by Jen Finelli
I looked at my watch. Needed to wait fifteen more minutes before the state police began to show. As we stood there my ceramic armor plate began to sink down my leg. This kept happening. I didn't know why I hadn't bought tights yet. When it came to keeping body armor in place, these “cargo pants” were about as useful as a screen door on a submarine, as Mama would say.
We breathed...in rhythm...together...all connected by our roles in this game of triads. The victim, the perpetrator, the hero, all blurred in our life-breath to one thing: human.
No sirens. No knock outside.
I lowered my hand and let the guy fall to the floor. Blood pounded in my head. I kneaded my temple with my glove as my stomach knotted into a tight little ball of quivering muscle.
What if they didn't come? What if the wrong cops came? Dang it, Keisha, all up in my head—now I didn't trust the police, and I needed someone to trust.
What if the wrong cops came?
Give them another twenty minutes.
No one moved. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, antsy from standing in the same spot for so long.
A knock on the door. “Your time's up, man, it can't take that long.”
I started to dial the human trafficking line again to ask them for advice. The knock intensified.
“I'll pay for more time!” the John squeaked as I shot him a look.
“Then get out here and pay!”
The John turned his pockets inside out, eyes wide as empty little white flags of defeat stuck out of his pants.
Knock knock, Natasha, time was up. Ready to get caught ruining your own rescue mission?
Well, screw it.
“You're going to take the fall for this,” I hissed to the John. “You're going to go out there and start a fight, and we're going to leave.”
“Open up or I'm coming in!”
I grabbed my new sacrificial lamb by the collar. “And whatever they do, remember I will do worse if you f' up.”
“Yes ma'am.” He almost laughed in his nervousness as I dragged him to the door. I looked at him, surprised. In the corner of his grin twitched a desperation like in the eye of that rabid squirrel my cousin trapped once. “This is all I wanted anyway,” he said.
I shoved his bony butt out the door before he could say anything else, because his leery-eyed humanness freaked me out. I saw it, though: the adrenaline, the risk, the taboo, the 'now we're doing something together that could ruin both our lives.' He'd bought a prostitute while I built a mask.
I shook the yech out of my head and whirled on the girl. “The others. Where they keeping them?”
She didn't answer me. Her tiny hands trembled as she squished her blue weave back into place. Her lip quivered: if Keisha was a wildcat, this was a kitten.
“Hey, do you want out, or you wanna stay here?” I asked.
“Out, of course I want out,” she stammered, turning to me now. “They're in the basement. The—the stairs are next door!”
“Next door left or next door right?”
“Um, um, left?”
I punched a hole in the left wall.
My fist came out in an empty kitchen. Not a stairs.
Oh my gosh. I turned to her, my breath short and eyes wide.
“I mean right! I'm sorry, I'm really bad with directions!”
I charged across the room, somehow holding back my urge to glare at her—come on, Natasha, of course she forgets directions, she's busy remembering all her traumas. Yech. I tore the right wall a new one.
A poof of damp air and a musty, mildewed smell met me in the black hole.
Bingo.
I slammed through the wall and fairly tumbled down the stairs. The cold floor hugged me in the darkness while my ears and nose picked up sight's slack: scuffling, muffled whimpers, oppressive wetness...as my chest heaved against cement, thirteen pairs of eyes stared at me.
Hoooly wow.
Young, skinny guys in dresses and make-up lay handcuffed to the radiator. Women, some in schoolgirl outfits, others with punk collars and spiked hair, wore duct tape around their wrists and ankles. Needles lay scattered around the floor, and someone lolled in the corner with her tongue hanging out of her mouth.
“I'm here to set you free,” I panted, fingers splayed across the floor as I picked myself up. “If you'll have it.”
“Where will we go?” asked a guy in pink.
I opened my mouth.
And what came out was my own address.
My brain freaked out, but my mouth kept barking orders and directions as I marched down their rows, slicing duct tape left and right like a veteran freedom-fighter who'd stormed the border of the land of milk and honey. Of course I'd send them to my house, to my mother. Who else could I turn to when I needed to hide thirteen human trafficking victims I didn't have time to carry one by one to a safe house in another state? You could always count on Mama, on Mama who found a six year old cosplayer stretching out her favorite lingerie, and instead of scolding the child, gripped those chubby little shoulders, looked her right in the eyes, and said,“Baby, one day you'll be a superhero for real.”
“For real, Mama?”
“Is a pig's rump made of pork?”
Turns out, it is.
*
The Last Touch: Thirty Minutes Ago
So we went from house to house, Blue Hair and the John and I, sending him to the front as a distraction while we went around back and found basements to turn into Swiss cheese. Once I'd sent my freed ones running along the docks towards the bus stop, I'd bust up through the floor and rescue the John last minute with a solid pimp beat-down. Next house and we did it all again.
By the time we got to the last house, no one had had a chance to call for help. They obeyed when I showed up: everyone could see I didn't have a ton of control over the Thunder's intensity yet, and no one wanted me to accidentally break down a whole house on them. Blue Hair and the John stomped phones and piled weapons on the table while I shoved bound and gagged traffickers into closets, and as the flushing left my face, and my stomach un-pitted, I actually took a deep breath and felt good.
“It's really easy to find stuff for typing people up in the house of someone who ties people up for a living,” I commented to Blue Hair.
She didn't answer. She was staring at one of the pimps in the corner.
He was a scruffy, better-looking young guy, crouching by the china cabinet with his hands up as he waited for me to come around to tie him up. He didn't look at me—he seemed caught in her gaze. “I'm sorry,” she mouthed as her eyes welled up. He shook his head and spread his lips in a sad smile. He understood.
Holy frick, she was in love with one of the traffickers. She wasn't helping me because she wanted to, she was helping me because she was scared.
And she was standing next to a table spread like Thanksgiving dinner for guns.
Before I could blink, she'd raised and fired. My hands fluttered to my chest—
The John fell over with a hole in his head.
“Hoooly—” I licked my lips to collect myself as Blue Hair raised the gun to her own temple. Why? Why why why? “Whoa whoa whoa girl,” my mouth said. “Listen, sweetie, he was a bad man. I can understand why you'd do that—”
“You understand nothing,” she whimpered.
“I understand that you've got no reason to hurt yourself, sweetie, please put that down.” I eyed the other pimps as they watched for their chance to jump me.
“I want out,” Blue Hair said, whispering now.
“Okay, let's put that down and talk about that. What's he got on you?” I nodded my head towards the pimp in the corner.
“He saved me.” Hoarse, with a tear in her eye. “He saved me from that one.” She pointed towards another guy I'd tied up on the couch, a fat guy with a tattoo of a breast on his hand. Her chin wrote their story in shakes: the sweet trafficker with a kind allure, “just one more client, and then we can run away together,” 'saved' her from the money-hungry brute. Of course she had to love her better mast
er, her chin said. “He saved me, and I didn't deserve it.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you want to be free, don't you?”
“I do, I—I do but I don't want to lose him. I don't want to choose, I—I'm so tired, so tired of this, look, you're hurting people, you hurt him, I don't want to hurt people, and look at all the people I've helped you hurt, no, no, I just want out...I think I'm done here.”
I licked my lips again, trying to get up the courage to take a step towards her. She couldn't have both him and herself, but was I gonna tell her that with a gun to her head? “Let's talk about that. Put the gun down and let's—”
Blue Hair's lover-boy in the corner cleared his throat. “You have a phone call,” he said.
I stared at him. I didn't exactly plan on making words with the guy who'd ruined everything just by making eye contact with his victim. “You do have a phone call,” he repeated as he lowered his hand to his pocket.
What the—
His eye twinkled, and someone tackled me from behind. I rolled over and threw the someone off, and then everyone tackled me, a whole pile of nasty dudes, legs, arms, things everywhere. Holy what, were they all psychic with each other? I blasted Thunder to escape and leapt for where Blue Hair stood crying.
Things are clearer in mid-air. Blue Hair didn't have her finger right on the trigger, and her grip sucked—with everyone fighting around her she'd almost forgotten what she was doing. A small finger-punch of Thunder knocked the gun backwards, out of her hand.
I landed on her and we tumbled to the ground. I wrapped my arms around her as she struggled against me—no, no, I would get her out of here, we just needed a good grip, then we could fly—
D-ow! Her head smashed into my lip. Light flashed in my face, and stunned, I let go, and she got up, and jumped into her lover's embrace. He wrapped those lanky, muscled arms around her from behind, his lips tickling her ear as he held her close, and with one hand on her chest he propped a gun against her chin. She relaxed, and her eyes closed.
“Good girl,” he whispered.
“I'm a good girl,” she smiled.
“Oh, sweetie,” I murmured.
I didn't have to hear the fat guy growling in my ear to know the deal: Blue Hair wouldn't mind getting shot, and LoverBoy wouldn't mind shooting her, but it'd be my fault forever if he did, and I would mind.
So I didn't fight as rough hands yanked me to my feet, and someone jammed a phone against my ear.
“Who are you?” the phone asked.
I didn't answer. I looked at the faces around me like, do you guys really expect me to say something, here? My stomach was twisting tighter than my gramma's dishrag when she rings it out, my lip was throbbing, and nausea swept my vision away. They had me, now what did they want me to say?
“I asked you a question,” said the phone. “And if you don't answer it, your little friend will die. Or should I say, my little friend.”
The overstated grandeur made me laugh. “Look, you don't care who I am. What do you really want?”
“I want your weapon. Hand it over to my lieutenant.”
“Once he's got it there's no way he's going to give it to you,” I said.
“I'll be making that call, thank-you very much. I know who to trust, and I don't hire lieutenants I can't—”
“First off, I don't know which of these fuglies is your lieutenant, but I do know the power of the Thunder,” I said. “When it attaches to a person, it attaches permanently, and unless you got a really good reason to chop off his body parts, he won't give it to you. If you want it, you take it from me yourself. Don't send a lackey or you'll regret it.”
The other end went silent for a second. “Give the phone back to Rocky.”
I looked around. “Yo, whoever's Rocky.” The guy holding the phone met my eyes. Oh, hey, he did kind of look like the old guy from Creed. “He wants to talk to you,” I said.
Now as I waited for the phone to decide my fate, suddenly my adrenaline crashed. Shoot, there was a dead man over there by the table, with red splattered everywhere and a hole in his head leaking onto the Persian carpet. My vision seemed blurry, and dangit, I started to sweat, and if I didn't clench my fists hard I feared I'd tremble. I couldn't tremble, or even think about what men like this did to make people feel weak. They had their hands all over my arms, squeezing tight, and they'd know if anything in me caved.
I clenched my jaw and planted my feet. Rocky hrmed and 'uh-huh' and 'yes'd on the phone, and LoverBoy gently ordered someone to send a search party after my escapees; BlueHair told him the wrong directions to my Mama's house.
Wow, she really was bad with directions. Even after she heard me repeat them like four times. These guys would end up at Walmart the way she told it.
Finally, Rocky hung up. He whirled his finger in the air in a circle like a military man: “Let's move out,” he said. “She's meeting with Crane.”
I let out a sigh of relief. Interrogation via phone seemed like it'd end with me getting killed when the call dropped. The closer I got to the man in charge, the better my odds of bringing this whole thing down. I hid my grin, but as we pulled out of the neighborhood in the white van, I looked out the back window to see the state police trickling down the side roads...closing in on the remaining pimps in the area.
So that's my story, from my conception, to this, this my birth: the part where I work myself through the sticky dark spot and come out a hero. Blue hairs on my clothes and blood on my lip, every man I look at averts his eyes in fear.
It's like I am the Thunder.
As they take me out of this van I've been chasing for months now, I realize what I'm still missing. They're dragging me down a long white hallway to meet the boss, and there's no first impression, no statement—just some girl in a green skater dress. And if I die, I'll die just some girl in a green skater dress. I'm missing an emblem, a big explosion, right on my chest, with blast waves coming off of it, a symbol that means I will change everything. Something you can spray-paint in graffiti, something that can outlive me, something that can't be stopped or ignored.
“Where are we?” BlueHair asks under her blindfold, as we come to a stop.
I don't tell her. I know why she's blindfolded and I'm not. She's going to live.
If I did tell her, I'd say we're in a small airport, where they've parked two or three of those little planes that carry “Eat at Joe's” signs in the cartoons. The hangar's dirty and big, with spiderwebs in every corner, and gaudy fluorescent lights that struggle to compete with the rays of the setting sun, like ugly step sisters.
I’m so hungry I could eat the butt out of a leather duck. Deep in the South, where sushi is still called bait, my cousins start serving out huge platefuls of collards and pulled pork right about now. Something about the dying sunlight makes me think of sunsets over farms and creeks, and I'm sad.
Strolling between the airplanes, and clapping his hands as his business heels click, I see Bird Nose. Well, hey there, stranger! He looks different in his Armani suit, but it's the same guy, and the familiar makes me happy. I was kind of hoping the big bad guy would turn out to be my history teacher, actually, but I can take Bird Nose instead.
“Hi there, I'm Crane,” he says, coming to shake my hand. He notices the men holding back my hands, and decides to pat my shoulder awkwardly instead. “So what's all this?” He waves his palm over me like a fashionista waves at an outfit. “Who are you?”
I squint. “Do you not remember what I did to your boys at the docks three months ago?”
“Oh, that? The paper attributed that raid to the police. We never had concrete evidence to suspect otherwise.”
“And when I flew off with two girls?”
“Well, Black Butterfly had been sighted in the area. Was that you?”
“Are you kidding me?” I could rip out my braids right now. Shoot, Keisha jinxed me! She called me the worst superhero ever, and now look! Scarf lady and the Guardians are taking all my credit. “You had no idea what I could
do?”
“If you think you're frustrated, imagine how I feel.” Bird Nose waves Blue Hair and LoverBoy to sit down by one of the planes, and another goon wheels over a tall red, clattering toolbox. Bird Nose takes out a large wrench, and a saw. “But I like to take credit for my mistakes and my failures, because there's no other way to learn and grow. And this time, it looks like failure or not, we've lucked out.”
“Why do you want my Thunder, anyway?” I ask as he approaches with the saw. “Are you into the weapons trade?”
“No, just people. People are the gift that keep on giving. You can't sell the same gun or packet of cocaine twice.” He stretches the serrated edge over my bare arm, and then takes it back with a smile. “You know this game. Tell me where to cut to extract the Thunder, or she—” He uses the saw to pantomime a rifle pointed at BlueHair. “Pccccth-boom,” he says.
“Cut?” BlueHair whimpers. “Did he say cut?”
“It's alright, sweetie, he's a professional barber,” I say. “Bird Nose, you didn't answer my question.”
“Or you mine. And—oops, your question doesn't matter.” He kicks my knee for no apparent reason. I don't react, but it's throbbing. “Shall we just start cutting randomly?”
I pause, and try to calculate a response based on his face. If I lie too quickly, it'll look fake. This needs to look like it came out of me in duress, and it needs a grain of truth to sell it. But if I give away my grain of truth too fast, they'll think they've got what they needed and kill me. I need time, and he's impatient for some reason.
He kicks me again, in the same knee. Daaah jeeeez man, pick the other knee this time! “I'm on a schedule here,” he says.
Battling with my history teacher taught me how to make the consequences drop. I clench my jaw and give Bird Nose the stubborn glare that used to make Mama bend me over her knee.
He pinches the saw against my arm and starts to cut, at an angle, along my skin.
Aaaaaaaight, screw this! “My mask!” I yell. “Stop, it's my mask! Nanoparticles in my mask! You have to rub it right, and say the command, and it'll untangle itself!”
He stops and stares at me, disappointed. “I thought you'd last longer.”