A loud hum followed by a sharp jerking sensation wakes me. I try to rub my eyes but my hands are tied. Zip-tied. I’m on a plane with no idea how I got here. Two men I have never seen before in my life are sitting in the tiny cockpit a few feet away. The one on the left turns around and looks at me from behind a shock of scruffy blondish bangs.
He scratches the unshaven stubble around his chin. “’Ello my dear.” His voice is young, like Patrick’s, but thick with a Swedish accent. Maybe Bulgarian. Russian?
The plane jerks again and I slide to the back, crashing against the metal siding. “What’s happening? Who are you? If this is kidnapping, you picked the wrong girl. My dad’ll kill you.”
My dad, the sun-deprived philosophy professor, has never even been in a fight.
“Nobody will ever find you where we take you, dear girl.”
Scruffy is a slimy prick. “Take me back, you sick bastards!”
Scruffy’s heavy cologne stings my nose when he makes his way to the back of the plane and unzips his pants. I see an opportunity. And take it, clamping my jaw around Scruffy’s hand as hard as I can. Shrill howling. He examines the bite mark, hardly torn skin, and then his uninjured hand comes down on my cheek. Palm flat and chewed-off fingernails, far weaker than any slappy scratch girl fight blow. You can take this, idiot Cecilia. My face stings but I laugh at him anyway and spit foamy saliva in his face.
“Cotton mouth. Got any water?”
Scruffy narrows his eyes. He says something in a different language to his pilot buddy in the cockpit and sits back down in the seat beside him. The pilot grumbles and comes to the back of the plane to put a fist in my eye socket and dig his boot in my ribs. He is not satisfied yet. A blow to my stomach and my lungs want to quit.
Blood pounds in my ears but I’m not done yet.
“Must be shitty to have to kidnap a girl and put her on a cargo plane to get laid.”
He smirks and kicks me again in the ribs. I go quiet now. I lie in the back of the plane with my knees pulled to my chest. Somewhere in between frustration, turbulence and pain I hit a lapse in time. Is this the twilight zone?
The music is blaring. Wait, that’s me over there. There are my friends, and Patrick, too. I watch as Patrick leads me to the dance floor. We’re dancing and having a good time. I look around and my god, there is Scruffy. He blends in with the rest of the crowd with his faded college t-shirt, sandals, and shaggy hair. His easy smile makes him appear normal enough, but he is watching me.
Patrick is saying something to me. He winks. I blush. He throws back a wave before pushing the men’s bathroom door open. I am running my hand through my sweaty hair and tugging at my shirt. I look so stupidly naïve. I always considered myself smart. Maybe slightly cynical at times, but never the easy prey I see standing before me. Ok, I’m walking now. I’m trying to get through the crowd. I scan the sea of faces as I follow myself. There is Scruffy again. He is leaning on the bar and looking over his shoulder.
I am standing in the bathroom line close to the bar, too close to the bar. Scruffy is ordering a drink. The bartender hands him a jazzy blue cocktail and Scruffy puts a cherry on a plastic orange toothpick. He looks over his shoulder again then slips his hand into his pocket. What are you up to, Scruffy?
He walks to me. “’Ello, for a pretty girl. What is your name, gorgeous?” Hands me the drink.
“Oh thanks, but I’m actually waiting on my boyfriend.”
“What is it with Americans? A man is not allowed to buy a pretty girl a drink just because she is beautiful? Girls here pretend not to enjoy innocent flattery. I will never understand American women. At least give me your name.”
“Cecilia.”
“Cecilia. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl. Enjoy your Spring Break, Cecilia. And please, my feelings will be hurt if you don’t at least accept my compliments.”
Look at me, just taking the drink and taking a sip. Fearless. Untouchable. Oblivious.
Scruffy nods approvingly. I give a polite smile. We go our separate ways, fading back into the crowd. Minutes pass. Disorientation. Confusion. Hell of a drink. Damn right. Patrick goes to get me water. He says not to move and he will be right back. But I’m about to throw up. I want to yell at myself being pushed and jostled through the crowd. I should have stayed and waited for Patrick. Scruffy is lingering. A vulture.
No one notices me, just another drunken college girl from the States who’s had too much in Tijuana. Everybody does it, the time of your life. I can’t help myself. I stagger. Sickened, I have to look away when I fall. Danger. Danger. Haunting roars of laughter. The music is so loud. There are warnings everywhere. I can’t save the girl clawing at the air, trying to stand in front of me. People are knocking me over. No one looks suspicious or concerned when a man, a scruffy handsome blond, puts a large overcoat over me. No one notices Scruffy carrying the lifeless body, me, Cecilia Claire Gardner, out of the club. Patrick is darting in and out of people. He is panicking. Too late, Pat, I didn’t listen when you said to stay put. I wanted to tell you, I think I love you. I hear him call for me but I know I can’t call back. I’m not even really here.
+ + +
The aircraft runway is nothing but a cleared stretch of dirt surrounded by a giant mass of tropical trees. Hardly civilization. The air is damp and heavy with a hot stickiness. Beads of sweat gather around my temples and creep down the sides of my flushed face. It’s hard to breathe and I am so thirsty.
I am forced into the bed of a Jeep. Scruffy collects a stack of cash from the Jeep driver and that is the last I see of him or the pilot. The air becomes even thicker and the sweltering humidity wraps around me like a boa constrictor, squeezing the life out of me. I count to sixty over and over as I slide around in the Jeep. We finally stop and the engine dies after I have counted to sixty 40 times. Jeep Driver pulls me out of the jeep and throws me to the ground. A shabby warehouse sits in front of me, an ugly sore thumb in the depths of untouched jungle. Jeep Driver yells something in another language, different from that of Pilot and Scruffy, and jerks me up by my hair. I cry out but he does not let go.
“Please let me go. I’ll do anything.”
Jeep Driver’s face does not move as he drags me inside. A row of rusting chain link dog kennels lines the far side of the concrete floor and in them I see girls, hollow and sickly girls.
There’s an open cage down on the far left. “I don’t want to go in there,” I plead.
Jeep Driver takes a plastic rod from a hook and pokes my ribs with it. Electricity surges all the way down to my bones. I scream when Jeep Driver rams the electric poker into my back. He brushes my shoulder with it. I do not scream again.
Into the dog cage I crawl. I hug my knees and trace the indentions in my skin from crawling across the concrete floor. Jeep Driver grabs a pail and turns on a squirrely faucet. The pipes burp and gurgle before frothing out muddy water. Jeep Driver waits for the pipes to clear out and yield slightly cleaner water before he tilts the pail underneath it. How kind you are, Jeep Driver. He pushes the pail in the cage with his foot, sloshing water everywhere, before he slams the gate and locks the heavy chains that drape over the cage.
The warehouse door closes. The sunlight becomes only a frayed thread between the rolling door and the frame. I am left in the dark with the others.
“Where am I? What’s happening? Anyone know English?”
Thirty-four seconds, a ragged cough from a few cages down, silence.
My windpipe is shriveling up into a scratchy wrinkle, leaving only remnants of what used to be a throat. More silence. I take the pail and drink. The water leaves grit on the roof of my mouth and the taste of dirt on my tongue. The cage wire is not that thick, but of course I have nothing to cut it with. I can tell it is growing close to nighttime. The speck of light at the door is fading. Rain begins to fall. It is light at first, and then grows heavier. Raindrop bullets ricochet off the tin roof.
I push against the sides of the cage as hard as I can. I push so hard the wire digs into my back. Keep at it. The cage will eventually give. Maybe it will.
“Won’t work.”
“Come again?” I wait. Silence. “Are you there?”
Silence.
Damn.
I get nowhere, except to the point of exhaustion. The thunder is furious, cannons going off. The sky is a giant machine gun peppering rain bullets onto the roof; the wind is rough as it pushes against the warehouse. Maybe the wind will knock the whole thing over. Don’t kid yourself, Cecilia.
I cannot get out. Fuck, I cannot get out. I have no idea where I am or what is going to happen to me. I curl up in the corner of the cage, resting my head on my hands, and cry for my mother. My stomach is in my throat. The last thing on my mind is sleep but I close my eyes anyway, not like there is much else to do.
Dreams never come as I fade in and out of consciousness. I only drift through different shades of darkness. My skin is crawling. I wake to a bug, really too big to be a bug, on my arm. I slap it off and scream. No one here cares. A balmy glow bleeds through the crack in the rolling warehouse door. My spine is sore. Can’t imagine why, Cecilia, certainly the cargo plane, being beaten, the electric cattle prod or banging yourself against the cage has nothing to do with it. Why did I take that drink from that psycho Scruffy jerk? I slap at a prick on my neck and cringe. Mosquitoes this big should be illegal. Hopefully I’ll die of malaria before these depraved strangers can do anything else to me.
Nothing happens for hours. The morning turns into a sweltering afternoon. The sweltering afternoon turns into a stagnant dusk with no signs of life and no interest in conversation from the others despite my best attempts. I even tried the little French, one German phrase, and two Chinese cuss words I know. It is hot, very hot, and dark inside the warehouse. I keep sitting, force the grimy water down every once and a while, and think about Patrick, yellow fever, my parents, and how terrible the world really is. I guess I won’t be making it to that organic chemistry midterm.
I am in the middle of wondering how poisonous these bugs the size of hamsters are that somehow sneak in and out of the warehouse when the door groans. Light floods in. It hurts my head. I shield my face until I feel the throb in my eye sockets fade. My right eyelid twitches. The warehouse door slams shut. Now there are stirs. The others are not just dead bodies locked in a cage as I was beginning to think. A shadowy figure wearing a Red Sox baseball cap walks across the room filling water pails. Another man with a cowboy hat comes in carrying something. He takes two girls out. One fights him. He slaps her to the ground.
He is carrying a syringe. The one girl does not want to fight anymore after he jabs the syringe between her toes. I catch her gaze for only a second before Cowboy Hat pulls her to her feet. That gaze. She isn’t looking at me. She is looking somewhere past me with glossy, marbled eyes, like a corpse or a blind person, a blinded corpse. I am afraid.
Cowboy Hat hands the man with the Red Sox cap a black duffel bag then leaves with the two girls who can barely stand. I get a closer look at Red Sox as he nears my cage. He looks around my brother’s age, eighteen or so.
“Please tell me who you are.”
He looks at me. His eyes are not robotic like the others. He does not speak.
“Why do you hurt them? Why are you doing this?”
Guilt slumps his shoulders and etches lines in his young face. I would like to think it is guilt, at least. He is a prisoner too, but there is money to be made. I am catching on. He is quiet as he unzips the black duffel bag and pulls out a spotlight like the battery-operated one my father carries when he fishes at night. A flip of the switch and the entire warehouse lights up. I look closer at the girls and their bluish purple skin, stringy hair, and whittled bodies. Most are propped against the sides of their cages like barely clothed dolls no one wants anymore. The girl next to me is sprawled out across the floor of her cage, wheezing and convulsing.
Trash, warped scrap wood, rusting tools, and an old gas can litter the rest of the warehouse. And then there is Red Sox, unlocking my cage and reaching for me. I scoot backwards. He wraps a clammy hand around my wrist and jerks me forward.
“What are you doing? Who the hell are you?”
He throws me to the floor and I shield my head from cracking on the concrete. I try to stand but the blunt toe of his boot pummels into my lower abdomen. I coil into a ball. Another kick. My last thread in humanity breaks. Red Sox is standing over me. Do you feel like a man?
Ragged gasp. “Please, please don’t.” Pain. I taste blood.
He kneels down and zip ties my wrists and ankles together then gags me with a dirty cloth. Red Sox is breathing heavy after he finishes securing the cloth in my mouth with duct tape. He grabs a needle filled with a yellowy brown liquid. I cannot get away from him. The needle pierces the inside of my arm, taking the innocence from me.
The liquid surges through my veins. A burst of acid shoots up my throat. I cannot breathe again. Bile funnels into my lungs. I am going to die drowning. Red Sox must think so, too, because he rolls me on my stomach and rips the tape off of my face. He pulls the soaked cloth out of my mouth and I throw up, coughing and spitting. My hair is in my face. Red Sox pushes it back and uses a clean towel to wipe my mouth and dab the cold sweat away from my forehead. He could not let me drown in my own vomit. I am no good dead but the other gestures confuse me. Coward. You hate yourself.
I am feeling much better. More than better. I am rocking on a wave somewhere in the ocean. Red Sox has his hand on my face. He drips something from a syringe in my eye. Burning. Awful burning. I feel it again and my eyes grow heavy. Dark clouds loom over me and all becomes dark. I can still feel the rock of the waves in this strange and shadowy black night and I’m not afraid.
