by F P Adriani
I thought about my predicament again. Maybe people didn’t even know I was gone?
For as far as my eyes could see, they only saw sand, sand and more sand. I was afraid to move too much, there could be quicksand, and then what? I’d be screwed for life.
“How appropriate that would be,” I mumbled. “Diamond Sand’s death by Diamond Sand.” I laughed hard at the irony—what else was left for me to do?
I shifted to half-lying on my right side, felt an agonizing throbbing pain in my upper back. My head hanging down, I broke out into a sweat, could barely breathe because of the pain. The sand started getting blacker and then so did the whole world around me….
When I woke up a second time, I realized it would be dark soon. I managed a slow crawl to the cavern’s edge, sat back against the hardened sand and rock. My vision seemed too blurry—a concussion probably. Or maybe I was just losing my mind?
I sat there trying to take deep breaths, but failing because of the shoulder pain. Breathing deeply moved my shoulder and so hurt too much.
I didn’t know how long I sat there, but my blurry vision eventually located something against the graying sky, something shiny and bright. I instinctively tried wildly waving my arms at it, but then the pain began swallowing my vision once again. The thing in the sky moved, accelerated, came closer….
My third time waking up—red and brown all around me, even the air seemed red and brown.
I was lying inside somewhere, in a cave it seemed, clay and stone walls, golden light coming from somewhere. The area beneath me felt pretty soft, so I must have been on a bed of some sort.
My head throbbed only a little less than my shoulder, my mouth felt as dry as the sand desert. I tried licking my lips but didn’t have enough saliva to coat them. I coughed a bit, saw movement in the brown shadows, as if someone had peeled himself off the wall. And then I saw another someone sitting on a black metal chair—a woman. As they watched me, their faces looked cold, emotionless.
“Where…am I,” I half-squeaked, half-choked.
“Nowhere you need to know,” the man from the shadows said, moving closer to me.
“I need water….”
“A doctor looked at you, said you were wounded badly. But you’ll live.”
“That’s good to know…but the water please….”
He motioned to a big glass on a table to my right; the table sat about a foot away. It seemed like fifty feet because I’d have to sit up and stretch over for it. I looked at his shadowed face; so he wouldn’t help me….
Somehow, I managed to reach the glass, the brown enclosure spinning around me a bit, yet my whirling brain finally realizing that the pain in my shoulder was still bad but not as bad as it had been in the sand. One of my hands gripped my head, willing it to stop the motion inside. It worked. Then I downed all the water in two gulps; I dropped the empty glass onto the clay floor.
My nose twitched at a bitter smell suddenly—me. I must have pissed myself at some point. I felt more piss in me now.
“I’m dirty and I’ve got to piss,” I said.
“You’re going nowhere yet. This isn’t a motel.”
The woman came over to me then; she held metal cuffs in her hands. Blood pounded in my face: instead of letting me piss, they were going to bind me up. Great.
“Lie down,” the woman said in a curt voice, so I had no choice but to do so. My head would only start swimming again anyway with too much neck motion.
I closed my eyes as she slid the cuffs on me and strapped my wrists to the bed’s frame….
When I next opened my eyes, I no longer had the cuffs holding me down, and neither that man nor that woman was around. New people were: three, two males and one female again. They were sitting in the dim yellow light, playing cards at a table nearby. One of them had his eyes on me from the first instant I had mine on them.
I started to move my head but that lightheadedness still made any motion there a bit difficult; they must have drugged me, whether for nefarious or pain-killer or healing purposes, I didn’t know.
Staring up at the dark ceiling now, I said quite loudly, “I really need to piss. Or maybe more than piss. Kidnapping can carry a life sentence, times two for resource security personnel. Why the hell are you holding me?”
“We’ll see what the boss says,” one of the men responded.
“Who’s your boss?”
No answer. I turned my head, saw they still sat there playing cards. The woman finally threw down hers, a big grin on her face as she slid a pile of coins her way.
“You cheated,” the man who’d been staring at me said to the woman, looking at her now.
“No, she didn’t,” said the other man.
“But she usually wins.”
“That’s because she’s good at it.” I saw him nod at the woman and then tilt his head my way as he spoke to her. “I think you should take her around the corner so she can wash or whatever.” He unstrapped one of the guns from his side and slid it to her across the table.
I watched her pull up a cloth mask over the bottom half of her face, then she came over to me, and we began the slow process of unfolding my body from the bed—or, more correctly, I began it. She only helped yank me up a bit at the very end.
Walking behind me through a narrow corridor, she guided me with the occasional prick of the gun barrel in my back; between that and the tight confined space, my forehead began to sweat, and a couple of times my nervous unsteady feet tripped on rocky ground.
Finally we reached a wider but walled off area, with crude plumbing inside: a small sink, a small ground toilet, a small tub. Motel or not, this was no temporary living space. A pile of clothes sat on a chair near the tub. She must have seen where my eyes had gone.
She said now, “Those are clean. Wash up quick and then change into them. Leave your…uniform on the other chair there.” She walked outside the enclosure, though no door completely closed it off. Outside, leaning sideways against the opposite wall, with a turn of her head and a few steps forward, she could probably always see me inside.
I used the toilet, then took a one-armed too-slow sponge bath, as I couldn’t lift my left arm without pain; afterward, with my good arm I soaped and rinsed my pants to get the urine off.
As I moved I examined the main red clay and gray-brown stone walls of the cave, trying to place where we were on Diamond. But the walls looked generic: we could have been many places. Caves were numerous on the planet, one of the reasons the extensive mineral resources here had been found so quickly. Too many of the known natural caves had been quickly exhausted of important minerals, but some of the bigger natural caves—I’d heard people lived in them. They were of course called Cave People. And now I wondered if that was who was holding me….
As I was pulling on the clean robe they’d left for me, my eye caught sight of something different on the floor, something separate from the red clay and dirt, something purple, more than one something purple. I grabbed for my shoe, delayed putting it on as one of my hands manipulated the lace, the other touched one of the purple somethings. It was unmistakable: the garlic thistle again.
“Move it in there,” came the woman’s hard voice. My fingers flew off the thistle and were on my shoe when she walked into the doorway.
*
“Why am I here?” I asked her as we moved back through the narrow cave-hall.
She hesitated at first. Then she said, “We found you two days ago. You would have died.”
“Who are ‘we’?”
She didn’t respond, just as the guy hadn’t earlier.
“I don’t like the wrist cuffs,” I said now.
“I don’t either,” she replied, and I glanced at her over my shoulder. Her blue eyes looked directly at me. But then she added, “It’s not my decision to make.”
When we got back to my bed, the same two men were still there, but the blanket I’d been lying on was gone; a different one lay in its place.
They must have seen me looki
ng at it. “Your bed stunk,” one of the men said, and I could feel the heat in my cheeks. “And we’re having company later. The Boss.”
“Oh goody,” I said, and then the woman roughly shoved me a bit from behind.
“Get back on the bed,” she said.
I wanted to turn around and punch her in the face for helping these men degrade me, but then she had her own free will, and, apparently, she used it to imprison other women. As I crawled onto the bed, my stomach growled loudly all the while. When the hell had I last eaten?
“Didn’t the doctor tell you to give me some food?” I asked now, collapsing back onto the mattress.
The staring man from earlier walked away then, and the man and the woman sat back at the table, facing me. There were books on the tabletop now. The woman raised the lamplight there, and then I noticed the man held a small knife and started carving a piece of pale wood or something…. No, it wasn’t wood; it was soap. The soap in the bathroom had carved intricate swirls of a design I’d never seen. He must have been responsible for that.
“What’s that looping design?” I asked now. “I noticed one on the tub soap.”
There was a long silence, and then just when I thought he wouldn’t answer, he said without looking up, “It’s old, from Earth.”
“You ever been there?”
I figured he wouldn’t answer that question, considering they probably wouldn’t want anything about their identity known, so I was surprised when he said, “No. Never.”
I would have talked more, hoping to get him to reveal more, but the other man, the staring one from before, came back then. He held a plate of food and now he carelessly dropped it onto that table near my bed. “Eat and then the cuffs go back on.”
“Why?” I said, looking up at him a bit nervously. “I ain’t going anywhere. You’ve got me pinned here in other ways.”
“You talk too much,” he said in a dead-cold voice, staring down at me with matching dead-cold eyes. “Either eat or talk. You open your mouth again now, and I take the food away and you don’t eat today.”
Though I was fuming behind them, I lowered my eyes and used my good arm to grab the plate.
*
I never ate so fast in my entire life—my mouth felt like a food vacuum. There was only bread and apples, and neither tasted too fresh. But it was food. And I must have swallowed as much air as food; afterward, I belched loudly.
Both the soap carver and the woman laughed at my belch. I didn’t think kidnappers were supposed to laugh at things like that, but I’d take it…if that other guy, the nasty cold one, would stop giving me nasty cold looks. I wouldn’t take that. I avoided looking at him.
A moment later, he brought the cuffs my way. Goddamn this. Being bound up in a cave—what was next?
I kept my head turned to the wall as the guy locked the cuffs, but then I felt his hand under my chin, roughly whipping my head in his direction. His face hung above mine, his crooked nose looked as if it had been broken one too many times, and he breathed down at me out of that crooked nose and out of a half-smiling mouth. “You were good. You didn’t talk. How else can I stop you talking?” His eyes narrowed and his mouth turned into a suggestive sneer.
“Cut it out,” I heard the woman say from the table.
Half-laughing, half-grunting, he let go of my chin and stalked off past the table and out of sight.
I was shaking; I stared up at the cave’s top, or where the cave’s top should be, but it was too high to see. I only saw a vague black above me, hovering, waiting.
*
There was really nothing left for me to do but sleep—well, I couldn’t help sleeping. Both whatever they’d been feeding me and my shoulder pain were conspiring to not keep me awake.
But the next time I woke up, there was something new in my environment—someone new.
I could tell she was new by her height and slenderness. Wearing a long dark robe, her back to my direction, she stood across the cave in a darker section, talking quietly but agitatedly with the others, quietly probably because she didn’t want me to hear. At one point her hand jerked back near her right ear, in my direction. I saw one of the others look at me, and then she spun around and began walking toward my bed.
The lamplight fell on her face, and then I saw the red hair and pale face of Arlene Hu.
*
Well, well, well, I’d finally succeeded in at least some of this job. Unfortunately, with my being bound and all, it seemed I’d never get to succeed at the rest.
My heart pumped harder while Hu stood over me, her cold flat eyes staring down at me, reminding me of that picture in my file.
Her voice was icy soft when she spoke, and I thought, This woman sounds like a fucking nut.
“At a distance,” Hu said now, “orders get lost. You shouldn’t have been bound up like this.” Her head jerked at her cohorts. The woman who’d taken me to bathe rushed over and unlocked my cuffs.
My arms finally free, my left hand rubbed at my sore right wrist.
“You disgust me,” I said up to Hu’s face now.
Hu’s eyebrows were a lot darker than her hair, and, at my words, those dark eyebrows shot up at me. “I just had you untied. That counts for nothing?”
“You’re the one fucking keeping me here. I know who you are, Hu.”
“Lots of people do. Lots of people will now know who you are, Senda.”
I could feel my lips tremble as they angrily fluttered open. She knew my name—how the hell…. Then I remembered my ID badge on my belt—missing when I’d washed my pants. And then there was my wallet—had they taken that?
My lips were still shaking when I asked her, “What’s going on? You’re going to ransom me now? Then what—kill me?”
“Oh nothing as dramatic as that. You’re worth more if you’re in good shape than in bad shape.”
She walked away abruptly and disappeared down the cave, leaving me to wonder what the hell was next. For all I knew, I’d be sold into some kind of slavery.
*
It seemed she’d been telling the truth though, and nothing too dramatic would happen to me. At least the woman who’d taken me to bathe indicated this later when she brought me more water and mumbled, “It’s all about image.”
“What?” I asked, pulling a confused face.
“Your being here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and she walked away.
I thought of my friends then, of Nell and Tan—did they know where the hell I was?
Tan.
He’d slept with those vacant Hu eyes. Though maybe they hadn’t been vacant then….
I did not want to think about that now, this personal shit, and how Hu and I had shared someone. That made me feel even sicker than I already was.
She came back the next morning—or what I assumed was the next morning based on the way people in the cave were behaving and the breakfast food they were eating. There was more traffic in here now; I was never alone. And neither was Hu, it seemed. She always had this man hovering nearby. He wore all his head hair in a single long braid, and his face always looked unhappy.
This time when Hu walked up to me, the first thing out of her mouth was, “We’re not murderers.”
I almost blurted out, “You could have fooled me!” But instead I said, “And what do you call the shit at The Festival? I bet someone was killed there, huh?”
She didn’t answer my question directly; instead, she asked one of her own. “What makes you think I’m responsible for that?”
I only laughed then, a little wildly; I could feel some spittle flying out my mouth. I wiped at it with both hands. Overnight, they’d bound up only my good arm this time, and then unbound that before I’d even woken up. Apparently, they’d done this because Hu had come back.
Her head jerked over her shoulder, and she said, “Get me a chair,” to that same nasty guy from the other night. He did as she’d asked, and now she pulled the hood
of her dark robe all the way down.
Right before she sat, I said, “If you crowd weren’t around The Festival, then how’d you find me?”
“You were miles away then. And I’m not saying we weren’t around. I’m saying we didn’t plant any bombs.”
“And last month in the mines—what’s your excuse then?”
“What mines?”
“North Pine Mine. One explosion, one thwarted explosion.”
There was a long silence; for an instant her glassy staring eyes seemed to penetrate my face. Then, she said, “Let me just say that sometimes people attach themselves to something when they don’t belong attached there. They act on their own. I’m not a thug butcher.”
“You could have fooled Diamond.”
“And you represent the whole planet? You know what about it? Who are you?”
“I’m here to bring you in to the UPG!” I blurted out. Stupid! She’d have more reason to harm me now, assuming she was actually afraid of me and what I represented. That, apparently, wasn’t the case though.
Now, for the first time, her face lost its vacantness and became animated, with laughter. Her whole face shook, so did her shoulders; she glanced over one of those shoulders at her cohorts, who moved closer and stood spread near one side of her chair. “You hear that? This guard’s taking me in.” She turned back to me, her eyes slowly falling over me and my bed, then back up to my face. “I think you’ve misread the situation here, about who’s in control.”
“Things can change one moment from the next.”
Her smile faded and she nodded fast. “True, very true. Like this planet—it was supposed to be left to the people how they wanted to live here, and then that changed. They’d been lied to, cheated out of their own. I’m not into hurting civilians.”
“Really? Who do you think most of the mine workers are?”
Her voice hardened fast. “Don’t tell us about the mines. We know first-hand about that.”
