Penance_An Imp World Novel

by Debra Dunbar

  “Whoa, she speaks. And she speaks English.” Sugar took a bite of her bread. “We’re in a truck, girlfriend. Thought that much was obvious.”

  “But where are we going? How long have we been in here? What’s happening?” I looked around at the other women. “I don’t remember much of anything.”

  Understatement of the year.

  “I’m not sure how fast we’re traveling, but we left New York City almost two days ago,” the woman with short, spiky blue hair told me.

  “They tossed you in here with us early this morning,” the dark-eyed woman told me. “What town were you in when you last shot up? Might give us an idea of where we’re headed.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to think of something, anything that might trigger a memory. Shooting up. Could I at least remember that?

  Nope.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember,” I confessed.

  The dark-eyed woman shrugged. “You were so out of it we thought you were dead. Must have been one hell of a bender you were on if you don’t remember what town you were in. Runaway?” She peered at me. “I thought maybe you were Kitten’s age, but you look older now that the light is better.”

  “Junkies all look old,” Sugar announced. “She’s probably twelve. A couple more months on heroin and stores would have been offering her senior citizens’ discounts.”

  “Her face doesn’t look like a junkie’s,” the girl with the Spanish accent said. “Her skin is beautiful. It glows.”

  I blinked at her in surprise then looked down at my arms. The track marks were gone. All that remained was creamy-white, smooth flesh. And it did glow, as if I’d coated myself in some iridescent powder.

  “You all came from New York?” I asked, my voice raspy, as if I were reviving long dead vocal cords.

  “Yeah. They kept us chained in an old warehouse for a day or so before they loaded us up. One night some guy came through, herded us onto this truck, and off we went.” Sugar shrugged. “Mess’s and my pimp is probably raging around Soho, thinking we ran off on him.”

  The dark-eyed woman laughed. “Like hell he is. Who do you think sold us to these guys? Probably for a twenty and some smack.”

  Sugar spat into a corner of the truck. “Dick. I hope he ODs. It would serve him right.”

  New York City. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, trying to force some kind of memory into my mind. An apartment, a boyfriend, a job, some flophouse—anything. But nothing concrete prior to my waking up sick in this truck existed in my mind.

  Nothing except the overpowering need to suffer, to atone for my sins. I’d done something horrible in my life—something that had nothing to do with the vanished track marks on my arms. I’d been weak, and made a horrible choice, and that choice was eating my insides worse than the stomach acids and bile.

  “What’s your name, hon?”

  I looked up at the dark-eyed woman, having no idea what my name was. Thinking too hard about it only brought on a pounding headache.

  She ran a hand over my shoulder. “That’s okay. Two of us don’t speak any English, and Sugar and I don’t exactly go by the names on our Social Security cards anyway. Keep your secrets, bury your past. We’re all in the same boat here.”

  We weren’t. I would have gladly given her my name if I’d only known what it was. The throbbing grew in my temples, spreading down into the base of my skull as I contemplated the blank pages that told the story of my life.

  “I’m Mess,” she added, “as in One Hot Mess. That’s Sugar, ’cause she’s so sweet. Over there is Pistol, Kitten, Tasha, and Lacy. And that’s Pillow, and Baa.”

  They were all semi-indistinct figures in the dim light of the truck, but one thing was clear—they were all young. Most looked to either be in high-school or barely out of it. All were dirty, with filthy clothing and wary eyes. Sugar had shoulder-length platinum blonde hair and was wearing a tattered and stained little black dress. Mess appeared to be a mix of African-American and Asian heritage, with an angular brown face and long, wavy hair. Kitten looked like a preteen with soft golden-brown curls spilling down past her shoulders, and Pistol was the one with the spiked blue hair. Tasha, Pillow, Lacy, and Baa were clustered near the front of the truck—Tasha cradling her broken arm. They all had dark hair, but I couldn’t make out much of their features except for the fact that Pillow and Baa were curvier in build than the other two girls.

  I nodded at each in turn, trying to appear friendly. I was vulnerable, a woman without a past on a truck bound to who-knows-where. I needed them. My life, my future depended on their assistance.

  “What shall we call her?” Sugar asked, the usual cynical note in her voice. “Junkie? Red? New Girl?”

  “She looks like that mermaid.”

  That statement came from the one introduced as Kitten. She stepped closer, and I caught my breath at how very young she appeared—I’d thought teenager, but she seemed barely that with her soft curls and a heart-shaped face.

  “Mermaid?” Everyone looked at my legs, encased in a pair of torn, dirty blue jeans, not ending in a fin.

  Kitten smiled at me, looking sweet and innocent. “Yes. The Disney one. Ariel.”

  Now everyone looked at my hair for some reason.

  “Yeah, Ariel. That’s what we’ll call her,” Pistol said with a laugh.

  Sugar snorted. “I’m not calling her a Disney name. Red. Her name’s Red.”

  Sounded good to me. It was better than Jane Doe in my book. “So why are you all on this truck?” I asked, more wondering why I was on this truck.

  Mess scooted closer beside me. “Sugar and I were working girls who got on the wrong side of our pimp and found ourselves ‘traded.’ I don’t know everyone’s story. The foreign ones were probably lured over with the promise of jobs. The other girls are likely runaways.”

  “I’m not a runaway,” Kitten’s voice wobbled.

  “Me either,” Pistol added. “And it doesn’t matter how we got here. All that matters is how we’re going to escape, to get out.”

  “In a body bag, that’s how we’re gonna get out,” Sugar replied. “Do you wanna end up like the Russian girl? Or worse? We shut up. We do as we’re told. Hopefully once we fuck enough guys, we’ll be allowed a little freedom. That’s how these things work.”

  One of the curvy girls from the back edged forward, the one named Pillow. “Maybe we’ll get arrested,” she said in a soft, Spanish-accented voice. “Screw enough johns and one of them is bound to be an undercover cop. Then we can ask the police for help.”

  Mess shook her head. “Oh, girl, the cops won’t believe one word you say. They’ll lock you up for the night, then your pimp will come and spring you. Then he’ll beat your ass for causing him the inconvenience.”

  “But most of us aren’t even eighteen,” Pillow protested. “I’m just sixteen. If I tell them—”

  “If you tell them, they won’t do shit,” Sugar interrupted. “They’ll say you’re lying about your age so you don’t have to be in jail. They’ll call you a dirty whore. And when your pimp comes to get you, they’ll think you probably deserve the beating you’re gonna get. Girl, cops are not your friend. Getting arrested isn’t gonna be your salvation.”

  “We just need to stick together,” Mess told her. “Look out for each other. Try to protect each other as best as we can. It’s not so bad. As long as we help each other out, we’ll be okay.”

  “Not so bad?” Sugar laughed. “Standing on a corner and picking up five or six guys a night isn’t so bad. Being stuck in a room and spreading ’em for twenty to forty a day is the meaning of bad. We’ll be lucky if we can walk by the time they’re done with us.”

  Kitten caught her breath and Mess tried to shush Sugar.

  “What?” The blonde girl scowled. “I’m just telling it like it is.”

  I frowned in confusion. “So they’re going to prostitute us out? We’re going to be in some kind of sex ring?”

  Sugar nodded. “Damn right. They’ll stick u
s in a room and advertise us on a few internet sites. On the street, we did maybe five guys a night. We had a quota, but it was mostly just a money quota, not a guy quota. You could pick and choose who you wanted and what you’d do. Some girls went all basic and they’d need to do more to make the quota. Others would do kink and not have to screw as many guys to earn out.”

  “Most pimps take a cut, but there’s a minimum you have to give them each night,” Mess told me. “The more you pay, the less chance you’ve got of getting beat.”

  “These sex rings are worse,” Sugar added. “Like I said, get ready for twenty to forty guys a day. You don’t get to keep no money. You don’t get to pick and choose who you screw or what you let them do to you. We’re all whores now—the worst kind of whores.”

  “I’m not a prostitute,” Pistol argued, the sharp edge of panic in her voice. “This is a mistake. I’m in college. I have a family, and friends. I’m not a prostitute. I won’t do it. I’ll just refuse and fight them. They can’t make me have sex with a bunch of random guys.”

  Sugar laughed. “They can make you. Beat you enough, starve you enough, and you’ll be happy to have sex with random guys. Look at Tasha back there. You think she wouldn’t blow some nasty-ass guy to keep from having her arm broke, her face beat, and some stick shoved up her again? A few bruises and you’ll fall in line and do as they say. We all will.”

  Pistol glared at her. “Guys won’t want to have sex with a beat-up woman, or a starved one. I’ll refuse. I’ll fight. I’m not going to be a prostitute, no matter what happens.”

  Mess eyed her sadly. “Hon, the kind of guys who we’ll be servicing don’t care if you’re bruised or got your ribs showing. They just want to screw a girl, and some of them might want to add a bruise or two to your collection. Fight all you want, but in the end same thing will happen. It’ll just hurt worse.”

  I caught my breath, trying to comprehend what Sugar and Mess were saying about our future—about my future. Grabbed by a prostitution ring. Runaways, girls-on-the-corner, girls lured from their country with the promise of a job… With the exception of Pistol, they all seemed to be high-risk. I guess I was high-risk too, as an addict. I didn’t want to imagine what kind of bottom-barrel prostitution ring this was that they scooped an ODing junkie off the street to sell. “Why me?” I asked, half to myself.

  “Why’d you get nabbed?” Sugar snorted. “Damned if I know why they’d want a junkie. Well, actually I do know. You’re gorgeous, even with the weird hair you’ve got going on. Your face…your skin…you’re beautiful under all the vomit and track marks. That’s probably the only reason they’d take a chance on buying a girl who might die before we got wherever we’re going.”

  I looked back down at the smooth, clear, flawless skin, glowing with a pearlescent sheen. Rotating my arm, I didn’t see any sign of the track marks. I didn’t see a freckle, a mole, a scar, or anything beyond smooth flesh and a dusting of fine hair so pale that it blended in with the skin.

  “You are beautiful,” Kitten said, shyly reaching out to touch my hair. “Like a mermaid. Like an angel. So beautiful.”

  “Don’t go getting all lezzy on us,” Sugar told her. “It’s gross enough in here without having to watch a bunch of carpet munchers go at it. Save that shit for later.”

  “How’d you get your hair that color?” Pistol asked, eyeing me curiously. “I need to freshen mine every week to keep it blue like this, and red is even harder—especially that color of red. You look like a cardinal, a red bird, turned into a human. All you need is a set of wings to go with that red hair.”

  I reached up to touch the knotted mess that was pulled back into a low, disordered bun and wished I had a mirror. Realizing how long the tresses were in their elastic, I yanked a lock free and pulled it in front of my face.

  It was red. Red as in not-seen-in-nature red. Well, not-seen-on-a-human-head nature anyway. As Pistol had said, my hair was the color of a cardinal’s wing. Bright, bright red.

  I’d clearly dyed it at some point, and recently if what Pistol said was true. What color was under the dye? I wondered why I’d chosen this particular shade of red. Given the color of the hair on my arm, I assumed that I was a natural blonde. Maybe I’d felt too monochrome with that hair color. Maybe I’d wanted something shocking to stand out in a life where I felt I’d never been noticed.

  Maybe it had been on sale at the drugstore and I’d figured what the heck?

  “Where do you think we’re going?” I asked, my voice still raspy from the vomiting and dehydration, and lack of use.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sugar told me. “When the truck stops, we’ll be herded out, cleaned up, chained to a bed, and sold like a piece of meat until we’re not worth paying to screw anymore. If we’re lucky, they’ll drug us to make it all bearable.”

  Kitten choked back a sob and turned her head, her shoulders shaking.

  “Cut it out. You made your point earlier. No need to keep harping on it, scaring all the girls.” Mess made a tsk noise and glared at Sugar as she put an arm around the other girl.

  Sugar shrugged. “There’s one reason girls like us get grabbed up, and that’s to make a bunch of money for someone as sex slaves. Those foreign girls won’t know how to escape, and the rest of us, except for the blue-haired college princess there, won’t have anything to escape to. When this truck stops, we’re just gonna have to spread our legs and survive as best as we can.”

  “Stop it.” Mess pulled Kitten into her arms, hugging her tight. “Just stop.”

  “There’s no escape for us,” Sugar continued. “None.”

  “No,” Pillow protested, the word rolling with her Spanish accent. “We can escape. We can always escape. It’s better on the streets on our own than living with someone who…” Her voice trailed off and my heart lurched as I mentally completed the rest of her sentence.

  “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Pistol said, eyeing the other girls huddled in the back of the truck. “We don’t know. There’s no reason to go scaring everyone and panicking ourselves here. Because we don’t know.”

  The look on her face said she did know what was going to happen, and her vision of her future was the same as Sugar’s.

  As for me, I doubted we’d be carted around in the back of a box truck for the rest of our lives. There had to be something planned for us, and I was pretty sure it would be unsavory. I might not remember anything beyond yesterday, but some time in my life I’d clearly read enough news to know a human trafficking operation when I saw one. I looked down at where the scars on my arms had once been. I didn’t feel any incredible cravings, only grief and guilt, but I’d seen those scars when I’d first woken. And I knew in my heart why, if not how, I’d woken up here. Penance. I needed to repent, to make amends for a past I couldn’t remember.

  No matter who I’d been or what I’d done, I needed to atone. And I had a feeling that here, with these eight women, was where I was going to make amends. Here, with them, was my chance for redemption.

  Chapter 2

  The truck eventually rumbled to life. We braced as it bumped through whatever remote parking area we’d been in and sped up onto a main road. The light inside the truck faded as day slid into night, and we slept fitfully to the swaying, bumping motion. When dawn came we were still moving, our filthy water and loaf of bread long gone. By the time it started to become uncomfortably hot, the truck slowed, bounced over what were either speed bumps or some serious potholes, then jerked to a stop. We sat, sweltering in the heat, inhaling the wafting odor of our excrement and sweat as we waited. When our captors finally rolled open the back of the truck bed, we were blinded by the unfamiliar bright light.

  When my vision adjusted, I saw we’d driven into a huge distribution-warehouse sort of building. It was one cavernous, open space with what looked like a stage against one wall, racks of folded metal chairs next to it. Along another wall were doors and shuttered windows—offices perhaps. The other wall was just one huge block of
cement, a soda machine humming in the corner. I wasn’t about to turn around and see what was behind me, but I envisioned a row of bay doors.

  Three men stood outside the truck next to the two drivers who’d tossed the water and bread in to us. None of us so much as twitched. We were like rabbits, holding very very still in hopes the wolves at the door didn’t notice us.

  “Damn, Serge. You testing our ability to make diamonds from coal or something?” A man took a step closer. He was short and built like an elongated triangle with broad shoulders and narrow hips. Acne scars divoted his cheeks like pockmarks. His face twisted as he got a whiff of the inside of the truck.

  “They’re just dirty,” one of the drivers said. “They’ll clean up nice. King picked ’em out himself. Look, we even got a really young one. I’ll bet she’s a virgin too.”

  Mess moved to stand protectively in front of Kitten. I heard Pillow inhale sharply.

  “Well, let’s get them out of this truck and see what we’ve got.” Pockmarks stepped back and rubbed his palms together. The small door near the front of the truck opened and we were trapped, the two drivers herding us forward with broom-handle sticks. There were no steps to climb out of the truck, so we each knelt and hopped down unaided, stumbling and falling as the three guys laughed.

  None of us had eaten more than a few pieces of bread, and we were all seriously dehydrated and shaky. One of the women who’d been huddled up front the entire ride, a tiny Asian girl who didn’t look a day over fifteen, tripped climbing out of the truck and fell. Her skirt slid up around her waist, and as she stood tugging it down, blood ran from a cut on her knee.

  The heat was oppressive—dry as the hard cement we stood on. Pillow swayed next to me, and I put out a hand to steady her, even though I could barely stay upright myself. The three men looked us over while behind us I heard the drivers closing up the truck.

  “Yeah, they’ll do,” Pockmarks said to Serge as the drivers rejoined them. “They all under eighteen?”