by Zan, Koethi
Before we could fully register what was happening, the back doors of the van were thrown open, and I saw seven or eight girls, all younger than we were, dressed in identical, thin white robes, with sad eyes and drawn faces, looking back at us without emotion or surprise. We were unceremoniously tossed into the back, almost landing on several of them. They didn’t flinch. In fact, they barely acknowledged our presence. New arrivals, apparently, were par for the course.
I looked up in time to see the van doors clanging shut. I heard the front doors open and slam and the engine rev. A solid metal divider formed a barrier between us and the drivers: we couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see us. A narrow rectangular window ran along each side of the cargo hold. I couldn’t quite tell in the dark, but I suspected they were tinted an impenetrable shade of black. The church van.
I banged desperately on the doors until Tracy pulled me away and shoved me into an empty pull-down seat at the front of the van. I noticed there were seat belts, but none of the girls were wearing any. Tracy and I sat next to each other, and I pulled the seat belt around me and clicked it in place with trembling fingers. Even in our desperate situation, Tracy raised her eyebrows at me, but then pulled on hers as well. Might as well not die in a car accident, though perhaps these other girls felt it would be a fate better than anything else they had going.
It was dark in back, but one small light had been left on overhead, so I could see the faces of the girls near us quite clearly. They seemed even younger up close. Some were pretty, or had been before the life had been sucked out of them. Some were not. They all looked half-starved, just as we had all those years ago.
I recognized their self-protective expressions, all of them turning their faces inward somehow, to whatever small safe haven was left inside their minds. The one place far in the back, where no one could touch, where even the body’s pain could not reach. I knew that place. I had lived there for about thirteen years now.
The girl across from us must have once had a chic pixie haircut, but now it was as disheveled as she was. She glanced over at us with eyes that were slightly more human, less animal, than the others.
I whispered across to her in the dark, “Who are these guys? Where are they taking us?” I was almost surprised to hear my voice shaking. The shock had—temporarily, at least—conquered my terror. For the moment I was all focus.
A half-smile flickered across her face, then disappeared. I didn’t think she was going to answer. When she finally did, I noticed she was missing a couple of teeth.
“Do you really want to know?” she finally said.
“Yes,” said Tracy, leaning forward in the dark. “Yes, we really want to know. We have to figure out how to get out of here.” I could hear the fear in Tracy’s shaking voice, despite her attempt to hide it.
The girl sniffed, “Yeah, good luck with that,” hastily adding, “If you do figure that out, let me know. I’m in. In for anything. But I doubt it. You don’t know what you’re up against.”
“Then tell us,” I said.
“We’ve seen some pretty bad stuff ourselves. You’d be surprised,” Tracy added.
The girl looked at us straight on. “No. No, I wouldn’t.”
Her glance drifted away, her eyes lulled into a dead stare at the darkened windows.
“Well, what do you think it is?” she finally said in a quiet voice, without shifting her gaze.
I didn’t want to think.
Then she faced me directly, “And whatever you are thinking? Think worse.”
I told myself she didn’t know how dark my imagination could go, and I tried to focus on something more productive. Like making an escape.
“Do you think we’ll be driving all night?”
“Depends.”
“On?” Tracy muttered, her annoyance barely hidden. She didn’t like guessing games.
“On the order.”
“Order?” I wanted her to get to the point now, too. I wanted to know what was coming.
“You know …” She made a typing motion with her fingers. “Whatever the client orders up on the Internet. My advice? Do exactly what they say, and it hurts a lot less overall.”
I looked out the back windows to see the highway slipping away behind us, trying not to visualize what she was suggesting.
Tracy leaned over and lifted the limp wrist of the girl next to her, who didn’t even seem to notice. “No restraints, anyway.”
“Not in the van,” the girl replied. “They have to be ready with a story in case we’re stopped by the cops. We know the drill. We’re part of a religious order.” She lifted the arms of her white robe to demonstrate. Then she nodded toward the back doors of the van. “It looks like an ordinary church van, but trust me, they’ve fixed the door handle on our side. It doesn’t connect to anything.”
So that was it. Noah Philben’s religious organization was cover. Had Sylvia been one of these girls? So eager to get out, she agreed to marry Jack Derber?
I shook my head, pushing away these thoughts. Pointless. None of it mattered if we couldn’t get out of this situation alive. At that moment my mind was utterly clear. Even through my fear I felt energized. Just as I had during my escape.
It was as though the only time I could feel calm was when the worst had actually, finally happened. Now I could focus. This is what I had prepared for. And now I just had to think. Only thinking could save us.
“What happens when you arrive at a new location? Tell me exactly,” I said.
The girl smiled wryly and shook her head, covering her mouth with her hand this time.
“That really depends. Sometimes we have special instructions. Sometimes, you know, we have to get all … dressed up somewhere first.” She nodded toward a corner of the van, where a large wooden chest stood, secured with two heavy metal padlocks.
“If we don’t have an appointment, they take us to one of their buildings to get locked up for the night. They seem to have a lot of … facilities, I’ll say that.”
“Are you ever left alone?” Tracy asked, sounding desperate.
“Only when they’re convinced you’re finally brainwashed into total submission. When they know you are so scared you wouldn’t dare make a move. When you believe the stories they tell you.”
“What stories?” I was dreading the answer even as I asked.
“About the white slavery network. That there’s a huge organization that will hunt you down and kill you if you try to escape. And kill your family. If you still have one.”
The van’s engine revved, and we made a hard right turn.
“How did you end up here?” Tracy asked after a few minutes of silence, while we took in the girl’s words, trying to process the impossible.
“I was pretty stupid. Got myself into this mess. I ran away with my boyfriend when I was fourteen, and we hitched our way to Portland. We both wanted to get out of some sticky situations at home.”
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“We should’ve known better,” she continued, “but when you’re young, you think you’re going to beat the odds. You know, whatever, we were just kids back then.”
I held my tongue, thinking how very much she was still just a kid.
Tracy shifted forward, “Let me guess. Drugs. What was it? Heroin? Ecstasy? Special K?”
The girl looked at her blankly at first but finally nodded. “Heroin. That was Sammy’s thing. So … you know the story—he had to pay for the drugs, so he had to sell the drugs. He didn’t exactly have an MBA, so you know, funds got low. Especially because he ended up using half of his own shit.”
She was shaking her head, clearly more disgusted at Sammy’s business acumen than at the fact that he was a heroin dealer and user. “So he got into it with these very gentleman chauffeuring us at the moment. He had to pay off his debts somehow.” She shrugged.
“With … with you?” I asked, revolted.
“Well … Oh, I should have known something was up. He begged me to go
with him for a pickup. He got down on his knees and cried, saying he couldn’t do it without me. He was convincing. I guess anyone can turn out to be a hell of an actor when their life is at stake.”
She paused and stared at the ceiling. I couldn’t read her expression.
“Look, I know he loved me. And I know it nearly killed him to do it, but you know, it was him or me. Only one of us was going to live at that point. And he picked himself.” She pursed her lips. “Fair enough.
“He took me out to this warehouse in the middle of fucking nowhere, see. I have played this scene over in my head like a zillion times. Obviously this was a bad idea. Obviously it could not end well. Who knows? Maybe it was a form of suicide walking into that building that day. At any rate, we did it. We walked in, two kids in the middle of one big shitstorm of a life. And there were these three guys”—she jerked her thumb in the direction of our drivers—“sitting at a tiny little fold-out table in the center of the room. It was comical, really. They were really … big you see.” She held up her hands in the air, far apart. “And the table,” she laughed, “it was so small there in front of them.” She held her hands close together, showing us the proportions.
She couldn’t go on, she was cracking herself up so much. We waited silently, frankly not seeing the humor in it at all.
Finally, she continued. “I didn’t suspect it right away, but I was pretty creeped out when I saw the looks on their faces. Grinning from ear to ear. Looking back, I guess they thought they knew an earner when they saw one. At the time I was afraid they were going to rape me. Ha.” She looked off in the distance and swallowed hard. But there were no tears.
“That was pretty naïve. I thought a little gang rape was about the worst thing on earth.” She laughed, but it was humorless this time. She wiped a strand of brown hair out of her eyes, pushing it back behind her ear.
All three of us shifted uneasily and stared down at our knees. As though we couldn’t even look at each other and see our shared shame in one another’s eyes. I looked up at the row of girls next to us. If they were listening, they hid it well. Each seemed wrapped up in her own thoughts, or the total lack thereof. Finally, the girl started talking again.
“Anyway, they grabbed me and dragged me away. Sammy was crying and yelling out how much he loved me. But I could see that shifty look on his face and knew he was in on it. Sure he cried, but he was crying for himself. Poor Sammy, losing his girlfriend like this. When they told him to beat it, he turned and ran as fast as he could out the door. He was smart, I suppose. Set me up, then got the hell out. I know it just killed him, though. Well, maybe it was even enough for him to sober up. I hope so anyway.” She sighed.
I was amazed at this girl’s capacity for what sounded like forgiveness.
“Aren’t you—don’t you hate him?”
“Oh, what for?” She sighed again, more deeply this time, and looked up at the dim light above us. “He was really just following his fate. No point in using up my hatred on him. It is what it is. I got dealt this hand—no use suffering regret as well as pain. Right now I just have to figure out each morning if and how I am going to survive the day. I don’t mean, like, psychologically. I mean literally. Will. I. Live. Through. The. Day. Some girls don’t come back.”
“Maybe they escape,” I said hopefully.
“No way. Like I said. Look at these girls.” She gestured broadly at the girls in the van without turning to face them. “They look like they’re plotting an escape? They all believe in the network, don’t you girls?” She kept her eyes locked on us as she said it. “And you know, maybe they’re right. We’re marked, after all.”
“Marked how?” Tracy sat up straight at that.
“They brand us.” She said it leaning forward, almost spitting out the words. And then she sat back smugly to watch our reactions.
Neither of us batted an eyelash. “Explain. Details,” Tracy ordered in a flat voice.
The girl pointed to her hip. “A brand. Right there. They say that everyone out there in the ‘network’—in the underworld, I guess you’d call it—knows their mark. Like cattle herders. And if we get caught by anyone out there, we’ll be returned to our rightful owners.”
“What does it look like?” I asked, terrified because I had an idea I knew the answer.
“Hard to say. I don’t like to look at it too much. They rarely heal just right, so on some girls it just looks like a little lump of twisted flesh. I guess those in the network have special skills at reading scar tissue. I suppose you could say it looks maybe like a bull’s head, except the horns kinda go straight out and then up.” She held her hands above her head, with index fingers pointed out, to demonstrate.
“Could it be … is it possible that it’s a headless man with his arms out? You know, with a body sort of like that Leonardo da Vinci drawing?”
She shrugged, whether at the concept of the headless man or the reference to Da Vinci I couldn’t tell. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
I half stood up, nearly hitting my head on the roof of the van, and shifted sideways a bit, unbuttoned my pants, and pulled my jeans down just past my hip. I pointed to my mark, my own little lump of twisted flesh.
“Does it look like this?” I almost shouted, choking out the words.
The girl put her fingers to her lips and whispered to me angrily, “Shut up! You don’t want them to have to stop the van to see what’s going on.”
She leaned closer, and I pushed my hip forward to move it more directly under the light. She studied it carefully, then shrugged again.
“Yeah, that could be it. Like I said, hard to say.” She gulped and suddenly looked afraid. “Wait a minute. Does this mean you were in the network when you were young, and you escaped, and you’ve … you’ve been brought back? So they aren’t just bullshitting? And that’s why you’re, like, so old?”
I felt Tracy shudder beside me. Was she right? We were both thinking it. Had we been led back into the “network” after all this time, back to our rightful owners? Were the ten years in between the fantasy, and now we were back to reality?
“So,” she continued, leaning back and eyeing us, “so I don’t need to tell you what you’re in for? You know?”
Tracy leaned forward toward her. Their faces were almost touching there in the near dark, under the soft glow of the single light overhead.
“Listen, what we lived through was something much worse. I was held captive in a goddamn cellar by a goddamn psychopath for five years, chained to a wall, brought upstairs only for torture.” She leaned back, expecting the shock to register on the girl’s face. Instead she shrugged.
“Sounds a hell of a lot easier than this. Sounds to me like you just had one john. One john is easier than hundreds of johns. Simple math. With one john, I don’t care how psycho he is, you can figure him out a little bit. Understand how he works. Plan ahead. Manipulate. Not a lot. But enough to make it hurt a little less. When you’ve got new johns all the time, who the hell knows.”
Tracy said, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. At least you’re out in the world.”
“Out in the world?” the girl scoffed. “Is that what you think this is? Unless basements and padded rooms and purpose-built cells and—”
She suddenly shut up, bit her lower lip, and looked away.
When she turned back to us, her eyes were veiled and dark. Her tough-girl stance disappeared for a split second, and I saw only fear and hurt on her face.
I didn’t like the images that were suddenly flooding into my head. I didn’t want to know what could have caused the pain I saw in her expression.
“Why don’t we focus on what we’re going to do here? It doesn’t matter who has suffered more so far. Let’s focus on how to keep us all from suffering going forward.” I turned toward the dronelike faces beside me in the van. “Girls, there are more of us than them.”
The girl with the pixie cut turned back to me, this time anger glinting in her eyes. She whispered fiercely, her
lips twitching.
“Shut up! If you try to incite a revolution, they will tell on you in six seconds flat. They are dying to inform. Then they get an entire day off. An entire day without anyone touching them at all. So shut the fuck up.”
I looked at the girl in disbelief, and then at Tracy, hoping she would take this point to heart. I had never done anything that bad. I wanted her to understand: this is what suffering can do to you. But Tracy’s face was as impassive as a statue’s.
The girl abruptly stopped talking.
In the silence, as the van rumbled through the night, I thought about what this girl had told us, and my calm started to evaporate. My heart was pounding so hard, I thought it would beat right out of my body.
After a few more hours, when the dawn was just breaking, the van made a sharp turn and bumped hard along what must have been a dirt road. The van swayed side to side, creaking noisily until it slowly pulled to a halt. Tracy and I jerked to attention, and Tracy poked the girl’s leg to wake her up. She slowly shook her head to pull herself out of her haze. She looked bewildered at first, but then, recognizing us, she nodded.
Tracy bent toward her, whispering, “By the way, what’s your name?”
“Huh?” the girl muttered, seeming confused. I wondered if she’d forgotten it in all this.
“What’s your name?” Tracy asked again.
“Oh, yeah, that.” She smiled at us, gaps and all. “No one’s asked me that for a while. My name is Jenny.”
Jenny. The name gave me a jolt of courage. I looked at Tracy and saw my own determination reflected back in her face. We braced ourselves for the moment the door would open.
CHAPTER 30
We sat for a long time as the van idled, our seats vibrating slightly beneath us. The engine went dead. The front doors opened and slammed shut. Then it was quiet. Too quiet. Five minutes went by. Ten.
Our arms taut, we gripped the cold vinyl beneath us, waiting. Someone lifted the exterior handle of the cargo doors once, but nothing happened. Then the driver’s-side door creaked open one maddening inch at a time. It was as if they were taunting us. We sat perfectly still, listening, and then it came. The sudden, dull click of the lock. They were coming for us.