by Kitty Thomas
There were no other exits.
"How did you end up here?" If Julie didn't keep a semi-normal conversation flowing, she was going to lose her mind. She already felt as if bits and pieces of it were breaking off and floating away from her.
"I met what I thought was a nice American man over the internet. He was supposed to become my husband and give me a new life in America. But instead, I was brought here. My passport and identification were taken and... no husband. They said if I managed to escape I would get deported or go in prison because I was a criminal here illegally, and prostitution is a crime. As if I would choose that. Let them lock me up. I'm sure it would be better."
"Your English is very good," Julie said.
"Thank you. I practiced a long time for my American husband."
Julie was about to ask why Manka was the only other person down here with her, when the question was answered by a coughing fit. Manka drank from a glass of water next to her bunk until it subsided.
"Whatever they're giving me isn't working. I'm not getting better. I'm going to die down here."
"You're not going to die down here," Julie said. But as she said it, she had serious doubts. If what Manka said was true, short of some FBI sting stopping this and rescuing them, they were all probably going to die down here. It was a thought she tried very hard not to dwell on.
A few minutes later, the door opened, and a large group of women—about thirty in all—filed into the room, all wearing nice black lingerie of various styles.
"Who is this new girl?" a blonde with a strong French accent asked. She immediately started stripping off a long black silk nightgown, uncaring of her nudity. She tossed the garment in a basket beside the bed.
"I'm Julie," she said, trying not to stare at the French girl.
"Americaine? How odd. Who did she piss off? They never bring americaine girls. They aren't exotic enough for these pieces of shit."
"Were you a mail-order bride, too?" Julie asked.
Manka made an offended sound—clearly not appreciating being referenced that way—and the blonde let out a derisive snort.
"Mais, non! I was to have a modeling contract. They said it was lingerie and asked if I would be okay with that. I said, oui. This was not what I had in mind. Je suis Josette. But you may call me, Josie."
"She does that all the time, mixing French in with her English," Manka said.
"Excusez-moi, Manka. I didn't have a perfect mari waiting on me." Josie turned abruptly and went to the shower in the middle of the room, and turned on one of the shower heads.
"I didn't either," Manka reminded her.
Josie rattled off something quite long and derisive-sounding in French and stepped under the spray. Julie looked away.
A Latina girl sat on the bed next to Julie's. She laughed. "You better get used to public nudity, honey. Everybody's gonna see it. Paying clients. Guards. Your fellow whores. That's right. You're no better than us now, blanca."
Dmitri must have been looking to get women from all around the world, like some perverse international doll collection. Julie was the American doll. Boring to other Americans, but necessary to complete the set.
"I'm Carmen," she said, finally. "Welcome to hell."
"Julie." Her name sounded stranger and more distant each time it fell from her lips.
"You must be the sweet one on the menu. How many men you fucked? No wait... let me guess... rich bitch living on Daddy's credit cards. Frat boy boyfriend in college... big brothers to your sorority. Experimented with a few girls to be edgy. How warm am I?"
Finally, the tears came. Whatever dam had been holding them back burst, and she didn't care if Carmen or any of the others saw her cry.
"Oh shit, we've got a weeper. Well, isn't that special? You better toughen the fuck up, girl, or you're never going to survive this. Close your eyes and pretend it's your boyfriend. These men are all into boring shit in the bedroom anyway. Lucky for us."
Julie must have betrayed something with her facial expression because Carmen's eyes went wide. "You have had a boyfriend, right, blanca?"
Julie couldn't meet her eyes.
"Girlfriend?"
No response.
"Okay, but you've at least had sex. What are you? Twenty, twenty-one?"
"Twenty-two. And no," Julie said.
"Shit, girl. Did they steal you out of a convent?" Carmen got very serious and concerned all of a sudden. "Listen to me. You can't let them know. If they find out you've never been with anyone, they'll make this a thousand times worse for you. These entitled dickheads will fight to see who gets to deflower you, and they'll make it a big public show. They did that shit to Umiko when she first got here. She was barely seventeen and had been... sheltered."
The Japanese girl stood at the edge of their conversation, a darkness falling over her expression.
"I'm sorry that happened to you," Julie said, at a loss at what else to say. These girls were acting so casual it was unsettling. She wanted to buy into whatever sense of normalcy they'd created to survive but she couldn't yet. She didn't want this to be the new normal. It couldn't be.
Umiko shrugged.
Carmen quickly changed the subject. "Umiko is our little mermaid."
The Japanese girl managed a small laugh. "My name means child of the sea. They like to tease me about it."
When Umiko had gone off to shower, Julie turned back to Carmen. "They'll find out if I bleed," she said, unable to believe she was speaking as if she accepted all this as her new reality. She knew she had to be in some kind of shock. Her voice didn't sound like her own. It couldn't be. None of this was really happening. It was all a bad dream. She'd wake up.
Carmen interrupted her internal monologue. "But then it'll be too late. It won't matter. Just try to keep the client from finding out then dump the sheets down the laundry chute."
"Won't they find it when they do laundry?" Julie asked.
Carmen rolled her eyes. "Oh yeah, like these assholes do laundry. We do the laundry. It's practically the only other time we get out of this dungeon, to do the domestic shit, but don't think that's an escape opportunity. There will be guns on you the whole time. Besides, if they saw it, there would be no way to know who it came from. Maybe a client got rough. Maybe a girl is on her period. These hijos de su puta madre are squeamish about periods. They won't ask, and they won't care."
"Okay." Julie noticed some dark sinister stains on the ground. "What's that?"
"You don't want to know," Carmen said. But after a pause she told her anyway. "When I talk about survival here, I mean that. If you make too much trouble, they will fucking kill you. A lot of times when it happens, they just drag someone out of the room and nobody sees them again. We're not completely sure they die. Maybe some get sold to someone else. But I've seen them kill a couple of girls here in cold blood. That's what those stains are. And I was part of the clean-up crew on that one." She pointed.
"H-how long have you been here?" How long could anybody be here and still maintain any sense of themselves?
Carmen looked around, as if she expected to find a calendar on the wall. She shrugged and said, "What's time in a place like this? I don't know... long enough... so long that I'm afraid they'll notice I'm not as young as the others anymore, and then I might become one of those stains. You don't get out of this alive. The only thing you can do is prolong the inevitable and hope they've made a mistake out there. Maybe someone is investigating. Maybe they'll bust down the doors any day and get us out of here."
It was a very nice thought. And too much to hope that this probably-imaginary sting operation would come to an end in the next few hours.
"Do they speak English? The people running this place?" Julie asked. She knew Aleksei did.
"Most of them do, but except for Dmitri, they speak mostly in Russian. A lot of the time we only know what Manka tells us later. She can understand them, so we hear what she can remember, usually the next day. I'm sure they don't know she's Russian. They picked her up
in Poland, and her English is so good. You'd think they'd be smart enough to know a lot of these girls speak more than one language. But they are usually careful, and Manka is smart. She looks blank whenever they speak, except reacting to general tone like the other girls. But maybe they're just playing with us. Maybe they know she understands and tells us later. Maybe it's all part of their sadistic games. I don't know. There's no way out anyway. It doesn't matter what we know or don't know."
Several other girls were using the shower now. Josie had finished first and went and brought a big pile of towels and laid them down outside the range of water splash. Eventually, they'd all showered, including the girls in the bunks right around Julie, Carmen, Umiko, Manka. They all got into bed without a stitch on and pulled the covers over them.
"You don't sleep in pajamas?" Julie whispered to Carmen who was in the bed next to hers.
"Blanca, this ain't the spa. They're not going to spring for sleepwear. The only clothes we get is what we fuck the clients in and what we clean the house in." Carmen's expression went very dark and hard all of a sudden. "I'd like to slit their motherfucking throats in their sleep. Every night I pray to the virgin. I pray down terror and gunfire on them."
Carmen was kind of scary. But a good scary. An understandable scary. And a scary that made Julie feel like she wasn't alone. Somehow she knew this would all be way worse if she were alone.
The door opened, the metal clanking and scraping loudly against the wall.
"Ladies," an older Russian man said. He was tall and thin and looked out of place as the leader of a prostitution ring, but it was clear he was the leader. The energy and sense of calm resolute power that rose off him was unmistakable.
Aleksei stood behind him and to the right. His eyes immediately found Julie's, and he smiled. Did he really find this a fitting punishment for being kicked out of the bar? Or had he planned to take her anyway?
Dmitri continued. "The clients have left for the evening. Everyone but Umiko eats."
"That's not fair!" Carmen practically snarled. One of the guards stepped out of the line and advanced on her, his hand raised as if prepared to beat her for the outburst.
Dmitri said something in Russian and the guard backed down. "Do you want to eat?" Dmitri asked Carmen.
She was silent. Umiko cried quietly in her bunk.
"I did everything the client wanted," Umiko said.
"Silence!" Dmitri said. "Everyone but Umiko eats."
Several men came in with food. Nothing fancy. Mostly sandwiches and things that had come out of cans. They put the food on the ground closest to the door. Then a few more came in with bottles of water.
Slowly the girls got up from their bunks and went to get food and water. There were whistles and taunting in Russian from the guards, but Julie couldn't see how it would be any less horrible if they were still wearing lingerie. Either way, they were all meat to these men.
Julie stood out conspicuously as the only female in the room who wasn't naked. She also didn't make a move toward the food, afraid to call too much attention to herself. Besides, she'd eaten at work. It wasn't as though she were starving.
Work. Dani's already seemed like a lifetime and worlds away. It seemed impossible that that life and this one could exist at the same time on the same planet without some complete breakdown of all the laws of physics.
A gentle kind of shock had set in. It would be normal to scream or cry or be defiant, but she had the very strong sense that she wouldn't survive long if she did any of those things. These guys didn't need her breathing. They could just drag somebody else in off the street. And as had already been made plain to her by the other girls, nobody was going to be that excited by an American on the menu here.
Julie thought if she was quiet enough she could blend into the background and somehow put off the inevitable. She could barely allow the inevitable to form into words in her head. She tried to tamp down lost virginity and assault. Especially the combination of those two things. And that one ugly word that she couldn't bring herself to contemplate that unified everything into one searing grisly thought.
But when she pushed away the words, what rushed in to replace them were images. And that was much worse.
Finally Dmitri's eyes landed on her. "Who is this? Who brought her here?"
There was a long pause. Finally, Aleksei spoke. "I brought her. Her name is Julie. She got me kicked out of the bar she works at."
Dmitri rounded on him, and suddenly any pretext of refinement dropped from his manner. He began to speak in fast, clipped Russian. Whatever he said was bad enough that the large terrifying man with the snake tattoo on his neck actually shrank back. Then Dmitri backhanded him across the face like a pimp might hit the woman he was abusing.
The other guards chuckled. Aleksei glared, but not at Dmitri. His glare instead landed on Julie.
"Feed her. After everyone eats, bring her upstairs to me."
Now that she could no longer escape their notice anyway, Julie went to get food and water and took it back to her bunk. The guards watched them as they ate, but after a few minutes in this hellish tension, Julie noticed something strange. When the attention of the guards was turned away for a moment some of the others would hide a bit of food away in their blankets, different women making their move at different times as the guards' focus swept back and forth over the room like security flood lights. Several girls were doing this. Julie did it, too. Because she was sure it was for the Japanese girl.
The little bits they could squirrel away and the risks no doubt taken, couldn't keep Umiko well fed, even as tiny as she was, but it would keep her from starving. Carmen saw Julie hide a small bit of her food and smiled and nodded her approval.
Despite the mild arguments Julie had witnessed earlier, in the end, there was no us and them among the girls. It was them versus their captors. It was how they'd all survived this long, how any of them had maintained a semblance of a personality. It was the source of any sense of normality Julie had witnessed in this underground cave and the source of any normality she would know from this point onward.
When everyone had eaten, the guards started to file out of the room, one of them turning off the lights on his way out, casting them into total darkness. A flashlight came on, the circle of light growing larger and larger. Then someone she was sure was Aleksei grabbed her roughly off the lower bunk and dragged her out of the room while she struggled and stumbled to keep up.
Behind the steel door was a long hallway, still underground. The hallway was well lit and guarded. There weren't just armed guards at the door. They lined the whole impossibly long hallway which led to the one way out—a wide set of concrete steps that went up into another kind of darkness.
Aleksei didn't speak to her until they were halfway up the stairs. She was sure he was leaving a bruise on her arm from the tight grip he had on her. When he finally spoke, he said, "You should have taken me up on my offer and gone on a date with me. I would have been very good to you."
Julie didn't believe that crap for a minute. She doubted he knew how to be truly good to anyone. Particularly anyone female. But she was smart enough to know that the best thing to say to him was nothing. It was the choice that might keep her alive the longest.
And yet, with the unending nightmare that lay ahead and the near certainty of an ignoble death at the end of it, she wondered if it might not be better to fight and rebel... go out in a blaze of glory. If they were so quick to kill these girls, maybe that would be the best option to take. But stupidly, she focused on the idea Carmen had planted in her head that there could be some authorities out there who suspected Dmitri's crimes... people who were putting together a case, who might find and rescue her.
For some absurd reason, Julie had expected to be taken up to a fancy office or a conference room. In a twisted way it made sense. Dmitri was the boss. So he must have a nice office. Maybe he liked to make threats or lay down the law from there. But she wasn't taken to an office or conference room.
Instead, she was led to a large, ornate bedroom. Two scary looking guards with guns stood outside the room. They didn't glance her way. Their eyes were focused straight ahead as if there were something particularly interesting on the wall of the other side of the hallway.
Inside, Dmitri sat on the edge of a large king-sized bed in a plush black bathrobe. "Leave us," he said.
Aleksei released Julie's arm and gave her a long dark look that was half lascivious intent and half pure murderous rage. He bent and whispered in her ear, "Don't get it in your head that you will sleep tonight. When he's through with you... it's my turn."
He pulled back and looked into her eyes, a satisfied smirk curving his lips as he enjoyed her terror at the prospect. This... thing... this... inevitability she'd thought she could put off was happening tonight. And though she definitely didn't want to lose her virginity right now to Dmitri, she didn't want to ever be alone with Aleksei under any circumstances. There was something in him that was deeply not right—far beyond the criminality of this enterprise he was engaged in.
She thought of Gabe suddenly, and she didn't know how she knew, but she knew there was something about Aleksei that was like that thing she'd seen inside Gabe, the thing that had scared her. Except she was sure Aleksei was far worse. Given the choice between them, she knew she would have run to Gabe. No question.
Dmitri said something sharp in Russian which was probably a repetition of the order to leave because Aleksei gave him a dirty look and then sauntered out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
A couple of moments later a bang of gunfire sounded out in the hallway, and Julie heard the sound of a body dropping onto the ground outside the door. She released a startled scream and then rushed to cover her mouth, trying her hardest to be quiet. Her gaze slid to Dmitri on the edge of the bed. He hadn't moved the slightest inch. He wasn't ruffled or disturbed or surprised. Instead, he smiled mildly in her direction.
