Savage Drift

^{CHAPTER TEN} JOSIE

“You wanted to clean,” Venger says. “So clean.”

Well, of course, to clean—to properly clean a urine puddle off a courtyard floor—you’d want a bucket and a mop. A sponge would do it. Hot water. Some Mr. Clean, maybe, or at least some bleach.

Take it back even more and start by sweeping up the dirt, so it wouldn’t cake all up in the bucket.

What did I have?

I have a dirty towel.

On our first day, Mario had given me a four-word mantra to get by: “Look down. Look dumb.”

He said that would get me through life in the Virtues.

Look down, look dumb.

I scrub the stone pavers with the towel.

Most of the pee had run into the cracks anyway.

There was no way to get it out. It was just going to have to dry up. You’d never see the urine in the morning.

But Venger wants to see me scrubbing so I scrub.

The skin doesn’t come off my knuckles right away. It starts coming off about a half hour in.

I have to be more careful; somehow the wiring is messed up in my brain. Things don’t hurt the way they should anymore.

How do you know you’ve grated the skin off your finger bones? They hurt and then you look and see blood on your towel.

I feel my knees, though. They ache. The cold from the stone is setting into my bones, that’s how it feels.

I hear our group come back from mess.

I hear Heather cry, “She’s still there.” And hear her shushed.

Venger takes out a pack of cigarettes.

“Hard to get cigarettes in here. Know how I got these?” He is chatting to me like I am a barkeep in his regular haunt.

“Every week, we ship off about fifteen, twenty prisoners. All type O. All people who’ve been exposed for longer than a couple hours. Bunch of brass. They ask me for the worst of the lot.”

He lights a smoke. I can smell it.

My knees are numb now. They feel like they are made of cold metal. But my back is screaming.

“They take them away. I don’t know where. And do experiments on them.”

It is getting cool, now, but that isn’t why I feel my flesh shivering.

“I just wanted you to know that, so the next time you think about disrespecting me, or showing off for Scietto and the snot pack, or just doing anything even the littlest bit out of line.”

He is standing over me and I can smell his god-awful breath intertwined with the cigarette smoke.

“Here’s what I want you to keep in mind: I can send you somewhere even worse than this.”

I can’t help it. I laugh.

I say the word, “Really?”

The thought is so absurd.

And I hear a sound from him and it sounds like a laugh.

I dart a look over my shoulder and he is laughing, too.

Somehow I think this means I can get up. The ordeal seems over.

I lean back on my heels. Wipe off my brow.

“What’re you doing?” he asks me, still chuckling.

“I thought… I thought we were done.”

“No,” he says. “Not yet. I’m gonna keep you out here till the last group goes in. Safer for you if we wait until after lockdown.”

“I think… please,” I say. “Can I go now?”

He leans down to me, nodding, liking what he is seeing, I guess. That I am broken.

He opens up his maw and says, “Not. Just. Yet.”

I hear the next group go over to Plaza 900.

I hear them come back.

My knees are bleeding now.

Crickets somewhere start singing. It isn’t too cold for them, I guess.

Soon they will die.

My left hand keeps cramping up.

The last group goes over for dinner.

Forty-five minute shifts.

Then another thirty minutes to get everyone locked down.

My hips feel raw in their sockets.

Tears fall from my eyes and that is fine, I use the water for my cleaning. Spot, spot, drip, drip, drip. The dark little tear-marks vanishing under the arc of my towel.

I didn’t know I could cry, anymore. I nearly thought they were rain.

I should have stayed out of it.

“I can take care of myself, for Pete’s sake,” Mario had grouched the day after I kept Venger from cracking his head open at the fence. I was supposed to let the guards bust his head like a melon, if it came to that.

I was supposed to keep my head down until I was set free.

“I’m an old man,” he had said. “I’m not afraid to die—but you, you’re my project. You’re my last good deed on this earth and you’re making it out of here alive.”

Ha-ha. I saw the trick.

I should take care of myself for his sake.

The stain is long gone and the towel, now, shredded into long, sinewy strings that I hold cupped between my palms.

I ask God if this might be a good time to get it over with.

I know all I’d have to do is rise to my feet and take a weary swing at Venger and he’d put me down.

He wears a gun. He wears it so we can all see the leather holster.

It isn’t the kind of riot-control gun the other guards wear. Those ones are big, semiautomatic guns, loaded with tranquilizer darts.

Venger’s gun is a pistol loaded with bullets.

God, I pray. Send me a sign if I should get this over with.

There is no sign.

“Send me a sign if I should not get this over with.” I must have mumbled aloud.

“What’s that you say?” Venger asks.

“I said, God, please send me a sign if I should not end this!” I sit back on my heels, holding my wet face in my hands.

Venger leans over and grabs me by one of my hair knots. He pulls up and I rise to my knees, my neck taut.

“I guess you’re feeling pretty sorry for yourself,” Venger says. “Maybe by now you’re thinking, ‘This a-hole Venger, he’s serious. He MEANS what he SAYS. Maybe I won’t PUSH him anymore.’”

I start shaking now. And the poor sucker thinks I am shaking scared.

No, my blood is rising and I am keeping my weary self from trying to kill him.

Battered, bleeding, wrung out as I am, I want to wrap my two hands around his neck and SQUEEZE.

“Excuse me, Mr. Venger,” comes a voice and the sound of heels clicking across the courtyard. “Is this really necessary?”

Venger releases my hair and I fall forward, catching myself on my bleeding knuckles.

“You’ve been forcing this young girl to scrub this same spot since I left to make my rounds, two hours ago.”

“She might look harmless to you, Dr. Neman, but this one’s a real animal.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

You’re making it worse, lady, I want to tell her. Just leave us be. It’s almost over.

“She’s just about done now, right, Josie?” Venger asks.

I nod.

Head down.

The doctor leans over. I bow my head, avoiding her inquiring gaze.

“You come by the clinic tomorrow and we’ll get some gauze on your knuckles,” she says.

And I sigh as her heels click away.

Now I couldn’t get Venger to kill me.

Because that doctor was a sign from God and I couldn’t ignore it.