Survival/Apocalypse12 min read
"I thought it was a job — then I thought I would die"
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I never planned to go abroad. I was bored in a small town, bored in a cheap internet cafe, bored enough to click the tiny flashing ad that promised work and five thousand a month. The sky that day felt too wide for my life, and the promise sounded like air that might lift me.
"Five thousand a month," I told the screen. "That's more than I'll ever make in a year here."
"Come to Yunnan for the interview," the girl in the chat said. "We will set everything."
"Who's your boss?" I typed.
"Just come," she replied. "You'll see."
I took the bus. I thought of new shoes, of sending money home, of my mother not worrying so much. At the corner noodle shop they handed me a bottle of water, the man there big and simple-faced, not the "girl" from the chat. He looked at my hands and then at my shoes.
"Can you use a computer?" he asked.
"Yeah," I lied. "I can." I felt stupid lying even then.
"Get in," he said, pointing at the van waiting outside. "We go together."
The van looked older than the town. "They pay so well," I protested to myself as I climbed in, and drank from the water. The taste burned like metal.
I woke to crying.
"Why are you crying?" I asked the girl beside me.
"I want to go home," she said between sobs. "I want to go home."
"Who brought you here?" I asked.
"Don't ask," she whispered. The van rattled on. Men spoke in short, clipped words. Their hands were heavy like tools. One of them had a dragon tattoo coiling black up his fingers.
"Quiet!" the dragon man barked. He grabbed the girl's throat.
"Let her go!" I said, but the world was thick around my brain. The water had done its work.
The van stopped. Two men opened the doors. We were dragged into a basement office full of computers. A dead man lay in the corner, already pale as old paper.
"Dead," someone said. "Too much work."
"Take off your clothes," the dragon man told us.
"Why—" I started.
"Take them off!" he snapped, and the electricity knocked a woman down when she hesitated.
"Stand left if you can use a computer," he ordered. "Right if you can't."
I went left. I didn't know why it felt safer.
"You wear this," he said, handing me a yellow vest with a bullet hole burned through the chest and dried blood around it. "We got quota. We sell. We earn."
That first day became an exercise in losing small things: shame, privacy, and then everything.
"What's your name on the network?" he asked me, showing the screen.
"Ke...Keke," I typed, because I remembered how the girl had called herself "Keke" in the chat.
"Good," he said, smiling without joy. "We make money. We send money to boss. You either make money or you are useless."
I watched them teach us the scripts. They told us to be women online, to flirt, to coax, to make men send. "Like pigs," the dragon man said. "We fatten them, then we take."
"Why would they send so much?" Patricio asked, his voice raw.
"They fall in love," Hudson Mueller — Black Brother — explained, showing us messages on screen. "They fall into the net."
"You're telling us to steal?" I said.
"Call it work," he said. "Call it survival. We only die if we fail."
I learned the scripts. I learned the coy lines. "Do you like me?" "Come visit." "I'm all alone." I typed and typed while my hands shook.
One night, a man showed up in messages—Anton Reid, a middle-aged bald man who loved games and walnuts. He sent money quickly, gullible as a child.
"Send me more," I wrote as Keke. "My flight is expensive."
"How much?" he asked.
"One thousand now. Ten thousand later."
He sent a thousand. Then ten. My stomach clenched when Hudson smiled and took the transfers.
"You're fast," he said. "Keep him. He will give more."
"He's lonely," I told him. "He's not bad."
"He is a pig," Hudson said. "We feed on pigs."
Once, when Anton asked to video call, they made Isabella the long-haired girl strip in front of the camera for money.
"Please," Isabella begged. "I'm scared."
"Show them everything," Hudson hissed. "Make it believable."
She was quiet, limpid. His nails dug into her wrist; she had bruises on her throat.
"Please, I will send more," Anton said to the screen. But he didn't know what more would mean.
"Make him pay," Hudson said. "Make him pay for the show."
Isabella's voice broke when she screamed at the camera, "Help! They are kidnapping us! Please help!"
"Shut it!" Hudson snapped. He stabbed the electric baton under her. I smelled burning meat.
"Don't be stupid," he spat. "We have rules."
I kept typing. I kept lying. Once someone warned the men with a loud message, but Hudson smashed the keyboard and taught us a lesson.
"Hands up," Hudson said. "We watch all messages. No running. No crying."
The first month, I became very good at turning a line into money. The second month, a man in Anton's position transferred a hundred thousand in a day. I was forced into the "paradise room" as a reward—an ugly room of broken women whose eyes had been emptied by repeated violence. Isabella was there, curled.
"Why did you come back?" I whispered when my thirty minutes ended. "You looked—"
She looked at me with a stare like a coin—shiny, empty. "I didn't know," she said. Her lips trembled. "I don't know anything."
I hugged her because I could do nothing else.
Months passed—no, I can't write "months passed" because the rules tell me not to. My life did not pass; it shrank, flicker by flicker. Each day we were pushed to coax people. Each day we were watched.
One day Anton sent a string of messages I couldn't ignore. "Do you love me, Keke? I want to see you. I will come."
I wanted to stop. "I can't," I wrote. "I don't have money."
Anton found me later after the cameras. "You tricked me," he whispered in a voice flat with pain. "My savings—gone."
"He was a pig," Hudson said when he saw Anton's messages. "Delete him. He's useless."
A week later, Anton's wife—Kendall White—sent a message begging for return. "My husband is dead," she wrote on my chat. "Please, give me back what you took."
I couldn't answer. I had taken his life in another way. He tried to kill himself when he learned the truth. He hadn't died, but a man did step off a balcony and fail to move. The nightmare lodged in my chest like a stone.
I tried to stop. I tried to make less money. Those who did not earn enough were taken. Sometimes they were sent to the second floor—blood rooms. They came back pale, gasping.
"Where do they go?" I hissed to Patricio one night.
"They take them upstairs," he said, eyes hollow. "They bleed them. The boss says they sell organs. The boss says it is profitable."
"You mean they… take limbs?" I whispered.
"Not limbs," Patricio said. "Kidneys. Hearts. They sell them to buyers who visit on feeds."
I wanted to vomit. I wanted to burn the screens that taught me how to lie.
One afternoon, a man named Dax Carlier lay dead at his desk. "Too much work," someone said. "He collapsed."
Hudson watched us with the same flat eyes as the dead man had when he stared at the screen before dying. "Don't be like him," Hudson said. "If you don't make money, you will be like him."
The first time I was sent to the second floor it felt like the end. They strapped me to a metal board and started taking.
"No!" I shouted. "Please!"
"Quiet," said a voice that would later mean the world.
They took from me far more than any clinic would allow. I lost a kidney. I woke on straw, blood sticky and cold on my skin.
"You look better with less weight," Hudson said when he saw me stumble. "You're like a new model."
I wanted to punch him. I wanted the knife back inside me so I might rip his throat. But my hands were weak.
One afternoon, there was shouting in a language I couldn't understand. The door slammed open and women in uniforms stormed in with cameras. Megan Barron stood at the head, cool and terrible and fierce.
"Police!" she shouted in English first, then in our language. "Hands up. Don't move."
Hudson's face changed. He went from the predator to a small squirrel in less than a breath. "Who—who are you?" he stammered.
"We have evidence," Megan said. "We have rescues ready. Put your hands where we can see them."
People shouted. Cameras flashed. I heard the drone of voices, the knot of fear and triumph.
"You're under arrest!" Megan said.
Hudson smiled the wrong smile. "You can't—" he started.
"Look at them," Megan said, and she pointed. "Look what you did."
She brought the survivors to the front like a parade of broken things—Isabella walked like someone stitched by hope and hate, Patricio trembled, I couldn't feel my face.
"You will pay," Megan said. "You will stand publicly. You will face your victims."
They dragged Hudson out. He tried to fight, tried to spit, and his bravado cracked. The cameras recorded his face the way vultures watch fresh meat—cold, steady, waiting for the final collapse.
"Why didn't you help me?" I asked him as they cuffed him.
"Help you?" Hudson spat. "You were a useful tool."
"You were a butcher," I said. "You sold us like animals."
He laughed at that, and then the laughter died. People gathered—locals, embassy staff, journalists, the families of those we conned. They formed a rough circle in the square outside the detention hall.
Megan had organized a public reading of evidence. "We will show the world what their business model is," she told me later. "We will not let them hide."
I watched as Mika, the translator, read out names and messages: the lines we were forced to type, the sums transferred, the threats, the images. Cameras fed it live. Phones recorded. Men watched and watched until their faces paled.
Hudson's punishment was not a quiet cell in a far-off jail. Megan had arranged for a public reckoning. The courthouse square filled with people. The rescued—too many of us—stood on the dais like survivors in a bad dream. A long banner listed the counts: trafficking, torture, illegal organ trade, forced fraud.
"Listen to me," Hudson yelled from behind a temporary fence. "This is politics! You don't know anything!"
"Shut up!" someone shouted. "You don't get to speak!"
"Tell us," Megan said softly into the microphone. "Tell us why you thought you could sell other people's lives."
Hudson fumbled, his face crimson and wild. "We had... orders. People paid us. We gave jobs."
"That is all," a woman said into a camera. "He gave jobs. He sold men and beat women for profit."
The crowd began to chant. "Shame! Shame! Shame!" It rose, a tide.
"Do you feel sorry?" I asked Hudson, my voice thin.
His eyes flicked to me. He looked old and strange. "I'm sorry if... if we lost money," he said, and the crowd laughed in disgust.
"You're a liar," someone spat. "You sold kidneys."
"Yes," Megan said into the mic. "You sold kidneys. We have receipts. We have videos. You sold the lives of our people to the highest bidders."
Hudson's bravado finally cracked.
"No, no, I—" he stammered. "I didn't—"
"Why did you burn them?" an investigator asked. "Why did you send them to die?"
Hudson's fingers dug at the chain around his wrists. "We had to keep costs down! We had to move product! I was... scared!"
His voice shrank. He swung his face from the crowd to the ground, then back up as if the words might not stick anywhere.
"Shame!" the crowd chanted louder. People recorded him. Someone held up a phone and showed a clip of Hudson smiling while a woman screamed as an electric baton burned her skin. The clip played again and again on big screens. Each replay made some laugh, some gasp, some cover their mouths.
"He promised money," Patricio said when given the chance to speak. "He promised life. He gave us only knives and holes."
There was a small child in the square—Anton Reid's son—staring at Hudson like at a villain in a movie. The child's face was an accusation folded into childhood.
Hudson's color left him. He began to beg. "Please," he mouthed, "please, I'm sorry."
"Say it," Megan said. "Say it to them."
Hudson looked at the rescued. He looked at Anton's family. He looked at Isabella. The words stuck in his throat like nails.
"I... I'm sorry," he croaked. The crowd hissed. "Please—"
Then he lashed out, trying to escape. Two guards held him by the shoulders. He fought, and the crowd leaned in. He fell to his knees and then lay flat, gasping.
Journalists asked questions and printed them. Heads of embassies looked on. People we had conned—those who had lost money because of us—showed up to glare. "You ruined us," one man shouted. "You took our savings."
Hudson's face showed the progression I had imagined so many times in private: first a smirk, then shock, then denial, then a small, animal panic, then collapse. The crowd recorded each beat.
"You're done," Megan said finally. "Not only prison. Not only fines. This will be known. The buyers who paid for organs will be pursued. The accounts will be shut."
"They'll try to hide," Hudson said weakly.
"Then we will keep shining light," Megan said.
The public humiliation didn't end at words. The court would decide the legal consequences, but for a long time the image of Hudson struggling in the square, filmed by thousands, would be the first punishment. He had wanted secrecy. Now there was none. I felt a strange relief watching him shrink.
After the square, the investigations widened. People were traced. Accounts frozen. The networks that bought kidneys were exposed. Men who once thought themselves above accountability had to answer at microphones and under lights.
People in my town later would not use the word "job" the same way. Parents would warn their children: "Don't answer flashy job posts." The internet cafe where it started became a place of whispered memory.
The story did not end with Hudson's collapse. The court case that followed was long and public. Witnesses were called. We had to stand and tell. I told the judge about the burning, about the electric baton, about the buckets of blood. I told the story in short, sharp sentences. I could not carry every moment in my chest, so I gave them up to the court.
Hudson tried to plead for mercy. He said he had dependents. He said the money flows forced him. He apologized with the same mouth he used to order our cruelty. The families looked at him—Anton Reid's wife, Kendall White among them—and she held her son's hand like a shield.
"Do you feel regret?" the prosecutor asked.
His answer gave me a kind of peace. "I regret that I was caught," he said, and the murmurs in the courtroom were heavy.
When the verdict came, Hudson was sentenced to a long prison term plus restitution, and international buyers were indicted. The list of punishments included not only confinement but public reparations: funds to help victims rebuild; an international task force to investigate organ brokers; and a public registry of traffickers. The judge read a strict, bare-boned order and the cameras recorded the reading until the feeds were shut down.
I wanted to say the punishment was sweet enough, but it wasn't. The wound in my side only half-closed. I had one kidney gone, a scar like a crooked river along my flank, and years in prison for the crimes I had been forced to commit. I had taken money; I had hurt people. Punishment followed plenty.
When I was out, Megan told me she had been the one who kept watching my messages. "You were the only one who sent me real information," she said. "You helped me map the operation."
"I didn't mean to help," I told her.
"You did," she said simply. "You stayed alive. You gave names."
We went to return something to Anton Reid's family. Anton wasn't dead. He had faked his death in messages, hoping to trick us into paying him back. I stood on his doorstep with gifts and trembling hands.
"Are you Anton Reid?" I asked when the door opened.
"Weird question," he said. He stood there everything ordinary and mortal.
"You said you were dead," I said.
He blinked and smiled sheepishly. "It was a lie. I wanted sympathy. I'm sorry."
Kendall White watched us both with a face made of years. She accepted my gifts in silence. There was no grand reconciliation. There was a small, human conversation that ended with me walking back into the bright sun. The city lights felt like a different life.
"Life is fragile," Megan told me later. "And strange. You cheated people because you were forced. You shouldn't have to live with being the only monster."
"I still do," I said.
"You should live with what you can change," she said.
I decided to change everything I could. I went to college, to a job that was honest and low-paid. I told my story to groups—students, young job seekers, neighbors. I became a loud and angry cautionary voice.
"How did you start?" a student asked me in a crowded room.
"With an ad," I said. "An ad and a little greed."
"Would you go back?" someone asked.
"No," I said. "Never."
We had to be careful in what we demanded. The world did not repair itself all at once. But the square and the court had taught the people who had found wealth in others' misery that light could become machinery. For the traffickers and organ dealers there was shame that didn't heal their greed, but it broke their secrecy.
There were things I could not fix—there were faces that would never leave me, noises I would wake up to, the scar and the missing organ—but I could tell the truth. The truth put people in cages and forced apologies and made files. That mattered.
Once, sitting by the river, Megan said, "You know why we made it public?"
"Because it's loud?" I guessed.
"No," she said. "Because they felt safe in secrecy. If people see their faces on six screens at once, they will think again before they do it to someone else."
"And you think that'll stop them?"
"Not by itself," she said. "But it helps. The fear of being seen is real. They used shadows. We turned on the lights."
We walked away from the river and found small things to do: a job that paid little but steady, a friend who would not sell me, a town that had new warnings pinned on its lampposts.
In the end, my life took another shape. I was no hero. I was certainly no saint. I went through prison because I had lied, and that was fair. But I also watched the tyrant who had cut out people's hearts shrink under the lights and cameras until he felt small. I watched Anton's family pick up pieces. I watched Isabella try to learn to speak plainly again.
Once in a while, I still get a message from a stranger in a chatroom — "Job? Big money? Come quick." I close the tab. I don't click.
"Did you ever feel real hate?" a reporter asked me once, and the question caught like ice.
"For a while," I said. "But hate eats you faster than them. I turned mine into words."
"Do you forgive them?" the reporter asked.
"I forgive myself a little," I said. "I try to make it right in small ways."
Megan watched me after the interview. "You're not alone," she said. "We will keep watching."
When Hudson was led away that first day in the square, he was changed. He had lost control and lost the silence he had used as a weapon. The punishment was both public and legal—loud, ugly, and necessary. It did not undo what he had done. But it made sure, for a while, that his face could not be hidden from the world.
I still sometimes wake at night to the sound of small machines—keystrokes, clicks—and for a moment I am back in the basement. Then I breathe and tell myself the story in full, names and all, because telling is a kind of repair.
"Tell them not to trust the bright promises," Megan told me once.
"I will," I said. "I will tell them everything."
The sun sinks the same way it always did. But now when it goes down, it lights a city that watched a monster stumble in public daylight and found that light could hurt him.
The End
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