“You like cookies?” I asked.
He nodded, taking another. He ate so fast that I wondered if he was starving.
Benny returned, glass of milk in hand. He set it down by Dan-Dan, patting him on the shoulder. “Remember how I told you Kyann and Dante were coming to talk to you about where you’ve been?”
At that, the smile on Dan-Dan’s face crumbled, and he dropped the cookie, staring at the table. He nodded, frozen, looking like he was about to be whipped.
“Benny,” I said. “Can I see you in the kitchen for a moment?”
Benny nodded. “We’ll be right back, Dan-Dan. You go ahead and finish your milk and eat more of the cookies.”
I followed Benny into the kitchen, where he shut the swinging door behind us.
“All right, what’s going on?” I asked. “Is Dan-Dan developmentally disabled?”
“He does seem so, doesn’t he?” Benny said. “He didn’t act like this before he was captured. He came back like this — like he has the mind of a child. I don’t know if it’s fear conditioning, or if they did something to him while he was there. He used to read a lot, and was actually quite the thinker. Now though, ever since I met up with him again, he seems dazed. I’m not sure what happened, Legs. Whatever it was, it seems to have pushed him down so far that he has to look up to see the bottom. I was hoping you could figure out what happened.”
“We’ll do what we can,” I said. “I might want to bring Sophia in on this. She’s really good with getting flashes off of people’s lives, you know. I don’t want to send her down to this area though. While she can take care of herself, this isn’t a safe neighborhood for anybody.”
“I’m not sure how to get Dan-Dan to your office,” Benny said. “He’s not good with buses, I can tell you that. And I don’t have a car. I don’t know if the taxi would stop for us, given I’m a goblin. And then there’s the fact that Dan-Dan’s terrified they’ll come for him again.”
“We can take care of the transportation,” I said. “If you can convince him to get in the car, we can send Orik down to pick you up. Anyway, let’s go see what we can find out. I’ll be careful. I don’t want to scare the poor guy anymore than he obviously has been.”
I followed Benny back to the table, where we both sat down. I glanced at the cookies, then at Benny. “These aren’t laced are they?”
He shook his head. “No, there’s the bag that they came in. They’re Dan-Dan’s favorite, so I bought them even though they cost an arm and a leg.” Benny usually bought generic at all costs.
“Hey, Dan-Dan, do you mind if I ask you a question or two? It’s okay if you can’t remember, or if you don’t know the answer. We won’t be mad.”
Dan-Dan picked up another cookie, staring at it. “Go ahead. I’ll try to answer.”
“Before Benny found you, do you remember where you were?” I asked.
Dan-Dan pressed his lips together, but after a minute he nodded. “I was in the bad place. I don’t want to go back—please don’t make me.”
He was trembling, and I glanced over at Dante. Dante seemed to catch on, and he gently reached out, placing one hand on Dan-Dan’s arm. “We aren’t going to make you go back. In fact, we’ll try to make sure that you never have to go back. We just want to know about it so we can help others who might be stuck there. Were there other people where you were?”
That seemed to spark a light in Dan-Dan’s eye. “There were. At least ten. We all worked together, at least until Becky died. Then there were nine.”
Frowning, I asked, “Who’s Becky?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where she came from. We were always in the laundry. We slept in the back on piles of clothes. I hate the smell of bleach.” Dan-Dan finished off his milk.
“What did you do there?” I asked.
“We washed clothes. Big piles of clothes. We did that all day, three days a week. Two days a week, we carried boxes and sorted them. Each box had a number on it, so we had to sort them into piles of the same number. A lot of them were pretty heavy, and the women had trouble carrying some of them. One day each week we scrubbed the kitchen from floor to ceiling.”
“What kitchen?” Dante asked.
“It was like a warehouse, only a lot bigger. I don’t know where it was because we never got to go outside. The last day each week we washed out the cells. They took the people out of there, and we had to go in and clean everything. It always smelled because there were no bathrooms there, only a hole in the floor and the people sometimes missed. We had to clean everything from top to bottom, put new covers on the beds, and the women in our unit were assigned to scrub down the prisoners.” Dan-Dan had a horrified look on his face, and I sensed he was close to panicking.
“You’re safe now, you’re okay. Tell me, who were the prisoners? The ones from the cells?”
“Women and kids. Boys who were under twelve, and girls and women from—oh—I think about three years old on up. Every week there would be new people, and some would be gone.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I asked one time, and the supervisor beat me so bad that I fainted. You learned not to ask questions. You don’t ask why.” He coughed, tears streaking down his cheeks.
