Abducted

by Tikiri

  “In a few hours,” Tetyana said.

  “Hours?”

  “Voici,” Luc said, passing an empty plastic water bottle to her. “Here, use this.”

  Katy took a long look at it and shook her head. “I’ll wait,” she said.

  The thought of hiking up my skirt and peeing into a bottle while huddled so close in the back of this moving van wasn’t appealing. I was holding too. I knew from those long safari trips my parents and I took back in Africa a million years ago, the more you talked about peeing while on the road, the more you wanted to go. It was best to say nothing at all.

  “Don’t feel bad about peeing in bottle,” Win spoke up. I looked at her. She’d regained some color from when I last saw her laid out on the bed, unconscious.

  While Win was sleeping, Luc had explained that she’d been drugged. That fall down the stairs and nasty kick from Zero would leave her with bruises, but she was going to be okay, he said. As the most injured and the youngest, Win got most of the rations we had at hand. The “rations,” which Tetyana carefully distributed among us throughout the trip, consisted of ten bottles of water and five Ziplock bags filled with dried fruit bars. This was what had been in the bags at our feet. One of the bags contained the injection kit Tetyana had used to put us to sleep earlier, but she kept that close and allowed no one to touch it. She obviously had prepared for this. And had done this before.

  “I peed in bottle for one month,” Win said. “Easy to do after practice.”

  “One month?” Katy sounded shocked. “Why?”

  “We were in a metal box.”

  “Metal box?” I said, in horror. “For a whole month?”

  “Do you mean a container?” Luc asked. “Like a shipping container?”

  “It was in a ship, yes,” Win said.

  “What were you doing in a shipping container?” Katy asked.

  Win was silent.

  “Win,” I tried. “Can I ask where you are from?”

  “My home is near Don Dhet. Laos.” I detected a slight pride in her voice, a longing for a home far away.

  “Why did you leave?”

  Her voice came soft and hesitant. “Three Chinese men came in big jeeps and said we will get good jobs in Bangkok. My father told me I was going to make a lot of money and took me out of school. I was always first in my class and wanted to stay, but I had to obey my father.”

  “Did he know where you were going to end up?” I asked, using my softest voice.

  “I remember the Chinese men giving a big TV to my father. He was so happy. He said it was payment for me. I don’t think he cared what they were going to do to me. My mother cried but no one listened to her.”

  I heard a gasp from Katy on the other end. “Your dad sold you for a TV?” she asked.

  I swallowed and wondered, not for the first time that day, how a family member could so easily betray their own daughters, their own sisters. Are we worth so little?

  “What did you do in Bangkok?” Katy said.

  Win was quiet for a moment. “It was in a hotel,” she said, her voice thin, expressionless. “I worked for men. Many men came every day, sometimes twenty in one day.”

  Her words sucked any remaining air from the van. I felt nauseous again. I heard a whimper come from Katy.

  “See my tattoo,” Win said, unfolding one leg. I couldn’t see much from where I was sitting, but I remembered those Chinese characters that curved up her thigh.

  “This means I belong to that Chinese group. If they sell you to another group they give you different tattoo. But Zero said he doesn’t give tattoos. I’m happy because it hurt when they put it.”

  That’s not a tattoo, Win, I thought, they branded you like they brand cattle. But I couldn’t say this out loud. I looked over to see Katy had reached out and put her arm around Win.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said sweetly. “I wanted to go home, but they put chains on us at night.”

  I heard another gasp from Katy.

  I felt like I’d seen and heard enough for one day, without going mad.

  “One day, they told us they’ll pay more if we work in a bigger city,” Win continued. “Supposed to be a better job. No more men, they said. They promised.” It seemed like she wanted to let it all out, and in the confines of the dark van, she may have felt it safe to tell her story. No one stopped her.

  “So, they took us to Pahang.”

  “Where’s that, Win?” I asked.

  “Isn’t that in Malaysia?” Luc said.

  “Yes. Then they put us on a boat and we went to Manila. That’s where I saw the big ships. They were huge. It was at night and I don’t remember going inside the ship, but they told me that’s where we were going. I remember waking up in the dark and we were inside a big box with other girls from Thai and Laos.”

  “Mon dieu,” Luc whispered. “My god.”

  “How old were you then?” I said.

  “I was the oldest. I was ten.”

  I gave an involuntary shiver. How could anyone do this to a child?

  Next to me, Tetyana was silent, but I could see her clenching and unclenching her hands, faster and faster.

  “I was lucky,” Win said. “Three girls didn’t make it. When the men came, they opened the doors to take them out.”

  Luc put his head in his hands like he didn’t want to hear any more of this.

  “We heard them splash into the water.”

  Oh my god, I whispered.

  Then, there was silence. It seemed Win had worn herself out. She put her head on Katy’s shoulders and closed her eyes. Everyone else seemed to have lost their voices.

  I leaned back against the panel, trying to digest all this. Something about Win’s story stirred a memory, a memory from long ago. I was sitting in a classroom, reading a book I couldn’t put down. It wasn’t an ordinary book. Ms. Stacy from Canada, who taught grade six at the international school I’d attended back then, assigned books beyond our classroom’s mandatory list. Some had been hard to read because of their language and the topic, like this one I’d held in my hands that day.

  It was a story about a boy who’d been captured in West Africa and sent on a ship with thousands of others to America, where they were sold off to become slaves in plantations. Instead of metal boxes, the boy and his companions were kept in the bottom of the ship. Maybe they didn’t have containers back then, I thought, but I understood one thing now. What happened hundreds of years ago, and what everybody claimed was a terrible thing, was still happening. Today.

  Everyone in the van had either lapsed back into their personal nightmares or had fallen asleep. All I could hear was the vehicle’s steady hum. When we passed a streetlight, the van lit up inside for a split second, just long enough for me to glance at the others. We looked like a bunch of discarded refugees. I wanted to reach out and tell everyone that everything was going to be all right, that everything was going to get back to normal. But what’s normal? To them? To me?

  “Luc,” I said, nudging him.

  “Hmm….” He’d been resting his head against the van, eyes half-closed.

  “What about you?”

  “Pardon?”

  What’s your story?”

  “What story?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” he said. I felt my eyebrows lift involuntarily. I’d thought he was the same age as Katy and me, or at least eighteen.

  “How did you get here?”

  Luc was silent.

  I prodded him. “How did you end up here?”

  He sighed. “I’ve nowhere else to go.” He paused. “I belong here.”

  “Here? With these monsters?” Those words came out before I could think.

  “It’s better than where I was before.”

  “How can anything be worse than this?”

  Luc shrugged. “Just is,” he said, and turned his back to me.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.
/>
  I took stock of my own situation. I hadn’t been locked up in a trans-Pacific shipping container, or sold as a prostitute, or raped by a man while my own brother held me down. I’d had some close encounters, but for the most part I’d gone unscathed. None of my worst experiences even came close to what any of the others here had gone through.

  My curiosity got the better of me and I turned to Tetyana.

  “Tetyana?”

  I knew she wasn’t asleep because she was still clenching and unclenching her hands. She didn’t open her eyes for a whole minute, and when she did, she looked to me with raised eyebrows.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s strange that from the back, you look so much like Katy,” I ventured.

  “You see what you want to see,” she said quietly. “I’m nothing like her.”

  “What I mean is, it’s not every day you find two redheads in one place. I find that interesting.”

  “You think this my real color?” She pointed at her hair. “I only give what customers want.”

  I hesitated before asking my next question. “Why are you here?”

  She looked away. “Because I choose to.”

  “Why would you choose something like this?”

  She shook her head and closed her eyes again.

  “Are you related to Vlad?”

  “Of course not!” That came out with force.

  I’d met her only a day ago. I knew nothing about her, but I knew she knew this game. She knew the men up front, she knew everyone’s backgrounds, she knew what to do, and most importantly, what not to do. There was something about her. Those hard green eyes, that grim red mouth. But one thing was clear: underneath that bravado and hard shell, Tetyana was hurting.

  “Too many questions, right?” I said.

  She sighed. “Until today, I—.” She didn’t get to finish the sentence. The van screeched to a halt, throwing us all into a topsy-turvy heap against the wall of cardboard boxes.

  “Watch out!” Luc yelled, as the boxes started to rain on us.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Tetyana’s and Luc’s lightning-quick reactions saved us from getting crushed. They threw their bodies against the wall of boxes, but a few still tumbled down, one on my leg. I leaped up to help them and push the boxes back in place.

  Win and Katy, who’d been roughly awoken, looked around in shock.

  “What happened?” Katy asked, her eyes widened.

  Tetyana put a finger to her lips. Her self-assured look had returned, but I detected a tinge of nerves.

  “Halt!”

  The van rocked as the men in front jumped off and slammed their doors. We could hear a mumble of voices outside.

  “The stop sign’s over there,” said a commandeering voice. The voice didn’t sound happy.

  “Sorry sir, we not see it.” I knew from the high-pitched voice it was Vlad.

  “Passports and license papers, please.” Is that a border agent? A police officer?

  “Yes, sir,” Zero and Vlad chorused. The front doors opened and shut again.

  “Transport permits?”

  More mumbling. It sounded like Zero and Vlad were on their very best behavior.

  “Follow me,” the voice said.

  We heard the scrunch of boots on gravel, walking away from us.

  In that instant, I sprang to my knees and shouted “Hey!” startling everyone in the back of the van. I lunged forward with my fists, ready to beat the side panel, but before I could do anything, Tetyana grabbed me and clamped her hand over my mouth. I struggled, but Luc jumped in and held me down by my shoulders.

  “Mmmmm.” I tried to pull away from their grip, but they were both strong.

  “Allez au diable! Stop it!” Luc said. “They’ve got guns.”

  “Settle down, Asha,” Tetyana said. “This is not the time for that.”

  I stopped struggling. Tetyana’s and Luc’s grips softened and I pulled away from them. Everyone was staring at me.

  “If that’s the police—” I began in an angry voice.

  “It is the police,” Tetyana snapped. “Local police.”

  “Then, we should—” She cut me off.

  “You think it’s that easy?” she said, with a look of scorn. “All we do is call 911 and everything will become all right?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I demanded. “We didn’t do anything when they killed that girl. Now we’re not gonna do anything when the police are right here? Do you enjoy getting tortured?”

  “Do you enjoy trying to get us killed?” Luc asked.

  “Asha,” Tetyana said, as if gathering all the patience she had in her. “The last thing we want to do is to walk into hands of these men.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” she paused. “How do you know they’ll help us?”

  “Because—” I looked at them helplessly. We’re in Europe, not in Goa or Dar es Salaam anymore, right? “Because they’re the police,” I said almost pleading. “That’s why. How do you know they won’t help us?”

  When Tetyana replied, it was in a slow, low voice. “There are no border crossings in Europe anymore. At least in the EU. Think about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When legitimate police set up traffic stops, they have teams in place who flag you down from afar. And you can hear them all. They don’t have a single man holding a haphazard stop sign in the middle of an empty road.”

  I blinked.

  “These guys work alone and know which trucks to stop to take their cut. This is not a true checkpoint, and this route is not new. It’s ten thousand euros of protection fee for every trip. They do this every time.”

  I felt like someone had just punched me in the stomach.

  “He heard you, all right,” Tetyana said, her eyes boring into mine. “But he didn’t come get us, did he?”

  The sound of boots crunching on the gravel came back. We instinctively hunched low, even though we were inside the van, behind a wall of boxes.

  The back doors of the van screeched open. The wall of boxes didn’t let much light in, but I could smell the fresh air from outside. I wanted nothing more than to take a deep, long breath in, but I didn’t dare. The men were only a few feet away.

  Someone was pulling out the boxes. I strained to listen. Someone was opening them up, inspecting them or taking something out, then closing them up again and throwing them back into the van.

  “This ours?” the officious voice asked.

  “No sir, this for Belge,” I heard Zero say. He sounded fairly confident, not the voice of an anxious man running away from a murder of a cop and trafficking five of us across a border.

  “Where’s ours?” asked the unknown man’s voice.

  “Here, right here, sir.”

  More boxes were pulled out and cut open. More rustle of newspaper.

  “Moroccan tea, sir. Very good for your heart,” Zero said. Vlad guffawed.

  In the back of the van, Tetyana had spread her arms out, as if to keep us all back, to protect us. We sat quietly, just as we did at the warehouse a couple of hours ago.

  “This also is for you, sir,” Zero said. A box slid off the truck and was opened. “Especially for you.”

  Silence. A grunt from the officer, then a rustle of papers.

  “This is real?”

  “Yes, sir. Always. We only work with real stuff.”

  More grunts. Silence from Vlad and Zero.

  A car buzzed by, but other than that, it was a quiet. I tried to imagine the highways from London to Belgium. I knew Belgium was north of France, across the channel from England. How did we get here? How many countries have we crossed? Where are we? I regretted not paying more attention in my geography class.

  “Ça va.” The officer sounded satisfied. “You can put these in my car.”

  I heard a grunt from Vlad, and the sound of boxes being pulled out of the van one by one and taken away. It took several trips. I wasn’t sure how many boxes they took from the bac
k, but our wall remained intact.

  “Merci,” the authoritative voice said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Vlad said.

  “Bon journée.” The officer sounded uncharacteristically friendly after all that commandeering.

  The doors screeched shut again. The men got back into the van and slammed the front doors.

  Something bitter came to my throat.

  Part FOUR

  If they hadn’t tried to break me down, I wouldn’t have known I’m unbreakable.

  Gabourey Sidibe

  Chapter Twenty-three

  It was early in the morning when we arrived at our destination.

  After the first pit stop at the warehouse and the second one at the pseudo-checkpoint, the van stopped at four more places along the way. And Katy and I had gotten over the indignity of peeing in a bottle.

  Sometimes, the van stopped for ten minutes, other times for an hour. Every time the van parked somewhere, I’d wondered if something nasty was going to happen again, and every time I heard footsteps walk away from us and not return for a while, I’d wondered if they’d abandoned us to die, cramped behind this wall of boxes.

  I wanted to break through and run out, but Luc said it would be a waste of energy. “That’s bulletproof glass and the doors can only open from the outside,” he’d said. “Trust me.” If Tetyana hadn’t kept track of time and reminded us to breathe, I’d have gone stark raving mad.

  When the doors of the van finally opened eight hours after our departure, we stumbled out like zombies, with me back under Bibi’s robe. The van was parked in a back alley next to a nondescript house with graffiti on its cracked walls and iron bars across its windows. It was a shabby, narrow three-story, structure, one of those traditional European row houses that are taller than they are wide. This house looked like it had been built centuries ago and not been taken care of since, just like the one we’d left behind in London.

  But we didn’t have time to take in the fresh air or our surroundings. With even less sleep than we’d had, Vlad and Zero were grouchier than ever. They made us line up and move the remaining boxes into the house, one by one, while they watched with guns in their hands and dark frowns on their faces.