An Oral History of the American Sacrifice Town

Lauren Bajek (bio)

Sacrifice towns? Of course I know about them. Half the runaways I catch, they get caught up in one. That’s their whole promise, isn’t it. When you can’t trust Mommy or Daddy anymore, at least you can trust the magic of the town. Hell, I lived in one for a few years after I emancipated myself. Hell of a place. You follow the rules, and only the right people get hurt.

Oh, I don’t know if I should talk about them.

For what?

A dissertation?

Where are you at?

No shit, a girl from a shitty little town like this? Good for you. Okay, tell you what. See my glass is getting empty here? Triple-fermented hard kombucha with flax. Healthier than water, and it gets you drunk. So you buy, and I’ll talk, and you just let me know when I stop making sense, and then in the morning I’ll move on. Deal?

A double to start, if you don’t mind.

Thank you.

I should start with my old town, yeah? My story’s not too different from anyone else’s. I grew up in a place a lot like this one and my parents never loved me enough. After my dad left, my mom used to let her boyfriends feel me up over my clothes. When I tried to say something, Mom said she knew what real abuse was like, and a little groping wasn’t abuse. So as soon as I was old enough to pass for grown, I packed a go bag and stole the cash from the toilet tank and left.

You spend enough time on cross-country buses, you learn this country a different way. People talk like America is all one thing, but it’s not. It’s a bunch of small places all crammed together, and sometimes you get off the bus and you can tell a place don’t like you. And then three exits down it’s a dishwashing gig that lets you camp in the store room at nights, and strangers smile at you on the street.

Once you learn to feel the mood of a place like that, sacrifice towns stick out like a beacon. They don’t just tolerate you, they want you. They love you. That’s paradise.

I bet you don’t want to hear that, but it’s true. I bet your paper is on The Moral Dilemma of Sacrifice Towns in the Late Capitalist Disaster Economy yada yada. I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t feel like much of a dilemma when you’re in it. So one innocent is chosen to suffer or die so that everyone else can live a comfortable and happy life. You know how that’s different from a regular town? Two ways:

Only one innocent is hurt.

And everyone else gets a good life.

But you want to hear about my town. Another double, hey? Thanks.

It was middle of nowhere Michigan, and I felt it calling me once I was bout fifteen miles away. Three stoplight town, houses in good repair, everybody with a Mom and Pop job but somehow paying their bills. Best years of my life, there. I lost my virginity. I learned to smoke pot.

I got into town just a couple months after the annual sacrifice, so I was well settled in by the time things got weird. Tends to happen that way. Towns get fed and happy, they pull new folks in. Anyway, this guy Tyson, couple years older than me, everybody started taking him out for drinks and giving him blowjobs behind the movie theater. Anytime I tried to skip a party, they’d say, you have to go, it’s for Tyson.

Well, they put off telling me until the afternoon before the sacrifice. Guess they’d had enough folks get spooked, they didn’t want me to have enough time to get to the Grand Rapids PD and back. I thought they were joking until they opened up his neck.

Now I don’t think it’s respectful to say exactly what happened to the kid, but I’ll just say that not a drop of his blood went to waste. It all got used.

Nice guy, Tyson. Taught me to play guitar. He couldn’t have had a better farewell party.

Well, I left after a couple years. Not because I was afraid of being chosen, mind. That town saved my life, and if it wants my blood, it can have it. Any day. No, I’d gotten involved with this girl and turns out she didn’t love me like I loved her, and the town wasn’t big enough for me to avoid her in.

Oh look, I’m empty. How about one for you, too, and you can tell me about your dissertation.

No shit. It goes that far back?

What does archeology have to do with it? I mean, how much can you really tell from—

Huh.

You know, I always thought it was an American thing. I gave you shit about all that late stage disaster capitalism stuff, but I guess I figured we invented it. You’re right, though. It’s human nature, isn’t it? Everything has a price, and the three best currencies are death, pain, and sex.

Yeah, in that order. Near as I can tell.

Oh, the towns that run on sex are hellholes. First of all, it takes a lot of sex to power a little pocket paradise. Waste of damn time. But no, worst thing is that it only works if the town thinks you enjoyed it. You know what it does to a person, to have to pretend to like it for years on end, because your safety depends on it?

Well, you’re a pretty girl. Maybe you do.

Towns that run on sex usually only operate a couple of years, anyway. Maybe a decade. A bunch of horny friends get together, they can power a little utopia for a while. It’s not sustainable, though. Low recruitment, high turnover.

No, there’s a reason why the oldest and most stable sacrifice towns all run on death. Pain works great if you’re in an out-of-the-way place, hard to get away from, but pound for pound death is the winner.

It’s good, right? You get used to the sourness. That’s how you tell it’s got the good bacteria. You want me to squirt some vitamin D extract in there, too? Prevents Alzheimers.

Sure, I get it. I guess I could have anything in here. I mean, I’ve been drinking it, but—

Oh yeah. Well, after I left my town I wandered a little. Spent a horrible couple months in a sex utopia. Did a little stint busking in Chicago, indie-rock covers of hip-hop songs, that kind of thing. Decent money in that if you catch suburbanites who are in for the weekend. They think it’s hilarious.

While I was in the Chi, friend of a friend cleaned for this rich couple out in Glencoe, lost their daughter. I say lost. She ran. I said I could find her. Just bragging, you know, I had a pretty girl’s attention and I wanted to keep it. But she passed the message. We agreed on terms. I found the kid.

She’d got herself involved in a real pit of a town just over the border into Indiana, south of Gary. The town was a pain-eater, and it liked to feed off the newest arrivals. Must have been a new town, still stupid—if you eat pain from your newest residents, nobody will have a baby inside your borders, see? Because babies count as new. And sacrifice towns only survive when they’re generational. A clever one can go decades, centuries probably.

Anyway, by time I found her she’d been there a month and she was pretty well ready to leave. Two day drive to get back to Glencoe. First day, she pretended I didn’t exist. Second day she’d slept well I guess, and I asked her what it was like.

Like I needed to eat my way out of my skin, she said. The pain was all I could think about. Getting out, but it was my own body I had to get out of. And keeping still made it worse, and moving made it worse. Aren’t you glad you have a soft bed waiting for you at home then, I said. She didn’t say yes.

Now me, I think that’s clumsy. If you’re going to eat pain, I say go for the psychic pain. There’s good power in shame if you know how to use it. And shame keeps you staying put.

Well her parents were happy, and they made some referrals, and it turns out a lot of kids had been running away from Glencoe lately. Good old homegrown homophobia. Or transphobia, one of those. Kids are so creative nowadays, sometimes it’s hard to say which is which.

Turns out these kids had a freaky pronoun-swapping little friendship group, and their parents found out and started researching one of those camps, to make them straight again, and the kids got wind and bolted.

Now I see how you’re looking at me, and yes, I did find those kids and take their Daddy’s money. But the other thing I did is give them some pointers on how to cover their tracks a little better. Last I heard, they’d made a tiny little sex-utopia of their own to lie low until their families lost the scent. They were going to go up to Seattle together. Now I don’t know if that panned out. Most plans don’t.

Well by that point I had a reputation, and it was easier to keep on finding runaways than it was to stop.

Sure, and the money’s good.

Oh no, I turn down most jobs I get offered. Only so much time in the day. And you can tell, when you meet the parents. You just feel it. Like you’re not willing to put a kid in their power.

Well okay, I’m sure I make some mistakes. But I try. And most rich kids don’t survive on the run, either.

Sure, easy. I’d always rather pull someone from a death-eating town. Those places are straightforward. They’re honest. They give what they give, and they take what they take. I don’t know, they feel like home. Pain-towns are alright, as long as the kid hasn’t been there too long. Those places confuse you, though. You start to feel you deserve it, like something’s wrong with you if you’re not hurting. Hard to get a kid home in one piece, and besides, I worry about em.

The less said about sex-towns the better. Give me the fucking creeps, but at least it feels good to play the rescuer. Never once met a kid who enjoys trading sex for safety, no matter who they’re trading it to. There’s only one town I really couldn’t handle, but I can’t think it lasted long anyway.

Really? It’s not going to help your paper, tell you what.

Okay, you better get us both another drink.

Now I really don’t like to talk about this, so if you quote me I’ll deny it. But about ten years ago I was chasing this boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen. Still wasn’t sure about his mom—I wasn’t so good at reading em, then. Well, he ended up down Georgia way, and his trail quit, middle of nowhere. Once you get hold of the last credit card or surveillance ping, all you can do is comb the area, waiting for the town to put its feelers out for you.

Well, this town didn’t want me. Only sacrifice town I ever saw not to salivate at the sight of fresh blood. You gotta understand, a sacrifice town’s a hungry thing. That’s what it is, is hunger. It’s an animal, bout as smart as a dog. You can negotiate with it, and you can trick it, but it can’t trick you.

So yeah, I knew something was off when the town didn’t call to me. But you get a paper map, you divide the area into zones, you can still find it. It’s not rocket science. I was walking down the shoulder of the highway and I felt more and more uncertain, and then all of a sudden I was through the border, and I could feel the town itself up ahead.

So there I am, minding my business, thinking about this kid Brandon and what might work to detach him from the town. From what his parents had said, I’d figured him to be drawn to pain-towns. He was the type to go too deep inside himself, you know? Sensitive. Big ideas. So I had my senses alert to the personality of the town, too. Trying to figure out what it wanted from me, now that I was in.

Oh yeah, you can usually tell pretty quick. Hard to put your finger on it, until you’ve visited your first dozen, but the town softens you up for whatever sacrifice it’s hungry for. In a death-town, say, the food tastes really good, the air smells sharp. Pain-towns give you this feeling like you’re settling in for the long haul. That type of thing.

Now things went wrong as soon as I saw Brandon. I already knew he had my type of coloring, but the way he sat there on the bench outside the drugstore, hunched over a fat little paperback, he could have been my little brother. He could have been my son.

Shit. Another shot, huh? And what do you want. You don’t have to match me, you order your little vodka cranberry. Is that still what girls drink at bars?

No shit, I thought that was a lesbian thing.

Huh. I guess you can’t always tell by looking.

Okay, okay. Well I wasn’t going to go talk to the kid while I was feeling that way. So I walked around the block, and you know me, I’m a talker. I got to talking, and by the time I’d circled back around to where Brandon sat with his little book, I’d got three different recommendations for a good place to get a drink, plus an offer of a spare room to stay in. Now that surprised me, because I’d been figuring it for a pain-town, where generosity’s a little harder come by.

Looking back, I can see how it wasn’t right already. Too full of myself to notice at the time, though.

So I came back, struck up a conversation with the kid, and he told me right off where he was staying that night. I remember thinking he was lucky I’d found him fast, because he didn’t know how to watch out for himself. And feeling like hot shit, you know, I was gonna button up a two-month job inside a week.

Well, it didn’t go that way.

The night started out smooth. I broke into Brandon’s room no problem, got him over my shoulder, down the stairs, out into the street before he’d hardly woken up. I figured, run him out past the border, the town won’t have a hold on him anymore.

Got out to the crossing with the main road and the town was waiting for me.

I mean, the people. Don’t know what they were doing awake at that hour, but they were there, in a line across the road. Now I’m a big guy, but I can’t take more than two at once, especially not and keep hold of the kid. So I put him down, but I didn’t let go of him.

I’m not convinced the boy agreed to leave with you, said someone from the line of people. Pretty dark out, I couldn’t see who.

I said, I’m from his parents. He still belongs to them. I’m just collecting.

Nothing. It was like I hadn’t said anything. We all just stood there in silence, and then somebody said we should go to bed and handle it in the morning, and we all just went.

Now here’s when I really should have started thinking. Because by rights that ought to have been a brawl. They ought have broken my arms and took my cash and tossed me out over the border with no shoes on. But shit, they everything but tucked me in with a hot milk.

Took me almost a month to figure it out, though. And when I confronted Layla, lady whose spare room I was in, she didn’t even deny it. The town: it wasn’t eating death or pain or sex. It ate spite, and it ate it up clean. Nothing left. You hear me?

Maybe I’m explaining it wrong.

Listen, somebody steps on your toe, you push em in the chest, right? When someone talks bad about your sister, you clock em.

No? You grew up different than me then. But listen, spite—that’s what makes us human. That’s what makes us better than animals. How you think we invented anything? To prove we were better than the next caveman down the block. Now it’s not pretty, but I’ve seen a lot of human nature and what we do better than anyone else is take a little nugget of hate and build something beautiful out of it.

This town? None of that.

You know what that means? No rivalries, or none with real teeth. No sabotage. No pettiness. No laughing when the other guy falls. No spreading rumors. No spanking your kids. No hate-fucking. No hate at all. Shit, no cops. No jails. No spite. How the fuck you gonna build a functioning society without spite?

You’re young, of course it sounds good to you. Shit, why do I bother.

Fine. Well, I stuck around a while. I’m not one to give up, and Layla had that type of mouth with a dimple in the middle of her bottom lip, you get me? So two reasons to stay.

And I figure it was good for a while. At least, time passed and I wasn’t mad at it. But I can’t hardly remember it. Like a dream, you know? It doesn’t make any sense when you try and think it through. I know me and Layla had our disagreements. And I know she never hit me or threw her drink on me or made fun of me about how I can’t stand to have someone touch my neck. But I can’t make that make sense together. Because the hurting’s how you keep score of how much you love someone.

Layla wasn’t like that. No spite left in her. And sure, that feels good while you’re in it, but it’s not reality.

Anyway, I cheated on her. I saw an opportunity and I took it. Out behind the gas station. Even then, seemed like Layla didn’t even care. Oh, she cried and all, but she didn’t try and hurt me back. I figured we were still good, til I went in for a kiss and she stopped me. Told me I had to move out. I said What about all your fancy principles and she said I gave up my violence, not my boundaries.

What the fuck does that even mean?

That just about broke the spell for me. I mean, figuratively—the town still had its magic, strong magic, making my life all calm and smooth and convenient. I moved up above the bookstore and put my mind back on my job. And it really started eating at me, how calm folks were. I started insulting people, tripping them, anything to get a rise. Nothing worked. They just rolled their eyes at me and moved out of range. That’s what I mean: inhuman.

Second time I tried to take Brandon out of the town, I was slicker. We were friends at that point, both big fans of books with spaceships on them. Really good kid. It was easy to convince him to take a walk with me and talk aliens and space-rays and all that, and pretty easy to turn him onto the road out of town.

He stopped, though, right inside the border. This is too far, he said.

Well, it wouldn’t take more than a minute to carry him over the line back to the real world, so I popped him in the chin, knocked him right out. Stooped down to pick him up and the magic I was swimming in—remember the magic? the town’s magic?—it rippled and started to tear, and the tear was running right through me, right through my chest.

I guess I must have fell. My arms and legs didn’t work, but I managed to look down and it was this big shimmery rift right through the center of me, and I felt so small, like I didn’t matter at all, like I’d thought I was at the center of the universe but it turns out the universe has no center at all, it just keeps going forever, and worst thing was, looking down the rift, I could feel it getting bigger. It was going to swallow me up.

I guess I blacked out. Came to and I still had that big rift pinning me down, plus some people stood around me and Brandon was leaning on them. The bruise was already coming up on his chin. You don’t have to, somebody was saying to him, and he said Yeah, I know, but I want to.

Then he looked at me and said We’re not friends anymore, but I forgive you. And the rift closed up.

And what do you think they did to me next. I mean listen, what would you do?

Right, because you’re a human goddamn being.

But I’ll tell you what they did: absolutely nothing.

I’m serious. They let me walk back into town by myself, they let me go back to my little futon above the bookstore, they still even served me at the diner. But everywhere I went, they looked at me. I mean all of them. I’d walk in the room and they just stopped what they were doing, stopped talking, and turned and watched me.

I’m a strong guy. I’m tough. I’ve seen some shit, you know? More than any person ought to see. But man, I didn’t last three days. Worst part was, when I told everyone I was leaving—when they watched me hike out the main road—even then, they didn’t say shit to me. Not even a Good riddance to chase me out.

You get it, right? You get why, all the sacrifice towns I’ve seen, that’s the one that gives me nightmares?

Lauren Bajek is a writer, parent, and literary agent living in the American Rust Belt. Her fiction is published or forthcoming in Baffling Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lightspeed Magazine. Online, she lives at laurenbajek.com.