Lost Girls by George D Shuman

black socks.
    Her buttocks would be one of those places, though you couldn’t see her buttocks in four inches of diesel fuel, vomit, and shit.
    Today was the first day in a week they could see one another’s faces. Today one of the ship’s crew smelled the diesel fumes rising from the false hold and realized that a fuel tank had sprung a leak. Before today, in utter darkness, one of the girls might succumb to the fumes and pass out in a corner, might fall facedown in the muck, not to be found until it was too late. Two had died that way during the storm their first night at sea, drowned in their own waste.
    Aleksandra stared up at the light.
    The opening wasn’t a hatch in the truest sense of the word. It looked more like a section of flooring that had been cut out of the desk and then laid back in place. She knew they were near the engine room from the rumbling and pervasive vibrations in the walls surrounding them. She had heard of false holes welded into the hulls of freighters to smuggle illicit cargo and had no doubt they were sitting in one.
    She looked at the young faces around her. Some looked as young as fifteen.
    Before the “hatch” had been removed, Aleksandra would not have bet on any of their chances for survival. They would simply have exhausted all the oxygen in the hold and begun to suffocate, one by one. Now that they could breathe again, Aleksandra was encouraged to live. Aleksandra was resolved not to die without a fight.
    She looked around the narrow hold, thinking they hadn’t been the first to suffer this fate. The compartment had probably been constructed to move heroin or cocaine across the oceans. The space they occupied was no wider than her shoulders. They had to step over one another to walk to either end in hope of finding some privacy.
    How many women had died here before them? Dozens? Hundreds? She’d known just how close a call they’d had on this trip when she saw the captain’s face looking down at them. He was screaming at the crewman to extinguish cigarettes for fear of igniting the fumes.
    The smell must have been unbearable coming out of that compartment. Fuel, vomit, and shit and of course their filthy bodies, both dead and alive.
    She was worried he might simply order them to flood the container with fire retardant and then seal it again. It would have been the safest thing to do under the circumstances. The price of a few bodies could hardly be worth the risk of fire at sea—an errant spark, hot ashes from a cigarette sucked into an air vent, lightning, static electricity, anything could follow the vapors to its source.
    But he didn’t. He just left them there, hatch open to ventilate the hold. She could only guess that they were nearing their destination and the captain wanted to be paid before ridding himself of his cargo. No one was going to pay him for dead bodies. Or maybe it was what he saw when he looked in that hold. Maybe he couldn’t stomach the idea of more death.
    The absence of a hatch gave them light and fresh air, but temperatures in the hold were near suffocating and the engines rattled violently. They were all light-headed and nauseous, all still vomiting.
    Aleksandra looked at the young faces around her and wondered about their stories. They were Russian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovakian; all had somehow been lured to port cities on the Baltic Sea. The irony was that she, Aleksandra, who understood better than any of them what was happening to them, was not supposed to be among them. She was the mistake. She had never been part of the kidnappers’ plans.
    Aleksandra Goralski, Warrant Officer Class One of the Central Investigation Bureau, Polish National Police, was in the Baltic harbor of Gdansk to explore concerns about a corrupt chief customs commissioner. The commissioner had begun to exhibit sudden and extreme changes in his lifestyle, a lifestyle that included a teenage mistress, vintage cars, and a pleasure boat far beyond his means.
    Because the