The Line Book One: Carrier

by Anne Tibbets

  Lucky.

  She felt me watching and met my eye. It was the strangest smile I’d ever seen.

  Gums and wrinkles.

  I eventually caught the girl’s attention and motioned her over. “Got any food?” I asked.

  “Benny makes a good sausage sandwich,” she said, though I could tell she didn’t believe that.

  I eyed the hairless bartender. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll take one.”

  The girl left the table to tell Benny.

  At least I knew his name. Getting hers was going to be tricky.

  In a few minutes, Benny appeared out of the back room with a plate. There was a fried sausage sliced in half between two pieces of brown bread. Benny handed the girl the plate, and she brought it over.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She held out the scanner. “Forty credits.”

  I paid and smiled at her, but she didn’t respond. She turned and went back to the bar. The man with the knitted cap was waiting for her there. Turned out he wanted another go.

  * * *

  Hours later, I still sat in the bar. The band played again, the same ten songs from before, and I ordered another sausage sandwich—which desperately needed mustard and a little fennel, but I ate it anyway.

  I still hadn’t gotten the girl’s name. She wasn’t exactly chatty.

  I debated paying for some alone time with her back in the kitchen but couldn’t stomach it. I thought perhaps Benny might tell me her name, but he didn’t look the friendly sort. The only one he talked to was the girl.

  At the end of the night, they shuffled the people out of the bar and into the street, shut off the red light and locked the door.

  It was dawn.

  The stinking black streets had turned liquid orange.

  I felt exhausted.

  Back at the boarding house, which was empty, I paid for another day. With my shoes under my pillow, I lay down.

  I tried not to think about my second day as a free woman as a waste. After all, I had found the first piece of the puzzle. A replacement. I just had to convince her of that. It had to be approached delicately.

  But I couldn’t help thinking how I had only six months and twenty-eight days left before the Line would come for my babies, and for me.

  I fell asleep with that horrible thought in my head.

  Chapter Four

  When I awoke the next morning, the women of the boarding house were arguing again. It took me a moment to realize what was happening. And it wasn’t what I expected.

  The little girl from before was curled into a ball on her bed, sobbing. The blonde lady from the fight was standing over her, barking.

  “It’s not like I want to do this, kid. Really! But I can’t find a job, and you’re all set with the shop thing, so I’m gonna take off for a while. I’ll be back once I have a job. I promise.”

  The girl wailed in agony.

  “I’m sorry, okay?”

  The pony-tailed lady and the other women in the room shot looks of contempt at the blonde one. She didn’t notice. She was too busy abandoning the kid.

  “Fine. Well, if you’re just gonna sit there and act like a baby, I’m takin’ off.” The blonde turned to leave.

  The little girl bolted upright and clung to the woman’s waist. “Mommy, please don’t go! Stay. Please!”

  Mommy? That lady was the kid’s mother? I sat up in bed and felt something I hadn’t felt in years. I couldn’t quite place it.

  “Please, Mommy. Don’t leave me!”

  My eyes went hot.

  My fingers touched them.

  They were wet.

  I hadn’t cried in years, not since my first week on the Line. I hadn’t allowed myself after that, for fear I couldn’t stop.

  I rolled the warm tears through my fingertips. They felt alien.

  “I’m sorry. Really, I am,” the blonde woman spat, prying her kid off. She didn’t seem upset at all, more like annoyed. “But I gotta go.”

  “Mommy, please. Don’t leave me!”

  Without another word, the blonde skittered out the door. The child crumpled into a heap of agony.

  Giving each other uncertain looks, none of the other women moved.

  Before I could stop myself, I was out of my cot and had my arms wrapped around her.

  “I want my mommy!” she bellowed, choking on her words and nearly hyperventilating. She buried her face into my chest. “I want my mommy. Mommy! Come back!”

  I knew this feeling. I’d said those words.

  I had screamed for hours for my mother. Vira, the woman from the restaurant, had taken me from my family and after I’d “misbehaved,” she’d locked me in a closet for three days before opening it to give me some stale bread and a glass of water. By then, starved and thirsty, I would have eaten anything.

  In those days, I’d sobbed for Mama just like this.

  The memory was suddenly so vivid. I was reliving it right along with the little girl in my arms.

  She felt so heavy.

  I held her until she passed out, both of us full of remembering and feeling. The weight was unbearable. Her sobs echoed in my ears like thunder claps.

  One by one, the other women filtered out of the room, off to look for a day’s work. The lady with the ponytail, who had been called Shirel, sat down on her cot across from us. She didn’t seem so tough anymore. She looked guilt-stricken.

  “I’ll stay with her,” she said.

  Thank you!

  I had to get out of there. I was suffocating.

  I laid the girl on her pillow and rushed outside. When I got there, the stench from the garbage on the street was so strong, I heaved right there on the sidewalk. I choked and wretched a second or two, then walked off, away from the boarding house, my vomit in a puddle at the door.

  Tears crusted my cheeks, but I did not wipe them.

  I felt so strange—as if I was numb, but jittery with electricity.

  I was emotionally awakened for the first time in years and I hated it.

  It was as if a multitude of colors had only just appeared.

  Blinding.

  The trash-covered streets were vibrant and sharp. The crystal blue sky was vast and endless. The water in the gutters sloshed, fast and loud. The sun shone like a beacon of heat and warmed my frozen face.

  Everything was more alive.

  Me.

  I wandered around, my senses twice as sharp, until it grew dark. Then I went to the blood-colored bar and spent the evening watching the girl waitress as she traipsed almost every man and woman into the back room, and I listened, absorbing her screams of ecstasy. I swallowed a warm beer and had another sausage sandwich, savoring the saltiness on my tongue.

  The waitress never spoke to me except to take my order, and that was fine.

  I was so full of what it felt like to be living, I couldn’t speak. The floodgates had burst, and I was terrified of what my emotions were doing to me, now that they were awake.

  Right there in the bar, among the drunks, the smoke and the same ten songs, I relived parts of my life, as if for the first time.

  My home. Mama and Daddy. My little sister and the feel of my sleeping mat against my cheek.

  The restaurant, and the smell of Hugo’s moo goo gai pan sizzling in the wok.

  The Line, and the sound of my sleeping chamber door squealing open each morning.

  Then I thought of the little girl and reheard the pained cries for her mother. This led me to ponder the two babies in my own belly. I wondered if I would ever do the same—if I would leave them like the girl’s mother, like my own mother had, if I had to. But the more I thought on it, the more I realized I never could. I knew too well what it felt like to be left, to be abandoned.

  To
be sold out.

  I couldn’t pass that emptiness along to anyone.

  I had to keep the babies.

  The very thought of what that decision meant for me, for my life and for the babies, slammed into me. This was no longer a curse given to me, but a choice.

  A commitment.

  Just then a voice filled my head, repeating over and over. A word the little girl and I had cried that had gone unanswered.

  Mama.

  I could have sworn the voice was calling for me.

  * * *

  The next few days I floated in and out of the boarding house. Truthfully, I couldn’t handle the little girl’s crying. It felt like razors on my skin.

  The pony-tailed woman, Shirel, seemed to understand my withdrawal. Whenever the girl got emotional, Shirel would look at me, then ask her into her bunk. She would eagerly crawl in and sleep soundly on those nights, spooned with Shirel like two pieces of a broken puzzle. But I don’t think Shirel slept a wink. She only stared at the wall and blinked, lost in thought. She ended up even more haggard and droopy the next day.

  I was too afraid she’d stop if I asked her why she was doing it.

  After the rest of the women fell asleep, I’d leave, off to wander through the empty marketplace on 15th and Avenue L, hiding behind shop tents and huddling beside mountains of garbage, waiting until the red bar opened.

  Since the first night, the bar had a different singer each time. Some knew a few more songs than the toothless lady, but not many.

  The smoke in the air seeped into my clothes and my hair, becoming a part of me.

  I found this comforting, in a sickening sort of way.

  When there, my eyes followed the blonde girl as she waited tables and went into the back room. All the while, Benny worked behind the bar, pouring drinks into dirty jars. I ordered sausage sandwiches when I got hungry. It was the only food they offered, and when I didn’t want to throw up, it made sense to eat. My stomach was iffy at best. Even though the idea of food often made me sick, I knew I had to eat.

  It wasn’t only about me anymore.

  I didn’t know how I was going to do this, this life, motherhood, alone. Or how I could survive in Auberge, caring for two more people, especially since I felt as if I could hardly take care of myself. The more I thought about it, the more it scared me.

  First things first, though, I had to get out from under the Line. This meant my plans for the waitress had to work, the quicker the better. In my mind, there wasn’t any other option. It gave me a direction, the beginnings of a larger goal.

  By the fourth day of my hanging out in the bar, they’d found some clean water to offer me, because I kept asking if they had anything to drink other than beer. They charged me five credits more for the water.

  During all this, the waitress continued her appointments. She was an enthusiastic partner, regardless whether the buyers were male or female. She developed the habit of searching me out when she exited the back room door. I could tell she got off from the look on my face.

  It was a cross between disgust and admiration.

  I listened for signs of her faking it, but she was either a far superior actress to me or honestly enjoyed herself every time. Being an expert at faking it myself, I couldn’t tell the difference, which was a testament to her abilities. I wanted to be sure she was authentically interested in sex. It helped alleviate my guilt for what I was about to do.

  Finally, one night when the bar had thinned out and was almost empty, I got up the nerve and asked her what her name was, and for some odd reason, she told me.

  “Margo.”

  I was taken aback and hadn’t thought in advance what my next question should be, so I dumbly answered, “Oh.”

  Margo smirked and went back to work.

  When she arrived later with more water, I was ready. “You like it here?”

  Given the purse of her lips, the question appeared to stump her.

  “You have options, you know,” I added.

  Her dark eyebrows raised in distrust. “What?”

  “Ever hear of the Line?”

  “Yes.”

  “You get paid there.”

  Sort of. I wasn’t sure it was possible for a girl to turn herself in to the Line and get paid. I didn’t know with one-hundred-percent certainty that they’d let her keep payment for her services. I didn’t want her pay, but technically, if I brought her in, I’d be the one to receive it. But I wasn’t sure. The asshole manager hadn’t mentioned that, and I hadn’t thought to ask at the time.

  Margo lost patience with me and went straight for my jugular. “You want a go or not?” she blurted.

  It took me a second to register what she’d said. “A go?”

  “You watch me. I figured you were ready to ask for a go.”

  A go at her.

  Oh, God.

  There couldn’t have been anything else I wanted less than sex.

  “No!” I said too loudly.

  She recoiled.

  I backpedaled. “I just thought you’d do well on the Line. Since you get paid there.”

  Her face froze for a moment and her eyes drilled into mine. “Paid?”

  “Yeah. They give you a private sleeping chamber and your own room for appointments. They have doctors and nurses there to keep you healthy. I used to work there.”

  “You don’t look like you’re off the Line,” she said, eyeing me.

  “I don’t?”

  She shrugged as if dismissing the idea as soon as it occurred to her. “Thought you’d be, I don’t know, older. Look more used up or something.”

  I sure felt used up, and probably looked it too, but that confession wouldn’t have helped my cause just then. What was this girl playing at? “Thanks, I guess.”

  “And you got paid?” the girl added, squinting her eyes at me.

  “Well, yes, they pay.” Half-truth.

  “They feed you?”

  “More than sausage sandwiches.” Oatmeal mush, with biscuits hard as rocks and mystery meat gravy, usually.

  The girl sighed, as if the thought of food was worth it for her. “Why’d you quit?”

  I hesitated. I could tell her the truth, but she would bolt. If I lied, she might know I tricked her once she got there. But did that matter? “My contract was up,” I offered. So they’d said.

  “Contract?” she asked.

  “Ten years.”

  “Hmm.” She turned and went back to work.

  I couldn’t tell how the talk had gone. It was the most we’d said to each other in almost a week. She seemed intrigued by the idea of the Line, and that didn’t sit well with me.

  I knew it was what I had to do, what I’d been doing by watching, stalking this girl and trying to gain her trust enough to talk to her about it, but just then I couldn’t bear to look at her.

  The idea of what I was doing repulsed me.

  I left the bar. A perfectly clean glass of water was still sitting at my table.

  * * *

  By leaving the bar early, I was forced to go back to the boarding house. It was just a few hours after twilight. One of the lightbulbs that hung from the ceiling of the women’s room had burned out, putting half of it into shadow. The lights of the room couldn’t be shut off until nearly midnight.

  I sat on my bunk, clutching my knees to my chest, my back against the wall, and watched the women. It was the same group from my first day, except the one who’d left.

  From what I could tell, a few of them worked off and on at a glass-recycling factory, sorting different-colored bottles. They bickered back and forth about who was picked to work that day and who didn’t have enough to eat. Two of them whispered passionately to each other in the corner. One woman snored from her bunk by the door, her
lean arm dangling from her cot. The little girl didn’t say much of anything. Though I did overhear her tell an orange-haired woman that she had blisters from sweeping all day.

  I wondered if that would be me soon, sweeping like her or working in the factory like the others. When the credits ran out, and I made my own living, I would have to compete with these women for work. I knew I didn’t want to raise the babies here, in the boarding house. But I wasn’t sure how was I supposed to go to work with no one to look after them. There was still so much I had to figure out.

  What if I couldn’t earn enough to feed them?

  I knew I could never take them to an orphanage. With population control monitored by Auberge, many children ended up there. It was overcrowded, underfunded and crawling with disease. Plus, orphanages were known for their rampant abuse. They often sold unruly girls to the Line; I’d met a few of them. The orphanage girls told stories of babies lying around in cribs all day with no human contact except when they got fed. If they got fed. Many kids died from neglect. And if the child was disabled in any way, he or she was euthanized.

  I knew I wouldn’t abandon my babies there, or anywhere. But the scope of my information was limited. What did I know about Auberge and how to live in it, really? All I knew so far was what I didn’t want.

  I had to do better than that.

  I vowed right then, my head resting on the grey wall behind my one-twenty-a-day cot, that in the morning I’d figure out how to get a job.

  I could wash dishes, even though the idea made me sick at the memory of my time in the restaurant. I could also cook, which I hadn’t done in years but had always loved doing.

  I had to do something. Trying only to find a replacement, and not thinking further along in my life, was a mistake.

  “You deaf? I’m talking to you.”

  I hadn’t noticed, but one of the ladies was standing in front of me. It was the pony-tailed woman, Shirel. She surveyed me up and down.

  “Leave her alone, Shirel,” one of the other women said.

  “What?” I asked. Shirel seemed high-strung and hardly had a muscle on her body. Her cheek bones stuck out so far they looked sharp enough to cut right through her skin.

  “Where you work? They hiring?” she asked.