“H-how long have you been here?” How long could anybody be here and still maintain any sense of themselves?
Carmen looked around, as if she expected to find a calendar on the wall. She shrugged and said, “What’s time in a place like this? I don’t know... long enough... so long that I’m afraid they’ll notice I’m not as young as the others anymore, and then I might become one of those stains. You don’t get out of this alive. The only thing you can do is prolong the inevitable and hope they’ve made a mistake out there. Maybe someone is investigating. Maybe they’ll bust down the doors any day and get us out of here.”
It was a very nice thought. And too much to hope that this probably-imaginary sting operation would come to an end in the next few hours.
“Do they speak English? The people running this place?” Julie asked. She knew Aleksei did.
“Most of them do, but except for Dmitri, they speak mostly in Russian. A lot of the time we only know what Manka tells us later. She can understand them, so we hear what she can remember, usually the next day. I’m sure they don’t know she’s Russian. They picked her up in Poland, and her English is so good. You’d think they’d be smart enough to know a lot of these girls speak more than one language. But they are usually careful, and Manka is smart. She looks blank whenever they speak, except reacting to general tone like the other girls. But maybe they’re just playing with us. Maybe they know she understands and tells us later. Maybe it’s all part of their sadistic games. I don’t know. There’s no way out anyway. It doesn’t matter what we know or don’t know.”
Several other girls were using the shower now. Josie had finished first and went and brought a big pile of towels and laid them down outside the range of water splash. Eventually, they’d all showered, including the girls in the bunks right around Julie: Carmen, Umiko, Manka. They all got into bed without a stitch on and pulled the covers over them.
“You don’t sleep in pajamas?” Julie whispered to Carmen who was in the bed next to hers.
“Blanca, this ain’t the spa. They’re not going to spring for sleepwear. The only clothes we get is what we fuck the clients in and what we clean the house in.” Carmen’s expression went very dark and hard all of a sudden. “I’d like to slit their motherfucking throats in their sleep. Every night I pray to the virgin. I pray down terror and gunfire on them.”
Carmen was kind of scary. But a good scary. An understandable scary. And a scary that made Julie feel like she wasn’t alone. Somehow she knew this would all be way worse if she were alone.
The door opened, the metal clanking and scraping loudly against the wall.
“Ladies,” an older Russian man said. He was tall and thin and looked out of place as the leader of a prostitution ring, but it was clear he was the leader. The energy and sense of calm resolute power that rose off him was unmistakable.
Aleksei stood behind him and to the right. His eyes immediately found Julie’s, and he smiled. Did he really find this a fitting punishment for being kicked out of the bar? Or had he planned to take her anyway?
Dmitri continued. “The clients have left for the evening. Everyone but Umiko eats.”
“That’s not fair!” Carmen practically snarled. One of the guards stepped out of the line and advanced on her, his hand raised as if prepared to beat her for the outburst.
Dmitri said something in Russian and the guard backed down. “Do you want to eat?” Dmitri asked Carmen.
She was silent. Umiko cried quietly in her bunk.
“I did everything the client wanted,” Umiko said.
“Silence!” Dmitri said. “Everyone but Umiko eats.”
Several men came in with food. Nothing fancy. Mostly sandwiches and things that had come out of cans. They put the food on the ground closest to the door. Then a few more came in with bottles of water.
Slowly the girls got up from their bunks and went to get food and water. There were whistles and taunting in Russian from the guards, but Julie couldn’t see how it would be any less horrible if they were still wearing lingerie. Either way, they were all meat to these men.
Julie stood out conspicuously as the only female in the room who wasn’t naked. She also didn’t make a move toward the food, afraid to call too much attention to herself. Besides, she’d eaten at work. It wasn’t as though she were starving.
Work. Dani’s already seemed like a lifetime and worlds away. It seemed impossible that that life and this one could exist at the same time on the same planet without some complete breakdown of all the laws of physics.
A gentle kind of shock had set in. It would be normal to scream or cry or be defiant, but she had the very strong sense that she wouldn’t survive long if she did any of those things. These guys didn’t need her breathing. They could just drag somebody else in off the street. And as had already been made plain to her by the other girls, nobody was going to be that excited by an American on the menu here.
Julie thought if she was quiet enough she could blend into the background and somehow put off the inevitable. She could barely allow the inevitable to form into words in her head. She tried to tamp down lost virginity and assault. Especially the combination of those two things. And that one ugly word that she couldn’t bring herself to contemplate that unified everything into one searing grisly thought.
But when she pushed away the words, what rushed in to replace them were images. And that was much worse.
Finally Dmitri’s eyes landed on her. “Who is this? Who brought her here?”
There was a long pause. Finally, Aleksei spoke. “I brought her. Her name is Julie. She got me kicked out of the bar she works at.”
Dmitri rounded on him, and suddenly any pretext of refinement dropped from his manner. He began to speak in fast, clipped Russian. Whatever he said was bad enough that the large terrifying man with the snake tattoo on his neck actually shrank back. Then Dmitri backhanded him across the face like a pimp might hit the woman he was abusing.
The other guards chuckled. Aleksei glared, but not at Dmitri. His glare instead landed on Julie.
“Feed her. After everyone eats, bring her upstairs to me.”
Now that she could no longer escape their notice anyway, Julie went to get food and water and took it back to her bunk. The guards watched them as they ate, but after a few minutes in this hellish tension, Julie noticed something strange. When the attention of the guards was turned away for a moment some of the others would hide a bit of food away in their blankets, different women making their move at different times as the guards’ focus swept back and forth over the room like security flood lights. Several girls were doing this. Julie did it, too. Because she was sure it was for the Japanese girl.
The little bits they could squirrel away and the risks no doubt taken, couldn’t keep Umiko well fed, even as tiny as she was, but it would keep her from starving. Carmen saw Julie hide a small bit of her food and smiled and nodded her approval.
Despite the mild arguments Julie had witnessed earlier, in the end, there was no us and them among the girls. It was them versus their captors. It was how they’d all survived this long, how any of them had maintained a semblance of a personality. It was the source of any sense of normality Julie had witnessed in this underground cave and the source of any normality she would know from this point onward.