Stung (6 page)

Voices tug at my sleep, whispers dancing with my hazy dreams.

“Come on, man. I’ll keep him until Sunday and then take him to the lab. You can have the pay,” someone says, his voice hushed.

“Why?” another voice asks.

“I don’t know. ’Cause you’re new at this job? And I don’t want to see someone as young and healthy as you dead. How ’bout I give you eight ounces?”

“For a
Fec
? You want to
buy
him from me?” the other man
answers, his voice deep and distinct. I know this voice—Bowen. I try to open my eyes, but my body is as unresponsive as stone.

“Sure,” the first voice says.

“Why?”

My dreams overpower the voices, dreams of a world lush with budding plants and birdsong, as if the dead summer has turned to spring.

A smell wafts at me, burning my sinuses and making me gag—a smell like rotting meat, morning breath, and dog crap—pulling me out of a deep, troubled sleep. I turn my head to the side and gasp for fresh air.

I am lying on my back, on something hard, and my muscles feel as if I haven’t moved them in a year. I try to stretch, but my forearms are stuck together, from my elbows to my wrists. My legs, too.

A breeze stirs the air, and the rancid smell surrounds me again. I gag and open my heavy eyes. A low army-green canvas roof stretches overhead, bright with sunlight. A threadbare sleeping bag is zipped around me, pulled snug at my neck. I try to move again, and when the sleeping bag shifts, a gust of air escapes it. My eyes water and I gag again, my hollow stomach
clenching. The nasty smell that pulled me from sleep? It’s
me
.
My
smell.

I cough and wheeze, stretching my head as far to the side as it will go. Someone throws the tent flap open, and a black man whose shoulders fill the entire tent opening sticks his head inside. Covering his mouth and nose with his hand, he glowers down at me.

“Tell Bowen it’s awake,” the man says, his voice muffled beneath his hand. “And it needs a hose down.” He drops the tent flap back into place.

I clench my stomach muscles and do a shaky sit-up, and the sleeping bag falls around my waist. The tent flap opens again. I try to twist around and see who is there but can’t.

Someone gasps. “Don’t move a muscle, kid.”

I recognize this smooth, deep voice—Bowen—and do what he says, turning my aching body to virtual stone. He coughs and then squats beside me, unzipping the sleeping bag. He hooks his hands under my armpits and drags me into sunlight. Four armed guards move from the four corners of my tent and point their guns at me.

“If I release your legs, you must not attack,” Bowen says from behind me, emphasizing each word like I’m dense. “Nod once if you understand the meaning of my words.” I nod once and Bowen sighs. “Shoot him if he does anything, boys.”

Without warning, my ankle cuffs separate from each other. I twist my ankles and point my toes. Hands are in my armpits again, lifting. Someone groans behind me. “Better burn his sleeping bag, guys. I don’t think anything will remove the smell,”
Bowen says. He coughs and gags. “Walk,” he commands, shoving me forward. On legs stiff and awkward, I put one foot in front of the other. Bowen walks behind me, his voice directing me through the camp with the command “left” or “right.”

The entire camp stares as I wind past tents and burning fires. Words follow me.
Security hazard. Level Ten. Mark of the beast. 8 ounces. Black market. Fight. Honey. The pits
.

“Stop,” Bowen orders. I am at the log cabin from the night before. I freeze, my back to the camp, and stare at a knot in one of the round logs that make the cabin’s walls. Out of the corner of my eye I see a garden hose being pulled from a hook on the cabin.

Water hits me from behind, and I gasp as a shiver makes its way from my scalp to my feet. I guess I’m taking a shower. In frigid water that sprays so hard against my shoulders I almost fall forward. But I can feel the layers of grit and sewage and blood and Arrin dripping off my skin and clothing, and welcome the cold water. A puddle forms beneath my feet—hazy gray swirled with deep brown.

Squinting, I slowly turn into the spray, ducking my head into it, letting it drench my thick bangs and squirt them out of my face. Next, I bring my shackled forearms to my face and, coughing and spluttering, scrub my skin.

By the time the water stops, my entire body is trembling with cold and covered with goose bumps, my clothes are soaked, and the tattoo on my hand is a dark, visible warning. I shake my head from side to side, flinging drops of water from my hair.

“The bathroom’s on the other side of the cabin,” Bowen says. I nod my understanding, relieved. My bladder is about to burst.

Blinking water from my eyes, I start walking. Like before, Bowen stays a couple of paces behind, remote always pointing at me.

When we get to the bathroom, my stomach starts to hurt as a new fear descends. There are no stalls, no toilets, just a trough.

Three men occupy the bathroom, talking, joking as they stand side by side peeing into the long, narrow trough. One looks over his shoulder, and his eyes meet mine. His pee stops, and he’s out of there before he has his pants zipped. The other two look at each other, and then over their shoulders at me. They’re gone before their pee hits the trough. Bowen, behind me, chuckles under his breath.

I stand shivering, dripping a puddle onto the bathroom floor, but don’t make a move toward the wet, brown-stained trough.

“What’s the matter, kid?” Bowen asks from the doorway. I peer over my shoulder and look at his annoyed face through my stringy, sopping bangs. Whipping my bangs aside, I take a closer look at his face. My heart lurches.

When I was eleven, I fell in love with my neighbor. He was gorgeous, sixteen, drove a motorcycle, lived across the street, and made out with his girlfriend on his porch swing in the summer
.

I’d climb the tree in my front yard and watch him and his girlfriend through the leaves, fascinated, disgusted, jealous. Sometimes when they
were making out, he’d look across the street without taking his mouth from hers, and our eyes would meet. He’d roll his eyes and then they’d slip shut and I was forgotten
.

My mom called him an inconsiderate, hormonal teenager who should take his personal affairs where the whole neighborhood didn’t have to see them. When she found out I’d sit in the tree and watch, she called his mom and complained
.

He didn’t stop making out on the porch swing—started making out more, in fact. And when he caught me spying, he’d yell, “Hey, kid, why don’t you go find someone your own age to spy on?”

His hair was the color of milk chocolate, and his eyes were somewhere between blue and gray. And his name was…

“… Duncan?” The word leaves my lips before I can stop it.

Bowen’s eyes narrow, and his hand, the one that has been pointing the remote at me all morning, drops to his side. He blinks and the remote is aimed at me again. “What did you say?” he asks.

I bite my tongue and look at the floor. “Uh, I need, you know, like … walls?”

“You gotta be kidding me, kid. You want privacy?” he grumbles.

I’m a girl. I can’t pee standing up, especially into a trough. And Arrin said pretending to be a boy is a safety precaution. “Need to take … a dump,” I whisper, trying to sound like a guy. The lie floods my cheeks with warmth. Bowen presses himself against the wall beside the door and groans.

“Get out,” he snaps, motioning outside.

“But I—”

“Just do it, Fec! Out!” His voice is cold and hard. A voice to fear.

Careful to give him a wide berth, I step through the door and into blazing sunshine. Something hard rams into the back of my thighs. With my arms cuffed, I can’t find my balance. I topple forward, skidding to a stop on my forearms and knees. Bowen grumbles something under his breath, something laced with cuss words.

“Get up or I’ll kick you again,” he says through gritted teeth.

It takes me a minute, but I climb to my feet despite the fact that fear makes my muscles weak and tears have filled my eyes. I’m not crying because my elbows and knees are scraped. The tears are of self-pity. Tears that no one else is going to cry for me, a prisoner in this camp, with no family and no friends.

“I need an armed guard!” Bowen bellows, making me flinch away from him. The camp shushes. After a long silence, three men reluctantly grab their guns and circle me.

“What’s the problem?” a big black man asks—the same man who opened my tent flap. Heart pounding, I stare down the barrel of his gun and wonder the same thing—what is the problem? That’s when my arms swing free, no longer fused from elbow to wrist. The guards, though armed with rifles, take a giant step away from me.

“He’s gotta do his business, Tommy,” Bowen says, shoving me forward hard. My arms flail and I barely manage not to fall to the ground again. Tommy laughs and casually swings his gun into the side of my head, and I do lose my balance this time.

“Get up, kid.” Bowen laughs, kicking me firmly in the butt. Quickly, I scramble to my feet.

With my hand pressed to my aching head, I bite my trembling lip, blink away fresh tears, and follow the sound of Bowen’s voice as he guides me to another bathroom. One with stalls and doors and toilet paper. And even though I only need to pee, I sit on the toilet a long time, letting tears stream down my face.

When I’ve gotten control of myself, I wipe the moisture from my cheeks with my hands and, hair hanging in my face, come out. Bowen activates my arm cuffs. As I walk out the door, I brace myself for a gun to the side of the head or a kick in the butt. But they don’t come this time.

I spend the day baking beneath the hot sun with my back to the wall, arms and legs fused together, head and knees throbbing, surrounded by four armed men.

When the sun is low in the sky and shadows stretch long, Bowen, eyes wary, comes for me. We walk through the camp—me in front—and stop at a cold, deserted fire ring constructed from a handful of small boulders.

“Sit,” Bowen orders, motioning to a large, flat boulder a few feet from the ring.

I sit and try to stare without staring, peering at him through my tangled bangs while he stacks pieces of wood that look like broken table legs inside the ring of rocks.

Can this cruel man be the same person who lived across the street?
I wonder. My butt still throbs from his kick. He sprays lighter fluid on the varnished wood and holds a match to it. Flames flare up, heating my face. I quickly lean away and Bowen jumps, aiming the remote at me, eyes wide with fear.

“No sudden moves,” he warns.

“Sorry,” I grumble, glaring at him. “The flames burned my face. I couldn’t help it.”

The guard from the bathroom—Tommy—walks over to us, something dangling from his hand. Bowen looks up and shades his eyes against the glare of sunset.

“Hey, Bowen. I caught this by the wall. Thought you might want to feed it to the Fec.” He holds out a wet, skinned carcass and grins.

Bowen takes it and frowns, then looks up at the man again. The man shrugs beefy, broad shoulders.

“Thanks, Tommy. I’ll cook it up. See how he likes it,” Bowen says.

Tommy chuckles and studies me with dark, satisfied eyes. I look away and stare at the flames eating the wood. “You want me to hang around? Just in case?” Tommy asks.

I can feel Bowen’s eyes on me. “I think I’ve got it under control,” he says. “But I’ll let you know if he starts scaring me more than he already is.”

“You just say the word, and I got your back,” Tommy says. He walks away.

Bowen slides a long metal rod through the carcass and balances it across the fire pit, turning the meat as the flames jump up to lick it, and I study him again. Aside from the dark scruff covering his lower face and framing his lips, he’s hardly changed. If anything, time has made him more handsome than he was when I’d stare at him on his front porch—even with the scruff.

The smell of roasting meat makes my head spin and my stomach growl, and Bowen glares at me, mouth hard, as if he’s mad that my stomach is making noise. I shrug.

The sun shines into his face and lights up his eyes, and I completely forget about the roasting meat. I was wrong about him. He is
not
Duncan—not the gray-eyed teenager I’d stare at across the street. Bowen’s eyes are too green, like grass and mint and dandelion leaves. Yet, I know him.

I look away from his guarded eyes and study my brown-stained pants, worn so thin above my knees they are sheer, and try to remember who he is, why he’s so familiar.

His hand is on the spit again, a hard, strong hand, brown from days in the sun. His long fingers turn it, making grease drip from the meat into the flames. I dare another look at him. This time he’s waiting. Our eyes meet. His eyebrows lift, his face hardens, and the remote is pointing at me.

“You planning something?” he asks with a smirk.

Like I can
move
with my legs and arms locked together. If I even attempted to stand, I’d topple forward into the fire. Not to mention I’m in a camp filled with men who would shoot me if I so much as stepped wrong. I laugh at the absurdity of it.

Bowen leans forward, eyes intent, and I stop laughing.

“Open your mouth again,” he says. I open my mouth and he peers inside. “Huh. Your teeth aren’t rotten. How old are you?”

“Thirteen?”

“You’re tall for a thirteen-year-old, Fec.” He leans back, but his eyes don’t leave me. They slowly cover every inch of my body, as if they can see the secret lying beneath my clothes. I hunch
forward, praying he can’t tell I have breasts. “Lift your hands. Show me your palms.”

I bend my arms at the elbow, forearms still locked, and splay my fingers. His hand leaves the spit. Without lowering the remote, he trails a finger over my palm and frowns.

For a heartbeat his eyes meet mine, and then I am forgotten. Turning the meat takes all his attention. More grease drips from it, popping in the fire. For a long time we sit in silence, Bowen intent on the meat, me intent on looking at him without looking at him. Without him noticing, at least.