Trafficked!

By John Peace

This is the cautionary tale of Rashad Stevens. He finds himself in a troubled Cairo during the infamous protests aimed at rallying what was left of the European and Mediterranean nations against their alien conquerors. Turbulent times. Despair is catching; poverty is killing.

Rashad and his Egyptian friend Hany are undecided: should they invest what little they have in a huge alien-run scheme to green the Sahara? Or trust their lives and their savings into the hands of the people smugglers and escape off-world to get work? So many others seem to be leaving. Perhaps this is Rashad's only chance to save the life of his mother. Perhaps Hany will finally be able to provide for his family. Or maybe their journey into the stinking underbelly of the overpowering, overlapping alien civilizations among the stars will turn out to be a greased slide into nightmare.

If you're desperate, you might hand over the keys of your life to a stranger and he might help you out, or he might take up residence, dumping you in the cold, many miles from home. But what if the strangers are not at all human? Is there any chance that they can comprehend your humanity and treat you with even a shred of dignity? When you realise that you've been trafficked, sold as a wage slave, lost, 913 light-years from home, what would you be willing to go through in order to get home again?

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Peace
• Release date: Apr 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476178455

John Peace

Originally an engineering graduate from the UK keen to become an astronaut, somehow I ended up working in community development overseas for some years. Did I take a wrong turn? I don't think so. I have very few regrets. In between, I've worked in a soup factory, driven a taxi in London, served refreshments in Regents Park and a few other odd jobs. Last year I settled with my Canadian wife and our two sons in Ontario, where we enjoy the great outdoors, Finnish pancakes and blueberries, preferably all three at once. I confess to a lifelong fascination with science and science fiction, ever since watching Dr. Who and Blake's Seven on the BBC as a boy. I'm even old enough to have fuzzy memories of watching the Apollo 11 landing on TV. Whew! That's hard to believe. At the time of writing I'm working on a series of science fiction novels for pre-teens (8 to 12 year olds) called Beyond The Elder Stars. The first one is named 'The Calling'; it's published on Amazon Kindle and in print with CreateSpace. See my blogs for links to the book and for extra free content. I welcome correspondence. To contact me, spell out the following (the address isn't given complete to evade the dreaded spam spiders...) rj + peace (snail shell thing) 123mail (dot) org

Book preview

Trafficked!

By John Peace

Copyright 2012 John Peace

Smashwords Edition

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John Peace drip-feeds a couple of blogs at: http://johnmpeace.blogspot.ca/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Trafficked:

Cairo

The Great Escape

Odor of Sheep

Honor

Chance To Make Big Bucks

The Dark Night

Justice

About This Story

About the Author

Cover Art Credits

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Cairo

The road was almost deserted, and Cairo was quietly soaking up the sun until a Beanpod roared overhead towards the big protest and started firing. Perhaps the exhilaration and despair from witnessing the one-sided battle was what kicked me into gear.

I was walking along the Nile Corniche that afternoon, northwards past the silent shell of the Kasr Al Aini hospital, with my two friends Hany and Sharlene. As usual, I was thinking hard of a way to pull myself out of penury. We were going to have lunch at Hany's house and talk about it. The trouble was, Hany was not much better off than me, and he had a family to support - his mother and siblings, that is. When the Beanpod flitted over us with a noise like a freight train, appearing between the treetops and high-rises, I had a hand in my pocket, and that helped quell the panic.

I have these seeds in my pocket, see, and I can't help plunging my hand in there now and again to check on them. They're apple seeds. Sometimes I take the sealed plastic packet out and look at them. I get a knot in my ribcage when I do. It's a puzzle how a tiny bit of smooth brown shell can hold so much. Still, that's what I want to do. One day.

My name's Rashad Stevens. I'm saying this so maybe someone will learn from what happened, stop from messing up like I did. Maybe we can't stop the invaders from coming, but this is for sure: if the truth is told, we can at least stop some people from going.

It was so hot that it felt like the sun was sitting on my shoulders, squeezing the life out of me. I was constantly wiping my brow. But then, I didn't grow up in Egypt. Hany, who did, seemed to be floating along, hardly touching the ground. To him, the climate was fine: an average spring in Cairo. He was wearing three layers and didn't appear to be sweating.

Hany Girgis had been my mentor and guide since I arrived in Cairo a few weeks before. He befriended me the moment I stepped off the Alexandria train at Ramses Station. Picture a pale blue shirt stuffed with beef, a chubby face with black eyebrows, and fleshy lips habitually turned up at the corners by some secret amusement. He was so extrovertly but quietly himself, so Coptic Egyptian: still proud of his ruined country, a cross tattooed on his wrist, toying with every conspiracy theory that came along, and compulsively hospitable. I don't know what kind of dam wall held his reservoir of despair in check, but whatever it was, I wanted one. So I often went to see him when I wasn't selling combs and cheap cologne and plastic toys in the street.

A foul breeze swept over us from the mud banks alongside the shriveled Nile. We all groaned in revulsion, even Sharlene. You want I sell you good perfume, Mister? said Hany with a grin. He was a great mimic, even in English.

I nodded. I'll take five tons of your best, I replied, straight-faced. Just two days before, we'd wandered through the Khan El Khalili, the old market, and played permutations of this scene over and over, for real.

To me, the whole city stinks of human sweat and smog and those pungent ET spores that look like bloated squids under the microscope. So a little cologne or incense now and again is an imperative in the odor wars. But the mud along the shrunken river was the worst. I blame the Aswan Dam project, which was actually the prototype for the multi-gigabucks scheme Hany was trying to drag me into.

We crunched the winter's dead leaves underfoot: big, mottled orange and yellow, and possibly the last leaves that would ever fall on the Corniche because the tree trunks were slowly being eaten by what they were calling njuk moss. At least some of our people are claiming the moss is edible. I pointed out to Hany and Sharlene the variegated crimson, gray and daffodil shades of the moss: reasons to be cheerful.

Sharlene really was floating: my AR wasn't calibrated properly. She was a Bohemian aunt figure, hair dyed blonde, face tanned maple syrup and cracked in a thousand lines that told her life story. Her moods changed like the weather in the streets of Istanbul where I did a little of my growing up. I could still see the beautiful woman she'd been when I was a child; but the beauty that was still inside of her kept overflowing on an ungrateful world. She was sitting on the air, telling us she remembered trying to cross this street back when she studied at the American University. She said you had to be a daredevil to get across, and you'd better be thin, because the lanes of charging traffic were so close together.

I shook my head in disbelief and told her I bet she used to stop the traffic. She laughed and said something like, I'm so glad I'm back here in Colorado in the RV. At least we have AC. When it works. She had a melodic laugh, not forced. In my AR contacts she looked all of her fifty-odd years, but the long, flickering, flame-like draperies she called clothes helped make her look young in spirit without pretension. She'd only just woken up and was still having breakfast, while Hany and I were looking forward to a legendarily late Egyptian lunch of mahshi and rice or whatever Hany's mother would manage to come up with in this age of famine and shortages. I never had the nerve to ask her how long she had to wait in line to buy her groceries. The smells and shy sounds of lunch were already breezing around us, teasing my empty stomach, overlaying a disturbing background roar that echoed through the streets. That area of Garden City was still inhabited back then: mainly by European refugees who'd renovated some of the old abandoned mansions. Some of them must have had local kitchen help by the smell of it.

At some point in our walk, I glanced across the road at a man limping along the other way. I only got a glimpse of his prow-like face, but it made me start, as if he'd called my name and walked off. Dad? Hany asked me what the matter was,