Most of the occupants of the next trailer had woken up, and I was relieved to see both cheetah shifters, Gael the berserker, and Drusus the incubus among its occupants. But I wasn’t sure I should be relieved to find them confined alongside us.
“Let me know when it’s done.” Vandekamp let his assessing gaze wander over all three trailers, then he gave his clipboard to a man wearing a thick pair of brown cargo pants and a lightweight short-sleeved button-down shirt with a stylized set of overlapping S’s embroidered on his front left pocket. He carried a tranquilizer rifle just like the one Vandekamp had shot me with.
When his boss had gone back inside, the man with the clipboard turned to the other soldiers, who gathered around for their instructions. “Let’s get this done right, boys. No mistakes. Start at the front and work your way back.”
The other men nodded, then headed our way, and I didn’t realize I was backing away from them until my bound hands hit the other end of my pen.
“I am Adrian Woodrow,” the man with the clipboard said, in a loud, clear voice. “I am the gamekeeper here at the Savage Spectacle, which means I’m in charge of your daily lives.”
Here at the Savage Spectacle? My stomach began to twist. The Spectacle was our final destination. Vandekamp wouldn’t have to rent off-season menagerie acts anymore because he’d bought three trailers full of us.
“The Savage Spectacle does not travel, and it is not a zoo. We are a licensed private collection of exotic wildlife, catering exclusively to the cryptid-themed fetishes and fantasies of a select list of private clients.”
“What’s a fetish?” Lala whispered, her hands trembling as they gripped the side of her pen.
Trista snorted softly, and since my answer would only have further scared Lala, I kept it to myself.
“You’re all about to be sorted into specific categories depending on your species and your position here at the Spectacle. You’ll be issued clothing and given a complete physical exam to make sure you’re bringing nothing infectious or transmissible into our community. It is in your best interest to cooperate fully. Consequences here at the Spectacle are swift and severe. Tolerances are nil. Orders will not be repeated.”
The men reporting to Woodrow slid open the first cell in the cattle car, and the men in padded suits pulled Zarah out, while the one of the ones in tactical gear aimed his tranquilizer rifle at her. Zarah still wore only a red sequined bralette and matching bikini because the succubi worked—and lived—in as little clothing as possible. Her bright costume looked sad and absurd, removed from the carnival atmosphere, but none of the men even seemed to notice. They simply hauled her into the building by both arms.
While they were inside, another team of four came for her sister, Trista, and over the next hour, my stunned, scared friends were removed from their pens one at a time and led into the building. The men wasted no energy and overlooked no precaution. They answered no questions, and eventually the women stopped asking.
I took in every detail I could, trying to figure out how far we’d been shipped while we were unconscious, but the only clue I had, other than lush flora that wouldn’t grow in Oklahoma or West Texas, was my hunger, extreme thirst and severely dry mouth. We’d driven hours, at least, but the sun had yet to set.
Or maybe it had yet to set again.
After the shifters, the succubi and the sirens were marched out of sight, a team of men opened the door to Rommily’s pen. She sat at the back of her cell with her eyes closed, slowly shaking her head in denial of whatever horrific vision was playing behind her eyelids. When they told her to come out of the pen, she didn’t respond. She probably couldn’t even hear them.
One of the men in bite suits reached into the pen and grabbed Rommily’s ankle with his bare hand. Her eyelids flew open to reveal featureless white orbs—the signature trait of an oracle in the grip of a premonition.
“Crushed by the weight of your own hubris,” Rommily said, each word running into the next as they fell from her mouth. “Broken rib. Punctured lung. Massive internal bleeding.”
Startled, the guard let go of Rommily and turned to his coworkers—the first lapse of judgment I’d seen from any of them so far. “What the hell is she saying?”
“That’s how you’re going to die.” Mirela’s voice was low-pitched and eerily steady, like the undisturbed surface of a deep lake. “When is anyone’s guess.”
“Is she serious?” the handler demanded from coworkers, who had no answer for him.
“Just grab her, Bowman,” the man in tactical gear snapped.
“Bowman...” Rommily repeated, blinking shiny white eyes at him. “Grab her...”
Bowman gritted his teeth and seized the oracle’s ankle again, then hauled her roughly toward the opening of the pen. Rommily’s head smacked the floor of her cell, and I flinched as her normal irises returned. Pain had driven her out of her vision.
Lala gripped the door of her cell. “Please be careful. She’s not dangerous. She’s just confused.”
The handlers led Rommily into the building with no particular care for how roughly they handled her. Yet neither of them touched her bare flesh again.
After the oracles had gone, I was alone in our trailer, and when the handlers unlocked my metal cell, I lowered myself to the ground before they could even reach for me. I didn’t fight when they each took one of my arms, and I held my head high as they marched me into the building, then down a hallway lined with steel doors. My dignity and the clothes I wore were all I had left in the world, and if being sold to the menagerie had taught me anything, it was that those would soon be taken away too.
Bowman opened a door halfway down on the left side of the hall and shoved me into a six-by-eight-foot gray brick room with a tall, narrow window at one end. There was a rolled-up blanket on the floor, next to a stainless-steel toilet/sink combo and a single roll of thin toilet paper.
Bowman cut the plastic binding from my wrists, then closed the door at my back. A soft beep told me it had locked automatically. The door had a square Plexiglas window at eye height and a rectangular cutout at the very bottom that was just the right size for a food tray.
As soon as the men were gone, I rubbed my sore wrists, then drank several handfuls of water from the sink, but I made myself stop when my stomach began to churn. Recovery from dehydration must be slow and steady. Then I used the toilet, my attention trained on the window in my door, to make sure no one was watching.
Seated on the blanket, I listened to footsteps and the beeping of more locked doors as the rest of my friends were marched and stored. The sun sank slowly outside my window, labeling the directions for me, but ignorance of the exact time and my own location ate at my thoughts like an infection. I’d only been imprisoned in the menagerie for about a month before our coup, and since then, I’d lost focus on the reality of captivity. I remembered pain and hunger and humiliation. But I’d forgotten about ignorance and dependence, and how they preyed on the mind rather than the body.
For hours, I sat in an impenetrable concrete cell, deprived of both food and information, and with each passing second, my anger grew until it overwhelmed my fear. The Spectacle was using ignorance as a weapon, keeping us in the dark to leave us disoriented and pliable.
At some point, immeasurable hours after I’d been locked up, a folded stack of material was slid through the opening at the bottom of the door. A food tray followed the clothing, and on it was an empty paper cup lying on its side, a boiled chicken leg, a slice of white bread and half an apple.
Before I could pick up the tray, Bowman’s face appeared outside the door window. “Change clothes and slide your old ones through the slot.” He disappeared without waiting to see if his instructions would be followed.
Still dressed in my grubby Metzger’s uniform, I filled the paper cup with water and ate every bite of food on my tray.