Westbound Pt. 01

We felt the truck slow down again, and waited in the warm yellow light for it to halt.

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"Why are we stopping?" I asked Nicolaides. "It hasn't been four hours."

"Lunchtime," he said. "A brief pause to feed and water the livestock, then another two hours to the next rest stop for a bio-break."

Nicolaides and Chuy passed out rubber bowls of slave kibble, the bland brown pellets that were a staple of the slave diet, and plastic bottles of water.

"We've got some sandwiches in the cab that you're welcome to," Chuy told me quietly, "Or we can stop at a burger place or something..."

"Actually," I said, "I've never had kibble before. Can I get a bowl?"

Chuy literally did a double-take, but silently gave me a bowl and a bottle out of his crate; and we were moving again.

The reactions of the women to their meal fell into two camps: the experienced slaves ate quickly, without much thought, while the newer ones dejectedly pushed the pellets around the bowl or nibbled at a few pieces.

"Eat it up," Ruzanna advised Brooke and Kenzie, "You never know when you'll get fed again. Besides, might as well get used to it now."

I tried it: it wasn't particularly bad, but it wasn't good, either — reminded me of some dried vegetable chips my sister got at a health food store once. It made me really thirsty so I drank up the bottle quickly, and Linda commented, "At least they're not using that stupid "high protein water" that's just water with bull sperm in it."

"Seriously?" I said.

Ruzanna scrunched her face up. "Ugh, I hate that stuff. It's supposed to get us to like the taste of spunk, but it just tastes like shit."

We talked about food, it's uses in training, punishing, and rewarding slaves, food they'd had, food they wished they could have, and I noticed some of the women starting to squirm.

Before long we stopped again, the men put the women in a coffle as before, and led them to the "restrooms."

This rest stop was bigger, with more amenities like a travel center with a cafe. The slave area was more developed too: it was still out in the open in a fenced-in area, but it had a sort of half-bench over grating-covered troughs, water faucets that could be used as bidets, and hot-air dryers mounted at waist height. The coffle approached the bench, and each woman straddled it, squatting so that her orifices were over a gap running up the middle, and when Linda (the first woman in line) reached the end of the bench she squatted, resting her naked bottom on the rough boards of the bench, and began to urinate; the others followed suit, and when they were all done she stood and led them to the faucets and dryers. All-in-all, a much more civilized display than the earlier stop.

Also like earlier, they attracted the attention of a crowd but instead of cat-calling truckers this one consisted of ordinary travelers and staring tourists, including families with children. I thought for sure that the mothers would hustle the children away, shielding their eyes, as I had seen in Central America. On the contrary, the parents would point out the women to their children, telling them who they were and what they were doing. The young men and boys were transfixed, of course, and Mary and Ruzanna put on a show for them. I even saw Linda running her fingers though her silver hair like combs, which made her large breasts heave up and down suggestively; she looked over at one open-mouthed father and winked at him. The father clamped his mouth shut and turned bright red, but didn't stop looking. Of his two daughters, the older teen scrunched her face up like Ruzanna remembering the "high protein water," while the younger teen appeared to be fascinated. I wonder what was going through her head?

As he was herding the women back into truck, Nicolaides mentioned that our next stop would be in six hours for supper and turndown.

"Turndown?" I asked.

"We adjust the temperature up a little, turn the lights red, and hand out blankets so the cargo can rest. At that point, you'll probably want to move into the cab with us — it's a sleeper, so there's a bed in the back you can use."

"Okay, thanks," I said.

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Linda shifted in her cage so her face was closer to the bars. "What about you, Frankie? What's your story? Why are you here?"

"You know why I'm here," I said, "CNS is doing a story for—"

"No," Linda interrupted. "Why are you here? I get a sense that you don't understand a lot of what's going on here, like you've been out of the country for a while. So you're a foreign correspondent, right? Why come back? Why do a story about the most boring aspect of slavery, transportation?"

I sat back, and realized that every woman in the truck was looking at me, even Brooke and Kenzie.

"I just got back from Central America, and I needed a rest. It was pretty rough."

"I saw your video," Linda said. "Why this story?"

"Like you said, I'd been out of the country for a while," I said, "When I left, slavery was still fairly new and unusual, now it's been largely assimilated into society. I was curious to see what things are like now, meet some slaves and talk to them, and get paid while I do it."

"What was going on in Central America?" Linda asked. "We don't know; news is for masters, not slaves."

"Um, well, there are a number of rebellions going on, bloody armed conflicts, because several governments are trying to legalize slavery there, probably under pressure from the US."

"Uh-huh. Tell me," Linda pressed, "What was the story with that burned village in your video?"

I looked around, every woman in the truck had crept closer to the fronts of their cages so they could better hear the conversation. I was feeling a bit uneasy for some reason.

"It was a rebel village. Or at least the government said so when they attacked it. They killed most all of the men, carried off the women and children, and burned everything they could. The rebels couldn't stop them."

"What do you mean, carried off the women and children?" Linda asked, quietly.

I looked around again. "I mean that the inhabitants of the village who weren't killed and didn't flee into the jungle, mostly women and children, were declared outlaws so they could be legally enslaved. The children will be handed off to the old women, and sent to a government camp somewhere. Any men not executed out-of-hand will be made into conscript labor. And the younger women and older girls will be sold. It's brutal, but it's how it's done down there."

"Did you witness any of it?"

"Of course," I said. "I was actually not accredited with the government at that moment, so I was fishing around, got a tip about the attack, and took a jeep up to the village to see for myself."

No one said anything, so I continued: "On one level, it was like something out of a movie: columns of smoke, big holes in the ground, helicopters flying around, soldiers everywhere. But on another level, it was outside of my experience: the soldiers rounding up the women at gunpoint, sorting them out by age, all the crying and pleading and shouting. Then a senior officer shows up — a colonel, I think — with some male civilians in a truck. The colonel orders the women to strip — the soldiers tore the clothes off of any who were too slow — and the civilians started unloading boxes of shackles. Then they separated the naked women into groups of six, chained them hand and foot, looped ropes around their necks and began loading them into some of the army vehicles. The ones who wouldn't stop crying or begging got duct tape over their mouths, and the ones who moved too slowly got a rope end across their bottoms. They must have hauled off a couple of hundred women, maybe more."

"Where were you?" Linda asked.

"I was watching from a safe distance, concealed, recording it all."

"Were you scared?" Kenzie asked.

"Petrified. I was afraid they'd shoot me, or worse."

"Or worse?" Linda asked.

"Or I'd find myself shackled and on a truck headed to an uncertain fate, never to be heard from again."

Silence.

Finally Linda spoke. "Do you really think slavery is a fate worse than death?" she asked.

"Well," I said, slowly, trying not to offend, "in Central America? Probably, or close enough. Those women were being enslaved against their will by a brutal regime, kind of like the trans-Atlantic trade in the nineteenth century. Here? That's a good question. Slaves in Western countries are either volunteers or debtors or convicted criminals who had court trials — at least in theory. America also has much better rules and a regulatory system-"

"In general, I mean," Linda interrupted. "Not as a comparison between countries. Assuming it's here, is it that bad?"

I looked at her for a moment, before turning to look at each of them. Then I gestured at the security cameras.

"Can they hear what we're saying?" I asked.

"No," Linda said. "Look at the camera housing, if it had any sort of decent microphone you'd be able to see it, or at least the grill over the opening, and I see no wiring for separate microphones. Besides, HCI is weirdly cheap when it comes to cameras; they only have black & white video, and they never have audio capabilities at all. I have no idea why, but you won't find a single one in any HCI facility that can hear what you're saying." She turned back to me: "So, would life as a slave in America really be as bad as death?"

I really had to think carefully about how I was going to answer that. "I was raised to be an educated professional, to expect that I would live my entire life as a free woman, that slavery was something that happened to other people. My default opinion was yes, it would be, at least for me. But now," I said, looking around, "I'm not so sure."

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"Have you ever spent any serious time around slaves?" Janet, one of the three entrepreneurs, asked. "Have you ever known one as more than a casual acquaintance?"

"No," I confessed. "I've been served by them in stores and restaurants, seen them on the streets, knew some who cleaned my friends homes growing up, passed them in hallways, but I couldn't tell you any of their names, no."

"So how do you know?" Linda asked. "The answer is: you don't know. Have you ever tried putting yourself in our shoes for even a minute? Actually, I have an idea," she said, looking around.

"Get in a cage," she said.

"What?!" I said, a little too sharply.

"Get in the cage opposite me, and stay there for the rest of this trip," Linda said, "Or no more interviews."

Unbelievable. My first time among slaves, and I've managed to trigger a rebellion.

"But you're all slaves," I said, "You told me yourself that I can order you all to talk to me, and you have to do it."

"No, I said we wouldn't talk to you until ordered. How much we talk, and what we say, is up to us. For instance, we could limit ourselves to yes and no answers, and there goes your video program," Linda said, her voice steady.

"But I could-"

"You could snitch to that oaf Nicolaides or call management at HCI, but what would you tell them? The slaves aren't talking enough? The slaves are giving answers that aren't interesting? The slaves don't like me?" Linda snorted. "Come on: put yourself on our level, just for a little while, and see how it makes you feel."

Actually, it might be useful, to shoot some conversations from inside the cages, give a cinéma vérité feel to it. And as I looked around at their faces, I realized they do kind of have me over a barrel.

I tugged on the cage door. "It's locked."

"It's sealed with electromagnets to keep the door from swinging around. To open it, you need a collar. There's probably some spares in that cabinet," Janet said, pointing up at a spot on the wall.

"I am not wearing a collar," I said.

"You don't need to, you just need it to get the magnets to open."

I opened the cabinet set into the wall (it wasn't locked, it was barely held closed), dug through the collection of junk inside and pulled out a thin metal collar. I waved it next to the cage, and the door popped open. I put the collar in one of the oversized pockets in my jacket, got on my knees, gave a last look around, and crawled inside.

The door latched shut with a click. I tried pushing it open but couldn't.

Before I could ask, Janet said: "The collar only opens it from the outside, not the inside; it's a convenience for the slave handlers. Hold the collar through the bars and it will open."

I looked around the inside of the cage. Nothing much to see, it was clean and the floor was padded, otherwise it was exactly what you would expect.

"It's a little strange at first, but you get used to it," Linda said.

"Mm-hmm," was the only comment I could make; it was more than strange, it was, well, I don't want to say frightening (I could technically let myself out), so I'll say unsettling because my stomach became unsettled.

But at the same time, I could see how it might be comforting. I definitely felt safe from any wandering grizzly bears.

"The biggest reason I'm reluctant to stay in a cage," I said, "is because of the reputation of transport companies and the people who work for them — some are little more than criminals. I've heard stories-"

"Slaves disappearing?" Linda asked. "Women headed for one place and never arriving, or another woman arriving in her place? That sort of thing?"

"That's not really true," Rhonda said. "On the rare occasion it does happen, it's always with some cut-rate fly-by-night operator whose offices turn out to be a letter drop at a UPS store. Honestly, if an owner is willing to place something as valuable as a slave in the hands of someone without performing any due diligence, it's the owner's fault when they turn up missing."

Linda nodded in approval. "Besides, this is an HCI-owned truck crewed by HCI employees, not contractors," she said. "We'll get where we're going alright. Don't believe everything you see on the Internet."

At that, all of the women (except the two youngest) laughed out loud; I felt my face turn red.

In an attempt to re-establish my authority as the interviewer (and to help regain my composure), I asked Rhonda: "I meant to ask you earlier, the business the four of you were in, what was it exactly?"

Janet answered. "Purchasing and supply contracting for major corporate offices. Their office managers would give us orders from a catalog of our available goods, and we would supply them at a fixed price. Saves the managers time with bids and contracts for small lot purchases, or regular purchases of small items."

"What kinds of items?" I asked.

"Office supplies-" Janet said.

"Computer supplies-" Rhonda said.

"Slave supplies-" Tracy muttered.

Janet and Rhonda glanced angrily at Tracy, who shrank back into her cage. I wondered why Janet seemed to know how the cages worked, and Rhonda about slave transport; now it made sense.

"What kinds of slave supplies?" I asked.

All kinds, it turned out: from the obvious like restraints and tracking collars to disciplinary tools to hygiene and food products to, as I had guessed, cages.

"It is still strange to me," Janet said, "To go from negotiating bulk purchases of slave kibble over drinks atop the nicest hotel in Houston, to eating kibble out of a rubber bowl three times a day while everyone stares at my privates."

"Still annoys me," Rhonda said, "That when we got processed for transport HCI used the cheapest industrial soap on us instead of something that wouldn't sting our skin. It's not like Greenfields or Dr. Bronson's would have been that much more expensive, and a lot less toxic."

"Like Linda said," Janet added, "HCI is weirdly cheap on some things, and extravagant on others. Like these cages, they're the basic model of the most top-of-the-line series available. At least we'll be comfortable."

"Do you have any concerns about your new status?" I asked the three former entrepreneurs.

"No," Rhonda replied, "Not if someone keeps her mouth shut," shooting another dagger at Tracy, who quailed back again.

"It's a real concern though," Janet said. "Bad enough if we get bought," — she stumbled a little on that word — "by someone we used to work with, but if they own slaves from a company we used to supply...?"

"We sometimes had to demo items on slaves," Tracy said in a small voice. "They would just have to smile and take it, no matter what. I didn't think much about it at the time, because that could never happen to me." She looked over at me: "Right?"

End - Part One of Three