by Anne Tibbets
I heard the sounds of Ric getting dressed. Of him removing the blanket from his cot and laying it over the top of my naked, sobbing form.
He reached over once and touched my wet cheek with the backs of his fingers.
And then I heard the sound of him leaving the room.
And I sobbed all the more.
Chapter Six
“You know who I am?” Lover Boy asks.
He’s a behemoth, taller than me by a foot and three times as wide. There’s no way of going around him. There’s no exit to run toward. I’m trapped, and he knows it.
They call him Lover Boy, but not because of his charm, not by a long shot. Lover Boy is a regular on the Line, when he isn’t on probation or temporarily banned. But his nickname isn’t because of his amorous personality.
Lover Boy loves to hit. Not just hit, beat. Not just beat, blacken. Lover Boy gets off pummeling girls senseless, then he jacks off over the girls’ unconscious bodies or sodomizes them while they’re passed out.
It’s often theorized by us girls that Management makes him pay extra for that, but that he isn’t allowed to pick his own girls. They must choose for him, and whomever they choose is oftentimes never seen again after Lover Boy is finished with them. It’s the only logical reason we can think for them to keep allowing it to happen.
He beat Ava until she was blind. He shattered Mallory’s pelvis. He killed Bea. All three women had been on the Line for years, and their bodies showed it. Lean, stringy, sagging.
Afterward we’d hear whispers. Management chose those women specifically for that reason. They were beyond their prime and ready to be retired.
So when Lover Boy walks in as my appointment, the first thing I think is, Do I really look that bad? I’m only twenty-two. But still, nine years is a long time in that line of work, and surely I show it.
The next few thoughts that cross my mind involve cussing and silent pleas for a quick and painless death, like a broken neck or a crushed skull. But I’m not that fortunate. I try to hide the terror from my face but know I’m not succeeding.
Lover Boy smirks, probably satisfied with my fear. He’s already clenching his fists.
“You know why I punish girls?” he asks. His eyes scan me up and down, taking in my naked body. They stop briefly on my breasts and he undoes his belt buckle.
“N-no,” I say.
“Because they won’t do what I ask. They’re bad girls,” he mutters.
His pants hit the floor and he steps out of them. He stands there, wearing nothing but a wrinkled shirt and a pair of old sandals held together with thick black tape.
“You don’t like bad girls?” I ask, stalling, even though I know it’s pointless.
He shakes his head and licks the palm of his hand with his wide, white tongue, then rubs it on himself. “Now be a good girl, and this won’t be so bad.”
I involuntarily step backward, away from him. My back presses against the cold cement wall. I realize quickly this is a mistake.
Lover Boy’s dark eyes flash with fury and he stops in his tracks. “You scared of me?”
“N-no.”
“I said if you were a good girl this wouldn’t go so bad, and then you back up against the wall? I told you, only bad girls need to be afraid. And you’re afraid, so you must be a bad girl.”
“I’m not a bad girl. I’ll be real good to you. What do you like?” But I see his expression shifting. His jaw clenches, and I stiffen, bracing for impact.
His fist hits first. From the left.
This surprises me. I’m expecting a right.
The fist hits me on the nose and jams upward. I feel my nose break and I see shards of light as warm blood cascades down my face. The impact sends my head careening back and it crashes against the cement wall behind me.
For a merciful moment, I black out.
When I come to I’m bent over the bed, my face down into the cot mattress, held by his fingers in my hair. His other hand is on my lower back, holding me down.
He hammers into me with such force my knees buckle.
I scream in pain and revulsion, and his hand on my back grabs my hip to keep me from falling. His other hand pushes my face deeper into the mattress. For a moment, I can’t breathe.
I hope I suffocate.
I black out a second time.
The next time I wake up I’m lying on the floor. I feel a foot connect with my rib cage and hear a crack.
“Stupid bitch! Bad girl!” someone shouts.
I scream again and the pain in my chest is so fierce I black out a third time.
When I come to, I’m inside my sleeping chamber. One of the guards must have stuffed me in there after Lover Boy finished with me.
I probably missed the evening meal and roll call.
I wonder if I will have the next day’s meals taken away as punishment, like Management sometimes does to girls who are uncooperative.
It doesn’t matter to me. The idea of food makes me nauseous.
I wonder if I will survive the night.
I welcome death.
I moan a few times, trying to find a comfortable position. But every inch of me hurts and I can’t stop myself from crying out as I move.
Lightning shoots through my sticky body as I shuffle around. It feels as if I’m in a coffin.
It hurts to breathe. It even hurts to cry.
I wish he’d killed me.
The woman in the chamber on my left bangs the wall a few times and tells me to keep it down, but I hear something else from my right.
It’s singing. After a few moments, I realize it’s Peni. She’s singing a lullaby, ignoring all the shouts from the other girls to pipe down, shut up, let a girl get some rest for God’s sake.
Peni ignores them and keeps singing, despite the fact that the whole Line can probably hear. I know she sings to make herself feel better. But in my head, it’s for me, even if she doesn’t realize it.
I’ve never heard this song before, but it seems just right, coming from her.
It drifts me off to sleep.
For just a moment, a brief, blissful, peaceful moment, I forget where I am. What I am.
Beam,
The sun shines brightly for you.
Beam,
Even if you feel a fool.
When there are storms in the air,
You’ll not care.
When you beam through your pain and mourning,
Beam,
Show me all your glory.
To see the rays come beaming through,
From you.
Sprinkle your soul with what fills you,
Burn away all that destroys you.
If your fears hide underneath, just breathe.
Push through to reach the next light.
Beam,
It’s just out of your sight.
No matter how bad things seem to be
Don’t forget that you—
Beam.
I awoke.
Naked.
Wrapped in an old blanket and lying on a cot.
I looked across the room and saw the other cot was empty and untouched. It hurt to know that Ric hadn’t come back, but I understood why.
I got up, dressed and made my way into the warehouse’s makeshift kitchen. Ric, Sonya and Cat sat at the table, each holding a cup of steaming coffee. Ric looked as if he hadn’t slept at all. His eyes were swollen and lined in red.
Sonya saw me enter and gave me a look I couldn’t place. It was somewhere between sympathy and disappointment.
Did she know? Had Ric told her what had happened?
I felt a rush of shock and embarrassment, then watched as Sonya stood from the table, patted Ric on the
arm, to which he nodded solemnly, and then she walked out of the room. She said not a word to me.
She knew.
Humiliation rose in the back of my throat like bile. And just as soon as I wanted to lash out at both of them for talking about me behind my back, I felt sympathy and gladness flood my head, and a tinge of jealousy. At least he had someone to talk to. I doubted there was a soul alive who would understand what I’d gone through. Except maybe Sonya, and she appeared to be more sympathetic toward him.
Cat slurped her coffee. “If you’re such a good cook,” she said, “make breakfast.”
“Could you give us a minute alone?” I asked, indicating Ric.
“No,” she barked. “I’m hungry. If you want to have a private powwow about your sex life, go back to your room and have it there.”
Ric shot Cat a look of rage, and she rolled her eyes at him.
“You told her?” I bellowed. I hated how I sounded—whiny, like a wounded child. But I was wounded. Talking to Sonya was one thing, but we’d only just met Cat yesterday and he was already spilling the depths of my shame to her?
“No, I didn’t tell her,” Ric said.
“I have the room next door, sweetheart,” Cat mused. “I heard the whole thing. Seriously, though, I couldn’t care less. I just want food.”
I felt a rise of relief and then extreme embarrassment. But I couldn’t find words to give my emotions justice, so I clamped my mouth closed and turned on my heel toward the hot plate.
She’d heard everything?
Everything.
This meant my moans, his gasping my name, my sobs.
It was enough degradation to fill my stomach with acid for months. Churning my mortification into anger, I pilfered noisily through the cabinets to find something to cook.
There were only two eggs, a roll of sausages that looked brown with age, a small pitcher of milk and a few cups of dry flour.
Pancakes it is.
I tossed the flour into a bowl, added the eggs and milk, stirred it up, then set it aside. There was no baking soda or powder so the cakes would be flat as boards, but I doubted Ric would care. If Cat did, she could starve.
Elsewhere in the cupboard I found some old sugar cubes. I crushed them, then added them to a dash of butter in a separate saucepan, turning the other hot plate on low. This would have to do as syrup.
Once the frying pan heated, I added butter and poured a portion of the batter inside. When they browned, I flipped them over.
“Ric, do you want some?”
Cat scoffed. “I think we already know the answer to that question.”
It took me a moment, but then I got it.
It wasn’t funny at all, but Cat was laughing as though she’d never heard a joke in her life.
I turned from the hot plates and glowered at her. It took everything I had to not hit her across the face with the hot frying pan. Ric was looking at her as if he wanted to do the same.
“No, thank you,” he said. He stood from the table so abruptly he spilled his coffee. “I’m not hungry.” Then he left.
He’d never once looked at me.
My insides turned as runny as the pancake batter and I felt my knees weaken.
What have I done?
This was bad. He was taking it personally. Like my rejection had been about him, and not about the ten thousand times I’d been raped before we’d met.
I hadn’t been ready. I thought I was, but I’d been wrong. It would take time to heal my past. Years more, apparently. But given the way he was acting, I wasn’t sure he’d be able to wait that long.
It may have been too late already.
Self-hatred swelled within. I should have known better. I should have stopped sooner. That was the last time I’d let myself get lost in emotions. I’d been better at hiding them all those years on the Line, but I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel, to get swept away.
And look what had happened.
“Awww,” Cat quipped, watching Ric leave. “Poor baby can’t take a joke.” She chuckled to herself again. My revulsion must have shown in my expression because she added, “Oh, don’t give me that. I seriously don’t care who you fuck. We’ve got bigger problems than your love life, believe me. How about the fact that we’re about to break into Auberge headquarters in two hours? You know, somehow I think that’s a little more important, don’t you? Hey! Where are you going? What about my pancakes?”
Fuck her pancakes.
Fuck Auberge.
Fuck this stupid apocalypse.
I had to find him. I had to know.
Had I ruined us? Was it too late?
I pounded down the center aisle of the warehouse, scanning the area for him. But I couldn’t find where he’d gone.
Finally, I passed Minnie, typing away on her little laptop.
“Have you seen...?” I started to say.
She pointed one hand toward the front, never taking her eyes from her screen.
I opened the door and what I saw sent a shiver down my spine.
Ric was in Sonya’s arms, and she was hugging him, rubbing him on the back, whispering something to him that was making him nod.
They didn’t see me there, watching.
Ric rested his face on Sonya’s shoulder and she reached one hand up, cupping his face as she spoke softly to him.
He pressed his cheek into her palm as if savoring her touch and closed his eyes as he nodded again.
I felt a wave of nausea wash over me.
I was too late.
* * *
Several hours later, our boots echoed off the marble floors of the headquarters entry like blasts from a jackhammer. We were in the lion’s den.
After spending the past few hours before the operation at target practice, I felt ready.
Secure.
Confident.
Or at least I wanted to think I did.
Ric and Sonya gave no indication that they’d seen me watching them hold one another. I’d gone back to the shooting range and spent an entire case of bullets practicing. With each shot I’d systematically shut down my psyche one chamber at a time and gained better control of myself.
No more feelings. No more emotion. I would get this job done, end Auberge, take my kids and Shirel, and we would build a life away from my inability to show love to a man.
And away from Ric, it appeared.
I had to accept what I was capable of and what I wasn’t. There was no sense in torturing myself any further with a relationship that wasn’t working. Besides, it wasn’t fair to Ric. It was obvious he needed more, and I wasn’t the one who could give it to him.
After this heist was over, and we were safe from Auberge’s tyranny, I would end what was left between us for good and set him free.
It was for the best.
When it was time to put on our uniforms and get ready to go, I did my best to feel nothing. I gathered my gear, strapped my gun to my hip and that was it. I decided there was no point being bothered by the fact that Ric still couldn’t look at me.
* * *
We marched into HQ. My face felt hard and solid. Despite increased security and video cameras mounted in the corners of the lobby, headquarters looked much the same as it had the last time we’d been inside.
The entry still had polished black-and-white marble floors with shining brass light fixtures hanging from the tall ceiling. They glared against the ground like blazing beacons, making me blink. In front of us, an ornately carved and highly polished wood security desk stood in direct contrast to the dirty, filthy and neglected sector of Central just outside the doors. It was the ultimate dichotomy.
It even smelled better inside.
Two Auberge guards in their pressed charcoal woolen uniforms
were posted on either side of the front glass double doors, which slid open with a hiss as we approached. Sonya and Bubbs marched in the front, walking side by side. Ric and I were behind them in the same formation. I tried to keep my face neutral, but the moment I saw we were surrounded by guards my heart pounded so hard I could feel it in my throat.
Luckily, no one seemed to notice my distress as we trooped straight past two more guards, standing erect and almost statue-like in the corners of the room, and two more at the security desk. In unison, we held up our stolen identification badges, and they nodded us by.
According to what Minnie had told us, the new HQ protocol meant our palm prints would be scanned by the corner guards before we were permitted entry into the next room, the elevator foyer. So we were expecting it when one of the guards approached from the left, a tall and bald man with shoulders disproportionately large for his frame. He came forward with a scanner in his hand and nodded at Bubbs, who faltered slightly in his stride. Just then, I heard the front doors hiss open.
“I need to see the chairman!” shouted a gravelly woman’s voice. “Where the hell is that bastard? I have a few words to share with that son of a bitch! Come out, Chairman Etienne! Come out, come out wherever you are! Etienne! Etienne! Where are you?”
The guard holding the scanner turned away from us and moved toward the woman, as did the other guard in the corner, and the ones behind the desk. I heard sounds of a struggle.
“Get your hands off me!” the woman shouted.
During the commotion, Bubbs and the rest of us continued our pace. With a steady and synchronized march, we advanced toward the elevator foyer as if there was nothing happening at all. No one stopped to scan our palms.
In the meantime, the woman at the door had given up shouting about Chairman Etienne and was now downplaying the entire incident. “Now, now,” she said. Her voice sounded large and breathy in the echoing entry. “There’s no need to get all touchy-feely. Just chill. I’m leaving. Hey—watch it! If you grab my boob one more time, you’ll have to take me out to dinner.”
Bubbs coughed on a laugh just as we rounded the corner and entered the elevator foyer. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the woman at the door, surrounded by guards. It was Cat. As planned, she’d succeeded in helping us bypass the palm scanner protocol. As we rounded the corner she shot me a look that sent a chill up my spine.
