"A Way of Life" by Li Hollinger

A Way Of Life

It was four o’clock on a chilly Tuesday morning when a lone cargo train passed unscheduled through the Canadian-American border an on into Turner, Montana. The guards stationed nearby eyed it warily, but allowed it to pass without question; they had been paid too great a sum to be hindered by conscience now. The thin ebony walls of the speeding vessel shook feebly as the cold from outside continued to find its way through the knots and fissures of the wood. Inside it met hundreds of frail, frightened bodies huddling closely together for warmth, the smell of sweat and leaky bladders rising from their clothes and causing the occasional cough, but otherwise it was silent as a grave. Two hundred twenty three children were being transported as freight inside this train, ages ranging anywhere from seven to fifteen. They were homeless, every single one of them, and tired, but sleepless, sleepless but wide-awake. All up and down the train this scene repeated itself, tonight was a short ‘shipment’, only 6 box cars total and two passenger cars bringing up the lead.
It was in the second of these passenger cars that three similar children sat feeling especially pleased with themselves. They were the cause of the night’s events, and though they were sure to be caught and severely punished eventually; they thought they had certainly been through worse.
“You know, they say innocent ones are like dogs…” the girl spoke first, her voice soft and slightly muffled from her position curled up on the window seat. She was perfectly dry and smelled palpably of lavender, a result of overusing a high-end woman’s perfume. Her thin blonde hair was chopped off unevenly: patches of it fell in places to her shoulder while some fell all the way to her waist, and it was matted with condensation where she leaned against the window.
“What are you talking about now?” The older of the two boys countered, his voice hard, unforgiving, carrying with it just enough remnant of a Slavic accent to suggest that English was not his first language, though he spoke it perfectly.
“I mean people say they can sense things… all kinds of things. Ghosts, bad weather, death. Us?”
“That’s rubbish, and you know it, they didn’t suspect a thing until it was too late.”
“Yea, I know, but don’t you almost with that they did.”
Both teenagers paused for a moment, seeming to fall into deep thought. Most people watching this scene would misunderstand the silent meaning that had passed between these two. The second boy, Warren P, Wasn’t quite as lost as an outsider would have been, but who knew if the speculations he made about the two were anywhere near close. He was the new addition to the team, the young blood; brought on only out of necessity when they had made the decision to start catering to an even younger crowd. And unlike the older two, Warren wasn’t a street kid with extenuating circumstances. Warren was a sociopath, and tonight had been his debut.
“Hey Rein?”
“Nn..?”
The older boy, Reinhold, hadn’t really taken to Warren yet, and when he could, avoided talking to him, replying to any direct address or questioning in grunts or monosyllabic answers. It didn’t complicate life much for him in the end though, since from what he could gather, Lauren seemed at the top of their small social hierarchy. She was the smartest, the fastest, the trickiest, and when it came down to it, she was the one that won the children over.
“What’s your excuse?”
“-Don’t need one.”
“I’m just trying to understand, it’s easy for me, you see…but I know with normal people it’s-“
“It’s easy.”
Warren felt his skin crawl as Lauren stretched superficially and turned herself over, he said nothing more. The movement had been meant to draw attention and establish order; moreover, one learned to watch themselves around the nymphet, as harmless and frail as she may seem, a viper lurked beneath those wings.
“You see, really they come to us mostly, like moths to a flame. All you have to do is walk the streets: the little mice do love a new face.” The nix accentuated her words with a playful giggle and her hands twined their way through Rein’s curls – they were lovers when she got like this, and the cruelty in her lit him like a flame. Immediately he was afire, raiding his voice to the recantation of past events.
“So ready to believe they are, a warm place to stay, a bowl of soup, a slice of bread to eat.” He was kissing her neck in between words and her arms embraced him gleefully.
“You lead, they follow, and by the time they see the train it’s already too late.”
After that Warren knew the rest: troops came with guns, children screamed, eventually they were herded into the boxes where the doors locked behind them and their futures disappeared. The company would stop in a city, retrieve a few loads, and never look back. He knew they picked up from Canada always and dropped off in the United States. Somewhere in Montana, off in the isolated desert, stolen children were stuffed away in a low-population area, where they would never be found.
Warren would lay eyes on it for the first time before long now; they would arrive in the first light of morning to unload the cargo.
“There were some pretty girls in this load, I wonder if we’ll break our record.”
Lauren seemed to be scrutinizing her nail beds but it was obvious she said this to entice curiosity. Unfortunately, she succeeded, and Warren clearly saw Rein smirk from his current position under her when he opened his mouth to respond.
“Record?”
“2,500,000. The most we’ve ever sold a single girl for,” the lesser of the two chimed with sick mirth.
“Fourteen years old, 5’3”, of South East Asian descent, brown hair, brown eyes.” His mistress added as if she were reciting in front of the class.
“You know, I didn’t actually think she was all that great.”
After this there was the longest pause when the three all though – the older two no doubt about the joy of the money they were about to come into, and the younger about what lay ahead. Faced with the heartlessness of the whole institution it seemed a little overwhelming even for him.
As the clock struck eight the train ground to a halt in the makeshift station of an old warehouse turned jail. There it sat, rustic and peeling red paint as guards still groggy from a full nights sleep filled out and took their positions wielding guns and cattle prods. Three children filed out of a heated passenger car, its fresh white paint harsh in contrast to the dark rotting wood holds that held the night’s haul. They surveyed each other, the leader again calm and composed, the older boy silent and hateful, the youngest withdrawn and hesitant. A heavy plated metal door opened before them and a woman dressed in a blue suit approached, the look of a frightened doe present in her eyes.

“If you’ll just step this way please, we’ll clear you out of the way before we start unloading.” Her voice was pleasant and carefully calculated, every syllable a perfect paradigm of what was intended.
The boys nodded and proceeded with her through the door but Lauren held back, looking with an odd sense of longing back at the train.
“I think…I want to stay and see the look on their faces.”
Reinhold just nodded and Warren fought back a fit of nausea in his stomach as he watched the steel doors close on her sweetly smiling face.