There were so many. Once I understood something about where I was and what they were, the part that tore at my mind was how many identical chambers lined the wall across from me, and my side had to have just as many.
It was seeing her that helped me understand my impossible situation. She’d been uncommonly tall when I spotted her in her sleeveless dress at the intake process, and now she seemed a hundred meters or more.
“So, Emily, on what little paper there is,” she sounded like she was giving a practiced speech to the woman following her, “they’ve been deported.”
I understood English but I’d avoided letting them know. Somehow I’d use it to my advantage. Somehow she’d pay.
“Nobody’s looking for them in El Salvador or Nicaragua or whatever, and officially they’re not here, so liability and risk are effectively zero.” She was so confident and smug. I was going to rip her hair out and feed it to her.
“Surely there have been moral objections, though. Are you concerned about internal opposition, Miss Burke?”
She dragged her fingertips across the front of the cages above me, her lacquered nails clacking against the bars. “The details of our operation are shared only at the highest levels. To most, there’s only figures—products and supplies. Our screening and security are second to none.”
“So, it’s quite special that I’m here, isn’t it?” I hated Emily more with every question.
“Four people have seen this room. You’re the fifth.”
Yet here we were. Hundreds of us. She relished talking about herself, and didn’t seem close to stopping.
“We’ve been able to turn a political and economic challenge into a resource. The energy that we harness through this process has no shortage of applications, and we’ve discovered that there’s an unexpected demand for our… byproducts.”
I seethed at the term. I wrapped my fingers around the bars between me and them, imagining the things I’d do if our situations were reversed. I could see them both screaming, one clutched in each of my hands...
That was one of my fantasies—it was the one that disgusted me the least. I hated her. I hated that her tight dresses and her lipstick and stockings did something to me. I hated how her fragrance filled the room for hours and hours after she was gone.
Emily adjusted her glasses and turned toward me, leaning forward. I felt like she was staring straight at me, but our cages were packed so tightly and she was distant enough that she could have been scrutinizing any of us. “It’s fascinating to see them so close. I haven’t seen them in person before, but I can understand why my clients are eager to work out agreements.”
“You’ve never seen them? Oh, darling.” Miss Burke turned my way, glancing back at Emily as her hand rose from her side and stretched out toward me. The only thing I hated nearly as much as her was this cage, but even then I couldn’t resist stepping back from the bars, shaking my head and raising my hands in defense.
It wasn’t me she came for, though. I heard a latch click somewhere above me and hinges squeak, and then saw a young, dark-skinned woman emerge, shrieking and clawing at the air as she dangled from perfectly manicured fingertips bigger than her head.
“Here.” She was revoltingly calm and casual as she handed the minuscule woman over like nothing more than some trinket. Emily received her awkwardly, cupping her hands together and standing motionless, staring at the thing squirming against her palms.
Her words came out in a breathy whisper. “It’s… so real. I can’t believe it’s—you know,” she looked up at the other woman, like she was self-conscious about what she was about to say.
“I can’t believe it’s a person.”
“Oh, darling.” Miss Burke didn’t miss a beat. She turned back just long enough to locate another latch, barely even looking. She didn’t care who she grabbed—I was fortunate enough to be beneath her reach. I could tell she’d pulled out a man, but that was about all I could see at first.
“This isn’t a person.” I got a better view as she lifted the man up in front of their faces, dangling and shouting with his ankle pinched between her fingers. “Have you ever held a person like this?”
She leaned close to the tiny figure swaying in her grip. “People have voices, they don’t squeal and squeak.”
The corners of her mouth curled back, amused in the most sinister way. “People are important. People matter. But this? This…”
I gasped, my hand reflexively covering my mouth as she whirled and flung the helpless man full-force into the nearest wall. The smack of his body against the painted concrete was too loud to have been real—my stir-crazy brain must have amplified the impact, just as it slowed time while he plummeted toward the ground, lifelessly tumbling end-over-end.
My mind was so reeling that by the time he stopped, I wasn’t sure if I even noticed the muted thud. Where he’d hit was unmistakable—a spatter of crimson on a bleach-white wall that I struggled to look away from.
Emily stared in silence while the woman she held squirmed and struggled with renewed vigor. Burke let out a long, contented sigh and moved toward the limp little body on the floor, the staccato strikes of her stilettos pounding my ears with each of her measured steps.
“You know, one of your clients really stands out from the others. SmallSnuff Studios?” She placed her palm against the same wall she’d splattered the helpless man on a moment ago.
“Not only does the business model make excellent practical sense, but their product is most… inspiring.”
Her toes rose from the floor, just enough to slide over the man. Emily’s voice was soft and flat. “I’m somewhat familiar.” Her eyes were locked on the elegant shoe perched atop a man’s body, covering it completely.
Just like my eyes, and surely hundreds of others. We all heard the first subtle crack, the crunching and squelching as her foot descended toward the floor. The slick wet sounds and squeaks of her tread slowly twisting against the hard floor, grinding the already flattened body to grotesque, pulverized smear.
We all heard her, too. Her low moan and soft sigh—her purr of satisfaction as she reduced a man to a messy stain. I shuddered with a sickeningly eager heat, watching her twisted pleasure and delight.
“It’s wonderfully cathartic to just… end one of them sometimes.” She dragged her shoe back, leaving behind a fading streak of deep red. “There’s nothing like it after a particularly challenging day.”
A spot, a smear, and whatever was stuck to the bottom of her shoe. That’s all that was left of him, but even with that in mind I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She turned back to her companion, their conversation barely slowed by her casual murder.
“You should try it.”
She’d watched her crush a man like an insect, and now seemed increasingly nervous with every passing second. “Oh, Miss Burke, I don’t know…”
“Nonsense.” She stepped forward and I was acutely aware her shoe peeling away from the floor. She slid her fingertips along Emily’s arms. “Don’t worry. I’ll let you have another one.”
Her fingers found Emily’s wrists and gently pulled outward without resistance; both simply watched as Emily’s hands parted, letting the little woman she’d held tumble to the ground.
A long silence followed. “So, I should just… step on her?”
“Naturally,” the reply came so easily. “There’s something to be said for taking one and just crumpling them up in your fist, but you’d have to leave to wash your hands.”
Emily nodded: it made sense. She lifted her boot, and the shrunken woman cleared her head enough to enter full panic, shouting and shrieking while looking up at the bottom of a colossal shoe. Too much goddamn sense.
“I can feel her.” It was a simple, objective observation as she settled her boot on her victim’s desperate, thrashing form. “I can feel her fighting me.”
Miss Burke laughed at that. “They can’t fight you. They’re helpless, pointless nothings and you’re helping me dispose of them.”
Emily just stood there, pinning that frantic, screeching woman under her boot. Was she enjoying this? Were they both so utterly evil? She looked like she might just be uncertain…
“Crush her.”
No sooner had Miss Burke made her demand than the tiny woman’s screaming ceased. Emily’s boot smashed to the ground with a grotesque squish, firmly sliding forward and back until all that remained was a broad streak of gory red.
The breath that Emily’d been holding suddenly flowed from her lips, and Miss Burke chuckled again. “Exhilarating, hmm?”
“I suppose I can see the appeal.” She turned her boot over, holding it at the ankle to examine the muck ground into her tread with a grimace of distaste.
“With SmallSnuff, that’s all that’s left.” Immediately their conversation returned to business. “Beyond my preference for their films, they’re also the safest and most practical solution. I want them to receive the largest possible share of shipments.”
“I’m sure we can arrange that.” Emily bent her knee and smacked the toe of her boot into the ground a few times, knocking free some bits of the woman she’d pulverized so efficiently. “Provided the rates we settle on reflect my client’s willingness to purchase in bulk. Now, I’d like that one, please.”
I’d been convinced they were coming for me before, but Emily’s finger was pointing right at me. Miss Burke paused briefly before turning my way, and before I could take more than a step back, my latch was released and her mammoth fingers dove into my cage, snatching me up with ease.
She barely slowed her gait as she dumped me in Emily’s waiting palm and moved toward the door. “Come along, we’ve got numbers to settle.”
Emily didn’t hurry after her. She was too busy looking me over, lifting me toward her face and exploring my body with her huge, dark eyes. She wasn’t exotic like Ms. Burke, but she had some appeal.
Until she decided to splatter or stomp me out like the last two people they’d pulled out of their cages, or took me home and ended me in some more horrid and sinister way.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I won’t hurt you, I promise,” and with that she shoved me in a pocket of her bag and went on with her day.
Suddenly everything made sense. She hesitated because she didn’t want to crush that woman. She must be undercover—an investigator or a reporter. I was getting out of here, and I was going to be safe. For the rest of the day as I sat in leather-wrapped darkness I filled my head with fantasies of seeing Miss Burke at trial, watching her squirm in her seat as I testified about her vicious torment, about the pleasure she took in snuffing out lives beneath her patent leather heels.
Over the years those fantasies would fade. So would my hope, my hatred, my everything, because Emily was just a contract lawyer, and I was nothing more to her than some sentient hamster to keep in a cage, make cute faces at and drop scraps of food for a few times a day.
I convinced myself daily that eternal damnation was the reward for bashing my brains out against a wall or choking myself on sawdust, but I still thought of Miss Burke every day. I thought of her twisted grin and her towering stilettos, and dreamed again and again that she’d picked me first… that I was going where I belonged. That I would soon be a smear on the bottom of her beautiful shoe.
Instead I swallowed another piece of stale cracker, and discovered that I still knew how to weep.