The Benders (6 page)

“Fight her!” I scream. “We’ll fight!”

But he shakes his head and already defeat floods his face. “We’ve lost, Ri,” he says, quietly, letting go of the warden’s gun. The warden grabs it and staggers back, running a hand over his greased hair.

“No,” I say, my throat squeezing. “You can’t go with her.” Sadness is creeping over my anger and I hate that. Anger means we’re still fighting. Sadness means…it means we’re giving up. “I won’t let them take you.”

“You don’t have a choice,” Nessa says, her voice flat.

“Let her go and I won’t fight you,” Clay says, his shoulders sagging. “Ethan, too.” Nessa smiles, removing the gun from my temple and holstering it. “I have no intention of doing anything to them.” She walks over to Clay and takes him by the arm. “Into the Jeep.”

He nods. She takes his wrists and snaps on cuffs.

It’s all so awful I can’t even speak. Kimber holds my arms tight, but I writhe against him. “Clay!”

He lifts his eyes to me. “I’ll go with Nessa for a while. If it’ll mean you’re safe, there’s no harm in being apart for now.” He smiles sadly. “You’ll be okay until I can get to you.”

“No!” I shout. “Don’t leave. There has to be another way.” I turn to Nessa. “What’re you gonna do with him?”

She smiles again, but says nothing. Instead she leads Clay into the Jeep and straps him in. He sits forlornly, looking at us as she walks around to the driver’s side.

Kimber tugs me back sharply. Beside me, someone’s yanking Ethan away. A man stands with burlap sacks and handcuffs. They begin cuffing Ethan.

“Stop!” I scream, fighting, kicking. Someone backhands me in the ear, dizzying my vision, but I keep struggling. “Leave him alone.”

“Hey!” Clay calls, pulling against the seat straps. “You said you’d let them go.” He looks at his mother with hurt and disbelief.

Nessa smirks, arching an eyebrow. “I did. The warden has other plans.” She starts the Jeep with a deep rumble. Clay’s screaming and tugging against his handcuffs, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I look between him and Auntie and Ethan, who’s being dragged away from me. How could this have happened?

A rough burlap bag slides over my face, plunging me into a stuffy, muffled darkness. I thrash and kick and get two solid punches to my kidneys.

I scream and scream and scream.

Arms drag me forward and I’m shoved into a hard surface and up into what seems like a truck bed. It’s even darker here and the air feels thick and stale. A van? A hand shoves me in. I collide with something soft. A body. It grunts and shoves back. The van doors slam shut. An engine starts.

This cannot be happening. I push up to standing, but the van takes off and I fall, landing on another body that kicks at me until I roll away. Panic blaring in my head, I push up to my knees and scoot to where I think the van doors are. When I find them, I bang my shoulder into the solid metal over and over. They took everyone—Clay, Ethan, Auntie. They’re gone. I slam my knee into the door with a dull
thunk
. The pain seems right somehow, like it’s the only thing keeping me sane. How could I have let them split us up? How could I have been so weak?

Ethan. Where is he? Does the warden have him? And Clay’s with his insane mother who’ll take him back to the Breeders’ hospital. I still don’t know if Auntie is alive. Oh God, it all happened so fast. Now they’re gone.

The van bumps over a pothole and slams me sideways into the wall and another body. Who are these people? My first thought is girls being taken to the Breeders. I shiver, returning to that awful nightmare. At least I’d be near Clay, but it won’t do me much good if I’m unconscious in the Plan B room with a mutant baby in my belly.

I fold up into a ball, my head blaring. It’s hard to breathe inside the burlap bag and crying makes the air thicker, but I can’t help it. I sob for Ethan, for Clay, for Auntie, for my mama who died so that Ethan could live. What would she say if she could see me now?

I wake with an urge to pee that’s so strong I think I’ll wet myself if we hit another bump. Slowly I uncurl, but in the dark it’s hard to know which end is up. Every inch of me aches from sleeping on the rough van floor. The air is a smog of human odor and rank breath. Even through the sack on my head, the rancid air makes it clear that others have lost their battle with their bladder. The van bumps onward. How long have we been driving? How long before they give us fresh air or water?

“Hey,” I yell into the sack. “I gotta go to the bathroom!”

No one answers. A few bodies shift. Someone coughs.

“Hey! I said I gotta piss.”

“Shut up,” says a voice to my right. His voice is muffled. He must be bound and covered like me.

“When will they stop to give us a break?” I ask in that general direction. “The air’s getting real bad.”

Someone shifts. “Last time we stopped was to pick up your ass. And the last person who complained went out that door and didn’t come back. Probably dead or wishing he was.” He waits for me to digest this and then says, “Shut up.”

I lower my voice and slide closer to the speaker. “Do you know where we’re going? Who’s got us?”

Some more uncomfortable shifting. Finally the speaker whispers. “Hope you’re ready to work.”

“What does that mean?” I urge.

But the van’s slowing and the speaker slides away from me. My ears go alert as brakes squeal and the truck bumps onto the side of the road. The driver gets out and crunches on gravel toward the back of the van. I don’t know how I’ll fight, but I’ll try.

The doors scream open on rusty hinges. For a moment, nothing happens. Then hands clamp on my clothing and I’m hauled forward. Whoever has me is big and smells like sweat, earth, and chewing tobacco. I shout a protest into the burlap sack that gets no response. My feet find earth as I stumble forward. Then the sack is ripped from my head.

Bright light blinds me. I blink and let my pupils adjust.

It’s a large compound. Twelve-foot-high concrete walls topped with bits of glass and metal shards circle a campus of rectangular brick buildings. To my right sits a big warehouse. The giant square doors are flung open. Inside people hunch over tables, working. A guard, with a handgun in a holster under his arm and a baton in his hand, watches them. I have a feeling he’s not here for their protection.

Across the dusty open square an ornate building catches my attention. Someone has taken pains to make an old industrial building look like a medieval castle, complete with stone turrets that rise fifteen feet from the roof. Colorful banners fly from the tops. I’ve seen castles in old story books, but I’ve never seen one in real life.

Where the hell are we?

I want to look around, but the man who yanked the sack off my head shoves me forward. I glance behind and see the others being herded out of the van and into the courtyard. My eyes swing left as I walk, looking for all possible exits. There’s the main gate that we drove through, now shut with heavy wooden doors and barred with giant four-by-fours, but that’s it.

We shuffle in a line toward a smaller, darker building behind the warehouse. As we pass the warehouse, I glance in. People work at tables over small machines or fiddle with bits of metal. At first I think they’re men, but then I see some of them have female features. Some even wear their hair long, though the lack of breasts tips me off. Benders. They’re all benders.

This is where they’re being sent. All these people have been sold. But why?

When I glance back, I see her. A broken body is being carried out of the van by two guards. Long gray hair drags in the dirt as they heft her between them.

“Auntie!” I scream before I can think. I bolt out of line and run toward the men. If they’re carrying her, she must not be dead. They wouldn’t have transported a dead body all this way.

A hard blow to my knee sends me flying into the dirt. Pain, raw and big as a house, explodes down my leg. I crumple into the dirt. The pain is a live thing in my head, eating up my thoughts. I grit my teeth and look up.

A guard, thick like a bull, stands over me, clutching the baton he used to smash my knee. His face looks…wrong, the features misshapen and almost melted, like he’s been burned in a fire. Instantly I think of my burned mother and then shove the thought away. This sour-faced behemoth is nothing like her.

“Where were you headed, baby doll?” he asks, his tone almost bored. He taps the baton against his thigh. “Got a train to catch?”

The guards holding my aunt between them chuckle, but baton man doesn’t lift a smile. When I say nothing, he frowns, the burn marks tilting down. “Get back in line, sugar plum.”

I clear my throat and somehow find my voice through the anger and pain. “What’re they gonna do with her?” I ask, pointing at my unconscious aunt.

The guard raises the baton as if to swing. I throw my hands up to block my face, but when no blow comes, I drop them.

“Get. Back. In. Line.”

Deciding it’s better not to be beaten to death, I pull myself up and limp back in line. The other benders watch me hobble between them. Their heads are down, shoulders slumped like weary cattle.

This building is squat and dim with low ceilings and few windows. The chipped tile, plastic chairs, and framed motivational quotes make me think office building, and a dumpy one at that. Boots make dull shuffling noises on the floor, but there’s another sound down the hall—hushed murmuring. The guards shove us against the wall where we’re made to stand and wait for long minutes without talking or sitting. My knee kills, but I use the pain to keep me sharp. My eyes mark all the doors; my ears catalogue all the sounds—the distant hum of some machine, a few barking dogs outside, the sound of liquid rushing through pipes ahead that makes me think they’ve somehow fixed the running water. When we came in I saw no windmills or solar panels but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.

The plastic chairs, fake plants, and off-white walls look like they’ve been in place for the last eight decades. Someone has been taking care of these buildings all along. It’s strange, almost like being inside a time capsule. There’s even a poster framed in glass that reads:
Company Cook Out, June 5
^th
2028, Prizes, Games, Food. BYOB
. That’s nearly seventy years ago.

Boots clomp toward us from down the hall, a hard and confident walk that turns everyone’s head. Behind me a voice whispers, “Keep your head down and stay out of trouble.” It’s the person I spoke to in the van. I tilt my head back to reply but get a shove in the back, my signal to keep my head straight.

Someone’s coming.

From the footsteps, I expect another behemoth, but instead the figure that steps out of the dim hallway appears to be a slender, baby-faced teen. No, not teen, another bender. This one doesn’t have the swagger of the guards holding the guns. This one, with his sandy brown hair and sparkling green eyes, walks toward us with his head high. His clean clothes and the clipboard he’s holding give him an air of authority over everyone else in the room. He stops in front of the line, his eyes searching us. I duck my head down. The one behind me, the bender who’s been talking to me, who catches his attention. There’s a flicker on his face of recognition and of disappointment, too, but he’s quick to hide it. I doubt the dummy with the gun notices, but I did. I mark it down as something to ponder later. Right now, I focus on the bender with the clipboard as he begins to speak.

“Ladies, gentlemen, however you decide to identify yourselves, my name is Doc. Today I will be doing an intake exam. Don’t worry,” he says, as a murmur travels down the line. “Nothing awful will be done to you. We are not experimenting. We are simply making sure you are healthy. Then you can begin your work assignments.”

“What if we don’t want yer goddamned work assignments?” one of the benders ahead of me shouts.

Doc blinks and opens his mouth to answer, but two guards seize the bender out of line and haul him out the door. The hard
thwacks
of batons against flesh and the agonizing screams keep everyone frozen for a moment. Doc tucks his eyes to the ground, clearly disturbed by the violence and yet he makes no move to stop them. When the bender is dragged back into the room and shoved to the end of the line, broken-faced and bleeding, Doc continues.

“You’ll come in single file.” He tosses a lock of sandy-brown hair out of his eyes. “Please be honest with me about ailments. We’ll be able to help you much more efficiently if you tell us what’s wrong.”

He strides down the hall, gesturing for the guard to bring in the first of us. They go into a room and shut the door. The rest of us wait in tense silence. I hear hushed voices, murmurs, and a cough. About ten minutes later, the first bender walks out, looking no worse for wear. He walks with a guard out the door and into the dusty compound. The next bender is ushered forward.

The wait is long and my knee still throbs. I’m tired and dehydrated and still have to urinate more strongly than I ever have in my life. Instead of focusing on my need to pee, I mull over this whole operation. Someone has been capturing benders and selling them as slaves to whoever runs this compound. It’s clear they’re being used as labor, but for what I can’t tell. No one cares about metal trinkets or jewelry anymore. Maybe they’re making weapons, water filters, or antibiotics. There’s little more needed and more expensive than drugs.

My mind travels back to my aunt. It makes no sense why Nessa Vandewater, or the warden for that matter, would sell her to a place like this. She is old and can’t do the sort of finger-blistering work that the people in the warehouse seemed to be doing. I shiver at the thought of what they might need her for.

I lean against the wall and think of Ethan and Clay. Oh God, Clay. An ache as big as a mountain sits on my chest when I picture his face. He was so willing to let his mother do anything in the world to him as long as Ethan and I were safe. But he made the mistake of trusting her, a mistake only a son would make. My fingers fumble for the gold ring on the chain around my neck, his promise to me.

I’ll always come for you,
he’d said, his blue eyes tunneling into my heart.
Always.