by Penelope Sky
And that would have haunted me.
“I’m getting out of here…somehow.” I kept my eyes on my food, the warm food that was quickly turning cold because we ate out in the elements, melted snow in patches around us.
“Don’t advertise that.”
“Why?”
“Some of the women are snitches.”
“What?” I whispered. “Why?”
“Because they’re rewarded,” she said under her breath, shoveling food into her mouth to cover her moving lips. “Some of the girls here are practically guards. Some are brainwashed, some are sleeping with the guards, some are given a reward that ensures their loyalty…it’s complicated.”
“How could you possibly sleep with—”
She kicked me under the table.
A guard passed, surveying our table before he moved on.
I was so absorbed in the conversation I’d stopped paying attention. “How could anyone sleep with one of these guys?”
“Because they’re treated even better.”
“I’d rather die.”
“You’re new, so you’re fresh, but the longer you’re here…the staler you’ll become. Your priorities will change. One of the girls here has her own cabin, a TV, games, a microwave with all the bags of popcorn she wants. And rumor has it… one woman even earned her freedom.”
“Really?” I whispered.
“It was before my time, so I didn’t witness it. But some of the girls insist it’s true.”
“Why would they just let someone go?”
She shook her head. “No idea.”
“Was she sleeping with one of the guys?”
“Dunno.”
I thought this place would be cut-and-dried, but I was wrong. Organizing an uprising would be complicated, especially when some of the women were more loyal to the guards than the women working at their sides every single day. “I want to talk to my sister, but they keep us apart.”
“On purpose.”
“Are there opportunities to talk to the others?”
“Maybe during one of the drops.”
“Drops?” I asked.
“A plane will fly overhead and drop the coke.”
My eyes narrowed. “Seriously?”
She nodded. “Most are flying from South America. It drops it from the sky, so there’s no trace of it. That’s why these guys haven’t been caught in decades.”
They’d been operating that long?
“They have us go out and put all the boxes in the wagons to be returned to camp.”
“How far out is this?”
She lifted her gaze and looked at me. “Don’t even think about it. The guys are on horses, and we’re on foot. You’ve got no chance.”
“Do they carry guns?”
“Bows and arrows.”
“What?” I asked in surprise. “They don’t have cars or guns?”
“I suspect they have guns, but I’ve never seen them.”
“But why use a bow and arrow?”
She shrugged. “No idea. But I imagine it’s to stay quiet. As for the cars, the journey to get here is too difficult to make in a car, even in a four-wheel drive. The path is too narrow at times for a car to make it through.”
My eyes narrowed. “If they’re trying to be quiet, that means someone nearby could hear it…right?”
She lifted her gaze and looked at me. “Raven, that’s just my guess. I really don’t know—and I wouldn’t gamble your life on it.”
Whenever I was in my cabin, there was nothing to do but wait until morning. There were no books for entertainment, so I spent most of my time soaking in the tub, just to get warm and try to relax.
The only entertainment I had was my thoughts—which made me feel worse.
I’d only been in the camp for about a week, and unless the weather was different, it felt like the same day over and over again. We went to those tables and bagged the coke. It seemed like the women at different tables were bagging different amounts, as if they already had a clientele that wanted specific amounts on a subscription basis. My job was to stand and watch, deliver a new box, and stand and watch again.
My mind used to be entertained by classic fiction, dissecting iconic literary heroes, thinking about their actions and the repercussions those had across time, their fictitious lines reverberating into the present. Those long papers I used to write late into the night. I loathed them and now it sounded like a vacation. I missed my laptop, the mug of coffee beside me, the view outside my window of the most beautiful city in the world.
All of that was taken from me.
The little things we took for granted.
Now I was just…existing.
I sat up in bed and waited for my dinner to be delivered, not even having a window to look through. I stared at my feet most of the time, wiggling my toes and watching them move through the socks.
The door unlocked, and the women set the food on the chair. She darted out again.
The guard entered, the same man who always came to visit me. With his face hidden inside that hood, his identity was obscured, but I recognized his movements, the breadth of his shoulders, the way he carried himself. He always entered my cabin like he owned the place. “You like Italian?”
With my arms crossed over my chest, I just glared.
He picked up the tray and set it on the bed beside me. “You’re getting good food, so you must be behaving yourself.” He stood over me, looking down at me.
I turned away, severing the eye contact I couldn’t actually make.
He moved to the chair and took a seat.
Social isolation was suffocating, but no amount of distance would make me want to converse with a guard. It was probably part of their brainwashing technique, to make you grow attached to the man who locked your door every night since you had no one else. “I prefer to eat without company.”
“Same.” The chair looked too small for him based on the way he covered it entirely. He leaned back, his boots planted against the floor, and he crossed his muscular arms over his chest, his hood covering most of his face, but some of his chin was visible because of the light.
“Then you can go.”
He didn’t move.
I pulled the tray to me and ate, because I didn’t want it to get cold before I enjoyed it. Food was one of the few things I had to look forward to, and their meals were actually pretty good. They purposely made us nutritional meals so we could work harder and pack their coke. I bit into a piece of garlic bread and kept my eyes down on my plate.
“You did good this week.”
Since all I wanted to do was snap back, I didn’t say anything.
“I thought it would take longer, honestly.”
I held my tongue and continued to eat. Being defiant wouldn’t get me anywhere, would only bring me closer to death, and even fighting my guard wouldn’t do me any favors. My focus should be on escaping, getting information to do that, and then solidifying a plan—and getting to my sister. “You said good behavior is rewarded.”
“It is.” A deep voice came from the hood, his chin moving slightly as he spoke. There was a shadow across his jaw, over his chin before it disappeared under the hood. His skin was fair, the limited amount I could see. “You want a book? Coke?”
Did women actually ask for that? A book would be nice, something to distract my thoughts while I was stuck in this cabin waiting for the sun to rise the next morning. We worked until dark, so there were several hours before bed that needed to be wasted. “I want my sister.” I abandoned my dinner and looked at him, even though I’d never be able to see those eyes, to see the reactions I relied on when conversing with another person.
He was still, so quiet it seemed like he didn’t hear a word I said.
“I want us to be in the same cabin.” I wanted to assuage her fears, to promise her that I would get her out of here, that there was so much left to live for…and we had to keep going. I knew her so well, and I imagined she was crying herself to slee
p at night, overwhelmed with the guilt that she carried on those small shoulders.
He shook his head. “Simple behaviors earn simple rewards. If that’s something you really want, it’s going to take a lot more than obedience.”
“Then what’s it going to take?”
He wasn’t wearing gloves like he did during the day, so his large hands were visible, covered in veins, the skin slightly cracked because the winter air dried out his skin. He rubbed his thumb into his palm. “Build up to it. Start small.”
I didn’t want to start small. “The only thing I want is my sister. I don’t care about a book or music.”
His hood shifted up slightly, like he’d stopped looking at his hands. “I know what you’re doing. I strongly advise that you don’t.”
“I just want—”
“You can’t escape. You’re going to get yourself killed. Your sister too. I know your life doesn’t mean much to you, but can you live after seeing your sister hang, her dripping blood turning the snow red?”
The image came into my mind and immediately made me sick.
“You can make a life here. It’s not the life you wanted, but you can appreciate the little things that bring you some joy. You work all day, just like normal people, and then you go home to a warm bed with books by your bed and crumbs in your sheets from the items that you earned.”
This brainwashing attempt no doubt worked on other people, but it wouldn’t work on me. They poisoned minds into accepting their conditions, into accepting the loss of freedom, to make them believe they should strive for approval, to work harder to earn the life that shouldn’t be dictated by someone else in the first place. “This bullshit might work on the others, but it won’t work on me. I know I deserve freedom, I know I deserve more, and these late-night talks and veiled kindness won’t change what I know in my heart to be true. Years could pass, and it wouldn’t change anything. But I don’t expect to be here that long…so it doesn’t matter.”
He was still as he stared, his reaction impossible to decipher without a face. He could have threatened me into submission, come to the bed and made my face bloody because of my outburst, but there was no retribution.
Maybe it was just a ruse to make me feel comfortable with him, or maybe he really had no ill will toward me. Maybe he was different from the others. Or maybe he wasn’t. “I have to protect my sister…and I will.”
6
Red Snow
He came for me the following morning, but he didn’t rush me to get dressed. He let the door creak wide open so the light could reach up the floorboards into the small cabin, but he stayed outside, waiting for me on the porch.
I pulled up on my boots and jacket and walked out.
He stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking in the direction of the clearing, two wisps of smoke coming from his hood.
I walked with him.
He was slightly in front of me, never walking directly beside me, like he needed to lead me in the right direction, when I’d taken this walk enough times to know the way. “Today is the Red Snow.”
I stopped in my tracks, my foot stopping in a puddle of melting snow. It’d been sunny for the past week, so the warmth of the rays had eaten away at the piles of powder. I suspected more snow was on the way, that it would pile high with the next storm.
He must have realized I’d stopped walking because he turned around to look at me. “It’s not you.”
I’d been on my best behavior since I’d been punched in the face, because I had bigger objectives than getting beaten. The meals were good and the lack of confrontation comforting. I worked hard because I wanted them to forget about my existence altogether. Bethany and I had short conversations at lunch, and I learned as much information as possible about this horrific reality. “You know who it is?”
He nodded.
It didn’t matter who the victim was, whether she was a snitch, whether she would stab me in the back at the first opportunity; she was a person who deserved to be outside this camp. The knowledge made me breathe so hard that my lungs burned with the cold and my eyes watered, only to dry out instantly because the air took the moist film away. “How can you live with yourself?”
“I have nothing to do with it.”
I marched toward him. “But you can stop it.”
“I can’t stop anything, even if I wanted to. It was necessary, because without an incentive to work, no one did their jobs well. Now, they all work like their lives depend on it—which is what we want.”
My temper flared, and without thinking, I shoved him hard in the chest.
He took a step back, anticipating my attack, and he grabbed me by both wrists and stopped the momentum, pushing me back slightly over a puddle in the dirt. His hands squeezed me tightly, digging through the material of the jacket and right into my flesh.
I didn’t care about getting a terrible lunch and dinner, about getting struck in the face. This was wrong, and while my actions wouldn’t stop what was about to happen, I had to do something, had to let all this pain out in some way. My eyes watered again, disturbed when I hadn’t even seen it happen yet with my own eyes.
He pushed my wrists to my sides before he released me. After a long stare, he turned around and walked forward again, exposing his back to me like he wasn’t concerned that I would slam my fist right into his back.
I watched him walk away, tears in my eyes, shocked that his fingers hadn’t gripped my throat and choked me.
After a few more steps, he stopped and turned back to me slightly. “The first time is the worst. But you’ll feel numb for the others.”
They waited until the end of the workday.
I noticed my lunch was the same as everyone else’s, as if my guard hadn’t reported my bad behavior. But I couldn’t appreciate the gesture because I was sick to my stomach, terrified of what was coming.
When the sun was nearly gone, torches along the perimeter were lit, like it was a ceremony. The flames blanketed everyone’s faces in the dark. Most of the women looked indifferent, like they really were used to this, like they would go back to their cabins as if nothing had happened. Others looked afraid—like they might be the next victim.
Then a man came into the clearing—a man I’d never seen before.
He was taller than the others, had to be six foot five, and while he was dressed like the other guards, a hood didn’t hide his face.
But he was more terrifying—because he had a metal plate over his face covering everything below his eyes. There were slits in the metal so he could breathe, but when his harsh eyes were the only things on display, it was somehow more menacing than no face at all. He walked down the rows of tables, his heavy footfalls echoing against the soil like he was stepping across the hardwood floor of a quiet house.
Every woman was absolutely still, eyes down, as if any contact would make him choose them.
Bethany sat across from me, her eyes on the table too, like she didn’t want to watch the enormous man walk up and down the tables, selecting his next victim, even though my guard had told me they already knew who it was. Maybe because I knew that information, it made me less afraid to watch him, to see the most horrifying event of my entire life.
He kept moving, his eyes looking at every woman he passed, all of their chins down while the shakes made them shiver—and not from the cold.
My sister had been working like everyone else, so I doubted she was the victim, not when she was fresh…as they described us. I watched him move down my row, anxious for it to be over because he’d terrorized us for minutes now, acting like he could feel the palpable fear rising from each and every one of us.
Like he got off on it.
He moved farther down the row, his eyes moving left to right, glancing between the two tables.
I stared, watching him move, seeing the bulky muscles through his clothing, seeing a man who weighed more than an ox.
Bethany lifted her gaze and looked at me, her eyes wide as if she couldn’t believe I was
openly staring at him. His back was to her, so she gave me a slight kick under the table, telling me to drop my gaze.
But I couldn’t.
He suddenly stopped, his head tilted, his wide and unblinking eyes focused on me. The stare lasted for hours, at least it felt that way, when it was only seconds. The women behind him turned to look at me, to watch him stare at me. He held his look, his eyes slowly widening into a maddening stare, as if he was waiting for me to back down first.
My entire body started to shake in terror, and I dropped my gaze.
Then he moved again, walking to a table farther away from us.
Bethany was shaking too, as if she feared she might be the next victim.
I lifted my gaze to watch him now that he was on the other side of the clearing.
He stopped behind a woman who was older than me, maybe in her forties.
She kept her chin down, but she started to shake uncontrollably as if she already knew her number had been called. Tears glistened in her eyes before she shut them tight, the moisture dripping from her lids and down her cheeks.
He grabbed her by the back of the neck and dragged her from the bench.
She screamed and screamed, her shouts of terror echoing across the clearing, burning hotter than the flames on the torches.
I dropped my gaze because I couldn’t watch this, couldn’t experience this, couldn’t handle what was about to happen. I closed my eyes and heaved in pain, tuning out the sounds, disassociating completely.
And just waited for it to be over.
I didn’t sleep that night.
I watched the sunrise through the crack under the door. My cabin was insulated because it had no windows, but I could hear the wind rustle the trees, hear the distant howl of the elements. It wouldn’t be a sunny and clear day like the last week.
It would be so fucking cold.
Footsteps sounded on the patio, and then the door unlocked.