The Line Book One: Carrier

by Anne Tibbets

  She’d tried to teach my little sister from those same cards, but she was too young and wanted only to eat them. I hadn’t thought about my baby sister in ages and the memory of her round face made me smile. Her name was Alair.

  Would she remember me too?

  The monitor in front of me flashed and caught my attention again. I could just make out the words bed, single and rate. But there were a few longer words that took a while to sound out disclaimer, responsible, injury.

  I think it meant that if I got shanked while staying there, Auberge wasn’t responsible.

  At least, I thought that was what it meant. It made me wish I’d paid better attention to Mame while I’d had the chance.

  One day, after a few months, Mame’s reading lessons had stopped. Soon, I had no more free time, and neither did she. The Line had eliminated our break period and scheduled us with back-to-back appointments. My time to practice reading had ended, and my “productivity” was increased by twenty-five percent.

  Still, the reading lessons were a blessing. If I hadn’t learned, I would have been truly lost.

  I didn’t know what happened to Mame. One day she was just gone. None of the guards would tell me where she went. Maybe she’d been retired and was in Central someplace, and I could stay with her, but I didn’t know where, or how, to look for her.

  The monitor in the boarding house showed there was a single bed open in the women’s quarters for one-twenty a day. I had no idea if that was expensive or not. I’d heard an appointment complain how he’d paid two hundred credits for me and I’d better make good on his investment. Surely a bed to sleep in was worth about that.

  I pressed my palm on the scanner and touched the monitor, selecting a single bed. A room card dropped down from an iron pipe in the ceiling and into a basin beside the monitor. I picked up the card that had a number two printed on one side and shuffled up the stairs.

  At the top was a row of closed doors. I found room two, slipped the card through the slot outside the door and it buzzed me in. The room was dingy white and smelled of dust. It held six twin-sized beds, each with a single pillow, a thin lumpy mattress, a grey sheet that at one point had probably been white, and a holey blue blanket. All the beds were empty. Some looked as if they’d been slept in. Some seemed as if they hadn’t been touched in years.

  Down the hall I found a communal bathroom, complete with showers and sinks and ugly brown tile covering every surface, from floor, walls, to the ceiling. No mirrors, though. But truthfully, I was glad of that. I was afraid to think how I looked.

  First things first: I showered off the trash and scrubbed my scabbed palms with the hottest water I could get from the old, noisy pipes, using a rough perfume-free soap that hung from a rope around the nozzle. There were some damp, scratchy towels to dry off with, sort of, and a washrag I used to clean up my clothes and shoes the best I could. Then I dropped the towels into the collection bin and got dressed again in my grimy clothes.

  Back in the room with the beds, I slipped my shoes under my pillow, half afraid they would disappear if I didn’t keep them close.

  My limbs felt limp and my head ached to lie down, so I inched toward the bed. Even as sorry as it was, it was irresistible. Damp baggy pants and stained, stinking shirt and all, I slid into the bed. My plans would have to wait until tomorrow. For now, I needed the rest. It was the first free sleep I’d had in seventeen years.

  * * *

  Several hours later I awoke to the sound of shouting. Two women were in the midst of a heated discussion.

  “Look, all I said, bitch, was that I don’t appreciate it. If you find that so fuckin’ offensive, that’s your problem. Personally, I think I’m the one who should be pissed off. You followed me to the factory and stole’d my job.”

  I rolled over to see. The room was full of bodies. The added flesh gave the air a thick and sweaty feel. Sitting on the bunks were women of all shapes and sizes, half a dozen of them. Most wore dirty clothes. Some were missing teeth. On one bed by the door was a little girl who couldn’t have been more than ten years old. Her legs were tucked underneath her and she rocked back and forth, her eyes wide.

  The yelling woman was in her late thirties. She wore worn-out jeans, a baggy T-shirt and a sweatshirt. Her blond hair was chopped to hell in all sorts of strange angles, as if she’d given herself a haircut in the dark with a razor blade.

  “Hey! It’s not my fault they picked me instead of you!” The other woman rolled her eyes. Her brown hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. She seemed to be older than the first woman. Maybe late fifties. She wore a long tattered skirt and a loose shirt, plus flat shoes without laces. She was clean but rail thin and had a starved look about her.

  The two yellers stared each other down in the aisle, looking ready to pounce.

  “You didn’t even know they was hiring!” the blonde woman barked. “You just followed me and swooped in and stole’d food right outta my mouth!”

  “Like hell!”

  “You gonna pay for my dinner now? Because since I didn’t work today, I don’t have any credits to buy food. That’s why I don’t appreciate your smart-ass comments, a’right?”

  “I ain’t paying for nothing!” The pony-tailed woman went back to her bunk and sat down.

  “Well, the way I see it, you owe me for showing you where the work was. So, pay up.” The blonde woman followed her.

  “Every person in town knows the recycle factory takes day workers.” The older woman snorted. She pointed her finger at the blonde woman’s chest for emphasis. “I didn’t steal no job from you. I’m not paying you nothing.”

  “We’ll see ’bout that...”

  The blonde grabbed the brunette by her ponytail and they flopped to the floor, wrestling. A few other women and the girl scattered from their beds to the walls to get out of the way.

  “Get her, Shirel!” one shouted.

  “Come on, will ya?” Another rolled her eyes.

  The girl burst into tears.

  This was more trouble than I needed.

  Once I had on my shoes, I slid out of bed and went to the door. Just as I was about through the threshold, a hand grabbed my elbow. It was the little girl. She looked up at me with a pair of colossal blue eyes just like Peni’s. But unlike Peni’s pale pigtails, this girl’s brown tresses were matted to her head with grease.

  “You got any credits you can spare?” she asked, innocent and pure.

  I shook my head and gently pulled my arm away. “Sorry, kid.”

  “Shit.” The girl let me go.

  I left, disgusted.

  That would be the last time I took suggestions from a taxi driver.

  Chapter Three

  Outside, it was night. Apparently, I’d slept in the boarding house all day. Or maybe two.

  The streets were smelly, dark and still. Not a sound. Nothing. Not even a cricket. The sky was black, as was the ground below it.

  Pitch.

  Pitch black trash.

  I was sorry I’d returned my room card now. Maybe I could have lingered in the lobby until morning to escape the stench, but there had been a pair of young guys there, and I wasn’t sure what kind of trouble I would get into if I stayed.

  Best to keep moving.

  Curfew was in effect, and the streetlights were out. No one was permitted outside past eleven at night. It was meant to keep order, and I supposed it did. But I was ravenous and didn’t want to stay among the hostile women in the boarding house. I kept to the shadows, watching for security cruisers, but didn’t see any. Four blocks down 17th Street and a few trips over a couple of curbs later, I saw light.

  Red light.

  I hoped it was a restaurant, because I was so hungry I felt queasy.

  The red light grew brighter and larger as I drew nearer. Faint music ema
nated from the glow. With no other apparent options, I went straight for it, a moth to the flame.

  As I approached, the music filled my ears. Soft old-fashioned blues music hummed through the walls. Slow and steady. Rhythmic and smooth. A trumpet and a drum set. A woman’s voice breached the blackness.

  “Blue is you.

  Your sadness as bright as the moon.

  Howl loud and true as only you do.

  I hear you in my dreams.”

  The doorway to the music glowed red around the edges. I pulled it open. A beacon of red light and wave of smoke nearly knocked me off my feet.

  Cigarettes.

  The smell shocked me. It had been ages since I’d been around it, but I remembered it well. My mother had smoked. Cigarettes were illegal under Auberge law, but my mother used to make her own from a plant she kept on the balcony. I could still see her licking the papers and twisting the ends, humming to herself.

  The smoke from the restaurant sliced through my nose, and I felt a rush of memories.

  Mama. It felt like one hundred years ago. A warm, soft, pillowy hug—that was the first recollection to breach my clouded memory. She had long black hair, like mine, only with slight curls at the tips instead of stick straight. Her laugh. I used to love it. It sounded like sunshine.

  I’d make funny faces and pretend to fall down, and she’d call me her little monkey and laugh so hard she cried. She’d tip her head back and raise one knee when she really got going. A trail of smoke drizzled from the tip of her cigarette as she’d wipe away her tears of laughter and pick tobacco off her tongue.

  It was the most vivid memory I had of her. I stood in the doorway for a while, feeling her, even though she wasn’t there, wishing I could ask her a million questions. About being a mother. About life. About me.

  Finally, a dark-skinned man came over. The red light made his teeth and the whites of his eyes look pink. “You got any credits?” he barked.

  Reality.

  I nodded.

  “Want something to drink?” He eyed me up and down.

  “Sure.”

  He waved his hand at a girl across the room carrying a tray.

  She wove her way around the round tables. There were about ten of them. Each one had two or three people crowded around on mismatched barstools and chairs. A few of the patrons were smoking and flicking their ashes onto the floor.

  A dark-skinned woman without a single tooth in her mouth sang her heart out on a small makeshift stage, while two pale men sat behind her, one with a dented horn to his lips, the other thwacking on a beat-up set of drums with the handles of wooden spoons.

  “Alone is you.

  Solitary in your naked truth.

  The stars consume the sky but then there’s you.

  Your moon lights up my dreams.”

  The girl with the tray came over and watched me expectantly. Her hair was strawlike and white-blond, with dark roots about an inch from her scalp. She had a ton of eye makeup on but I could tell she was young. Up close she didn’t look more than fourteen.

  “Beer?” she asked.

  I had a vague thought that a beer in my condition was a bad idea. “Um, no. Got milk?”

  She scoffed. “No.”

  “Water?”

  “I wouldn’t drink the water,” she said, and I could tell she was speaking the truth. “It’s brown.”

  I felt my stomach churn. “Juice?”

  Her shoulders slumped and she cocked her head to one side. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Okay. Beer.”

  She rolled her eyes and headed to the bar, a beat-up metal cabinet with a slab of cracked stone on top. She leaned over, talking to the bartender, the man who’d stopped me at the door. He had huge arms and no hair anywhere on his head. Not even an eyebrow.

  The girl wore a tiny mini-mini skirt with frayed edges, no bra and a tank top that was both too small and stretched out. Her nipples poked through her shirt.

  A man wearing a knitted cap got up from one of the tables, made some sort of hand movement at the bartender and slapped his hand on a banking scanner the bartender pulled out from behind the bar.

  The girl put her tray on the bar-top and eyed the knitted-cap man.

  Something was up. I found myself watching.

  When the transaction was approved and the scanner screen flashed green, she winked at the knitted-cap guy and took his hand, leading him through the door to the kitchen.

  I had a sick feeling in my stomach, and it wasn’t because of the smoke. I knew what was coming.

  I glanced around the bar. Nobody seemed to notice a young girl had just gone into the back with a fully grown pervert. The toothless singer sang on, the man on the horn blared away and the bartender used a dirty rag to wipe a dirtier jar and poured my beer into it from a keg.

  Then I heard them. Not them, actually.

  Her.

  The girl was screaming. With pleasure.

  She was so loud I heard her over the music. “Yes! Oh, God! Yes! Harder! Yes! Yes!”

  I wanted to turn and leave. Not this again. Not so soon. Almost every fiber in my body was screaming for escape, but my ears were stubbornly glued to the noises coming from the kitchen.

  Pleasure?

  She shrieked in ecstasy, and I was astonished. “Yes! Fuck me! Yes! Oh, God! Yes!”

  Just as I was able to convince my ears I’d heard enough, she let out an ear-piercing scream and then the man came out the door and back into the bar, zipping his fly.

  Quick.

  His knitted cap was pushed off to one side and he was grinning from ear to ear.

  Vile.

  The girl followed behind. Her mini-mini skirt was up around her waist and her tank top circled her ribs. Her breasts and pubics were exposed for the whole bar to see, but to my shock, nobody seemed to notice or care.

  I watched her face. She looked right at me and smiled. Happily. Her cheeks were flushed.

  I didn’t get it.

  She liked it?

  But how could she?

  She was just a kid. And sex was a violation. It was painful and horrible and never felt good. It wasn’t to be enjoyed.

  Was it?

  Never once, not ever—ever—had I liked it.

  Ever.

  How could I? Complete strangers pawed at me, breathed in my ear and slapped me around. Several girls from the Line used to brag that they loved their jobs, but I doubted it. I couldn’t even conceive how that was possible. There had to be something wrong with a girl who got off screwing strangers day in and day out.

  I gawked as the girl at the bar pulled her clothes back into place then leaned her elbows on the counter, talking to the bartender.

  The knitted-cap man slapped her across the ass with an open hand, which made her squeal and giggle. He went back to his table and lit a bent cigarette from a lighter he pulled from his pocket.

  She snagged a dirty rag from behind the bar, wiped in between her legs, tossed the rag into a bucket on the floor by the bartender, grabbed her tray, set the beer and palm scanner on it and walked over to me as if nothing had happened.

  I was in awe.

  Just then, an idea came to me.

  “Twenty credits,” the girl said, holding out the scanner.

  I hesitated. That seemed steep, but I needed to stick around if my idea was going to work.

  I placed my hand on the scanner and grabbed the beer; there was an empty seat in the corner. She nodded toward it. Instead of sitting, I sipped my beer. It was warm and gross.

  “I’m Naya.”

  The girl peered at me and frowned. “Good for you.”

  “How much you get for each appointment?”

  “What?”

  “The
men.”

  She thought about it but still seemed confused. “I live here.”

  “So, you don’t get anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I could tell she was irritated, but I persisted. “Do you make any credits for it?” I pressed.

  “We’re not hiring.”

  I almost gagged. “No! Oh God, no! Look, you don’t get it...”

  “I guess not.” And she walked away.

  Damn.

  The toothless singer belted away, and the horn and drums followed her lead, filling the tiny bar with so much sound I was sure the walls would come loose.

  I made my way through the tables and sat in the empty chair.

  The girl leaned over the bar, flashing what was under her mini-mini, talking with the hairless bartender. Whatever she was saying, he thought it was hilarious. After a second or two, they both looked over at me and laughed again.

  Great.

  Maybe this wasn’t going to work after all.

  The singer finished her song, and the people at the tables clapped half-heartedly. I was too busy watching the girl to join in.

  If I handled this right, my plan could work.

  A girl who loved sex could take my place on the Line. There wouldn’t be any conflict. Win-win. I could get this over and done with right away. Then I could start a life. Doing what, I wasn’t exactly sure, but at least I’d be free of the Line forever. This girl was my ticket out of this mess, or at least part of it. It was perfect. But convincing her of this was obviously going to be an issue.

  My stomach grumbled.

  I tried to catch the girl’s eye but she was at the tables, filling her tray with empty beer jars and taking them through the door to the kitchen. It reminded me of my days as a dishwasher in the restaurant. I wondered if this bar had a little girl washing dirty jars in back. The thought was so disturbing to me, I shook my head, as if that would scrub it from my mind.

  The toothless singer left the stage, went to the bar and drank some clear water from a glass pitcher she pulled from behind the counter.