I can guess why no one wants to attempt a break out. Where would we go? And the consequences of disobedience must be bad, because everyone in the cage is utterly frightened by the basketball heads.
Someone grabs the new girl by the arm and tries to pull her into our huddled pile. She’s about my age and has pretty red hair. I notice the ball heads keep coming back to the cage and commenting on her in their weird garbled language, making hand gestures from time to time. Then they laugh, a high-pitched, eerie sound that grates on my frayed nerves.
It’s almost like they’re taking bets on the new girl.
A few hours later, she wakes up. I’m hunkered down next to Liz, and I startle out of my stupor when she inhales sharply.
The girl sobs aloud, her eyes going wide.
“Don’t scream,” I hear a low voice hiss. I can’t make out who’s said it, but I know we’re all thinking it.
The redhead isn’t listening, though. She takes one look around her, panics, and begins to scream. Her shrill cry echoes in the hold. She won’t stop, even though others are waving their hands and touching her, trying to calm her down. She’s hysterical, her cries getting louder and more panicked the more awake she gets. She flails and thrashes against our warning touches.
Something beeps overhead.
The others in the cage go utterly still.
Weird birdlike chirps fill the air from the intercom.
One of the ball heads touches a panel that lights up, and he gargles a response. The crowd of girls seems to shrink back as the other ball head approaches the cage and opens the door.
It’s freedom, but no one’s reaching.
The redhead is snagged. She’s a fighter, I’ll give her that. She thrashes and flails as they touch her, screaming obscenities in French and shrieking for help. Everyone else sits quietly, watching.
I can’t stand this. I try to get up, to go help her. Liz grabs my leg. “Don’t,” she hisses. “Don’t call attention to yourself, Georgie. Trust me.”
Even though it goes against everything inside me to do nothing, I’m terrified too. It’s too easy to sit down and huddle with the mass of girls again. To sit and wait and see what happens when someone disobeys the unspoken gag order. And I hate myself for it.
A moment later, the redhead’s dragged to what I thought was an examining table. I watch in horror as one of the ball heads slaps some sort of mask over her mouth. When she goes silent, I realize it’s a muzzle of some kind. My own mouth thins, my teeth clamping together. I feel sick as her hands are stretched over her head and bound at the far end of the table with a cord that snakes around her wrists. Her hips and legs hang over the edge and I start imagining the worst.
She continues to kick and flail as one of the aliens grabs her skirt and rips it from her body.
“Don’t look,” Liz whispers to me.
I look, though. Someone has to look. Someone has to see.
Sick at heart, I watch as the redhead bucks and tries to free herself. I watch as the first alien undoes the front of his uniform with a touch at the collar. I watch as his friend makes laughing comments as he mounts the gagged woman.
I watch, dry-eyed and full of hate as they laugh and get on top of her over and over again. It seems to go on forever. At some point she stops fighting and goes limp, and I hope she’s passed out. I hope she doesn’t remember any of this.
Liz squeezes my hand. “Kira says they have standing orders that they’re allowed to ‘discipline’ any misbehaving captives.”
I nod and finally look away as the aliens talk in their weird language and switch places once more. I’m guessing she’s good and “disciplined”’ by now. I want to scream, but loud noises aren’t allowed. I dig my nails into my palms and gaze down the row of pale faces in the pen with me, trying to figure out which one is Kira. A girl at the end with silky, flat brown hair is weeping with her hands pressed to her ears. It’s as if she can’t stand to hear what’s going on, but the redhead is silent. There’s only alien chatter.
That must be Kira. She’s the only one who can understand them, thanks to the device implanted in her ear. I scan the others. They’re in shock, eyes averted. One girl wears a look of horrified grief, and I wonder if she was a screamer, too. I decide I don’t want to know. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to drown out the world. Trying to exist in a quiet bubble where none of this is real. Where if I pinch my arm hard enough, everything will go away and I’ll wake up.
But when I close my eyes, I see the redhead’s face as she’s raped. I see the ball head’s face as he jokes and yammers away in his alien language as he rapes the girl. As if it’s no big deal, just another day at the office, typical water-cooler shit.