Swallow it Down

by Addison Cain

  Ice trickled down her spine. “Oh my God.”

  Softly, he pulled at a springy curl, observing the light and the fire. “But you’ve seen that, haven’t you?”

  Over and over and over. Been caught a time or two, or three, or four. Whether in a cage or outside it, she’d seen the remains of women who hadn’t been so lucky.

  Taking her hair from his fingers, tucking it behind her ear, Eugenia made a mental note to avoid farms. Which put a bit of a damper on her original strategy. Farm labor seemed like decent work, and a time or two she had found families working the land on their own. Living on their term and not friendly with strangers.

  Bereft of her hair, the captain swept up her fingers as a replacement, weaving them with his own. “Shall we get dressed?”

  Her attention left their entwined grip, landing on hazel eyes in an unfairly handsome face. “I’m not going down to Level 9. Sure, you can drag me. But you’ll have to break at least one of my bones to get me there. You’re not locking me in whether it’s just for the day or for forever. You’re not breeding me for tickets. I want to hear the wild dogs, even if they send me running from a bed of sticks and mud. I want to watch the trees rot. I will find a good place.”

  “I see.”

  But she wasn’t done. “Give me back to Level 15. Put me on the rotating schedule. I give you my word I will do my best to satisfy—even face-to-face—the few times a year I’m called to service you. I’ll lie to the rest of the women and tell them...”

  “What will you tell them?” Spoken with the cold death of emotion.

  “I’ll tell them that you fucked me too hard from behind. That I slept on the couch. That I blew you and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get you to look at me.”

  “And just what are you going to do on Level 15?”

  The words came fast, betraying her shaky foundation. “Earn tickets. I know what you’re going to say. Brooke… she ran into trouble. But I’m smarter than she is. I always get out.”

  He didn’t flinch, once again a stone wall of a man as he rose from the bed. “Then let me get you your map.”

  Going to his closet, retrieving a clean pair of jeans, he pulled them on, unsmiling, as he watched her sit up in a pool of white sheets.

  On went a shirt, a nondescript button-down.

  Walking with purpose, he opened his door and closed it in an unhurried manner. The lock set in place with a resounding click.

  Ten minutes later, a stranger who bore a terrifying resemblance to Brooke was led through the door. Cowering into herself. Dressed in a hospital gown.

  A terrified, clinging stranger.

  Gathering back long hair, the captain exposed the familiar face the girl tried to hide.

  A face that had been mutilated—cuts left to close without proper suturing. Angry, infected, ghastly patterns.

  Brooke hardly blinked.

  His voice soft, the captain said, “Here’s your map, Eugenia. Your advice to travel south toward Fresh Water. You gave her directions straight into the worst hive of violence in five hundred miles. Fresh Water is gangland. You did this to her, and if you leave, this is what will happen to you.”

  The verbal knife slipped through her ribs, straight for the heart. In horror, Eugenia drank in a friend. A woman holding on to the captain as if he might keep her safe. As if this was the good place.

  Eugenia had enough medical training to understand the damage on display was never going to heal properly without repeated reconstructive surgeries. And surgery was not an option. She’d never gone that far in her medical training. “You let me give her the map.”

  Nodding, he tore out her heart. “The savages mutilated her genitalia. Her clitoris and labia were removed—the wounds seared shut the same night they began to rape her for sport.”

  Very little was more hideous than the concept of female circumcision. It was a forever rape—the total loss of ability to enjoy sex without a great deal of effort and proper mental stimulation. “I didn’t know.”

  “Yes, you did.” Letting Brooke’s beautiful hair fall back to cover her face, the captain added, “You knew, because you have been out there for six years. You’ve seen this before.”

  Her reply was small, her chin quivering. “Yes.”

  “And you told all the women on Level 15 that there was a world out there worth living in. Fed them your talk of freedom.”

  “There has to be.” There just had to be! This couldn’t be it. Locked away and used to make babies. What of her mind? What of her ambition? “Somewhere has to be the way it was!”

  “The world is nothing but savagery and violence.” He almost seemed to pity her. “There is no life for you off this ship, Eugenia.”

  That was the last straw. His ploy, his manipulation of history, laying all the blame at her feet was wrong. “You whored her for tickets and let her walk off this ship, knowing what was south!”

  “You gave her the map. You filled her head with possibility.” Blunt patience and pity became anger. “And don’t think I didn’t try to stop her. Brooke had been given the option to transition straight to Level 9. But she had your map, and your misguided bullshit to see her to freedom. And look at her now.”

  No, Eugenia couldn't bear to look anymore.

  “LOOK AT HER, EUGENIA!”

  Startled by the soft-spoken man’s yell, Brooke began to pee in submission like a spooked dog. And it didn’t stop—the damaged girl’s urine kept hitting the carpet.

  In horror, Eugenia found she lacked the bravery to move from the safety of the captain’s bed to help her. “Brooke?”

  “Can I go home now?” The whisper for the captain, not for her.

  “Yes, lamb.” Pressing a kiss to the top of Brooke’s bent head, his whole demeanor shifted to gentle. “Of course you can go home. I’ll take you right back.”

  Guiding the shuffling female from the room, the captain didn’t so much as look over his shoulder at the stricken redhead sobbing into her hands.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tears running down her cheeks, Eugenia pulled on her only dress.

  Using the fine towels from the captain’s bathroom, she blotted up the mess of urine. Urine that smelled of an unwell person.

  Do no harm. The first rule in medicine.

  Yet she had harmed Brooke. The advice had been well-meant. Eugenia had only suggested the exact same course she intended to follow once she made an escape: follow the map to Fresh Water.

  Where John would have sold her to a far more hideous fate than serving drunken, horny men.

  Over the years, all the credit she’d given herself for being smarter than everyone else. All the abuses she’d eluded.

  Sheer. Dumb. Luck.

  Spirited, determined Brooke was broken… Eugenia would have been broken too.

  Was breaking.

  A fissure ran through her spirit; it had been eating at her for years. Growing wider with each encounter, deepening with each escape. An aching throb of emptiness and loneliness that was only held together by tattered bits of hope.

  And lies.

  All the lies she told to herself so she might stumble through another day.

  There was no good place. There was only survival or death.

  There were only men who pushed too hard and stole pieces off the gameboard. Who broke the rules and twisted the sport. Men who were willing to subject dead women in living bodies to the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth they didn’t want.

  As if humanity deserved a fresh start. As if the transgression would disappear with a smiling new generation raised by mothers locked on Level 9. Children devoid of fathers like Neil who only wanted to hold their offspring.

  Neil who Eugenia knew had fathered at least one of the babies on the ship. He wouldn’t have grieved the loss of holding a baby so much if he hadn’t.

  She hadn’t known him well, but he’d seemed like a good man. Yet outside the ship, good men changed. They mutilated the genitals of women for reasons Eugenia couldn’t e
ven begin to grasp.

  Even the captain’s leashed men slipped. He’d had to put them down, he’d said.

  The lock clicked, the door opening… Eugenia still cleaning up pee, grieving a million different things at once.

  Brooke’s mutilated mouth, her glassy-eyed stare… the reason her friend walked with so pronounced a limp. The unbearable guilt for thinking she’d find salvation in saving Brooke.

  For knowing that as much as she hated it here, it was better than anything she’d ever found out there. “I’ll never love you. If you got me pregnant, I’ll find a way to not be anymore.”

  Eugenia was poison.

  Living in such close quarters, she had gotten to know the women on Level 15—the ship the closest thing she had to family in six years. And she couldn’t bear it. She could not bear knowing she’d fed into their desire for freedom they’d never have.

  She knew the men. She’d laughed with them, mocked them, yelled at them, belittled them for her own amusement.

  She’d grown dependent on Aaron for mental stimulation and a sense of normality. She’d had sex with him and given over to the act. Enjoyed it even after she grasped how he’d tricked her.

  Aaron who had no pity left. “Fine. Take off your dress. Get up on the bed. All fours. Don’t look at me.”

  His disappointments weighed down upon her back, as if he’d been saving it all up for that moment. The pain of it felt… familiar, because this new world hurt.

  Or maybe at heart she was a masochist. Either way, Eugenia deserved what was coming. Which was why she was already lifting the two-day-old blue dress over her head. Which was why she went to the bed as if stumbling through a dream and assumed the position every Level 15 girl knew by heart.

  Already up behind her, voice devoid of feeling, the captain ordered, “Spit on your hand. Rub it between your legs.”

  Shifting to balance her weight so she might look at her palm, so she might try to make her dry mouth produce saliva, she obeyed. She smeared her opening.

  Not that it mattered.

  He was in—a solid thrust that lurched her body forward and snapped her teeth together.

  Tangling his fist in her hair as if she might disobey and turn her head, he fucked her. Too hard. Too fast.

  And it was awful.

  But she bore it: his size, his coldness, the sting on her scalp.

  How there were no comforting caresses or any type of intimacy.

  And on it went, rocking her breasts forward, leaving her wrists aching so she might hold position in the onslaught.

  He didn’t come.

  Releasing her hair, he took her hips. Pounded faster.

  And when she couldn’t take another moment of the captain punishing himself for the sins they shared, she braved a glance over her shoulder.

  And found a man in abject misery.

  A man who loathed every moment of friction on his cock.

  Who’d screwed his eyes shut and thrown back his head as if concentration might make it end sooner.

  “Aaron, stop.” Softly said, full of pain for the both of them.

  The mechanical pistoning of his hips slowed, those hazel eyes opening to the world he’d created—eyes bloodshot and aged by the hollow, terrible fissure just like hers that ate him from the inside out.

  “Didn’t I tell you to keep your head forward?”

  She said it again, barely a whisper. “Stop.”

  His dick was half hard when he pulled out, when he marched naked to where she’d left her dress on the floor next to a pile of towels covered in human piss.

  Picking it up, he threw it at her. “Sleep on the couch.”

  There were so many things she could have said.

  I don’t understand what’s happening between us.

  A lie. She knew exactly what happened. He’d offered her the best world he might create, cobbling it together despite ugly circumstances and personal loss. And she’d rejected it.

  Where is the man who wooed me last night?

  Gone, literally, barely having pulled up his jeans before he slammed the door.

  Please don’t make me sleep on the couch. I can’t be like them.

  Who would stop her from sleeping on the bed? No one. Because she was alone in the nicest suite on the ship.

  But she lay on the couch anyway, naked, her dirty dress her blanket.

  And Aaron didn’t come home.

  She knew, because there was no sleep. There was only watching the dark turn to light. There was a morning with no breakfast. An afternoon with only water from the tap to fill her belly.

  And then an intrusion.

  Thrilled, Joan barged in. “I don’t know what you did, but it worked! He spent the night and all day in Jessica’s room. Everyone’s talking about it.”

  Eugenia would not throw up. She would not. “Then I’ve fulfilled my side of the bargain.”

  Scoffing, Joan waved a hand. “I mean, it was only one night…”

  Parroting the posture, the gesture, and the tone, Eugenia found solace in hate. “And I mean, it’s only one artery I need to cut.”

  “Young lady.” As if that phrase might work…

  “Old hag.”

  Plucking an innocuous plastic keycard from her pocket, Joan dropped it on the floor. “This will open any door on the ship.”

  It looked so bland, so anticlimactic as freedom lay discarded at her feet. “I’ll need water. Supplies.”

  “I never said I’d give you that. You’ll die out there either way. Die sooner and save yourself the trouble of suffering.”

  God, the woman really had a mean streak. One Eugenia felt was both enviable and a lash she deserved. “Like Brooke?”

  Waving off the sting, Joan said, “The new girl is named Chrissy. She has red hair too. He always was one for a redhead. I’ll change the schedule so she entertains him tonight. Go while he’s distracted.”

  Blue dress held to her chest, Eugenia came forward to swipe the keycard off the floor. “Won’t he know you gave it to me?”

  “The door wasn’t locked when I came in. Far as he knows, you snuck out during the night and threw yourself overboard.”

  Fair enough. “Which way do I go to get off the boat?”

  That, Joan did assist her with, the verbal map set to memory, Eugenia pulling on a dress badly in need of a wash and setting off—in the opposite direction.

  Joan was a liar. If she lied to her beloved captain, she was lying to Eugenia too.

  But the key card did work, and as the sun set, level by level, on a massive ship designed to hold thousands, only three hundred men roamed. Men who were easily avoided as she wandered through what might be the home of a new civilization.

  Cruise ships were generally tacky, draped in color and experience. While wandering, she found a dark casino, banquet halls with crystal chandeliers, guest rooms yet to be pillaged for supplies. Whatever she might find was stuffed into a pillowcase: pre-bombs cola bottles. Crackers wrapped in plastic way past their expiration date. Bags of nutritious nuts.

  A proper pack lacking the familiar weight of written knowledge.

  Nelson’s Textbook of Pediatrics, Volumes I and II… she’d forgotten them on Aaron’s bedside table.

  Let the ship keep valuable knowledge. Let the doctors here learn from it.

  Maybe the kids would benefit.

  For heaven knew, she didn’t deserve them.

  Brooke’s face and genitals were a testimony to that. The captain’s broken heart payment enough.

  Long past dark, a crisp breeze cut through her dress. Level 4—economy class rooms that were full of dust and smelled in need of an airing and boasted balconies. Standing in the wind, she heard the distant sounds of the Level 15 festivities, imagined she might even hear a search party, and dropped the small cabin’s in-room refrigerator into the water below. Once the surface tension had been upset and chance of a severe impact injury massively decreased, she threw herself over. Simple physics. Landing feet first with not a single brok
en bone.

  Pack dragging her down, the room’s sofa floatation cushions strapped to her body buoying her up, the current had its way with her.

  And for once, she didn’t fight back.

  Winter? Or was it spring? It didn’t matter. Either way, she floated for hours, lips blue before she felt sediment under foot.

  It was then she realized she had no shoes.

  Dogs howled.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dress flaking with dried mud, Eugenia walked through dead woods. Meandering in no particular direction.

  When she’d been closer to the ship, pockets of hidden farmland could be seen from the tree line. Acreage she would have once ran toward as a haven was now avoided at all costs.

  Roads were circumvented on her lackadaisical journey to nowhere, leaving no staged corpses for her to loot. Which meant Eugenia’s drinks had been exhausted, her snacks had been snacked upon. Weaponless, shoeless, and wild, she’d beaten the duck she ate for dinner to death with a rock.

  Pre-bombs, duck confit had been one of her favorite dishes. As had duck breast sliced thin and served deliciously raw. Which was how she ate it off the bone.

  Fire was not an option.

  It might be seen.

  And though that time of year in the south was chilly, it was nothing like the snows in Boston. The very ones that had driven her south to begin with.

  Not that she wasn’t cold.

  Uncured skins from freshly killed vermin kept some feeling in her fingers and toes. Poorly tied together with little strips she’d carved through with sharp rocks, they covered her well enough. And stank.

  That first week, the howls didn’t wake her up like they should. Eugenia was too busy dreaming of hazel eyes, flashes of anger, the feel of a man’s hands on her body. How he tasted.

  Every woman on Level 15 knew how he tasted. He knew how they tasted. And she could only guess how many of them he’d been with since she cut and ran.

  That was the price of her freedom, after all. Not that she ever imagined she’d earn it so quickly, or so unintentionally.

  It was surprising how boring the days were when all she did was hunt and walk. Too much time spent remembering and too little spent thinking.