I wiped my nose with my hand, trying to expel the smell from around my face. Joseph snorted in disgust. I turned to him, about to ask who’d been eating cat food, when I heard a sound I’d never heard before. A trumpeting roar. Loud and aggressive, sailing towards us over the edges of the red, ornate roofs that now grazed the top of the corn stalks.
Standing on my toes, I peered over the top of the soldiers’ shoulders, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever made the noise, but I couldn’t see. Joseph’s breath caught and his eyes widened, which only made me more impatient to get through. I tried not to push the soldier in front of me. Putting my hand to my throat reminded of their violence, where his fingernails had dug in around my collarbone. Despite the quiet, almost peaceful marching we had just done, we were prisoners and assumed criminals.
The noise sounded out again, and I mentally urged the soldier with the keys to hurry up. I wanted to kick him in the back. Finally, the lock opened and we were shoved through a wire frame and into an open garden. Hedges were neatly trimmed into concentric circles; sweet smelling roses edged the low bushes. The smell mixed horribly with the fish odor and I covered my nose with my hand, gaining an amused snigger from the soldier next to me.
It was beautiful, organic, and completely wrong. But when I looked past the gardens with their inviting wooden benches and candy-colored lawn to the gritty, black iron bars giving stripes to animals who had none, it was more like I would expect. A prison for animals. I blinked slowly, trying to take it all in, and was hit sharply in the back with a gun butt for my dawdling, knocking the wind out of my chest like a door slammed shut. Joseph growled behind me.
Someone held up a radio and spoke low and quick into the speaker, alerting Superior Este’s guards we were coming.
“How far to Este?” Joseph asked with pent-up anger lacing his words.
The soldier in front of me grunted and then answered, “Her compound is closest to this part of the wall.”
“I wonder what kind of mood the flea will be in. Paranoid or really paranoid,” the redhead snorted.
“Be quiet!” the man in the front snapped, before picking up the pace. “Este is cautious. That’s why she devised this entry; it’s how she keeps our technology safe.” The redhead shut his mouth, but I saw him smirk while his chin was dipped towards his chest.
I rolled that morsel over in my head, and it scared me. Paranoia didn’t really help our plan. We needed her to believe we were telling the truth.
I thought back to my one and only helicopter ride, the openness of the terrain inside the Superiors’ compound. I did remember one small patch in the corner that looked like yellowing grass, now understanding that was the cornfield we had just walked through.
One of the guards dragged his gun butt across the bars as we walked over concrete pathways, the sound echoing dully like a broken bell. We wound this way and that, turning back on ourselves and seeming to walk in circles. I glanced at the animals as I passed them, their droopy eyes and swinging heads emitting pure depression. No wonder Salim wanted to take his monkeys with him.
We came to the source of the trumpeting noise, and I had to stop. Its crusty eyes were so large in its leathery head, but they looked human. Its expression distinctively wise. It lifted its head, blew from its long nose, and then began to step sideways and back, sideways and back, swinging its gigantic head repetitively like it couldn’t believe some unknown truth. My heartbeat crept up in anger, knocking on my ribs and struggling to find a voice. This was cruel. This Indian Elephant, as it read on the plaque glued to its prison cell bars, was the epitome of sorrow. My hands strained against my sides, as the want to free myself and then all the mistreated creatures in here started to overtake reason.
One of the soldiers cocked his gun and aimed it at the elephant. “Poor bastard,” he said with one eye closed as he took aim, “maybe I should put him out of his misery.” They all laughed, banging the bars and shouting at it. I connected with its eyes, eyelashes as thick as wire, brushing over the oldness, the tiredness, of that human expression.
One of them picked up a rock and threw it at the animal. It hit it on the flap of its enormous ears. It flinched. They were too busy laughing and cracking jokes to see it stomp its large foot, plumes of dust rising up around it. They were too distracted congratulating each other on their own idiocy to see the anger in its eyes. They didn’t hear it as it charged towards the bars.
I’d never seen five armed men so terrified or move so fast before. They were all silenced, some of them falling backwards and swearing.
“Dumb animal,” one of them muttered as he dusted the dirt from his pants.
I couldn’t help myself. I put my hand to my mouth, but that only caused the laugh to fly sideways from my lips. I shook with it, pointing at the men on the ground. “Ha, well, you deserved that,” I said between giggles.
“Rosa… no!”
But it was too late. A chunk of a gun butt approached my face. I gasped, but I didn’t have time to react, and then darkness.
I put my hand to my temple.
“Morning, Sleeping Beauty.” Joseph’s face hovered in front of me.
I groaned, rolling over to look at the ceiling, expecting hard rock, or metal bars and restraints. Instead, I was faced with the canopy of a four-poster bed draped in red velvet. The luxurious fabric cascaded from each corner, pulled together with thick gold rope and neatly trimmed tassels.
I closed my eyes, sure it was a dream, opening one and then the other. No, it was still velvet, and the bed was still dark mahogany. And I still had mud all over my shirt and bruises on my skin.
“You know that was pretty stupid, Rosa. You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”
I sat up on the bed and nodded somberly. “I know.”
Joseph reached out to touch what I was sure was a brilliant purple bruise and chuckled. “It was pretty damn funny though.”
I smiled warily. This was way too creepy. It reminded me of the underground facility, where everything was an apparition.
“Where are we?” I asked, taking his hand in mine and putting it my lap. Joseph shuffled up so he was leaning against the headboard and sighed. I focused on the carved, brown cherubs draped on either side of his face, narrowing my eyes at the blue paint that had been dotted on their round, wooden eyeballs.
“After you passed out, they made me carry you. We went a really strange way, backwards and forwards. When we got to the gate to Estes’ compound, the soldiers stopped, each one tapped the symbol on the gate three times, turned around in a circle, and jumped. I swear I nearly ended up like you, but I managed to stop myself from laughing.”
“You’re joking, right?” I smoothed the thick, satin quilt that lay over my legs and frowned.
“I’m serious. It was like that all the way into her home. Knocking this many times, spinning around… I think Este may be a little more than paranoid.” He whispered the last sentence close to my ear. I looked up and noticed the camera in the corner of the room.
“So where are we now?” I surveyed the room, looking for the chinks in the projection.
“We’re in her house. The soldiers threw us in here and locked the door. Someone came in with food and water, flanked by guards, about an hour ago, but that’s it.” He stood up and moved towards the table in the corner. “Here, eat something.” I eyed the food suspiciously. “Just eat, Rosa. I already have, and I’m not dead yet.”