It all turned out the same for everyone. Even the strong died. And what then? Likely nothing. Just this pointless cruelty and suffering with no reason to it. As we drove farther from the shopping center, I mourned…not my life, but the lost potential of people in general.
We were smart. We were innovative. We could have made a better world. Or a better city. We could have found it within ourselves to be kind without light shining on our faces or harsh punishments to deter us, but instead, we did this.
Well, I didn’t do it. I was one of the victims. But then I thought about the lady at the front of the line, and how I had briefly fantasized about hurting her.
Now that I’d been taken, I didn’t have to pretend. The fatigue of trying to keep going had stripped me bare bit by bit. The weight of my sister’s well-being fell and crumpled at my feet as my imagined power to protect her slipped away.
If she could just make it until morning, she’d have enough time to make a friend—someone she could trust who’d help her survive longer if that’s what she still wanted. Maybe she wore the same mask I did. Maybe her continual insistence of striking out and looking for another city was just another death wish in disguise.
Like me going to the pharmacy when I knew from the depths of my being that I wouldn’t make it back in time—no matter how I might have lied to myself or Simone to get there.
Sitting in that unknown car, everything felt sharp and clear and solid for the first time in a long time.
“We’re here.”
I looked up to see a large, elegant house. What struck me immediately was the aesthetic. It wasn’t the cold, sterile silver and white and glass and metal that seemed to be everyone else’s favorite design scheme. It wasn’t an architecture of smooth planes and sharp corners.
It was hard to tell the color in the dark, but it was warm. Everywhere I looked, the building held a curve or flourish of some sort, carved marble or stone with gargoyles that stared down at me. Was this what it was like for those who didn’t live in fear? They were afforded the luxury of frivolous creative expression?
My house with Simone was small and utilitarian. The fewer flourishes, the better. The fewer exits or windows, the easier to guard. Everything was fireproof, anyway. Nobody needed more than one door. Why give potential intruders more entry points?
This house was nothing but entry points. Huge windows. Endless doors. A thousand ways to get in and probably no way to get out. I imagined the house sucking me inside it and becoming a solid wall with no possible escape. A big, inviting coffin.
The guy got out of the car and came around to my side. He was nondescript, like background noise to somebody else’s world. He pulled me out and dragged me up to the house. It didn’t occur to me to struggle or run. He was bigger. He was faster. My hands weren’t even free. And it was night. Hundreds of other creepy crawly opportunists lay in wait out here in the dark. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.
Inside, the house was just as alien as outside. It was a place that stood removed from time and space altogether. There was no sign of the technologies I’d grown so used to. I couldn’t even find a countdown clock. Everybody had a countdown clock. I was sure the technology was there, hidden and operating just under the surface; but it wasn’t visible to me.
The man took me down a long, dimly lit hallway and into a room close to the end. The room had an enormous fireplace crackling against one wall. It wasn’t an artificial fireplace like most houses had. It was real. It burned wood. Nobody burned wood anymore. It was odd because this house definitely seemed flammable to me.
Heavy ruby-colored drapes hung over a giant window. Even with the curtains closed, it felt exposed and unsafe. There were several overstuffed sofas along the walls leaving a huge open space in the middle of the room as if he constantly held lavish parties. A shiny black piano stood on one side of the room.
That was when I noticed the other man. I don’t think I noticed him before because he was still and perfect like a sculpture.
He sat in an enormous throne-like chair studying a book. I don’t know how I knew that. Our books were all on screens—when any of us bothered to read. Where had I seen a real book before? This guy loved to waste resources. Wood-burning fires. Paper in books. I wondered if this stuff he owned was only legal at night like everything else.
“Sir,” the man holding me said.
He looked up. “Santo. You’re back. That was fast.”
“The first one is always the easiest to catch,” Santo said. “Yes or no on this one.”
This one was me.
“Bring her closer.” The man in the chair closed the book and set it on the table beside him. He took a sip of an amber liquid in a glass and set it back down as well, the ice gently clinking.
Santo obliged him and dragged me closer.
“Shoes!” he shouted.
“I’m sorry, sir. This one has thrown me off. She hasn’t spoken.”
“Is she mute?”
He shook his head. “She had a conversation at the pharmacy.” He let go of my arm and eased back slowly as if waiting for me to run and scream.
I waited for the same thing, but I couldn’t. Without Simone, the whole sad charade of my life crumbled apart, and the stark depths of my malaise became clear to me.
When I didn’t bolt from the room, Santo took his shoes off, then he bent and took mine as well.
“We don’t wear shoes in the house,” the man said as if this should be obvious to anybody.
Everybody I’d ever met wore shoes in the house. Of course, their houses had concrete floors, so there was hardly a reason to not wear them. The floor here was made of polished wood, and there were rugs scattered about the room. Some were tightly textured. Others looked thick and soft, as if the entire floor was meant to be a tactile experience for anyone who walked across it.
Santo took my arm again and brought me closer to the man in the chair. My feet sank into one of the thicker, softer rugs. It unbalanced me. Standing this close to him, I barely breathed.
He rose from the chair, towering over me. He had dark brown hair and light green eyes. Sharp, perfect features. Elegant hands and feet. I closed my eyes and imagined him wrapping those hands around my throat and squeezing until everything stopped, and I could have peace. Finally.
“I think there’s something wrong with her,” Santo said. “I can get rid of her.”
I almost laughed at the very idea that there was something wrong with me in this scenario.
I opened my eyes again when a hand pressed against my cheek.
“No.” He watched me like one might watch an animal in a cage. “I’ll take her. Bring me more. Our guests will begin arriving soon.”
“Yes, sir.” Santo collected his shoes and left, shutting the door behind him.
It was quiet for a long time. I stood watching him while he watched me. If you’d stumbled upon the scene without any understanding of how our world worked, you might not have known which of us was the prey.
The man moved closer, invading my space. I’d hoped for some out-of-control savage who would give me a quick death. I could convince myself in those last moments that it wasn’t my fault for leaving Simone in this world with no family. What choice had I had? He was bigger. Stronger. Brutal. Blood-thirsty.
Suicide by villain.
But he seemed intent to flip that script. He might kill me, but he appeared more interested in other things. Great. I couldn’t run into a random killer?
I’d sat in the bathroom on so many occasions when the sky was suffused with so much light, holding a razor just over the skin on my wrist. But in the end, I never had the strength to just…press down. I could never bring myself to end it. Whether it was some internal weakness in my own character or guilt over leaving Simone to fend for herself, I couldn’t be sure. But being taken removed the burden from my hands and gave me a real possibility of escape. I just had to make them angry enough to lose control and spoil their plan.
He took my
bound hands in his, interlacing our fingers and raised my arms, then he pushed back until I was forced onto my knees on the soft, thick rug.
“Stay,” he said, as if I were his dog. He moved back to the chair he’d been in minutes ago when my arrival had taken him out of his book. He didn’t look much older than me. He was fit and clearly wealthy—not just from the immense house, but from how he obviously ate well and didn’t have any stress lines on his face. His was a life of the sort of comfort I could only imagine.
“You are my slave until morning. My name is Gabriel, but you will call me Master. You will address anyone I share you with by that title as well—or Mistress as the case may be.”
Another long gasp of silence, punctuated by the crackling flames.
“Do you understand?”
He wanted me to say “Yes, Master”, or cry or plead for mercy. I couldn’t even feel the fire only feet away. I was cold. Dead already. A mere ghost wandering the halls, still obsessed with the goings on of the living, tied here by the unfinished business of Simone.
“Do you understand?” he repeated more sharply.
I could give him continued silence or active defiance, but the one thing he wouldn’t get was my obedience. Obedience meant life would just keep chugging forward. This cycle of freedom and imprisonment, safety and fear. One couldn’t even enjoy the peace and safety of the day anymore because of the looming and impending night and all the imagined horrors it could contain. It was easy enough for him, but why should I be forced to keep existing in this world where everything revolved around the strong, and the weak were only given the pretense of fairness?
“Answer your master,” he said. He was so smug that I wished the night belonged to me and not him, that I could strip him away piece by piece until he was quivering and begging at my feet like he hoped I would at his.
“Fuck you,” I said. This guy was my razor blade... if I could just press a little harder.
“So…not mute? Wonderful.” More stillness and silence. More waiting as if the night was infinite instead of a ticking clock that moved toward day at the same speed it moved toward night. “Do you know how lucky you are?”
I laughed. I wanted to dig my fingernails into his face and leave marks that would forever say I was here, destroying his neat and tidy world for perhaps the first time in his memory.
He continued as if I hadn’t made a sound. “If you obey us, we will be good to you. We will feed you well and clothe you and keep you safe and warm. We won’t torture or kill you. This will just be an event in your life, and then you will go home alive and well when day arrives. You could have been taken by anyone with any plan or motive. You could have been stabbed and left for dead by someone less civilized than me.”
I glared up at him from the ground. “Does that speech normally get applause?”
He shrugged.
“And what if I refuse?”
“If you refuse, it will be a long and painful night for you.”
“I’ll take the pain.” I’ll take anything that feels like something. I could no longer wander the halls of this endless limbo where everything felt numb and like a long vast nothing, where I lacked the energy to do the most basic things for myself anymore.
When I didn’t go back home, when Simone maybe died, it would still be my fault because I went out into the night knowing I wouldn’t be back.
“What is your name?”
More demands. My name. My identity. Something else he could shred in his perfect hands like some bored house cat.
“Fuck you, Gabriel.”
He raised an eyebrow, but that was the extent of my affect on him. “Santo has your identification papers. He will deliver them to me when he returns. It’s pointless to withhold information.” He pulled me up off the carpet by the cuffs that bound my wrists together. Without a word, he led me out of the room and up an immaculate, gleaming staircase.
He opened a door on the right side of the hallway and flipped a switch. The room was as beautiful and comfortable as the one we’d just left.
“I am not Gabriel to you,” he said. “Address me properly, and I will let you stay in this room.”
Was that really such a fantastic offer to the others who came here that they would allow themselves to be further controlled?
“No. You aren’t my master. You’ll never own me. You can fuck off and die for all I care,” I said.
His grip on my arm tightened. He was already losing control. Good. He thought he would break me? He thought he could continue in his game of mercy and civility? I would tear away his mask to reveal the cruel monster beneath. I would shatter his delusions. I would hold up a mirror to force him to see his fucked-up reflection. He had no idea what he’d taken off the street. Without Simone, I had nothing left to lose.
“Very well,” he said. “But remember, you’re the one who chose the hard way.”
But had I? The easy way was being his slave? From the moment I’d opened my eyes on this world, I’d been a slave to it and all its fucked-up rules—to its nightly anarchy and the cage of polite civility I was restrained by daily. And I hadn’t considered that the easy way.
Gabriel took me back downstairs, past the room we’d just been in, and down another flight of stairs to an area underground that was much darker and plainer. Its impressiveness lay not in expensive furnishings, but in its finality.
He pushed me into a room that could only be described as a cell. I imagined it was like the cells in the unused prisons—the places meant to intimidate and scare the good people because the bad people only had to be patient to take whatever they wanted without much consequence.
“Santo will deal with you when he returns.”
“Because you’re too weak and cowardly?” I taunted. “You don’t get your hands dirty? Santo does the kidnapping. Santo does the violence. You get to pretend you’re extending some warped mercy for those of us stupid enough to be out so close to night, or those too poor to have strong security systems to keep them safe.”
“You may not know it yet, my defiant one, but you are mine…at least for a time. When you understand that, you will kneel at my feet and thank me for sparing you the fate you might have been subject to.”
He withdrew a key from his pocket and unlocked the cuffs on my wrists.
With my hands free, I turned and ripped the small mattress off the cot and threw it at him. He dodged it, then picked it up and tossed it out into the hallway.
“Sleep on the cold floor then.” Gabriel locked me in the room and left.
***
I don’t know how much time passed before the door opened. I’d stupidly left my portable countdown clock at home.
It was Santo. “Come with me,” he said.
“No.” I’d already decided I wouldn’t do a single thing willingly here. If they wanted to kidnap and harm me, they could do it without my participation.
I was sure others brought here would cower and obey and hope for mercy. They were afraid of pain and death. Death seemed to me like a welcome breath of crisp fresh air. And I wasn’t sure if I could feel pain anymore. It would have to penetrate the layers and layers of numbness that had wrapped around me hour by hour as the countdown clocks ticked relentlessly on. Toward day or toward night, it didn’t matter anymore. The point was that they ticked, and as long as they did, any freedom was an illusion.
Santo was not deterred by my willfulness. He grabbed my arm and dragged me from the room. We went further down the hall into another cell. This one had been made for punishment, not sleeping. A dungeon.
He shut the door behind him and stood between me and the exit. “I don’t know why you’re resisting us.”
“Oh gee, I can’t imagine,” I said.
He stared at me hard. “Look, Gabriel sent me down here to punish you. I won’t stop until you give in to our demands. You’ll suffer less if you just obey him.”
“You know nothing of my suffering. You know nothing about what it’s like to live in this hell-hole the P
owers That Be created—when it doesn’t benefit you.”
He looked almost sad. It was a commendable performance. As if he didn’t want to hurt me. If he didn’t want to, he could abstain. Maybe Gabriel would hurt or kill him if he didn’t carry out the order. Maybe Santo was a slave, too. But I couldn’t imagine Gabriel doing any dirty work himself. How he’d managed to have this house and so much power was beyond me. If he couldn’t inflict violence on his own, he seemed easy enough to overthrow. Santo could probably even do it on his own without much trouble.
“So you refuse to comply?”
“Do your worst.” If he thought I’d feel sorry for him, he was mad. Everyone has a choice. If I—someone already determined to be weak and pathetic—could choose pain over compliance, then what kind of sniveling coward was he?
He pushed me to a padded wall with shackles coming out of it. The padding seemed out of place under the circumstances.
“Undress.”
“No.” It filled me with a grim sort of glee that he was so used to frightened obedience that he didn’t seem to have spent much time actively doing violence, forcing things from unwilling victims who wouldn’t at least meet him halfway. Every time I spoke the word “no,” I felt his resolve crumble.
I had already chosen my course. As if I’d submit to anything at this point. Santo didn’t seem capable of even being a proper monster. Of what use was he to me if he couldn’t lose control and kill me? I wanted him to open the door between here and the other side and shove me through to the peace of nothing or the hope of something better.
But I could already see that he didn’t have the nerve.
He was fucking incompetent.
Santo left the cell and closed and locked the door behind him. A while later, the door opened again, and for the first time since night had fallen, I felt real hope that my whole sad desperate existence could end.
It was a new man. One I hadn’t seen before. There was a dark deadness in his eyes that was familiar. This man would end me. He didn’t reason with me or try to gain my obedience. He didn’t speak at all. Instead, he slammed the door shut and stalked across the room. He ripped the clothes off my body and shackled me to the wall without a moment’s hesitation.