Killing June (On Pause)

Killing June

                I screamed as icy cold hands wrapped around my arms, yanking me away from my ageing and wailing mother, my one and only friend crying out for me as the men from The Slaves held him back. My weak eight year old arms couldn’t break free from their grasp, Momma did her best to hide me like all parents did of their daughters, but I had disobeyed and gotten too close to the windows, they saw me and just like that they were there to take me. Papa was out at work, big brother was with him. What would they do when they saw that I had been taken as The Slave’s law ordered? I felt hot tears run down my grimy face as they snapped a gas mask over my face, similar to the ones that I saw my family putting on before stepping outside. “Momma!” I screamed, wishing I hadn’t tried to catch a glimpse of the outside world anymore, wanting more than anything to return to my blacked out room upstairs where they wouldn’t be able to find me. Momma would never tell me where the girls were taken, all I knew was that it was bad, but so was the crumbling world around us. “Isaiah!” I cried for my friend next as he bit the hand of one of the men, trying to break free. They cursed and hit him, the last thing I saw as I was dragged outside, blinded by the first glimpse of sunlight I’d ever gotten.

                I woke up covered in sweat, it beading on my forehead and tumbling down to the tip of my nose. There were claw marks on my arms and blood underneath my finger nails. I sighed, the recurring nightmare slowly fading away as day crept its way into the shadows of the room casting beams of light on my fellow cell-girls, all sleeping peacefully. It’d been nine years since I’d been taken from home and brought to the prostitution camp. My co-worker, and friend, Angel was taken at birth. She never had nightmares about the day she was taken, like most of the girls here she was too young to remember her real name, parents, or even if she had siblings. There was no past tying her down. I don’t know if I pity her, or wish it had been the same for me. Maybe then it would all be easier. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and pushed my blankets off, getting up with a creak and tip toeing around the scattered rusty beds and closing the door behind me. It wasn’t always open, at night it was locked from three when we retired to bed to eight when the guards came back to keep watch. They said it was to keep us safe. We know it’s to keep us from running away. Not that forgetting to lock a door would allow for us to get out anyway.

                The outside doors were heavily guarded at night, which was enough to stop any uprising, but nevertheless they surrounded it with a wall equipped with a gun tower, electric fence, and barbed wire. The only escape attempt was pretty well planned, at least to a point. The girl had been here for so long she had forgotten about the toxicity of the air left over from the nuclear war and forgot to snag a gas mask, after a few minutes of breathing in the air her lungs collapsed and she died shortly after. Following the escape attempt they stopped keeping gas masks out in the open just in case someone tried it again, customers were to hand theirs over to be locked up inside the Boss’s study.

                Usually there were guards in our wing of the building but not this morning, just yesterday there had been a big bust at an orphanage where they had been keeping over one hundred girls ages two to thirteen. The law that The Slaves had set long ago after communities had risen from the ashes of the nuclear war was that all girls were to be given up to the prostitution camps at birth. Any violation of this law could result in severe punishment or even death. I had heard the woman running the orphanage was shot on sight and the boys there had even been taken to be trained as guards for the camp. Then again, it was all rumors. The hope of all girls in hiding was to reach the age of twenty-six, once you were that old if you were found they would leave you alone, and you were left to live your own life, that was until you had a daughter and it was your turn to lose your child. The only way to keep the prostitution centers running was to eliminate potential partners for the men of the world, that way they would grow up and be raised in a world where it was right to pay for a girl instead of finding love and having a family of your own.