Parable of the Talents (24 page)

Where was Bankole? I didn't know. Well, we had ren-dezvous points. We would find each other. The idea was

not
to waste time running around looking for relatives.

Except for babies and very young children, everyone knew from the drills that a command to get out meant exactly that.

"Get out now!"

And we were to go in all directions. We were not to fol-low one another or group together and provide our enemies with big, easy targets. As much as possible, we were to put trees and geographical features between ourselves and the enemy.

But what were we to do when the enemy was

every-where?

Then, in the same instant, all seven of the maggots began firing. It took me a moment to realize that they were not fir-ing bullets, that, perhaps, we were not about to be killed.

They were firing gas canisters. I kept running, hoping that others were doing the same. No matter what the gas was, it was not intended to do us good.

I headed through the young oak grove that was our ceme-tery toward the fold of a hill that I hoped would both shelter me and give me an easier path up over the first hill.

Then just ahead of me, a canister landed. Before it hit the ground, it began to spew out gas.

And my legs wouldn't hold me. I was running. Then I felt myself begin to fall. It was all I could do to manage not to fall on my baby, instead to have her fall on me. I heard her begin to cry—a thin, un-Larkinlike whimpering. I don't be-lieve I cried out. I know I never lost consciousness. It was a terrible gas. I still don't know the name of it. It took away most of my ability to move, but left me wide awake, able to hear and see, able to know that my people were being col-lected like driftwood, being carried or dragged away by uni-formed men.

Someone came to me, bent, and took Larkin from me. I couldn't move my head to see what he did with her. I couldn't struggle or protest or plead. I couldn't even scream.

Someone came for me and took me by the feet and dragged me over the ground, down the hill to the school. I was wearing denims and a light cotton shirt, and I could feel my back scraping over rocks and weeds. I could feel pres-sure—bumping and thudding. It didn't hurt as it was hap-pening, but I knew it would hurt. All the adults and older kids had been carried or dragged to the school. I could see several of them sprawled on the floor wherever their captors had dropped them. What I could not see were the babies and young children.

I could not see my Larkin.

At one point, I heard shooting outside. It came from the south side of the school, not far away. It sounded like the guns of our older truck. Perhaps one of us had reached the truck and tried to use it as Bankole, Harry, and I had back when Dan and Nina Noyer came home. That was hopeless.

Our old housetruck wouldn't have been a match for even one maggot. Then I heard a huge explosion. After that there was silence.

What had happened? Were the children involved? Not knowing was an agonizing torment. Utter helplessness was even worse. I could breathe. I could twitch a hand or a foot. I could blink. Nothing more.

After a while, I could whimper a little.

Sometime later, a man wearing the uniform of the day—black pants and a belted, black tunic with a white cross on its front, came to do something to us, to each of us. I couldn't see what he was doing until he got to me, unbuttoned three buttons of my shirt, raised my head, and fastened the slave collar around my neck.

************************************

It was that simple. They took Acorn. Its name is Camp Christian now. We captives were not able to do more than twitch, blink, or moan for over an hour. That was plenty of time to collar almost all of us.

No one collared Gray Mora. He had been a slave earlier in his life. He had never worn a collar, but he had spent his childhood and young manhood as the property of people who treated him not quite as well as they treated their cattle. They had taken his wife from him and sold her to a wealthy man who had seen her and wanted her. She was, according to Gray, a short, slight, very pretty woman, and she brought a good price. Her new owner made casual sexual use of her and then somehow, by accident or not, killed her. When Gray heard about that, he took his daughter Doe and broke free.

He never told us exactly how he got free. I've always assumed he killed one or more of his masters, stole their possessions, and took off. That's what I would have done.

But this time, there was no escape. And yet Gray would not be a slave again.

I found out later that he managed to get to the housetruck, lock himself in, and fire on some of the maggots. That scratched them more than a little. Then, as the maggots began to fire on him and blow the housetruck's armor to hell, he charged one of them. He rammed it. There was an explosion.

There shouldn't have been. The housetruck was as safe as it could be. Making it explode had to take a con-scious effort—unless it was the maggot that exploded. I don't know for sure. But knowing Gray, I suspect he did something to cause the explosion. I believe he chose to die.

He is dead.

I can't believe that any of this is true. I mean . . . there ought to be a different way to write about these things—a way that at least begins to express the insanity and the terri-ble, terrible pain of it all. Acorn has always been full of ugly stories. There wasn't an adult among us who didn't have one. But we'd come together, lived together, helped one an-other, survived, thrived, we'd done that!
We'd done all

that!
We'd made a good home for ourselves, were making an honest living. Now people with crosses have come and put slave collars on us.

And where is my baby? Where is Larkin?

************************************

They separated the women and older girls from the men and older boys while we were paralyzed. They left the men in the larger room of the school and dragged us women into one of the smaller ones. I didn't think about it at the time, but that was an odd thing to do because there were more women than men in the community. We were dumped onto the wooden floor, half atop one another, and left there. The windows were open, and I remember thinking it strange that no one bothered to board them up or even close them.

The only good thing was that as I was half lifted and half dragged, I saw Bankole. I don't believe he saw me. He was lying on his back, staring straight up, one scraped, bloody hand on his chest. I saw him blink. I did see that, so I knew he was alive. If only he had gotten away. He would have been more likely than anyone else to find some way to help the rest of us. Besides, what will our captors do to a man his age? Would they care that he was old? No. From the way he looked, it was clear that he had been dragged across the ground just as I was. They didn't care.

Would they care that my Larkin was only a baby?

And where was she?
Where was she?

************************************

I was terrified every time someone came near me. All our captors were young men, and I'd seen two or three angry, bloody ones. I didn't know at the time that this was Gray's work. I didn't know anything. All I could think about was Larkin, Bankole, my people, and the damned slave collar around my neck.

As the sun went down, my body began to hurt—my back and my hands and arms burned where they had scraped along the ground as I was dragged. My head felt lumpy and sore. It also ached in a hard, throbbing way that might have had something to do with the gas.

It was dark when I began trying to move. For a long time, all I could do was flop around a little. Someone in the room groaned. Someone else began to cry. Someone gasped, choked, and began to cough. Someone said over and over again, "Ah shit!" and I recognized Allie Gilchrist's voice.

"Allie?" I said. I slurred the word, sounded drunk to my own ears, but she heard me.

"Olamina?"

"Yeah."

"Look, did you see Justin before they dragged you in here?"

"No. Sorry. Did you see Larkin?"

"No. Sorry."

"They took my baby too," Adela Ortiz said in a hoarse whisper. "They took him and I don't know where he is." She began to cry.

I wanted to cry myself. I wanted to just to lie there and cry because I hurt so much in so many ways. I felt too weak and uncoordinated to do anything but cry. Instead, I sat up, bumped someone, apologized, sat stupidly for a while, then found the sense to say, "Who else is here? One by one, say your names."

"Noriko," a voice said just to my left. "They took Debo-rah and Melissa," she continued. "I had Melissa and Michael had Deborah. We were running. I thought we were going to make it. Then that damned gas. We fell down, and someone came and pulled both girls away from us. I couldn't see anything but hands and arms taking them."

"And my babies," Emery Mora said. "My babies...." She was crying, almost incoherent, "My little boys. My sons.

They took my sons again.
Again!"
She had had two young sons when she was a slave years ago, and they had been sold away from her. She had been a debt slave—a legally indentured person bound for her family's unpaid debts. The debts were accumulated because she worked for an agribusiness corporation that underpaid its workers in company scrip instead of money, then overcharged them for food and shelter so that they could stay in ever-increasing debt. It was against the law for the company to break up fam-ilies by selling minor children away from their parents or husbands from their wives. It was against both local and fed-eral law, so it shouldn't have happened. Just as what's hap-pened to us now shouldn't have happened.

I thought about Emery's older daughter and stepdaughter.

"What about Tori and Doe?" I said. "Are they here? Tori?

Doe?"

At first, there was no answer, and I thought of Nina and Paula Noyer. I didn't want to think of them, but Doe and Tori Mora were 14 and 15—far from babyhood. If they weren't here, where were they?

Then a very small voice said, "I'm here. Get off me."

"I'm trying to get off you," a stronger voice said. "There's no room in here. I can hardly move."

Tori and Doe, alive, and as well as the rest of us were. I shut my eyes and took a long, deep, grateful breath. "Nina Noyer?" I asked.

She began to answer, then coughed several times. "I'm here," she said at last, "but my little sisters . . . I don't know what happened to them."

"Mercy?" I called. "Kassi?"

No answer.

"May?"

No answer. She couldn't talk, but she would have made a noise to let us know she was there.

"She had Kassia and Mercy with her," Allie said. "She's strong and fast. Maybe she got them away. She loved them like she gave birth to them."

I sighed. "Aubrey Dovetree?" I asked.

"I'm here," she said. "But I can't find Zoë or the kids

……….Zoë had all three of them with her."

And Zoë had a heart condition, I thought. She might be dead, even if no one meant to kill her. Not knowing what else to do, I went on with my role call. "Marta Figueroa?"

"Yes," she whispered. "Yes, I'm here, all alone. My brother.... My children

Gone."

"Diamond Scott? Cristina Cho?"

"I'm here," said two voices at once, one in English and the other in Spanish. Cristina's English was good now, but under stress, she still reverted to Spanish.

"Beatrice Scolari? Catherine Scolari?"

"We're here," Catherine Scolari's voice said. She sounded as though she had been crying. "Vincent is dead." she said.

"He fell against a rock, hit his head. I heard them say he was dead." Vincent was her husband and Beatrice's brother. He had only one arm because of an accident that happened before he joined us. He was, perhaps, more likely than most of us to be off balance when the gas collapsed him. But still

. . .

"He might not be dead," I said.

"He is. We saw him

" There were more sounds of crying.

I didn't know what to say to them. All I could think was that maybe Larkin was dead too. And what about Bankole? I didn't want to think about death. I didn't really want to think at all.

"Channa Ryan?" I said.

"I'm here. Oh god, I wish I wasn't"

"Beth Faircloth? Jessica Faircloth?"

There was no sound at first, then in nearly inaudible whis-pers, "We're here. Both of us are here."

"Natividad?" I said. "Zahra?"

"I'm here," Natividad said in Spanish. Then, "If they've hurt my babies, I'll cut their throats. I'll kill all of them. I don't care what they do to me." She began to cry. She's strong, but her kids mean more than life to her. She had a husband and three kids. Now, they're all gone from her.

"All of our babies are gone," I said. "We have to find out where they're being kept and who's guarding them and... and what's going to happen to them." I shifted, trying to get more comfortable, but that was impossible. "My Larkin should be nursing now. Right now. We have to find out what we can."

"They've put slave collars on us," Marta Figueroa said in almost a moan. "They took our kids and our men, and they put slave collars on us! What the hell more do we need to know than that?"

"We have to know as much as we can," I answered.

"They're not killing us. They could have wiped us out. They separated us from the men and from the young kids, but we're alive. We have to find a way to get our kids back. Whatever we can do to get our kids back, we have to do it!" I felt myself falling toward hysteria, toward weeping and screaming. I tensed my body. Milk was leaking from my breasts onto my shirt, soaking the front of it, and I ached so.

For a long time no one said anything. Then Teresa Lin, who had not spoken before, whispered, "That window is open. I can see the stars."

"Did they put a collar on you?" I heard myself ask. I sounded almost normal to my own ears. My voice was soft and low.

"What, this wide flat thing? They put one on me. I don't care. That window is open! I'm getting out of here!" And she began scrambling over people toward the window. Someone cried out in pain. Several voices cursed her.