The Back of the Van

“Are we here?” 

Mary looked at the face in the rearview mirror with expectant eyes.

“Well, we about to be. This is the new city, remember? I told you that’s where we going.”

“Right, I just didn’t think it would be so…”

“Small?”

“Well, yes.” 

“Hmm.” 

As Mary peered through the windshield the city was still just a faint smudge on the gray horizon. They had driven across miles of desert to get here, and now that they were here Mary felt her pulse quicken. She wiped her hand across her forehead and then ran it across her mouth and siphoned off the sweat, grateful for all the moisture it would give her, despite the briny taste. Trisha, the woman driving the van, took a big swig of water from a clear plastic jug and set it back on the passenger seat. The water inside sloshed and Mary swallowed in a dry throat. 

“Are you sure about this?” Mary’s leg was now bobbing up and down like an engine piston.

Trisha turned her head, speaking to her shoulder. “You know I am, and there ain’t no other way outta this mess, sorry to say.” 

She swung the steering wheel right and the van veered off the main road. Mary felt the van lurch off the asphalt onto dry desert earth. Pebbles crackled beneath their tires and a pinstripe of whitish dawn shone between the hinges of the cargo doors as the back wheels swerved to face the sunrise. Mary put out a hand to steady herself in the suffocating gloom of the cargo bay, closed her eyes, and said a prayer.

“You talking to yourself?" Trisha’s eyes in the rearview.

“No.” 

Trisha kept driving and the van kept getting hotter, like a slow-warming kiln. The AC was broken, she said. Wasn’t everything, Mary thought bitterly. Outside the front windshield the country opened itself to them in unyielding shades of color. Orange rocks. Tawny yellow basin dotted with shrubs and small cacti. Rock formations that flamed pink, then orange in the dawning light and rose up in great pyramidic mountains that still brooded in darkness, range upon range of mountains that drew out to a wavery purple smear in the distance. From what Mary could see as she craned her head past the front passenger seat–she was sitting on the floor of the cargo bay–they seemed to be traveling down a set of parallel grooves worn into the earth by the passage of many vehicles. The tire tracks took them lower and lower into the valley, sometimes forcing them to make a hairpin turn down a rocky switchback, other times taking them across a rickety bridge that spanned one of the many ravines and riverbeds that cracked the floor of the desert. The bridges were made of hammered steel panels riveted end to end, and groaned under the weight of the van. After clearing one bridge Mary let her breath escape through gritted teeth. A loud hissing sound. 

“Drive too bumpy for your liking?”

Trisha chuckled and shook her head from side to side, as if Mary were hiding from the dark and not trying to keep her lunch in as the van clambered over the bridges like an elephant on a trapeze line. 

“This van has got a lot of body jiggle.”

“Body what?” Trisha’s tone sounded as if Mary had just said something obscene.

“It’s an auto thing.”

“Oh.” Trisha cackled. “A’ight.”

The city was becoming more distinct. Large, inorganic shapes materialized from the purply gloom, every shape a new contour of Mary’s future life. The first object to emerge into focus was a wall. It was an offense to nature, a slipshod forty-foot construction of junk–corrugated iron, tires, wooden beams–topped with gleaming coils of razor wire, and in front stood a lower wall of cinder blocks topped with shards of broken bottles–clear, brown, and emerald green-catching and refracting the sun’s rays as the dawn light slid up the larger wall. Above the walls, pitched roofs and a forest of TV antennas. Mary could just make out the roofed cylinder of a water tower. The double wall must have spanned a half a mile. A large city, then. 

“The wall is actually just a barrier for a small section of town down there,” Trisha said as if reading her mind. “The entire county was much bigger. We don’t go outside the Wall, though. Too dangerous. Bandits and shit.”

“You still haven’t told me what this place is.” A note of distrust had crept into Mary’s voice. 

“Look, Mary–I can call you Mary, right?–we picked you and your people up from that dried-out, crusty joint you call home back there–you know, the place you woulda died-a thirst? There’s a reason we picked you up. You need survival, we need manpower. Don’t complicate it. You’ll be well provided for. Just be grateful you’re alive girl, and enjoy the ride.”

Mary tried to, but she was having trouble swallowing and the water in the front seat looked so delicious she thought she would die. 

“I’m grateful,” she said at last, “I just don’t know where you’re driving me.”

“It’s a safe zone. We got water, food, a job you’ll be assigned, along with your quarters, your clo'es. We run a pretty tight ship and we don’t take no S-H-I-T, but I think you’ll find the situation amenable, OK?”

“Ok.”

They drove on a straight course for ten minutes, the van jerking and shuddering over every pothole and bump in the road and Mary swaying along with it like a surfer bummed out on some loopy drug–surfing the waves of motion and emotion that rolled under her like a riptide, willing herself to not be pulled under, staring fixedly at the dawn light knifing through the gaps in the cargo bay doors and throwing orange fire on the walls. 

“Well, we here.”

Trisha braked and threw the gear lever into park. They were at the first checkpoint, outside the cinderblock wall. A man standing nearby in a ratty shirt and tactical vest took a long drag of his cigarette and flicked it into the sand. He looked at Trisha once and whistled to his partner on the other side of the van, who jogged to the gate, slinging a rifle that slapped against his back. The gate–corrugated steel panels stacked to triple their height and rusted to a deep brown–grated open with a noise that made Mary cover her ears. Trisha cranked the lever back into drive and revved the engine and the van eased over the fifteen foot threshold. 

“You gonna wanna hold yo breath for this.” 

Between the walls was all manner of sewage–mounds of human waste and rotting food, or food that was too rotten to be eaten. Mary pinched her nostrils and tried not to gag.

“Where are the others? Did they already get here?”

Trisha made no response, or pretended not to hear. 

Inside the compound Mary saw the blueprint of her future life spread out before her with grim, brutal efficiency. Dirty streets. Dirty faces set atop hunched shoulders. A tent city in a former park, hemmed in by streets and low-slung houses with dirt lawns and empty in-ground pools swimming with filth. Entire neighborhoods fermenting in squalor. The walled-in area was at least a hundred houses deep. It went back and back and back.

“You come with me, don’t worry about wa’s gonna happen.” 

They parked alongside the lawn of an ancient brick townhouse at the west end of the city. Mary narrowed her eyes in disbelief. A townhouse–in the middle of the desert. The sight of the hideous wall rising up behind–even more absurd. The side door hummed on its metal runners as Trisha slid it open from the outside, and Mary stepped out of the van. She stared at the smooth white columns running up to wide eaves, the windows trimmed in white, the lantern hanging above the doorway. The beautiful green door with the rusty brass knocker. The house was an invitation, she saw, but to what?

Trisha shut the sliding door with a bang. The sunlight had turned the upstairs windows into fiery prisms. Portals to an unseen world. The bricks were ablaze with orange sunlight, bracketed into tipsy-looking squares by the columns and the wall farther south. Trisha led her up the steps and through the door into an ice-cool entrance hall. The tang of urine and dung disappeared. Mahogany floors gleamed like fresh espresso and the walls shimmered under pearlescent French wallpaper–light gray, with Fleur De Lises in silver. A handsome staircase led up from the hall to the second floor, no doubt as gorgeous as the first. Mary laid a hand on the mahogany banister to make sure it was real. She felt her world closing in on her.

“Go upstairs.”

There was no warmth in Trisha’s voice. Mary mounted the stairs slowly, one step at a time, keeping her eyes on the second floor hallway. She could hear muffled crying coming from somewhere, and a dull tinkle, like chains dragging. Her heart thudded against her chest like a belt-fed machine gun. She emerged at the top of the stairs, looked both ways, saw the same mahogany floor and gray Fleur De Lis wallpaper. She noticed for the first time that the house was lit by candlelight–little white candles shedding halos of light from silver holders spaced at regular intervals. Together with the drawn shades, the candlelight was more menacing than perhaps was intended. As if she’d stepped into a haunted Chateau. Trisha’s feet could be heard lumbering up the steps–fourteen little groans–and the next moment Mary could feel her breath on her cheek. Hot. Rancid. 

“Step forward. Thataway.”

Trisha pointed. To the left, at the end of the hall, was a door.

“I’m not sure what this has to do with me getting acclimated–”

“You’ll see.” 

Her tone forbade further questioning. Mary took a step forward. Then another. And another. Finally she stood facing the door. A great expanse of wood that threatened to swallow her whole. She hesitated. 

“Go on.”

She palmed the handle. Her hand shook.

“Girl, if you don’t open that door–”

***

“Mary.”

Mary’s eyes fluttered open on a rosy dawn. 

“Mary, you’re safe now.”

Durius, not much more than a silhouette, nudging her awake in his gentle, quiet way. 

“We got you out. Some of the others are still stuck–” the word caught in his throat– “But we got you out and we have to go now, before they come after us.”

She raised her head. He smelled ripe, like he hadn’t bathed in days. She could just make out the rest of the camp, backlit by the red rim of dawn–dark forms getting up, moving about, packing their things. There was a boiling hiss and white steam rose from the ground as someone dumped water on the embers of last night’s fire. She should have let it smolder, Mary thought. We barely have enough water to drink as it is. 

She couldn’t see Durius’s face, hovering inches above hers, but she could feel his smile. Sorrowful, loving, as all people are toward each other in times of greatest need, when the normal bonds of kin and tribe are rendered obsolete. 

“They almost had you too, but we made sure the chloroform didn’t let that happen.”

He was holding her hand in both of his, kneeling next to her.

“What happened to the others?” 

Durius squeezed her hand. He took in a shaky breath.

“Some of them didn’t make it. We got Shelane out. Abigail, Mayjorie, Symantha. They’d brought us to different houses after picking us up at the Erg, so we had no idea where we were or what was happening to all of you. Jack cornered one of the drivers and got him to tell us and we tracked you down to that brick house. There were others. Other brothels–victims. We always heard about it... but we didn’t have time...”

“Broth…” The word died on her lips. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. A choking sound escaped his throat.

Mary thanked Durius for waking her. He helped her to her feet and they hugged each other for a long time. They parted and she turned to regard the town five miles North. Silent tears rolled off her cheeks and fell to crater in the dust. If only God would send the rain now, she thought, maybe they could stay a while longer.

“Time to leave, people.”

Peter was leaning against a Ford utility van–probably stolen–a jug of gasoline in his right hand, a plastic funnel dangling from his left, dripping golden fuel like nectar from a flower. From the look of the jug, and the fact that it was empty, she estimated that they had about two gallons in the tank–five at the most. If they couldn’t find a source of water on that amount of fuel, they’d all be dead within days. 

Mary heard a rumble in the sky. Her eyes grew large and she shot Peter a look, her face wild with hope. Peter looked up at the sky and dropped the jug into the sand. The sun was riding the jagged ridgeline, rising higher with each breath, but the clouds were dark and swollen and did not break before the dawn. Others looked up now. Durius ran a hand over his wispy hair–a thinning wreath of tow–and tilted his head toward the sky, closing his eyes.