Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  Her brain stuttered at the sight of the gangplank. It could hardly take in the ship and open water beyond it. She opened her mouth to scream. Hours of sitting hadn’t slowed the Mask. He lunged with precision, knocking over his stool. The stun stick passed between the barracoon’s bars and touched Kristen’s shoulder. Still clutching each other, she and the blond girl shared the strong current.

  Conscious, but unable to move, Kristen watched as her hand slipped from the tangle of blond hair receding from her grasp. After New Dawn dragged the younger girl out, they pulled at Kristen’s ankles. She felt the silk, then her skin, tear against the rough floor. When her head fell from the cage’s lip and onto the concrete, she whimpered.

  The Mask hovered close to her face, squinting at her. He reached down and pinched her ear. Hard. Her hand jumped. He grunted low in his throat, snatched her up by her armpits so that they were face to face. She heard him exchange a few words with someone. Another set of hands held her from behind, her head resting against a broad chest. Her gaze followed the other women being dragged out of the door and into the half-light—then out of her field of vision.

  The man behind the mask peeled it up from the bottom, stopped just above his lips. A translation patch stuck to the mesh’s underside. Now the gibberish made sense.

  “Say goodbye to home,” he said, his voice clear and deep without the conversion.

  The hands behind her covered her mouth and lifted her away from the barracoon, toward the ship.

  She was trying to remember the diagrams. All her life, she’d flipped past the Black History Month specials, those horrible images somebody should have forgotten by now. But now she wished she could remember. Then at least she would have some idea what the hold looked like. Maybe then she’d know where the blond girl was and where they’d put the men. She could feel flesh, but the heat made it difficult to tell which was hers. The Masks hadn’t been back down since they’d chained the captives to each other, and then to the ship. And she’d been near unconsciousness then.

  Someone coughed. Was that a man’s cough or a woman’s? Did it matter? Someone was awake. She tried to use her voice. When she heard it, it sounded like she’d been up for days, high on too much Mystique.

  “Bridget?” she pleaded into the dark. “Margaret?”

  “Matthew.” The voice came from beneath her. “Matt Holleran. From Georgia.”

  Kristen saw a flash of a gangly red-headed boy with green eyes beaming out from an ‘Equality is Now!’ poster. Senator Holleran and his family had posed for the short-lived campaign that was supposed to help end the call for reparations. She thought back to the faces in the men’s cage. There. The one with the dark red beard. Broad-chested, head bent beneath the cage’s low ceiling. Matthew Holleran.

  “Blake Denning,” a voice below her.

  “Harry Anderson,” and another.

  “Preston Caleb,” this one from above.

  “Bridget Hardy,” the skin on her left.

  A high-pitched whisper from above, “Margaret Eastland.”

  “Chuck Lassiter,” the skin on her right.

  “Drew Ellison.”

  Captain Tailor watched the infrared images calling out their names. He tapped the screen, then turned down the volume. Should feed them soon. No, just water, he corrected himself. He’d been battling how many inaccuracies to allow, trying to find the balance between highlighting their advantages and introducing them to the Middle Passage’s suffering, so that they could in turn introduce the White world. Though he and his crew were perpetrating one of the most ambitious experiments in the Rep War campaign, he had to maintain parameters. Already, he worried about the Examples’ advantages: a shared language, a smaller group, the faster voyage, and of course, all the moral prerogatives: no rape, no dying, limited physical abuse. But he aimed to get the majority into their heads and hopefully their hearts through the body. Identity politics infused with psychological warfare. He knew the formula would get results. He had to remain vigilant if they were to be the right results.

  Shireen walked into the surveillance room, still talking on her handheld.

  “What’s the final count on that?” she sighed. She thanked the person on the other line and hung up. She walked toward Tailor, slipping the handheld into her bulky jacket.

  “Fifteen dead at the Baltimore demonstration, though they’re only reporting them as injuries. Over 300 arrests.”

  “What about Tuscaloosa and DC?” he asked.

  She sat down in the chair next to Captain Tailor.

  “The Representatives in Tuscaloosa never stopped walking, just got in their transports and bolted. And the PFC postponed the March in DC.” She pulled the rolled-up mesh fabric down to her ears. “It’s cold in here.”

  “Again.” He answered to both statements. “How many postponements does that make?”

  “Three. This time something about one of the organizer’s connections to the Court of International Trade muddying the waters.”

  He laughed. “Once again, nonviolent proves itself nonviable.”

  Shireen fell silent. They’d always disagreed on this point. He knew that she believed a happy medium existed between the extremes; that she’d signed up for this project to protect the Examples, though Monitor was her official title, and, on the ship, First Mate. That title must have rankled her feminist leanings. But that’s exactly why Tailor needed her: Shireen didn’t say “yes” unless she meant it.

  Tailor stood and walked over to the heart monitors and blood pressure monitors that made up the center wall. He tore off hard copies of the latest readings and filed them away, made sure the digifiles were simultaneously saving and transmitting to the processors stateside.

  It felt good to stand; he’d been at the monitors for nearly two hours, making notes for the first draft of his press statement. He stretched his arms toward the ceiling, looked out the window at the crew taking in the fresh night air. Latrell shared a cigarette with TwoTone. Their light jackets flapped in the breeze, as the smoke swirled around the bill of TwoTone’s ever-present cap. Good men, those. They knew enough not to ask questions. He wouldn’t have to worry about them; they would do the job and take the freedom offered in Ghana, leave all the restrictions on felons behind and live as full men again. His attention to the details was just as much for this New Dawn crew as for the nine below. The voyage would change them just as profoundly.

  He turned back to Shireen, who sat, jaw tensed, looking at the surveillance monitors.

  “Should we feed them now?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I’ll go with TwoTone.”

  “I’ll go with you two,” Tailor said. He retrieved a mask from the top of the monitor banks.

  Shireen looked at him quizzically.

  “Research,” he replied to the unspoken question.

  Captain Tailor and Shireen collected the stocky man outside. All three pulled their masks down, opalescence shimmering in the moonlight as they walked.

  The hold stank. Even with the masks’ air filters, a level of the stench still entered Tailor’s nose—a sharp unpleasantness that reached past technology to give him the impression of feces, urine, and vomit. It smelled like the Rep War: everything let go after being pent up too long. Yes, he knew that smell.

  Walking past the containers of food and medicines New Dawn would bring onto the shores of West Africa, they reached the back corner where the nine lay, three by three, in a space designed for two industrial sinks. Shireen added powdered protein to the cornmeal mush and handed it to TwoTone, who did the water and food detail. Captain Tailor stood nearby, taking notes on a legal pad. He stepped closer and hovered near the middle tier. Shireen climbed atop the structure and searched for an ankle to spray with the antibiotic salve. Tailor heard her sigh; she turned and looked at him, her expression unreadable. She told TwoTone to give everyone extra water. Shireen’s words came out in Icelandic. With the trans link in his ear TwoTone understood well enough. After the training, time in the warehouse se
tting things up and the sea, they could both probably speak the strange language without the aid of trans patches. At first, Shireen had questioned Tailor about his “odd choice,” but now he was sure she understood: Who could understand Icelandic? Most people couldn’t even recognize it.

  Kristen dreamt of the sky. Its light-gray tones bobbed by, the sun still hidden in dawn’s hues: not the sunset sky of her trip to Bali, or the bright blue receding and advancing of her childhood swing, not even the rare red sunrise on the Hudson after a long night of cocktails and conversation. She dreamt of the last sky she saw, bobbing above, as her head bumped on the slats of the pier.

  Up on deck, the sky was clearer than Kristen had dreamed it. She kept her eyes on it as she stumbled up and down the small deck. She didn’t want to look at the men, the men without their masks. They barked commands in that strange language, though their waving hands made their meaning clear enough. Here. Go Here. Faster. Faster. Stop. Get Back. Right now. Do it again.

  She didn’t want to see the others from the hold, either. If they could just not look at each other, one day they might be able to see one another without the memory. Kristen doubted that “one day” would ever come. Apparently, New Dawn didn’t care if she and the others saw their faces. So the men would probably kill them out here on the open sea. They believed in results.

  When they had to go back to the hold, Kristen missed the light.

  If left in its grasp too long, the dark crawls over you and molds you into something unrecognizable. Already Kristen’s back had changed shape. Fluid filled her lungs. Her skin had become a separate animal that she tried to fight off. She’d been in the dark for five days.

  That night the crew came down to choose their bedwarmers. Tailor picked Kristen.

  When the two men who’d brought her up took off the blindfold, Tailor was already seated at a small table, a pitcher of amber-colored liquid at his elbow. The room was small. No more than a cot bolted to the floor, and the table. Tailor took the tail of the chain around her wrists from one of the crewmen and bid them good night. As soon as they were gone, he pulled the chain roughly, causing her to stumble closer to the cot. Wrapping the chain around the cot leg, he produced a small lock that he secured to the couplings, and chained her legs to the bottom of the cot.

  Tailor, winded, pulled up a chair and posed a question.

  “Imagine no one had tended to your brand. How do you think it would look now? How much pain would you be in?”

  Kristen didn’t answer. Could hardly breathe. Tailor inclined his head slightly and continued.

  “Imagine that there were one-hundred-ninety of you instead of nine. What do you think it would smell like? How many would be dying?”

  Silence.

  “Imagine that you’d had to walk the forty miles between where we captured you and the warehouse. How close to death would you have been in your high heels and silk pajamas?”

  Rage moved through her. She bucked in the chains, spraining her wrist, bruising her ankles. She called him every name she could think of. Names she didn’t know that she knew. She screamed her throat raw and then lay glaring at him, breath shooting out in short bursts.

  Tailor looked at her, smiling a little. Then he asked another question.

  He went on like that until the sun came up. Just before he called the crewmen to lead her back into the hold, he said:

  “Now imagine that I had raped you.”

  The well of tears that had threatened to spill all night came brimming over Kristen’s lids. She leaned against the doorframe, head bowed, trying to hide her face from him.

  “Next time,” he said looking at her intently, “if you do what I want, you can have some of the peach juice. It’s your favorite, no?”

  On the way back to the hold, the crewmen walked a full foot in front of Kristen. They held her chain away from their bodies and looked down at the floor or out at sea. At the entrance, they waited for Kristen to walk through, careful not to touch her.

  She was the last one to be brought back to the hold. Eight shadows filled the bank between the ceiling and floor. They hardly moved, didn’t speak, though she could hear one of the men on the top row whimpering. One crewman waited at the entrance, while the other dragged the chain across the planks and locked Kristen back in place. The two left silently, footfalls heavy and slow.

  The wood beneath Kristen creaked in time to the waves, but there were no human sounds, not from the crew above or the ones down below. It was as if a spell had been cast over everyone on the ship and now all aboard lay quietly, trying to remember how they’d become so afflicted. Kristen supposed this because she, herself, could think of nothing else.

  It was enough that her mind was working again. In the last few days, it had abandoned her for long stretches of time, capable of nothing more than the automatic functions of pumping her heart and breathing. Kristen would wait, ambivalent about the return of her awareness. Gradually, it let her hear the sound of scurrying after a long stretch of silence. When she could feel the cold moisture pooled under her buttocks, she knew it had returned. For better or for worse.

  Later, she heard the hold door open. Someone above her keened a quick note of terror. She watched as a shaft of light knifed through the dark, growing larger and brighter. Chains knocked against wood as the captives shifted, trying to curl away.

  The door closed. When Kristen’s eyes adjusted, four of the crewmen stood at her feet. They’d already unlocked the men on the bottom row; now they worked on her manacles.

  Up on deck, the captives huddled near each other. The remnants of their clothes hung at odd angles. All the silk that had once covered Kristen’s back was worn away, leaving only deep scratches on her reddened skin. She looked better than most of the other women. The crew kept their distance. No one shouted for dancing or prodded them with the short end of a stun stick. A half a dozen crewmen stood against the railing, staring out at the sea. Others dragged fire hoses into the hold to blast out its offal. These were the same men who had hauled the women and two of the men away last night, their shouts louder than the captives’ pleas; today, they looked stooped, a little less full.

  “Bedwarmers, Phillip!” Shireen stood in the middle of the monitor room, arms across her chest, glaring at Captain Tailor.

  “It’s good to finally hear you call me by my first name, Shireen.”

  She clenched her teeth until a solid square of tread emerged from the corners of her jaw.

  “You watched the monitors all night. Did anything happen?” he asked.

  “Hell yes, something happened—you went too far.”

  “Too far?” Tailor flared with his own anger now; his voice went quiet and steady. “This is nothing! A few questions and an uncomfortable night at the foot of someone’s bed. Why, Latrell even gave up his bed! Too far? They’re not children. They’re not dying. This is just a taste of suffering. A taste! They get to go free at the end, Shireen. Their children will be free. Their minds will be free. They won’t work a single day. Mark my words: No one will ever deny them their due. Not far enough perhaps, but not nearly too far.”

  Kristen heard Tailor’s voice and flinched, jerked her head toward the railing. Two of the male captives stared at her. When Kristen saw how the men looked at her, she knew she had become part of their nightmare. And they would never remember her any other way.

  Tailor sent for her. He shackled her to the table, hands pulled down into her lap by a chain looped under the seat, through the back of the chair, and around her waist. Kristen barely resisted. Fatigue had most of her; the rest stared at the camera and tripod pointed at the small cot in the corner of the room. Tailor pushed her up to the table and placed the pitcher of peach juice below her chin. Kristen’s nose worked independently of the rest of her, pulling deep breaths of peach into her mouth and chest. Captain Tailor sat down opposite her. He crossed his legs loosely at the ankle.

  She eyed the video camera over his shoulder, a hot knot of foreboding forming in her stomac
h. She wanted to believe the camera had been there the last time but knew it had not. Tailor’s last words to her echoed in her memory. Between them, her pain, abject hunger, and the cold gusting around the edge of the door, it was all she could do to stay conscious—never mind sane.

  “Kristen—” Captain Tailor looked directly at her, his tone even.

  For twenty-two years, Kristen, Senator Burke’s daughter, answered when someone called her name. The new Kristen, this woman snatched from her native soil, cried when she heard her name for the first time. She made no sound, only shook with her pain. Every other heartbeat she gasped for breath. Her hands hung loosely in her lap, head dropped straight down against her chest.

  Captain Tailor reached behind him to turn the camera around. And started his questioning.

  Kristen broke before the agents came, even before they’d reached the Tropic of Cancer. She told Tailor all the answers to his questions. All the ways her passage differed, bettered. Listed all the things she didn’t go through, mentioned the medical care she’d received. Learned his brutal lesson. Tailor had to reload the camera, she talked so much. In between answers, she guzzled from the goblet of amber-colored liquid. The juice tasted sweet, better than Kristen remembered.

  In the end, Tailor threw away his own draft and broadcast Kristen Burke, dirty, ragged, and grateful, as his statement.

  The Buzzing

  Katherena Vermette

  The buzzing was what we called it. After the bombs, the buzzing lasted for days. It was a harsh, overpowering sound that took over everything. It was so loud it was like you could see it. You couldn’t hear anything else. It made everything hurt, and everyone crazy.

  When it was all over, someone told me that the buzzing was actually inside not outside of our heads. It was all a horrible ear ringing because the bombs were so big, and we were so close to where they fell. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter at the time. All that mattered was that sound.