by Schow, Ryan
“My guys are clean and vetted,” the foreman said. His name was Vladimir, and though he was Russian, his American accent was perfect.
Vladimir seemed to have an eye for Harper.
“Come see what we’re doing, Harper,” Vladimir said.
“Okay,” she replied.
Inside the barn, most of the workers were framing out the rooms, meaning nails were getting hammered, and guys were talking about this and that. Then there were the electricians and their power drills. These guys were running holes through the length of exposed two-by-fours. In the center of the barn was a big bundle of wiring.
Vladimir was not in Harper’s league, but he wasn’t picture perfect, either. He was strong looking and confident, most of the real estate on his body toned from hard work and most certainly a minuscule diet.
Where she wondered if he was interested in her before, now she was sure he wasn’t. With Connor outside, Vlad looked at her like he’d look at a door knob, or a sack of feed. Her mood began to plummet. He’d only been polite to her for Connor’s sake. Now he was walking her around because he felt he had to.
“Connor said you’re going to be living here,” he said without pretense. “Is that right?”
“At first it’ll just be me,” she said, reserved, “but there will be others later.”
“I’m going to make you safe in here, but also, we’re going for a bit of luxury at the same time.”
“I’m more interested in safety.”
“Skylar wants you comfortable, too. She says that’s important.”
“I appreciate that.”
He studied her, probing her eyes, and then he said, “You realize most shelters are sparse, tight and uncomfortable, right?”
“I do.”
“This won’t be that,” he said, looking for some enthusiasm.
“Like I said, Vladimir, I appreciate that.”
“Please,” he said, “call me Vlad.”
“Okay.”
“Who are you?” he finally asked when the tour was over.
She felt some heat steal into her cheeks, but she reminded herself he was doing this more for Connor and Skylar than for her.
“I’m a nobody,” she said.
Laughing, he replied, “I doubt that. Listen, I have to get to work. If you need anything, or any of the guys bug you, just let me know.”
“I haven’t been bugged in a long time,” she said.
“If you need help with that,” he joked, “just let me know. But don’t tell Connor.”
She stared at him and he stared back. What was that? She didn’t say buggered. Did she just offer herself up for sex? Did he just offer?
“Okay, then,” he said.
“Okay.”
With that, he went back to work.
Instead of walking past everyone and feeling that moment of being seen replaced with that moment of being ignored, she left through the barn’s back door. Out there she saw Connor walking the raised beds with Stephani.
“Oh, hey!” Connor said. “Come check these out.”
There were eight very long planter beds all with fresh topsoil. The soil stunk of chicken manure and compost, two vital ingredients for plant growth. At least that’s what she understood from reading about how vegetables were grown.
She hadn’t had a fresh vegetable in years. Well, not until she’d arrived and had a few of Orbey’s meals. Now she wanted to seed the soil, water it and watch something grow.
Reaching down into the wood-framed planter bed, she took a handful of soil, brought it to her nose and smelled it. A smile crept over her face as she parted her fingers and let the soil sift through the gaps. She finally dumped the rest back into the planter box and said, “When do we start dropping seeds?”
“You got a whole bucket of ‘em,” Stephani said, “so let’s go figure out what you’d like to eat.”
Before they left, one of the guys came out front, scooped some water out of a nearby wash bucket and dumped it over his head.
Harper looked at his body, unconcerned with the plainness of his face, and she felt something stirring in her. It wasn’t lust, or need. It was just…she didn’t see this back in San Francisco.
This was what freedom used to feel like.
When he looked up and caught her staring at him, her eyes darted away and she felt embarrassed.
Back at the house, she and Stephani emptied the seed packs from the bucket and began sorting through them. Connor got in the mix, moving the out-of-season seeds to the right and the in-season seeds toward her and Stephani.
That’s when Stephani said, “Time to pick your meals, girl.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Skylar Madigan tried to open her eyes, but the blood had crusted her lids shut, making it difficult to see. Her face was pressed into something hard, but with a cold, polished surface. She started to move, but stopped abruptly.
Good God, it hurt!
She tried to move, slower this time, but she heard crinkling, like plastic being rustled about. When she finally worked her eyes open, she realized that sound was a plastic bag pulled loosely over her head. With her neck cranked sideways and her vision obscured, the pain in her face and body gave way to fear, and then to terror. Sucking it up, she flexed her body, trying to figure out if anything was broken, or even where she was. The first thing she realized was that her hands were bound together.
Something bit into her wrists.
Zip-ties?
Moving like a mermaid, her heels found purchase. She wiggled her head loose of the plastic bag finding she was in a porcelain bathtub stained red with what she imagined was her own blood.
Even worse, she was stripped naked.
She continued flexing and inching her body to a more manageable location in the tub. So far, nothing was broken, she had no fatal wounds, and now…now her memory was coming back.
She’d been getting dressed in the closet of the Minister of Propaganda’s hideaway apartment (“My wife doesn’t know about it,” he’d said.) when someone clubbed her over the head.
She’d gone to a knee, but then she turned to her attacker and that’s when the second blow rained down on her head.
This explained the blood. The indescribable migraine headache. The woozy feeling swirling through her.
She fought the urge to cry.
What had they done to her face? It felt punched, the flesh tight and swollen, her head a throbbing ache that just wouldn’t quit. That sob she’d been holding back snuck up on her and got loose. The brief hitch was an admission of the situation she was in.
Because she did not cry.
How had this even happened? She’d been careful. Meticulous.
She heard the man coming before he actually got there. When he arrived in the oversized bathroom, she looked up at him through a pained stare, aware she wasn’t shielding the terror in her eyes. She was too afraid of what was coming next to worry about posturing.
“Wakey, wakey,” the man said in a Chinese accent.
She squeezed her thighs together to cover her privates. She wanted to cover her breasts, too, but twisting and straining against the hard plastic binding around her wrist would only cut her. He looked down at her with a sneer and eyes that gently swept up the length of her body.
When you’re someone’s prisoner, there are no rules and nothing is off limits. This she knew. That’s why she stopped struggling. There was no room for modesty.
The man bent over, his big hand reaching for her. What was he doing? A dozen grisly deaths shot through her mind as she started to squeal. The possibilities hit her hard, the rush of them unrelenting.
What could happen to her now…it was so much worse than before.
With a roughness you reserve for the worst of people, he hauled her out of the tub, her hip bone and ankle knocking painfully on the side of the tub.
Where before there was fear, now there was a little fight. The blood pumped back into her body and she grimaced as he stood her on her feet. Loo
king down at her, he smiled again. She wasn’t a natural beauty, but she’d worked on her body through years of training, through years of fighting whatever and whomever she could.
Now she needed to fight, but she could not move her legs, and she could not move her arms. The slight struggle had her swaying this way and that, and then she wobbled a little too far to the left and had to hop not to fall over.
He walked around the back of her, taking his time to appraise her. She expected the lewd comments, the grabbing hands, the probing fingers. Instead, without warning, he kicked her in the butt, jarring her whole body. She was pitched forward, careening into the bed. She hit the sides with her thighs, then collapsed face first onto the mattress.
Straining to get up, her hands bound and useless, all she could do was lift her neck enough to look around and recognize the room.
It was the Minister of Propaganda’s bedroom.
Lying on the bed with this man behind her, this man she couldn’t see, she felt so incredibly exposed. Seconds passed and she didn’t feel herself being violated. She prayed to God it would remain that way. Rather than feeling any kind of assurances by God, she was overwhelmed by the feeling that nothing would ever be the same.
“I like this view of you,” the man said in broken Chinese.
“Really?” she said with hate-induced heat to her voice. “Because the Minister told me you were a cocksucker.”
“Not me,” he said, getting closer.
By now they must know what she’d found, although they wouldn’t know how she found it. She heard the man retreating and breathed a sigh of relief. Back in the bathroom, she heard him taking a leak. She was thinking of ways to escape when she heard a door open and then close. Someone else was about to join them. A new man walked into the room. He was of slight stature and he bore a calm demeanor.
“Hello, Skylar,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“A little exposed.”
“That’s because you are naked.”
“I appreciate you keeping me up on current events,” she said.
He smiled softly, a kind smile. He was dressed well, and handsome. This scared her. Men like this had charm and charisma, but they were also sadists, and unrelenting. He had a briefcase with him. She glanced down and imagined these were tools of his trade. Was his trade torture?
She didn’t know.
“She has a couple of head wounds, that’s it,” the bigger man from earlier said after flushing the toilet and returning to the bedroom.
“Has she been violated?” the handsome Chinese man asked.
“Had I known this was an option,” he said in slippery tones, “perhaps I would have been more…forthright.”
“He’s into other men, don’t let him fool you,” she told the new guy in a jovial, taunting tone. “Get it? Into other men?”
The man smiled again. In his eyes, there was compassion. It would not be reserved for her, and she knew this, for behind this façade she saw something dark squirming. Would he unleash this for her? Was he going to be the one to violate her, break her, kill her?
“I’d like to know who you work for,” the man said.
“We all work together,” she said. “There is no leader of the Resistance. We are all Resistance.”
He nodded thoughtfully. Setting down the briefcase, he stepped closer to her, sat on the bed with her. She had her head laying on the bed facing him. Delicately, he brushed a strand of hair from her face, tucked it over her ear.
“When I first came to this country, I found all of you so…ugly. You all looked alike to me. You were all just Gweilos. White insects I begrudgingly had to deal with.”
“We used to have this thing about racists, you know,” she said. “They spoke like you. It was sick.”
“The easiest way to divide people is through cultural and ideological differences. That and the power of words. Language can bring sophistication to people, or it can tear them apart if weaponized. Your country is proof of that.”
“Your pretty face is just a mask,” she said. “There are demons inside of you.”
“Indeed there are,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Two years ago I would never have done that. Put my lips to a face like yours. But I respect you. So many in your country have taken a knee, two knees. So many of you have chosen to lick the boots of minions in an attempt to be spared, to be…overlooked. That kind of weakness is responsible for my low opinion of your kind. But then I found you. People like you. Resistance.”
“Ask me what you want and I’ll tell you what I know. After that, do your best. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than this.”
Sitting up, he said, “I like you already.” Then, looking at her bare back, he said, “I see that you are not afraid to take a beating.” She felt him trace his fingers down her scars, down the areas where cigarettes had been put out on her back.
“Get her a towel please,” the man said. Then to her, he said, “Do you have any clothes?”
“I do.”
“Perhaps after all this, we can get you back into them. It must be dreadfully uncomfortable like this.”
“It is.”
He stood, walked around her, traced his finger down her side, across her butt check, into her center, then across the other butt cheek where he wiped his finger dry.
She swallowed hard, fought back the tears.
“I never could get an erection over your kind,” he said matter-of-fact, moving around the other side of the bed. “The Minister of Propaganda is a powerful position.”
“It is,” she said, hiding the tremors in her voice and turning her head.
He dragged his finger down the side of her face. It was the one he’d slipped inside her. The revulsion crawled through her unbidden.
“That’s why having such a position compromised by a beaten Gweilo seemed preposterous to me. I asked myself, what self-respecting gentleman would carry on with a dog like that? I asked myself how weak a man must be to abandon his own standards and sink so far as to share the same bed as a Christian, one as plain as you.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel better about myself, it’s working.”
“Have you seen the Minister’s wife?”
“I have not.”
“She’s a wonderful woman. Strengthened only by the sacrifices she’s made, not only in coming to America, but in being an official’s wife. You cannot understand the forfeits a woman like that must agree to.”
“I have an idea.”
“You lay there, his seed still in you, not an ounce of respectability to be found.”
“I didn’t beat the hell out of myself, strip naked and crawl into a tub. I didn’t bind my wrists or bend myself over this bed. And what about you? You are sophisticated and well spoken, yet you shove your finger in a dog’s twat and talk about respect. Whatever it is you want from me, let’s get on with it already. I’m tired of listening to your voice. It reminds me of everything I hate about your government.”
“I want to know who you work for,” he said.
“I told you already.”
“Specifics are better, Ms. Madigan.”
“What is your name?”
“You may call me Renshu,” he said. “But only if you cooperate. If you do not, you will only scream for mercy.”
“Okay, Renshu,” she said. “You are asking me the wrong questions. The better question would be, what do I know? Because when it comes to structure, or hierarchy—if you prefer—I will tell you this. We are not like you. We are purposely different. That means, whatever I know, and it’s merely a server location, begins and ends with me.”
“You ordered food to a place you would not be.”
“I owe my roommate food because I cannot pay rent. It’s an unspoken agreement. Plus it’s a bit of a joke.”
“I hardly find any of this funny,” he said.
The beastly man returned with a towel that he laid over the back of her so that her privates were not exposed. Already s
he felt better.
“What’s funny is how much he hates your people’s food. But I love it, so I’m trying to indoctrinate him. Surely you understand.”
He took the towel off her back, rolled it up, then crawled over the top of her and slipped it roughly under her face then around her neck. Putting a knee in her back, he pulled tight, then crossed the ends over to flatten her Carotid arteries.
The strain on her neck and head was violent, dizzying. Just when she felt herself passing out, he let go.
“I would like specifics,” he said again, that voice so dreamy, so…unbecoming of his actions.
“I have a few things I’d like to say about you people,” she started to say, but then he tightened the towel again, cranking it up with all his might.
The closing of her throat, the smashing tight of her Carotid arteries, the bulging of her eyes, it all scared her. She was prepared to die, to even endure more torture, but now that it was happening, there was nothing joyous or heroic about it.
He finally let go, her head dropping down into the bedsheets.
“This is all fun and games, Ms. Madigan. But in that briefcase there are pliers. There are clippers. The kind that take off fingers, nipples, clitorises. Would you like to keep all your body parts?”
Standing up, he ripped the towel out the side of her neck, burning the skin. He began to take off his belt.
“My daddy used to whip me, too,” she said, imagining he was going to choke her to death with the belt.
“I bet he did.”
“He was always trying to get me to do things his way.”
“Turn her over,” Renshu said to his goon.
The big man grabbed her, flipped her over on her back and gave Renshu the room he needed. His eyes were roving, fixating, growing wide and shrinking.
“You changing your mind about girls?” she asked in a low voice.
The first whip came down on her ribs. The sting had her gripping. With her wrists bound behind her back, she was defenseless. The next whip was to her privates. Humiliation didn’t even weigh in at that point. The pain was unbearable.
“That’s enough!” a man said, entering the room.
It was the Minister himself.
