Whispers in the Night Read online

  Somewhere inside the building a door slammed. Kristen jumped, jabbing her elbow into one of the bars. The Mask laughed at her, then fell silent, staring up at the landing behind the cages. From this angle, she could see the man beneath the mask, the reverence that smoothed out the tight lines around his mouth. She followed his gaze.

  Phillip Tailor, New Dawn’s leader, wore no mask; instead he donned a smile. Like the others, he wore black fatigues. In place of the mask, a pair of opaque glasses covered his eyes. A tall man, he towered over the cages, and Kristen felt a spell of vertigo. Tailor nodded acknowledgment at the man guarding Kristen’s cage. Leaning gracefully over the railing, he surveyed the busy warehouse floor. Another Mask, much smaller than Tailor, walked up to him. This one spoke in that gibberish language and pointed Tailor toward the back of the building. Before leaving, Tailor nodded once more at the Mask outside Kristen’s cage.

  Abruptly, Eastland stopped screaming. The Mask returned to his original posture, leaving a trail of blue sparks as he slowly dragged the stun stick back to his side. Eastland slumped against the bars, fingers twitching the last of ten thousand volts from her system. The blond girl scurried farther away from the prone body, pinning Kristen into the corner. Kristen was grateful for the sweat pressed into her skin, grateful for someone to hold on to, for something to come between her and the apparition who scrutinized her, sparking blue intention across the floor.

  Their captors were yelling. Still holding the blond girl, Kristen tried to follow one set of gibberish from man to man. The tone suggested commands, but she couldn’t be sure. She looked toward the sound of a bodega gate moving. This gate was much bigger and going up. The whole wall behind the barracoons recessed into its upper reaches and let dawn in. She smelled salt water, heard distant traffic, and hoped for a moment. Maybe New Dawn had gotten their ransom. Maybe her father had arrived. Maybe someone would see them and send agents. Maybe . . . maybe.

  Her brain stuttered at the sight of the gangplank. She could hardly take in the ship and the open water beyond it. The gangplank was too much. She opened her mouth to scream.

  Hours of sitting hadn’t slowed the Mask. He lunged with precision, knocking his stool over. The stun stick passed through the barracoon’s bars and touched Kristen’s shoulder. Still clutching each other, she and the blond girl shared the strong current.

  Conscious, but unable to move, Kristen watched as her hand slipped from the tangle of blond hair receding from her grasp. After New Dawn dragged the younger girl out, they pulled at Kristen’s ankles. She felt the silk, then her skin, tear against the rough floor. When her head fell from the cage’s lip and onto the concrete, she whimpered.

  The Mask hovered close to her face, squinting at her. He reached down and pinched her ear. Hard. Her hand jumped. He made a low noise in his throat, snatched her up by her armpits so that they were face-to-face. She heard him exchange a few words with someone. Another set of hands held her from behind, her head resting against a broad chest. Her gaze followed the other women being dragged out of the door and into the half-light—then out of her field of vision.

  The man behind the mask peeled it up from the bottom, stopped just above his lips. A translation patch stuck to the mesh’s underside. Now the gibberish made sense.

  “Say good-bye to home,” he said, his voice clear and deep without the conversion.

  The hands behind her covered her mouth and lifted her away from the barracoon, toward the ship.

  She was trying to remember the diagrams. All her life, she’d flipped past the Black History Month specials, those horrible images somebody should have forgotten by now. But now she wished she could remember. Then at least she would have some idea what the hold looked like. Maybe then she’d know where the blond girl was and where they’d put the men. She could feel flesh, but the heat made it difficult to tell which was hers. The Masks hadn’t been back since they’d chained the captives to each other, and then to the ship. And she’d been near unconsciousness then.

  Someone coughed. Was that a man’s cough or a woman’s? Did it matter? Someone was awake. She tried to use her voice. When she heard it, it sounded like she’d been up for days, high on too much Mystique.

  “Bridget?” she pleaded into the dark. “Margaret?”

  “Matthew.” The voice came from beneath her. “Matt Holleran. From Georgia.”

  Kristen saw a flash of a gangly redheaded boy with green eyes beaming out from an “Equality is Now!” poster. Senator Holleran and his family had posed for the short-lived campaign that was supposed to help end the call for reparations. She thought back to the faces in the men’s cage. There. The one with the dark red beard. Broad-chested, head bent beneath the cage’s low ceiling. Matthew Holleran.

  “Blake Denning,” a voice said below her.

  “Harry Anderson,” another said.

  “Preston Caleb,” one said from above.

  “Bridget Hardy,” the skin on her left said.

  A high-pitched whisper from above said, “Margaret Eastland.”

  “Chuck Lassiter,” the skin on her right said.

  “Drew Ellison,” the last one said.

  Captain Tailor watched the infrared images calling out their names. He tapped the screen, then turned down the volume. Should feed them soon. No, just water, he corrected himself. He’d been battling how many inaccuracies to allow, trying to find the balance between highlighting their advantages and introducing them to the Middle Passage’s suffering, so that they could in turn introduce the white world. Though he and his crew were perpetrating one of the most ambitious experiments in the Rep War campaign, he had to maintain parameters. Already, he worried about the Examples’ advantages: a shared language, a smaller group, the faster voyage, and of course, all the moral prerogatives: no rape, no dying, limited physical abuse. But he aimed to get the voting majority into their heads and hopefully their hearts through the body. Identity politics infused with psychological warfare. He knew the formula would get results. He had to remain vigilant if they were to be the right results.

  Shireen entered the surveillance room, still talking on her handheld. Moving toward Tailor, she concluded her conversation and slipped the handheld into her bulky jacket.

  “Fifteen dead at the Baltimore demonstration, though they’re reporting them only as injuries,” she said to him. “Over three hundred arrests.”

  “What about Tuscaloosa and D.C.?” Tailor asked.

  She sat down in the chair next to him.

  “The Representatives in Tuscaloosa never stopped walking, just got in their transports and bolted. And the PFC postponed the March in D.C.” She pulled the rolled-up mesh fabric down to her ears. “It’s cold in here.”

  “Again,” he answered to both statements. “How many postponements does that make?”

  “Three. This time something about one of the organizer’s connections to the Court of International Trade muddying the waters.”

  He laughed. “Once again, nonviolence proves itself nonviable.”

  Shireen fell silent. They’d always disagreed on this point. He knew that she believed a happy median existed between the extremes; that she’d signed up for this project to protect the Examples, though “Monitor” was her official title, and, on the ship, “First Mate.” That title must have rankled her feminist leanings. But that was exactly why Tailor needed her: Shireen didn’t say yes unless she meant it.

  Tailor walked over to the heart and blood pressure monitors that made up the center wall. He tore off hard copies of the latest readings and filed them away, made sure the digifiles were simultaneously saving and transmitting to the processors stateside.

  It felt good to stand; he’d been at the monitors for nearly three hours, making notes for the first draft of his press statement. He stretched his arms toward the ceiling, looked out the window at the crew taking in the fresh night air. Latrell shared a cigarette with Two Tone. Their light jackets flapped in the breeze. Good men, those. They knew enough to ask questions.
He wouldn’t have to worry about them; they would do the job and take the freedom offered in Ghana, leave all the restrictions on felons behind and live as full men again. His attention to the details was just as much for this New Dawn crew as for the nine below. The voyage would change them just as profoundly.

  He turned back to Shireen, who sat, jaw tensed, looking at the surveillance monitors.

  “Should we feed them now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she answered. “I’ll go with Two Tone.”

  “I’ll go with you as well.” He retrieved a mask from the top of the monitor banks.

  Shireen looked at him quizzically.

  “Research,” he said to the unspoken question.

  Captain Tailor and Shireen collected the stocky man outside. All three pulled their masks down, opalescence shimmering in the moonlight as they walked.

  The hold stank. Even with the masks’ air filters, a level of the stench still entered Tailor’s nose—a sharp unpleasantness that reached past technology to give him the impression of feces, urine, and vomit. It smelled like the Rep War: everything let go after being pent up too long. He knew that smell.

  Walking past the containers of food and medicines New Dawn would bring onto the shores of West Africa, they reached the back corner where the nine lay, three by three, in a space designed for two industrial sinks. Shireen added powdered protein to the cornmeal mush and handed it to Two Tone, who did the water and food detail. Captain Tailor stood nearby, taking notes on a legal pad. He stepped closer and hovered near the middle tier. Shireen climbed atop the structure and searched for an ankle to spray with the antibiotic salve. Tailor heard her sigh; she turned and looked at him, her expression unreadable. She told Two Tone to give everyone extra water.

  Shireen’s words came out in Icelandic. With the trans link in his ear, Two Tone understood well enough. After the training, time in the warehouse setting things up, and the sea, they could both probably speak the strange language without the aid of trans patches. At first, Shireen had questioned Tailor about his “odd choice,” but now he was sure she understood: Who could speak Icelandic? Most people couldn’t even recognize it.

  Kristen dreamed of the sky. Its light gray tones bobbed by, the sun still hidden in dawn’s hues: not the sunset sky of her trip to Bali, or the bright blue receding and advancing of her childhood swing, not even the rare red sunrise on the Hudson after a long night of cocktails and conversation. She dreamed of the last sky she saw, bobbing above, as her head bumped on the slats of the pier.

  Up on deck, the sky was clearer than Kristen had dreamed it. She kept her eyes on it as she stumbled up and down the small deck. She didn’t want to look at the men without their masks. They barked commands in that strange language, though their waving hands made their meaning clear enough. Here. Go Here. Faster. Faster. Stop. Get Back. Right Now. Do It. Again.

  She didn’t want to see the others from the hold, either. If they could just not look at each other, one day they might be able to see one another without the memory. Kristen doubted that “one day” would ever come. Apparently, New Dawn didn’t care if she and the others saw their faces. So the men would probably kill them out here on the open sea. They believed in results.

  When they went back to the hold, Kristen missed the light.

  If left in its grasp too long, the dark crawls over you and molds you into something unrecognizable. Already, Kristen’s back had changed shape. Fluid filled her lungs. Her skin had become a separate animal that she tried to fight off. She’d been in the dark for five days.

  That night, the crew came down to choose their bed warmers. Tailor picked Kristen.

  When the two men who’d brought her up took off the blindfold, Tailor was already seated at a small table, a pitcher of amber-colored liquid at his elbow. The room was small. No more than a cot bolted to the floor, and the table. Tailor took the tail of the chain from one of the crewmen and bid them good night. As soon as they were gone, he pulled the chain roughly, causing her to stumble closer to the cot. Wrapping the chain around the cot leg, he produced a small lock that he secured to the couplings. Next, he wrapped a length around her chest and locked these to the sides of the metal frame. She could move, but only if she wanted to rub metal against her ribs.

  Tailor, winded, pulled up a chair and posed a question. “Imagine no one had tended to your brand. How do you think it would look now? How much pain would you be in?”

  Kristen didn’t answer. Could hardly breathe.

  Tailor inclined his head slightly and continued. “Imagine that there were one hundred ninety of you instead of nine. What do you think it would smell like? How many would be dying?”

  Silence.

  “Imagine that you’d had to walk the fifty miles between where we captured you and the warehouse. How close to death would you have been in your high heels and silk pajamas?”

  Rage moved through her. She bucked in the chains, spraining her wrist, bruising her ankles. She called him every name she could think of. Names she didn’t know that she knew. She screamed her throat raw and then lay glaring at him, her breath shooting out in short bursts.

  Tailor looked at her, smiling a little. Then asked another question.

  He went on like that until the sun came up. Just before he called the crewmen to lead her back into the hold he said:

  “Now imagine that I had raped you.”

  The well of tears that had threatened to spill all night came brimming over Kristen’s lids. She leaned against the door frame, head bowed, trying to hide her face from him.

  “Next time,” he said looking at her intently, “if you do what I want, you can have some of the peach juice. It’s your favorite, no?”

  On the way back to the hold, the crewmen walked a full foot in front of Kristen. They held her chain away from their bodies and looked down at the floor or out at sea. At the entrance, they waited for Kristen to walk through, careful not to touch her.

  She was the last one to be brought back to the hold. Eight shadows filled the bank between the ceiling and the floor. They hardly moved and didn’t speak, though she could hear one of the men on the top row whimpering. One crewman waited at the entrance, while the other dragged the chain across the planks and locked Kristen back in place. The two left silently, footfalls heavy and slow.

  The wood beneath Kristen creaked in time to the waves, but there were no human sounds, not from the crew above or the ones down below. It was as if a spell had been cast over everyone on the ship and now they all lay quietly trying to remember how they’d become so afflicted. Kristen supposed this because she, herself, could think of nothing else.

  It was enough that her mind was working again. In the last few days, it had abandoned her for long stretches of time, capable of nothing more than the automatic functions of pumping her heart and breathing. Kristen would wait, ambivalent about the return of her awareness. Gradually, it let her hear the sound of scurrying after a long stretch of silence. When she could feel the cold moisture pooled under her buttocks, she knew awareness had returned. For better or for worse.

  Later, she heard the hold door open. Someone above her keened a quick desperate note. She watched as light knifed through the dark, growing larger and brighter. Chains knocked against wood as the captives shifted, trying to curl away.

  The door closed. When Kristen’s eyes adjusted, four of the crewmen stood at her feet. They’d already unlocked the men on the bottom row; now they worked on her manacles.

  Up on deck, the captives huddled near each other. The remnants of their clothes hung at odd angles. All the silk that had once covered Kristen’s back was worn away, leaving only deep scratches on her reddened skin. She looked better than most of the other women. The crew kept their distance. No one shouted for dancing or prodded them with the short end of a stun stick. A half dozen crewmen stood against the railing, staring out into the sea. Others dragged fire hoses into the hold to blast out its offal. These were the same men who had hauled the women and two of
the men away last night, their shouts louder than the captives’ pleas; today, they looked stooped, a little less full.

  “Bed warmers, Phillip!” Shireen stood in the middle of the monitor room, arms across her chest, glaring at Captain Tailor.

  “It’s good to finally hear you call me by my first name, Shireen.”

  She clenched her teeth until a solid square of tread emerged from the corners of her jaw.

  “You watched the monitors all night. Did anything happen?” he asked.

  “Hell yes, something happened—you went too far.”

  “Too far?” Tailor flared with his own anger now; his voice went quiet and steady. “This is nothing! A few questions and an uncomfortable night at the foot of someone’s bed. Why, Latrell even gave up his bed! Too far? They’re not children. They’re not dying. This is just a taste of suffering. A taste! They get to go free at the end, Shireen. Their children will be free. Their minds will be free. They won’t work a single day. Mark my words, no one will ever deny them their due. Not far enough perhaps, but not nearly too far.”

  Kristen heard Tailor’s voice and flinched, jerked her head toward the railing. Two of the male captives stared at her. When Kristen saw how the men looked at her, she knew she had become part of their nightmare. And they would never see her any other way.

  That next night, Tailor sent for her. He shackled her to the table, hands pulled down into her lap by a chain looped under the seat, through the back of the chair, and around her waist. Kristen barely resisted. Fatigue had most of her; the rest stared at the camera and tripod pointed at the small cot in the corner of the room. Tailor pushed her up to the table and placed the pitcher of peach juice below her chin. Kristen’s nose worked independently of the rest of her, pulling deep breaths of peach into her mouth and chest. Captain Tailor sat down opposite her. He crossed his legs loosely at the ankle.