Empire of Lies

The Great Swamp

It happened about a month ago. Serena was still living at home then. She was out on the town one night, the way she was almost every night, doing the clubs just as she was last night when I found her. She was wild and muddy-minded on Ecstasy and booze-same as last night. And same as last night, she ended up dancing in The Den with the fake flames throwing her shadow up among the other dancing shadows on the fake-rock walls.

She was out on the dance floor with a couple of girlfriends. Soon a guy broke in on them and separated her from the pack. She and the boy convulsed in unison to the Morse-code music and the stampede beat. Their hands waved in the air above their heads; their hips pulsed toward each other across an ever-smaller gap of darkness stroked by whirling colored lights. After a while, the music changed. It got sparkly and slow. Serena ended up hanging off the boy's neck like a pendant, her face against his chest. It was cozy dancing that way. She liked how he smelled. She decided she would spend the night with him.

She never found out his name. He told it to her, but she couldn't hear it over the music. He was a white guy, though; she remembered that. Most of the guys she hung out with were some shade of brown or yellow, some mix of bloodlines. But this guy was as white as she was-which was so white, it sometimes seemed to her a kind of racial nakedness. Sometimes she was vaguely embarrassed by her own whiteness. And she looked down on most of the white boys she met. But tonight, for some reason, the white of the boy against her whiteness struck her as exotic and attractive. She liked it.

The boy was unusual in other ways, too. Tall and narrowly built, he was disheveled and soft. He wasn't gym-rat ripped like a lot of guys she knew with their heroic pecs and washboard abs. He wasn't all skin and bones, either, like some guys who did more meth than food. There was soft extra flesh on him, all of it pale. She could imagine him in his college dorm room drinking non-diet Coke and eating baloney on buttered white bread while he studied. The image made her smile against him as they danced.

What else did she remember about him? He had short blond hair; slow-blinking hazel eyes behind wireless glasses. His shirt didn't hang loose in the going guy fashion, though half the tail had worked free from where he'd tucked it into his khaki slacks. Up top, his shirt was unbuttoned to show a wedge of chest, white and shiny with sweat and as hairless, Serena said, as an Asian guy's. Oh, yeah-and he was wearing something around his neck. She felt it when she put her cheek against him. She reached into his open shirt and took the thing out and looked it over in a drunken, flirtatious way. She might even have asked him what it was, but she couldn't remember what he told her. It looked to her like some kind of nail or a little spike or something hanging on a leather lanyard. It was weird, she said; sort of gothic, sort of violent like a gang symbol or a cult sign or something. (Listening to her, I was pretty sure I knew what it was. I was pretty sure it was one of those "passion nails" some Christians took to wearing after that movie, The Passion of the Christ, came out.)

Anyway, Serena and the boy left The Den together. It was around one or two a.m., she thought; she wasn't sure. She was wired from the Ecstasy, but the booze made everything go out of focus. The boy was drunk, too, and they were both staggering along the sidewalk, his arm around her shoulders.

As they went, a big car pulled up on the cobbled street. It was an old green Cadillac. There were some boys inside. Their arms snaked out of the open windows and their hands slapped the flanks of the car as they shouted and whistled to get her attention. She looked and recognized the boy behind the wheel: Jamal. She hooked up with Jamal sometimes. The other boys were part of his posse. She didn't know any of their last names. They were just guys she knew, guys who hung around with Jamal.

They laughed and banged on the side of the car and invited Serena and her date to get in. They said a friend of theirs was throwing a party at his house upstate. It wasn't just a house, it was a mansion. Their friend was crazy rich, they said. They said there'd be all the drugs in creation there, plus celebrities and caviar and champagne and all that other rich-guy shit. It sounded good to Serena and her drunken white boy, so they crowded into the car with the others.

They drove out of the city on the western parkways. They drove a long, winding way. It was crowded in the car. It was stuffy. There were a lot of guys all scrunched in together-six guys total-and the car was filled with the dense musk of them. After a while, crushed between her white boy and some fidgety, gassed-up brown guy, Serena began to fade. She leaned against her white boy's shoulder and closed her eyes. She felt the rhythmic bumping of the car. The deep, laughing male voices all around her grew distant and intermittent. She remembered only certain moments after that, certain words that broke through to her. For instance, at one point, she remembered one boy saying, "twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two," three times like that, urgently. Right afterward, she felt the speed and rhythm of the car changing. She remembered someone else saying, "The Great Swamp-grea-a-a-at!" dragging out the word until they all started laughing.

She woke up stretched out on the backseat. She was alone in the car. She thought she'd been awakened by the Caddy stopping, but she didn't know how long ago it had stopped.

Slowly, working her dry mouth-rubbing her eyes in the crook of one arm-rubbing her whole face with her two hands-she sat up. With a groan and a sniffle, she looked out the window, blinking heavily.

Where the fuck was she? It looked as if the car was parked on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of endless night. Was it the middle of a swamp, maybe? Or did she just think that because she remembered someone saying the word swamp? No. No: She could see a little now. There were trees on every side of her, branchless trunks of trees standing like guardian phantoms at every window. And there was water, too-she could see water glinting in the light of a quarter moon. She could make out tall, weirdly shaped reeds and thick, tangled grasses. And she could hear frogs, about a million frogs all around her. Some of the frogs were incredibly loud. In fact, at first, because she was still half asleep, she thought maybe it was the boys. Maybe the boys had gotten into one of those boy things, like a belching contest or something, and maybe the competition had driven them to the level of Belching Gods. Then, as her mind got clearer, she realized, oh, wait, she'd heard that sound before. Her mother had once dragged her on some overnight to the country at some house one of her boyfriends had and she couldn't sleep all night because of that noise, that same noise, and in the morning her mother's boyfriend told her: That was frogs.

She pressed her forehead to the window, trying to get a better view, trying to see where the guys had gotten to. She looked out past the tall, eerie guardian trees and over the glint of the quarter moon on the water and the reeds and the high grasses. But where were the boys? She couldn't see them anywhere. She couldn't see anybody or any sign of a house or anything like that. She started to get scared. It wasn't that she thought the guys would just abandon her forever, or anything. She knew they wouldn't do that because eventually they'd have to come back for the car. But what if they'd tried to wake her up and they couldn't? Or what if they saw she was fast asleep and figured, fuck her, they'd just leave her there? They might've parked out here, somewhere near the mansion, and gone on to their rich friend's party without her. And now what if she couldn't find the place? She didn't see any lights anywhere. What if she couldn't find the place, and the party went on all night, and they didn't come back for her until morning or even afternoon? What was she supposed to do until then? Wander around in this swamp looking for them? There could be alligators out there. Or snakes. Or some crazy guy who lived in the forest and took women back to his cabin and tortured them to death. And she couldn't just stay locked up in the car either. She'd have to get out and pee eventually. In fact, she needed to pee already. Where the hell were they? What would she do if those assholes had left her to stay out in this swamp all night alone?

She began to feel the first flutterings of panic-and she really did need to pee, too. So she pushed the door of the car open. The Caddy's toplight came on. That calmed her down a little. It cut through the dark, gave her a view of a couple of feet's worth of dirt road just by the tire. No snakes there that she could see, although she knew there could be one under the car, just coiled there, waiting, licking its fangs with its forked tongue, drooling for the first sight of her heel.

Gingerly, she stepped out. She edged quickly away from the car and whatever snake might be hiding under it. Not too far, though. She kept within arm's length of the open door. She made sure she could stretch her hand out and brush the side of the door with her fingertips. She wanted the door open for the light, but she was shy about peeing in the light in case the boys came back. But she was even more shy about the darkness where the snakes might be, not to mention the horrible frogs which were even louder now that she was outside, so loud she thought the slimy things must be huge. She couldn't stand the idea of one of those huge slimy things leaping onto her or walking across her foot while she was peeing. Somehow, though, she managed to find a clean, dry slice of shadow between the car and the night. She rearranged her clothes and squatted down and relieved herself.

While she was at it, she kept watch on the darkness with darting eyes. It was warm and still here. The air was unpleasantly thick and damp. Her glance leapt from one moonlit tree-specter to another, then lifted at a sudden noise to scan the branches above. The branches silhouetted against the purple sky looked like grasping hands poised over her. In fact, the whole scene seemed to her so much like something in a horror movie that she became more certain with every moment that a killer with a butcher knife was sneaking up behind her as she squatted there helpless. Her panic started growing. It felt like a big bird inside her-an eagle, maybe-opening and closing its wings, getting ready to take off. She made a little whimpering noise and bit her lip. She felt like crying.

But just then, just as she finished her pee, she caught a glimpse of light up ahead. She felt a burst of hope.

She straightened, pulling up her underpants quickly, smoothing down her party dress. She peered hard into the horror-show tangle of the forest, thinking please-please-please, trying to catch sight of that light again. She even pushed the car door back. She didn't shut it because she wanted to be able to jump inside if anything attacked her, but she pushed it toward the car until the light in the Caddy went out so she could see better into the darkness.

There it was again-that light. She got a longer look at it this time. It was the beam of a flashlight. It traced an erratic arc up out of the earth, then over some branches, then across a stretch of dirt road until, for a moment, it was a bright disc shining right at her from-she didn't know-not far, maybe twenty yards away.

Serena lifted her hand and almost shouted out. But quickly, she thought, Oh, that's real bright, Serena, because what if this was, in fact, the guy with the butcher knife who tortured women in his cabin? What if, in fact, just like in the horror movies, he'd already killed the boys one by one as they tried to scramble over the ground and get away from him? She knew it probably wasn't really the horror-movie guy-she wasn't stupid-she was just afraid it might be him or something else bad. Anyway, why would the regular guys-her guys-be wandering around this swamp with a flashlight? That didn't make any sense either.

She thought of turning on the car's headlights so she could see the road, but then that struck her as stupid, too. If there was some kind of bad guy out there, the headlights would lead him right to her. She had gotten a glimpse of the road when the flashlight swung over it. She had seen that it was a broad path, more than wide enough for a car. She thought if she went forward carefully, she could keep to it, keep away from the water and the snakes and frogs, and get to a place where she could make sure the flashlight belonged to her friends or to someone else who was all right.

Serena nerved herself with a big breath. She inched forward along the side of the car, keeping her fingertips on it the whole time. When she got to the front of the car and had to leave it behind, it was terrible, a terrible moment. She could barely take her hand off the hood, could barely force her feet to keep moving. It wouldn't have been so bad, she thought, if it wasn't for the frogs. They were so loud and slimy-sounding. And it sounded as if there weren't just frogs out there, either. It sounded as if there were animals growling, too, and other things she didn't even know the names of, or want to know. Also, she thought, it wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the shapes of the trees like phantoms watching her, and the silhouettes of the branches like grasping fingers. And it wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been so dark, too dark to see even two steps ahead of her, even by the light of the pale quarter moon.

But somehow she managed to keep going, to keep sliding her feet forward ever so carefully over the packed dirt, farther and farther away from the car, deeper and deeper into the darkness until-there it was!-the flashlight again, and not that far away now, not far at all. In fact, now, she could keep it in sight as she moved toward it. That gave her more courage. Another few sliding, cautious steps, and she heard voices-male voices. She was almost sure it was her friends. That gave her even more courage. She took another few steps. And now she heard the words:

"Just forget it."

It was Jamal's voice. What a relief! The tension flooded out of her with a sigh. She put her hand to her chest and her small shoulders sagged and her eyes fluttered upward: Whew! Now she felt much better, much more confident. As she came forward another step or two, she even started rehearsing the shit she was going to give the boys for abandoning her in the car like that, scaring her crazy like that. You don't just do that to someone, she was going to say. You don't just leave them out in the middle of a fucking swamp like that, assholes.

But then she saw them.

She saw the white boy first, the boy she'd been dancing with. The flashlight was right on him, right on his face. He was kneeling in the shallow swampwater with his head hanging down and his hands clasped together in front of him. Serena didn't understand what she was looking at for a second, but then she did. Because then she saw Jamal. The flashlight touched him, too. He was standing right behind the white boy. His arm was lifted straight out. He was pointing a gun at the back of the white boy's head.

The other four boys were all around, shadows hulking on every side of the kneeling boy-like forest ogres, Serena thought-with the quarter moon looking down on them through the silhouetted branches. The water came up over the boys' shins. Serena could hear them slosh as they moved. And she could see that one of them-she didn't know which one-had a knife. A big, horrible hunting knife. He kept jabbing it at the white boy's clasped hands and his face. The silvery blade would flick into the light, gleaming, and then dart back into the darkness.

Serena gasped-and then she clapped her hands over her mouth to keep the sound in so they wouldn't hear her. The frogs were so loud-there were so many millions of frogs and their belches were so constant, so incredibly loud-that she hoped they covered any noise she might make. But she could hear the voices of the boys, their low, murmuring voices and the sloshing sounds they made when they moved. They seemed almost to be part of the swamp noises, like the million frogs.

"You think you did something? You think you gave us trouble? We didn't even lose a wink of sleep," Jamal said. He was trying to sound high and sneering, Serena thought, but she could hear him choking back his rage. "You didn't do anything, and now look at you."

The white boy didn't answer. He kept his hands clasped in front of him. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving. He was praying, Serena thought. She could see his hands twisting together fretfully. His whole body was shivering.

"Fuck you-tell me!" Jamal yelled suddenly. The rage was suddenly thick and ragged in his voice.

The kneeling boy went on praying silently. Jamal growled and whacked him with the gun. He whipped the barrel across the kneeling boy's head. It made a ripe, hollow sound. The boy grunted and tilted over, splashing as he reached down into the water to brace himself against a fall.

Serena wanted to cry out. She wanted to scream at them, Stop it! Stop it! What are you doing to him? But she was so scared, it felt as if the fear had dissolved all the energy inside her, all the will. She couldn't scream. She couldn't do anything but stand there and stare with her hands pressed to her mouth.

And then Jamal said, "Do it," and they killed him-they killed the white boy as he leaned over with his hand in the swampwater. The boy with the knife grabbed the white boy's short blond hair, yanked his head up, and drove the hunting knife into his throat with terrible force. He ripped the blade to the side, dragging it free. Serena saw pieces of the white boy fly out into the air through the flashlight's glow. She saw black blood gout from him and splatter in the water. The white boy made a sick, gurgling sound. The boy with the knife flung the white boy aside, and the white boy pitched face-first into the water with a splash. The million frogs went silent. Everything was silent all around them. There was only the sound of the white boy convulsing and thrashing in the water. The water flew up, drops winking silver in the moonlit night. Then the boy subsided and sank down so that only the ballooning back of his shirt showed at the surface. The other boys hulked over the sunken body like forest ogres. The million frogs began to belch and croak and mutter again. The quarter moon went on watching through the branches. The phantom trees stood guard.

A moment before, Serena couldn't scream. Now the scream was forced out of her. She shuddered and bent forward with the thrust of it rising from her belly. She hugged her belly and the scream came retching out. Only at the last second did she cut the sound off, fight it down, but still, a high syllable of it broke out of her, out of her open mouth.

The boys heard it. They froze where they were standing shin-deep in the swamp. They cocked their heads, listening.

"Shit!" said the boy with the knife. "What was that?"

The boy with the flashlight jabbed it in the direction of the road. The beam cut through the trees and landed about ten feet to Serena's left. The boy started panning the light toward her. Serena could only stand there rigid and bent, clutching her middle, holding in her scream.

Run! she thought. And she did run. She broke out of her stance and tore up the dirt road with her arms flailing. She didn't know if the flashlight reached her. She didn't know if the boys saw her. She just ran with the breath hot and harsh in her throat and the hot, harsh tears streaming down her cheeks-ran until she reached the Caddy and grabbed the door, which was not quite shut, and yanked it open and hurled herself inside.

She pulled the door closed quick as she could to kill the toplight. She pulled it shut as quietly as she could. She sat in the backseat staring wildly through the windshield. She could feel her tears. She could hear her hitching, high-pitched sobs.

A second passed-and then she saw the flashlight beam. It was coming out of the swamp, moving toward the road. All the boys were coming up out of the water.

Serena dropped down onto the backseat. Quickly, she swiped the tears from her eyes. She curled up into the position she'd been in when she first came awake. She clutched her hands in front of her mouth. She couldn't stop trembling. She couldn't stop whimpering.

A twig snapped. She could hear the boys approaching the car. She could hear their voices.

She heard one of them say, "If she saw us, dude, we gotta do her. I mean, that's all."

Then they were at the window. She could hear their voices right above her. She knew they were looking down at her through the glass.

"She's still out." That was Jamal.

"I don't know. I heard something."

"So did I."

"Fucking kidding me?" Jamal said. "There's, like, a million fucking creatures and fuck-knows-what out here. It could've been anything. Probably, like, a bird or something."

"Could've been a bird. Kinda sounded like a bird, I thought."

"Listen to this shit," Jamal said. "It was probably just some fucking thing got freaked."

"I don't know. I mean, if she saw something…"

Serena lay curled on her side, listening to them. She was so scared, it seemed impossible she wouldn't tremble or cry and give herself away. With all her will, she made her body another thing from herself, a dead thing. She huddled deep inside her body as if she were hiding in it, as if she were some sort of worm hiding inside a big body-shaped shell. Inside the shell, she was trembling and whimpering and crying, but outside, her body was another thing from her, and lay so still it could've been a corpse. Even her tears had stopped falling.

"Look at her. She's dead to the world," said Jamal. "You saw her. She was so fucking drunk. She'll be passed out for hours."

"I always thought we should just fucking do her, just to be sure."

"Shut the fuck up!" Jamal hissed. "You want her to hear you?"

The other guy's voice dropped to a whisper. "I thought you said she was dead to the world."

"Come here, asshole."

Serena heard footsteps on pebbles and dirt as the boys moved away from the car. They went on speaking in lowered voices. She had to strain to hear them, but she could still make out most of what they were saying.

"We have a plan," said Jamal. "The plan's the plan."

"Yeah, but we were supposed to lose her before we did anything. That was the plan."

"It's still the plan. Only she passed out, that's all. It's the same thing. The plan was only him. He's taken care of. There's a whole story about him so no one will… you know: come around, come looking. People would look for her. The cops would look for her. That's a whole different thing. That's not the plan."

Another boy spoke. "What if the cops, y'know, like, interrogate her-whatever?"

And another boy: "Right. What if she goes to the cops? I mean, if she saw something on TV about this or something…"

There was a pause-as if Jamal was thinking it over, deciding whether the other boys were right or not, whether he should kill her or not. Serena, lying curled on the seat of the car, was startled by a small squeaking noise. After a second, she realized it was coming out of her own mouth. She forced herself back down, deeper away from the surface of her body. She lay in darkness there, waiting for Jamal to decide.

"Nah," Jamal said finally. "It's the same as before. It's the same plan. If she goes to the police, we'll know. She can't go to them without us knowing. We'll take care of her then, if we have to. For now, it's the same as before."

"Except she was here. That's not the same."

"She's dead to the world," said Jamal.

"Not dead enough for me," muttered another boy.

Another boy laughed.

"Fucking clowns!" said Jamal, and he laughed, too. "Get in the car. Let's get the fuck outta here."

There were footsteps again. The doors of the green Cadillac opened, and the boys piled in. Three got in front, and two got in back with Serena. They shoved her legs roughly off the seat to make room.

"Drunken skank. Get out of the way," one of them said.

She groaned as if she'd been asleep and sat up reluctantly.

"Where are we?" she murmured sleepily.

"Nowhere," said the boy next to her. "You're crunked. Just keep sleeping it off."

Serena stole a peek at him through half-closed eyes. It was the boy with the knife, the boy who had cut the white boy's throat. She could feel his haunch against her haunch, his arm against her arm. She could smell the musty boy-smell of him, a sweat smell now, and the dank smell of jeans wet with swampwater.

She laid her head against the window and pretended to go to sleep.

The engine started. The car backed over the dirt road. Serena laid against the door in a misery of fear, smelling the smell of them, feeling the touch of the boy who had cut the white boy's throat.

Somebody turned on the radio. There were drums like the footsteps of a giant running after her and a street-black voice like a machine gun threatening machine-gun violence in rhyme.

They drove with the music blaring all the long way back to the city.