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She yelled and launched herself upright, ready to run and fight anyone who stood in her way.
Or at least that’s what her brain told her she was doing.
Her yell dampened into the cloth gag and Buckeye flopped like a fish. The body behind her let out a grunt, deep and male, when her head thudded back and knocked against what might have been a chin.
Her arms and legs did nothing to help her get up. They couldn’t. Something held her ankles together; her boots had no play in any direction. When she made to fling her arms from where they curled under her ribs, all she managed was a banged elbow on the cargo floor beneath her and a sharp tug between her legs.
Straps. The painful coming-up-short was straps. Yanking on both sides of her crotch, circling around her back. Heavy canvas bagged her like an angry cat. This was a straight jacket.
She was bouncing in the back of a truck like a rag doll. In a hood. And a gag. Wearing a straight jacket.
Buckeye began to throw what her grandmother would have referred to as a ‘wall-eyed fit’.
The gag ate her screams as she thrashed. The floor bruised joints, and the fabric of the hood abraded the tip of her nose. More noises came from the person behind her now, and in front, as well. Their sounds were damp and muffled like hers. The firm line of pressure under her shoulder blades Buckeye now recognized as another set of forearms, restrained the same as she was.
The wheels jolted over some rock or crevice and her knees bashed into the legs in front of her. A feminine yelp came through another gag, and some grumble came from the man at her back. His sound told a brief story of irritation, of wishing Buckeye would just settle and shut up already. Her fellow debtors had given up hope.
After a few more futile grunts and tugs at her bonds, she did settle, however. If from exhaustion over anything else. The air inside whatever crude hood they’d placed on her was humid. Rough fabric sucked against her nose and puffed back out with her breath. It smelled like they’d found it in an abandoned building somewhere, untouched since before the Delineation.
This was what happened to people who owed money to houses of Greed. At least people like Buckeye, who ran. The odds were with a person until they weren’t, but oh god, when Luck smiled … The trouble came when Luck was the only shovel available to dig oneself out of a hole. And the Lady was fickle. Woo her all you want, there was no telling who she’d be in love with the next day. The next hand or roll.
Luck had fallen out of love with Buckeye Wheeler, and the desperate mail carrier had tried to win her back hard. Tried and failed in spectacular fashion. It had come to a point where getting half a continent away had been the only
avenue left. Not even to reconciliation, but to mere survival.
All her maneuvering had amounted to stalling, though, and Buckeye was fooling herself to say she hadn’t known this from the day she ran. No one would heed the rules of The Vice if the enforcers just let things go. They never did, and now here she was. Stacked together like cordwood with so many other unlucky sons o’ bitches who’d thought they could outrun Greed.
She let the truck’s sloppy suspension jounce her limp body about in time with the others’. Struggle was pointless. Even the scalding tears she didn’t bother to fight anymore. They just came, making tracks through the dirt on her face, without any squinching of eyes or hiccoughing in her chest. Buckeye let the darkness be a nest of safety, if only for a time, that hid from her whatever unpleasant fate lay at the end of this ride.
It was hard for her to say how much time had passed when the truck bumped to a stop. Nothing like real sleep had come, but the contrast of rough motion versus stillness was enough to bring her out of something akin to a trance. The arm she was lying on was asleep, so it had been at least long enough to accomplish that.
She made an attempt to stretch her calves by pointing her toes, and found her boots making contact with something shifting and rounded. A surprised grunt from somewhere past her feet had her suspecting it was the top of someone’s head, and Buckeye swallowed down another wave of fear and disgust at the enforcers’ methods.
Voices came from outside the cargo box, but nothing her straining would let her hear. A body to her right coughed through its gag, and she thought some other sounds elsewhere in the container might be sobbing. She shifted, the very beginnings of a full bladder another problem when she was already full up.
Heavy metallic clanking came just before the clatter of a roll-up door. Where there had been black nothing, now there was light-colored fabric, blurry, right in front of her eyes. Buckeye was not the only one to holler and wriggle against restraints. Daylight was close at hand. Freedom, right there. But then that was the joke, wasn’t it?
“You wanna spray this shit before we eat?” said the man who wasn’t August. Unless there were other enforcers who hadn’t said anything yet, Buckeye had decided there were only the two. How long had they been at it, to collect this many debtors in one place?
“Yeah, we might as well.” This was August now. Fucking two-faced cockstain. “Needs to cycle through once before we get there. And I’m not bettin’ our pay they got no way to tell.”
While Buckeye tried to make sense of why an enforcer would be ‘betting their pay’, a new series of sounds painted an equally confusing picture. Bootsteps on sandy dirt outside. Dull thunking and shifting of objects within the cab, which seemed to come from overhead because of the way they’d crammed the debtors in the container. Fluid sloshing from near the open door, and then the clipped report of someone climbing up into the cargo area, getting to their feet.
A truncated liquid hiss came from somewhere below her tied ankles, a muffled yelp right on its heels. The soles of shoes shuffled, and the other sounds repeated, one body over. Buckeye’s pulse leapt like a rabbit at the undefined new threat.
Spray? What are they spraying? What the fuck is this shit?
By the whimpers coming from all sides of her, the shift of limbs at her front and back, the mail carrier wasn’t the only one chewing on fear. Half a dozen more quick streams of some liquid against what she could now guess was fabric happened before Buckeye felt a boot wedging between her legs and those of the woman in front of her. Another strong spritz had the woman squealing, more in surprise than anything else, it sounded.
Reality set in when the boots shifted. Now there was one both in front of and behind her thighs. A hand gripped the top of her head through the hood and Buckeye squeaked, even knowing something was coming. Fingers and thumb swiveled her face toward the ceiling and ssplt!
Liquid splattered the outside of the hood. When her breath sucked fabric in again, everywhere around her mouth and nose was soaked. The scent of pupil-dilating mint and something acrid she couldn’t put name to overwhelmed, and Buckeye coughed into her gag. Others around her did the same, but the boots were moving on. Another spray behind her and the bound man snorted in protest.
In her new panic, there was no stopping her breath coming quick. Whatever they’d doused her with, Buckeye was inhaling by the deep, rapid lungful. No doubt this had been the plan, but what was her other option? Hold her breath until she passed out and it happened anyway?
She was too lost in her own distress to count how many more sprays before the boots moved back to the door. The grind of a chain signaled the sealing of their box, and darkness fermented collective fear all over again.
At least two or three people were crying. Outside, voices moved around the truck, sounding casual and unconcerned. Her own eyes watered, but this time it was from the sharp odor building inside the hood. The horror stories she’d heard about enforcer raids never mentioned anything like this, but in what couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes, the stories no longer mattered.
