch to everyone. I tried to slur between my slamming teeth, “B – b – be care-careful. Ha ha – a – a. Or we’ll su – su – susplode. S – S – stop shaking me!”

  But it was too late. The last Molotov cocktail flew out of my fingers and slammed against the tire by our feet. Glass shards flew everywhere. The woman’s shawl caught on fire. She dropped me and ran away, flames trailing behind her. I could see Jeff and Peyar cornered by a girl who was threatening them with a burning hunk of van seat that she swung above her head. I hoped she wouldn’t faint mid-swing.

  I giggled and stood up. I looked at my arms, black rivers trailing down past my wrists. I picked a shard out of my forearm and flicked it at the Weaselly man who was skittering past. Swan popped out of nowhere and tripped him. She hit him on the bottom with her poker as he got back up, squealed, and ran away.

  She tried to high-five me, but I pulled my bleeding arms away and looked to the only van that wasn’t burning – the yellow one in front. Top Hat collected the fourteenth girl, discarded her flaming cushion and scanned the alley for any more girls he could pop into the back. Seeing none, he came to me. Two had run off on their own. More power to them.

  “You want to get in?”

  I shook my head. Swan raised her poker to his double-breasted vest.

  “Who are you?!”

  He put out a thick palm.

  “I’m Carl. And you ladies are?”

  “Not in need of a ride. You better be for real,” I growled at him, “We'll find you. We'll catch you if you're lying. You'll be deader than I am.”

  “It's real,” he bowed like a silly chicken, “You're welcome any time. It's in the Park District, near the Old Wharf. Come and see.”

  “We'll come to check up on you,” I warned him.

  Ranger whistles began to blow. I ducked and dodged a can of tear gas.

  “I’m Swan. That’s Ophelia,” Swan yelled over the din.

  I closed the back doors around the heap of shaking girls. Top Hat ducked into his driver's seat, dusting off his pinstripes. The van grumbled alive, spitting smog at my feet, turning them soot Black instead of bleach White or zombie grey and green. I smiled. Top Hat plowed through the crowd of Rangers, van grill first. We followed behind his bumper, skittering past the coughing Rangers and confused onlookers who had all started to choke on the drifting pepper spray. They held their arms out in front of their bodies, waving at the clouds and pawing at each other. They looked just like zombies as I grabbed the hacking Swan by her sleeve and made a run for it.

  The Celebration

  I stopped running and dragging Swan as soon as I could duck into the side alley out of earshot from the Rangers. I tried again to stop laughing. I stuffed half of my shirt into my cheeks. I bit down on my arm, but I couldn’t stop cracking up. I held my sides and covered my mouth with my sloppy green and black dripping fingers, my blood making its way down from the glass shrapnel wounds in my shoulders. Swan grabbed the length of twine that had been acting as my belt. She yanked it and I followed behind her for a change, stumbling and clutching at the walls that I bounced off of as we ran and I snorted. She hauled me as far as she could before her fingertips turned purple from pulling my belt. S
he stopped to stare at me, hands on hips.

  I lost it again, choking on the hilarity of her having me on a leash, instead of Donnie, which I had more than half expected. Smoke was billowing up into the smoggy evening, pillars from burned out vans held up the sky. Our Molotov practice had paid off – all of those targets we had painted onto the bricks and all of those bricks that we had thrown had worked out. Our arms were true. Even dehydrated, starved, and dressed up in ripped burlap sacks our aim was devastating. We had taken care of that.

  Sirens wailed in the distance – Rangers checking to make sure the Auctioneers were ok, to comfort the wealthy Buyers and make sure that Swan and I hadn’t broken too many of their limbs. Somewhere near the Old Wharf, girls were getting out of a big, yellow van, into a Safe House, confused as to why they were not now Wives, dependent on a strange man named Carl for food and shelter. Probably. If his Safe House was real, they had gone from being meat to needing it like everybody else. Except for me. I hiccupped. I hoped, hoped that Carl wasn't a fraud. I would check up on him after we were clothed and sane. If Uncle Donnie didn’t find us now.

  My shoulders quaked and rolled. I opened my mouth wide and howled up at the cloudy place where the moon should have been. I rasped as my diaphragm, if I still had one, squeezed out the waves of laughter that ended with a gurgle. I fell down, my ribs revolting and sloshing my insides into a cyclone. I wondered if I was making puddles on the asphalt. I didn’t care. We won. We had done it. And I couldn't stop.

  Swan finally joined in my foolish celebration. She peered at the entrance to the alleyway that we had ducked into, and finding it empty, she pranced and skipped and twirled across the potholed terrace, not tripping a bit, pumping her arms furiously to the tune of her own hoots and whistles. She bounced up and down, swirling in the garb of the girls she had freed. No girls had been owned in that Auction, all because she had grown smart and skilled. She had taken care of that.