Written for the @flashfictionfridayofficial prompt:
(Content warnings: human trafficking, physical abuse)
(Word count: ~400)
* * *
Carcha woke up in groggy increments to the thick, cloying smell of acrid smoke and sweat. Lukewarm skin pressed up against his leg. His eyes widened when it hit him that he wasn’t alone, and he pushed himself off the wooden ground, wildly blinking in the darkness of his cramped surroundings.
The sound of frightened murmurs reached his ears. He squinted in the dark to make out the shapes around him. He was trapped in the midst of other bodies. The memories of the day finally came rushing back to him and he remembered that he was laying in a wagon filled with kidnapped people. Before he had the time to reach out to any of them, the doors to the wagon scraped open and he recoiled when a bright light seared his eyes.
“All of you, out,” drawled a man’s voice.
Carcha blinked through the sharp, aching pain at the back of his eyes, and the man’s shape focused in a neater shadow, back-lit by a fire crackling on the side of the beaten path.
The first captives hesitantly pulled themselves forward, afraid of the man’s proximity. Their slowness irritated him. His hand shot out and he grabbed one by the back of the neck to send him tumbling out of the wagon. The slave shouted and hit the ground with a dry, painful thud.
“Move your ass,” he snapped.
Things went faster after that. When it was Carcha’s turn to stumble out into the smoky night air, he noticed that the fire was oddly shaped. It wasn’t consuming wood. His gaze drifted to the side and he recognized the mound of clothes that had been made from the slaves’ belongings. The men were using it as fuel. Anger coursed through Carcha’s veins when he realized that it may have been his very own things laying in the lumpy base of the fire.
“Move,” repeated the man at his back, and he felt a brutal kick in his lower ribs. Carcha stumbled forward with a grunt. He tried to turn around then, but already he was being pushed forward by the others towards the fire where they were being herded like cattle. A woman tripped next to him and his arm shot out to catch her, but she quickly shrugged his hand off with a fearful look in her eyes and curled in on herself.
They were forced to stand downstream of the smoke, the metal around their wrists and ankles warming up uncomfortably from the heat of the fire. None of them talked. All that could be heard was the men’s voices and the crackling of the fire eating away at what had once been theirs.
