Sarah and the seven women ate and slept in the back of the cart. They were allowed out twice a day for bathroom breaks but everyone stayed tied. Sarah’s wrists had rubbed raw, bled, scabbed over, and rubbed raw again dozens of times over. Their captors were in a hurry. That was clear. They took turns sleeping in the front of the cart so that they didn’t need to make camp at night.
In the two days as they trudged eastward across England—through rains and evil winds, drizzles and even a spitting snowfall—they never saw another living person.
The other women in the cart were as close to zombies as still-living people could be, Sarah thought. Like her, most if not all of them had seen loved ones murdered before they were abducted. Two of the women had been raped. All of them sat in the cart, compliant, and numb with fear. They didn’t engage Sarah or each other. A couple, mother and daughter it looked like, clung to each other. The rest behaved according to what they all knew to be true without a doubt—they were on their own.
Midday on the sixth day, Sarah knew they were close to the end. Usually after lunch Angie stopped the cart and let the women out for a moment. Today, she jumped down from the driver’s bench and, with Jeff’s help, secured the tarp closed over the opening in the back, blotting out the light. Sarah tried to catch her eye to get some hint of what was happening but Angie was all business. The other women began to move restlessly in back. They, too, knew that something was coming. Whatever horrors they had been keeping back in the darkest recesses of their minds were about to come rushing and screaming to the foreground.
Sarah peeled a corner of the tarp away from the side of the cart and got down on her hands and knees to peer out. For an hour or more, all she saw was sky. Just about the time that the women were starting to relax again, the cart picked up speed and they began to talk in excited, panicked tones. Sarah could see buildings now, and other people on horseback moving alongside the cart. She could hear, too. It wasn’t the sounds of normal traffic pre-Crisis, but it was the unmistakable hum of a town in full activity. She heard voices calling, laughing, a horse’s scream and the constant clop-clop of more horse-drawn carts on the road with them.
“Be quiet!” she whispered to the women and they silenced immediately. It was dark under the canvas, and rank with the smell of unwashed bodies and stark fear. She could see the whites of the eyes of the woman who sat closest to her. They all stared at her as if waiting for her orders.
Well, I imagine you’ll be told what to do soon enough, Sarah thought. I guess we all will.
When the cart stopped suddenly, Sarah was still bent over to look through her gap in the canvas and fell forward toward the opening. She scrambled back but the women had surged forward and filled her spot. She felt a knee in the small of her back and her breath pushed out of her. Suddenly, the canvas tarp whipped back and the sweet breath of afternoon air came rushing into the foul-smelling cart. Sarah stayed on her hands and knees, trying to steady herself while the women receded like a noxious tide of noise and odor.
“Shirrup!” Angie’s voice was hard and shrill. As Sarah looked up and blinked into the light, she saw Angie and Jeff standing at the end of the cart. He unhooked the back panel and held out his arms to her. She hesitated.
“This is where you get off, petal,” Angie said. “Hurry up, we have a few more stops today. Move your arse.”
Sarah crawled to the edge of the wagon and felt Jeff’s hands capture her under her arms and drag her off the end of the cart. She fell to the ground and the pavement slammed into her face, cutting her lip open on her tooth.
“Who else, Ange?” Jeff asked, nudging Sarah with his steel-toed boot to make her move out of his way.
“That one,” Angie said. “The old one and the kid, too.”
“Aw, Ange, you’re no fun,” Jeff said. “I was looking forward to having a go at the tyke.”
“And that one there with the big nose.”
“But she’s got tits! No one cares about a big nose with those tits!”
“Let’s go, ladies,” Angie said. “You, you and you, out! Right now. I don’t want to have to send my friend in to get you.”
Sarah staggered to her feet and looked around as the two women and the teenager scrambled out of the back of the wagon. The cart had stopped in front of the entrance to a long dirt driveway. Behind her was the town they’d just ridden through. She craned her neck to see past Jeff. Down the driveway was a long series of shacks and huts strung together by ramshackle walkways. It looked like it had once been a factory of some kind. The windows were broken out, but Sarah could see smoke pouring out of the chimneys at each of the joined buildings.
A deserted workhouse in the middle of nowhere.
Only it wasn’t deserted.
Jeff turned and grabbed Sarah’s bound hands and looped a long rope through her bonds, attaching her to the two other women and the child. She could see the other women in the cart looking even more terrified than before they stopped. The end of the line for Sarah and the other two women seemed, clearly, to be some kind of factory. Even from this distance, Sarah could see women coming out of the door with buckets of water and going back in.
Whatever they were making in there, she thought, at least they didn’t seem to be turning people into soap.
At least she didn’t think they were.
Jeff brought her rudely back to the present with a rough jerk on the rope that ripped into her raw and bloodied wrists. She bit back a cry of pain. He saluted Angie from where she sat at the front of the cart and began to walk down the driveway, leading the women.
Sarah turned to see Angie watching her as she was led down the front drive. Their eyes met. Angie didn’t smile. Her eyes looked hunted and sick.
* * *
The smell of the place was beyond what her senses had ever experienced before.
Sarah entered behind the other women through the large double doors. As soon as she stepped foot inside, the illusion of a factory vanished and was replaced by the image of a fifteen century insane asylum. With only what natural light there was from the overhead windows—a bank of ten windows, each easily twenty feet high—vision was handicapped to distinguishing human form from animal.
Sarah stopped abruptly as the young girl ahead of her bent over and threw up the meager lunch she’d had an hour earlier. Before Sarah could think to sidestep the puddle of sick, she was assailed with the most intensely evil odor she had ever endured. Her hands flew involuntarily to her mouth in attempt to physically stop entry of the terrible stench into her nose or mouth. It was the smell of hell itself. A simmering pestilence of sewage and excrement, festering sores and foul air that was thick against Sarah’s lips and nose. She gagged and drew in a long, shallow breath through her mouth.
Her eyes watered in the fumes and she blinked to clear her vision. Jeff was still pulling them further into the interior of the hellhole. She could see now that he had a scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face. As she stumbled forward, the floor of the place slick underfoot, she saw the people. Hundreds of them lined the main corridor where Sarah and the other women were being led. On either side people were standing or kneeling, pleading with them, their arms upraised, their hands clasped in prayer. Many were naked, but those that weren’t were dressed in filthy rags.
They looked like they were starving. They looked like photos Sarah remembered seeing of concentration camp victims before the Allies rescued them.
The noise of the place was unholy, matched only by the relentless stench. A roar of machinery laced the people’s pleas like an undercurrent of percussion. Behind the line of begging wretches, Sarah could see bodies lying in various stages of decomposition. Beyond that were the long snaking lines of the factory workers standing at their stations, their backs to the door.
Up ahead, Jeff was talking with a stooped over, one-armed elderly man. The old man nodded continually as Jeff talked, never once looking him in the eye. Finally, Jeff thrust the end of the rope into the man’s hand and walked back
out the way he had come. As Sarah watched him, she found herself memorizing his walk, his eyes above the scarf.
If hope of seeing John again was what kept her alive, imagining this man’s eventual just deserts was what kept her sane.
He passed her without a glance in his hurry to exit the reeking bedlam.
Sarah turned to look at the people who still stood in the aisle, entreating her with muted cries of anguish. A young man, totally nude, screamed in frustration and Sarah thought she saw that his tongue had been cut out. She looked away in horror and gripped the rope in front of her as if it were a lifeline and not the very thing pulling her deeper and deeper into the furor and chaos. She forced herself not to look at the tragic souls with their arms outstretched to her. How can they possibly think I am in any position to help them?
But she knew. They were once like her. Strong, well fed. Clothed. Alert. They had once walked through those double doors.
A sharp jerk on her hands jolted her attention to what was happening in front of her. The old man who had been given their rope was in the process of untying them. Up close, Sarah could see he wasn’t really that old at all. But he was stooped and one-armed, and she bet he didn’t come into this place that way.
When he roughly disengaged her bonds, Sarah cried out in pain. Her wrists were badly abraded. She felt she had left a thin layer of skin on the ropes he whipped from her hands. He dropped the rope on the ground and motioned for her and the other three to follow him. Sarah noticed the young girl had her arms wrapped around the waist of the woman who was probably her mother. Sarah didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry for that.
The other woman, whose large nose had saved her from whatever had been behind Door Number Two, rubbed her wrists and kept her eyes on the back of their new jailor. She had been one of the new ones, Sarah thought. Her nightmare was only two days old.
They followed the man through the corridor of naked, weeping humanity into the very heart of the noise and confusion of the factory, for that was clearly what it was. The closer they came to the backs of the standing workers, Sarah could see bits of feathers floating in the air. As they came up to the workers, the feathers formed a virtual explosion of fleece and eiderdown that hung in the air like mushroom clouds of fluff.
As they hurried past the workers, Sarah could see that the women—there were very few men, and they all old—were killing, plucking and gutting chickens. The noise was at such a tumultuous peak that it was obvious the cacophony came from the terrified birds—most of them shitting themselves in their violent panic—and the sounds of the hand cranked machinery that smashed the carcasses to dust.
If ever there was a hell on earth…Sarah thought as she watched the glazed, robotic looks on the chicken workers.
The man stopped at one spot on the factory line and grabbed the girl from her mother. He shoved her into line and held up a finger to make her look at him. She tore her eyes from her mother and watched him as if hypnotized. He grabbed a live chicken from the crate to the left of the girl, wrung its neck and placed its still flopping body in her hands. He pointed to the basket of chicken feathers. In the clangor of the factory, it was impossible to hear conversation of any kind.
And then the girl, who up until a year ago probably had only used her hands to text her BFF or get a fill-in on her gel nail set, grabbed the spasmodic chicken and began frenetically yanking its feathers out. Sarah saw the man nod with satisfaction and then turn to look at the girl’s mother. He indicated with a jerk of his head that she was to stay with the girl. Sarah watched the mother’s face twist into tears of relief as she jumped up to the place to the left of her daughter and grabbed a live chicken.
The man continued walking until another gap in the line revealed itself and he repeated his tutelage with the big-nosed woman. A few steps later, he indicated a spot in the line and Sarah stepped up. He stood next to her and waited while a young girl handed the woman to her right a newly killed, largely plucked chicken.
Sarah watched the woman cut the chicken down its breast with a sharp knife and then pull the ribs apart before handing it to the man. He reached into the body cavity and pulled out a handful of warm, bloody offal. Sarah saw him quickly toss gizzards, heart and liver into a bucket in front of her, and the remaining viscera onto the floor. The woman directly to Sarah’s right waited for the gutted chicken with a small hatchet in her hands. The man handed her the chicken and Sarah watched her detach the bird’s feet and head in two whacks.
He stepped back and motioned for Sarah to take his place. The woman to her left handed her a newly cut chicken and the woman to her right tapped her hatchet with impatience.
Sarah stood and gutted chickens for the next five hours. At one point she tried to communicate with the women around her to ask where the facilities were that she might relieve herself. The man quickly appeared, but before she could speak he brandished a short stubbed whip and brought it whistling down across her shoulders. Stunned, Sarah whirled on him without thinking. He backed away from her, then grabbed the young girl in line and, in front of Sarah, beat her back and buttocks with his whip, his eyes on Sarah throughout.
She quickly took her place back in line and didn’t look up again until a loud bell clanged and all the workers stepped down from their places in line. She followed the women she had worked next to all afternoon to her bed for the night.
Too exhausted to think of eating and too nauseated to keep it down anyway, Sarah fell on the thin covering on the floor that was her pallet. The women’s dormitory was a smaller room off the main work floor, but the smell was no less foul. Sarah lay on the pallet, grateful to be off her feet. Her legs twitched and aching pain clawed up to her thighs.
How in the world would she last another day? Except for the high windows in the main killing floor, she had seen no other way out of the factory except the double front doors. A few women were allowed to go out to fetch the buckets of water they were constantly throwing down on the floor to wash away the blood and the sticky offal, but otherwise no one left or entered the building.
The light had plunged the factory into darkness except for one lantern in the dormitory. Sarah could smell food being cooked but she was too tired to lift her head to see who was doing it or if they were sharing. For the first time since she came to the factory, she heard voices and conversation around her. Soft, murmuring voices and even a chuckle filtered through her subconscious, although Sarah wasn’t sure she hadn’t fallen asleep and dreamed that.
Was it the middle of the night? Was she awake? Her fingers and feet vibrated with exhaustion and the exertion of being held taut all day. When she closed her eyes, she realized she had been breathing out of her nose for hours and hadn’t realized it. The smell no longer seemed that bad.
She was so tired she didn’t realize a hand was pressing on her shoulder until she felt it through her blouse and the thin rag that served as a blanket. She jerked around to face the woman who had stood next to her all day chopping off chicken heads and feet. For a moment, Sarah wasn’t sure she wasn’t dreaming her, too.
“You’re thirsty, luv,” the woman said, holding out a plastic cup to Sarah.
Sarah sat up and reached for the water, not caring if it were radioactive or laced with cyanide. She drank it down and groaned with the relief of quenching a thirst she hadn’t even registered that she had. “Thank you,” she whispered, the memory of the poor girl’s beating coming quickly to mind.
“We can talk a bit in here,” the woman said as she took the cup back. Sarah guessed her age to be close to her own. She had kind eyes, but her hair had been cropped short, as if she had been sick.
“How long have you been here?” Sarah was grateful for the kindness and she tried to smile, praying it didn’t look like something manic and unnatural.
“Not long. Just long enough to know the ropes.”
“How did you come to be here? Does your family know?”
“My family is gone.” The woman looked away and then back a
t Sarah. “It’s just me now.”
“Did they come to your village and take you?”
“You sound different. Where are you from?”
“I’m American. My name’s Sarah.”
“I’m Desdemona. People call me Dez. Where did they find you?”
“I was living in Ireland. They…they killed my husband to take me.” It didn’t feel any more real to say the words, but the pain at hearing them was just as bad.
“I’m sorry about that. We’d heard a rumor that they was going further afield for the recruits. Ireland, huh?”
Sarah shook her head. “Recruits for their poultry processing factory? They’ve kidnapped me for this?”
“That’s not how it works.”
“How what works? And those people by the door…the ones that look like they’re about to keel over? Who are they?”
“They were us, six months ago.” Dez’s mouth hardened when she spoke. “But it won’t be me. It damn sure won’t be me, I can tell you.”
“Is there no escape? I thought there were laws in England even after the, you know, the bomb.”
“We have laws,” Dez said with disgust. “But the people in charge are paid to look the other way.”
“Don’t you have a village? People to look out for you?” Sarah thought of Mike’s community. Everyone from very different walks of life had come together to forge a new kind of clan that watched everyone else’s back. If it weren’t for her and David’s stubbornness, she would probably be safe within their compound right this minute.
“I was a paralegal in Kent. I had a boyfriend, who I haven’t seen since The Crisis, may God rest his soul. He was a fool so I’m sure he’s dead. I stayed in my apartment for a while until the looting and the gangs drove me out, then I was living in the street. It wasn’t like that where you’re from?”
Sarah shook her head. “No, we…there’s a community run by this head guy and it’s all good and we…they look out for each other.”
“Well, that’s nice, I’m sure. There wasn’t anything like that where I was. When Correy’s goons found me, I was ready to be found.”
Going Gone, Book 2 of the Irish End Games Page 7
