"Quota"

            How the hell did I end up like this?  A sense of resignation spread through Eric Walton, as he eyed the monochrome, 6 x 8 span of his prison cell.  So the guy on the street corner had sold him a stolen watch, that shouldn’t make Eric the criminal.  Yet here he was, while the thief had conveniently managed to escape.
            The money had barely changed hands, before the thief’s eyes went wide, and he turned to run, grabbing a few of the remaining watches on display in his stand as he went.  Eric hadn’t even had time to turn around before being bent over that same stand, his hands roughly cuffed behind him.  As he was being dragged to a car by two men who looked to be police officers, his protests were met with but one reply in broken English, clipped and curt:  “You buy stolen goods.  You are a thief.”
            And the bastards hadn’t even tried pursuing the one who sold him the watch, seemingly content to wrestle the foreigner, the easy mark, into the back of their car.  He’d always heard about minorities being profiled back in the States, either to fill quotas or simply out of spite.  But he’d never imagined it would happen to him.  Light skin, blonde hair, green eyes—back in California he’d be about as far from a “minority” as someone could get.  But here…
            In a fit of frustration, Eric stood from his perch on the hard wooden slab that jutted out from the wall, and began to pace.  Why did I think it was a good idea to take a trip to Mexico?  His friends had told him he’d have fun, that it would be an adventure.  Visit the smaller villages, off the beaten path, they’d said.  And some adventure it turned out to be; two days of travel before winding up in a run down prison in some town whose name he’d be hard-pressed to spell, let alone pronounce.
He’d be lucky to still have his job after this, even if he was set free before his vacation was up.  Sure, the company could run for awhile without him, but his boss wouldn’t see it that way.  It had been like pulling teeth to get the man to approve Eric’s week-long vacation as it was, and that was part of the days he was legally allowed.  He could hear it now: “Dammit, Walton!  These sales figures need to be gone over right now!  Never mind that the end of the fiscal year is months away.  Never mind that I’ve already been working you like a dog.  Now, dammit!  And kiss my feet while you’re at it.  That’s a good little faceless drone.”
            With a sigh, Eric paused to look over his cell again, and realized just how bad off he was.  Everyone knew that prison was supposed to be unpleasant, but this was a little extreme.  The only furnishing was the row of planks set into the wall, which he realized was supposed to pass for a bed.  There wasn’t even a toilet.  At that last thought, his eyes flicked almost automatically to the grate in the floor.
            “They can’t expect me to piss down that,” he muttered to himself, catching a whiff of fetid odor rising from the hole, even as the thought struck him.  Any hope of fresh air was dashed, as he found that the small window to the outside world was not only barred, but sealed with safety glass.  Grimy with age and neglect, the brownish filth on the glass offered the only semblance of color in the depressing little cell.  In fact, his vibrant green eyes had never seen so much grey in one place.  With a look of disgust, he took off his t-shirt and began waving it through the air, trying to dispel the stench.  Finding this to be useless, he tossed it over on the “bed.”  God it’s hot, he realized after the exertion.
            All of this proved to be too much, and Eric stormed to the door of his cell and called out.  “Isn’t this a bit unfair?  It’s not like I—“  Suddenly he realized he should be trying to speak in Spanish, and cursed himself for not knowing more of the language.  “Yo estoy aquí…porque?”
            Neither outburst received an answer.  Big surprise, Eric thought as he peered out into the hallway outside his cell.  His view was restricted to what little he could see through a one-foot square, barred window in his door, yet what other cells he could see were all empty.  The door itself was a heavy sheet of dark metal, broken only by the small window, and a slot near the floor, presumably for food to be passed.  Somehow the place felt more like a dungeon than a mere jail.
            “It’s not like I killed somebody or anything…”  With a weary sigh, he returned to the only seat in the room, resting his head on his knees.  At least he hadn’t gotten stuck with a cellmate.  Eric had never been a large man.  That, plus the fact he was a foreigner meant he probably wouldn’t have lasted five minutes against someone who actually deserved to be locked up in a place like this.  Something like a cockroach, only far too large, skittered along the wall furthest from the door.  At least it’s not rats, he thought with a shudder.
            After a short while, Eric’s dismal reverie was interrupted by a faint voice from somewhere outside his cell.  Blinking in surprise, he hurried over to the all too heavy door with its little window.  “Qué?  What did you say?”
            Another, shorter pause passed before the voice answered.  “…I say, I killed nobody either.”  It was a man speaking, old and either nervous or outright scared from the sound of him.
            Jesus, they’re even throwing old men in this place?  The idea of someone like his father, who had to limp around with a cane, being put into a filthy place like this only stoked Eric’s anger.  While there was no reason to think this old man was that infirm, the elderly still deserved respect.  And unless this man had done something truly horrible, there was no excuse for such treatment.  With some effort, he calmed himself enough to give a gentle reply.
            “Qué usted aquí?  Why did they put you here?”
            The other paused again, as if unsure whether he could trust a stranger, a foreigner with even that information.  When the response did come, it was thankfully in English.  “They say, I go too fast in my…in my car.  Not…safe to have me on the road.  That is what they tell me…”
            Now it was Eric’s turn to pause, having been dumbstruck by the simplicity of the offense.  Finally, trying to wrap his mind around all this in a way that made sense, “Did you…were you drinking or something?  Was that part of the reason?”
            “No comprende, señor,” was the reply.  “Lo siento.”
            “I…”  Eric mentally kicked himself again for how little he managed to remember from his high school Spanish courses.  Eventually he abandoned trying to find the right words, and just let his confusion pour out.  “This is insane!  None of it makes sense; why would they throw us in here for such petty crimes?”
            This time, the old man’s reply came quickly.  “Please, señor, no grite!  Not as loud!  You must not anger them…”
            Still caught up in his indignation, Eric pressed on.  “Not anger them?  They’re just cops, solamente policía.  They have to follow the laws too!  Something isn’t right here!”
            The pause that followed was longer, more poignant than the ones that preceded it.  Something changed in that silence, and when the old man spoke again at last, his voice was a cryptic amalgam of pity and fear.
            “Lo siento, Gringo.  Tu no sepa—you don’t know.  But how could you?  And if I tell you, they would never let me leave.”  As he spoke, the pity in the old man’s voice grew while the fear steadily diminished.  “If I say nothing, maybe they will have mercy.  I live here since I was un niño, y no moleste nada.  I was good.  They cannot have much use for me…”
            The odd shift in tone from the man in the other cell caught Eric off guard.  Were the police in Mexico really so corrupt?  “Wait, you mean you know what’s going on here?  And what did you mean, ‘they cannot have much use for you’?  You make it sound like they’re going to put you to work in some slave camp or something!”  His attempts at expressing such complex sentences in Spanish were abandoned; Eric knew he was nowhere near that fluent, and could only hope the other man would understand him.
            “Lo siento, pero no comprende, Gringo.  All I can tell you is ruegue para su misericordía.  Pray for their mercy, Gringo.  Pray for it.”  The fear had shrunk far behind the pity in his voice by that point, and as the old man himself sunk into an incomprehensible Spanish prayer, Eric could have sworn that a hint of hope had begun to creep in.
            Completely lost now, Eric called out again in a desperate attempt to figure out what he had gotten himself into.  “Pray for…?  They’re fucking cops!”  There was no response.  “Hey.  Hey!  What did you mean?”  Still the man continued praying, paying no further mind to the loud foreigner.  An occasional dios or muerte registered in Eric’s mind, before the other man suddenly went silent.
            “Could you please tell me what you meant?” Eric asked, seizing the break in the prayer, and pressing his face up against the bars set in his door.  “What the hell is going—“  Just then, his reflexes threw him back several feet as a face appeared on the other side of the tiny window.  Deep-set, dark eyes regarded him from a face that looked to be made of tanned leather.  The man outside, a guard Eric gathered, held his gaze for a moment, before turning to his left, the direction from which the old man’s voice had come.  Slowly, the foreigner walked back towards the window.
            “Officer, why am I here?”  Eric spoke slowly, trying to forget all the strange things the other prisoner had said, and address this whole thing in a relatively normal light.  The dark eyes flicked back to his, and Eric found himself tripping over his words.  “I…look, I didn’t know that watch was stolen.  The one I bought.  I just wanted a souvenir…”  The cop remained silent, his unnerving gaze boring into Eric all the while.  “Can…I get a lawyer or something?  Or even a damn phone—“
            With a sudden clank, the door was unlocked and opened hard into Eric’s body.  He fell heavily, cracking his head on the concrete floor.  The drab greys of his cell spun around him, almost melding into one another, were it not for a contrasting flash of color as the man outside entered the room: red.  The guard was clothed head to toe in it.  But cops don’t wear…  Almost as soon as it formed, the thought vanished, for the guard pulled something from his belt and strode forward.  Scrabbling desperately back in an attempt to defend himself, Eric didn’t even have time to yell before the first blow landed…

            After briefly trying to see, Eric resolved to keep his eyes tightly shut.  His head was pounding, and the sensory input of sight seemed to magnify his agony five-fold.  He pulled his legs up into the fetal position against his still-bare chest, and felt them drag through something cold and wet.  Breathing was difficult, and often accompanied by a bitter, rasping cough.
There was no telling how long he had been laying there before regaining consciousness, but at least he had awoken alone.  In the brief glimpses he had stolen before the pain became too strong, he had noticed that.  The cop, or whoever he was, apparently felt that he had proved his point.
Red…  Had he just imagined that part?  Eric groaned as he tried to remember, and decided to leave that mystery until he felt like he wasn’t going to die.  Tentatively he opened his eyes again, and found the source of at least some of the increased pain as he did so.
            It was really only his right eye that was the problem; during the beating it had seemingly taken some serious damage and would barely open at all.  Lifting a weak hand to touch at it, Eric felt a sizable laceration running from the top of his eye socket to the bottom.  Every time he tried opening it, fresh, stinging blood seeped into the eye itself.  While it did still hurt to focus on outside images, he could at least endure the use of his left eye.
            His further recovery took quite some time, but he was uninterrupted during its course.  As long as he kept quiet, his captors seemed content to leave him alone.  When he was at last able to sit up, Eric took in the full extent of what had happened.  His pants were now almost as red from his own blood in parts, as the guard’s uniform had been.  A matching puddle of the liquid spread across the floor, trickling in a crimson rivulet down the foul-smelling grate.  Someone had slid a tray of food in through the slot in the door, upon which one of the roach-things was feasting.
            What in the hell did I do to deserve this?!  Overcome by revulsion, Eric dragged himself painfully forward and flung the tray as hard as he could muster towards the far wall.  Most of the contents barely made it halfway, with something that may have been beans splattering across the floor’s grating to join his blood in the effluent below.  The roach-thing recovered from its flight, and worked its way back to its scattered meal.
            Aching from the exertion, Eric pulled his broken body to the wood-slat bed and leaned against it, too weak to carry himself up to sit upon it.  Finding his shirt where he’d left it on the boards, he pulled it lightly beneath his back as a makeshift cushion.  He had not the strength to put it on.  The waking world became a tenuous thing for him, as he faded between the cold, grey-and-red reality and dark, fearful dreams.  He was back in his office, his co-workers all dressed in red.  He was in his cell, listening to strange noises drifting up from the grate in the floor.  He was on a boat, with blood seeping up from below decks.  He was moving down a corridor, staring up at the grey concrete ceiling.  He was in a candlelit, dirt-floored room, surrounded by people in red robes.  They were chanting something in Spanish…
            Wait…this is real!  With a painful start, Eric suddenly knew he was no longer in his cell.  The soreness throbbing through him, the scent of burning wax, the droning, incoherent chanting, they were all too convincing.  He tried to struggle to his feet, but someone took hold of him from behind, keeping him from rising past his knees.  From this vantage, he saw that he was in the center of a circle, both of people and of symbols drawn upon the floor.  And while neither set was moving, each seemed to dance and sway in the dim, flickering light of the chamber.  The symbols, sinewy, snake-like designs, almost seemed to be constricting, the edge of the circle closing in on him.
            The chanting rose in volume, and Eric was jerked roughly to his feet.  Whirling pinpoints of light filled his vision as he was spun around to face a set of double doors.  They looked just as heavy as the one to his cell, but far more ominous.  In vain, he tried to fight, but he may as well have been a child in the grip of his captors.  The portal crept ever-closer.  Another pair of robed figures moved to open the way, and only yawning blackness framed in red waited beyond.  Eric was not crying out in fear; he lacked the strength for it.  He barely had the strength to resist, as he was cast through the opening into the abyss.
            He fell, and for a brief moment he finally screamed, before plummeting beneath the surface of some body of water.  No, not water.  Too foul to be water.  But Eric barely registered this as the vile liquid filled his mouth and nose, instead struggling with all his might to reach the air.  As soon as he did, he retched, standing unsteadily and heaving up all he had.
            The disgusting liquid came up above his knees, stinking of shit, piss, rot, and death.  Eric choked, trying to breathe in the air of the pit.  Something brushed past his leg, something under the sea of decay.  He froze for one brief moment that seemed to stretch forever.  What the hell is in here with me?
            He made no move, except for his head, turning it in all directions to try and see something in the oppressive darkness.  Looking up, he saw a yawning square of dim light—the only illumination to be seen.  The silhouettes of two human figures could be seen on either side, watching him.  As his eyes adjusted, he saw what light there was, glinting faintly off the surface of the pool; even the reflections were sickly in this place.
            The chanting had stopped, or at least was not reaching his ears.  Filthy liquid dripped down from his chest, the droplets echoing too loudly in what would otherwise have been silence.  Whatever else was in the pool was remaining still.
From above, a soft voice issued forth from a blood-red hood, addressing another of the same.  “Una comida tan pobre.  Traiga el siguiente.”
            Such a poor meal.  Bring the next.
            Moments passed, and Eric could not tear himself from the spot.  The thing in the pit had made no further moves towards him, and Eric wasn’t about to tempt it.  But I can’t just stand here forever.  There has to be some way out…  Above him, the chanting had begun again, strangely discordant and arrhythmic.  Is that really Spanish at all?  That thought, out of place though it was, vanished as another sound was growing in the distance.  Rising in volume, as if to drown it out, the unseen men in robes continued their chant.  But Eric had heard enough to recognize, even frozen in fear as he was, the voice of the man who had been yelling.
            A frantic heartbeat later, the dim light was blotted out by a captive figure struggling in the arms of two others.  Fucking cowards!  It takes two of them to deal with an old man?  With one quick motion, the figure was airborne, and Eric was diving painfully out of his path.
            What followed was a series of splashes as the old man hit the surface of the pool and broke it again with a quickness that surprised Eric.  The new captive’s coughing sounded deafening in the stillness of the chamber, and Eric almost had to yell to make himself heard above it.  Now that there were two of them, he was a bit less afraid.
            “Old man, are you okay?  Maybe we can find a way out of here together!”
            The other’s coughing was cut short, and surprise was evident in his voice as he responded.  “Gringo!?  Pero…cómo es usted alambique vivo?”  He began sloshing frantically around in the liquid, and Eric realized from the echoes reverberating across the chamber, the man could not tell where he was.
            “I’m over—“  He froze, as something brushed by his leg again, heading for the direction the old man had landed.  Something large and fast.  “Look out!”
            The waters erupted ahead of him, dim stars twinkling through the gloom before vanishing.  In their midst rose something huge, seemingly too huge to hide beneath the decay.  Its skin shone dark and slick in the wan light for but an instant, before it descended upon the old man, cutting short his wordless scream.
            Eric tried to run.  Away from the beast, thrashing violently as it savaged the old man, and away from the horrible chanting above and beyond it.  But the foul pool was too deep for that, its bottom too slick.  Eric found himself instead wading with distressing slowness away from the monster and away from, he realized in panic, what little light was cast from the doorway through which he had fallen.
            Oh God, I’m gonna die.  One foot in front of the other, through the roiling filth.  Can’t go back, have to run, gonna die.  Further and further he fled, finding himself in complete darkness before the waves caused by the monster’s feeding stopped.  Eric barely noticed.
            Gotta be a way out, God what am I gonna do?  Gonna die, gonna die, gonna die.  A noise began to fill the chamber, sounding out above the splashing of Eric’s frantic retreat.  If he had been cognizant enough to think about it, Eric might have compared it to some terrible cross between someone choking, the noise of a cicada, and laughter: mirthless, cruel laughter.
            Keep going, gonna die, has to be a way out…it’s here.  Eric stopped.  There was no fountain of vitriol as the beast leapt forth, no unseen appendage brushing by his leg.  There was no longer even any bizarre, alien laughter, just silence.  Silence and fear.
            Too terrified to even think, Eric stood frozen to the spot and simply stared into the void.  The void stared back and, just before it enveloped him, laughed once more.

©2008 J. Asher Henry