The comfort women gathered together in what had been a storeroom and now, with the addition of chairs and tables no doubt stolen from people’s homes, did duty for a dining room. Some of the women didn’t want to have much to do with anybody. Jane was one of those. Others talked about what they’d done and what their Japs had done; they might have been factory workers comparing the behavior of machines. If they were going to talk, they didn’t have much else to talk about.

Supper was rice and vegetables-more than Jane would have got if they hadn’t kidnapped her. The Japs might not have wanted to fuck her if she looked like a starving woman. She didn’t care. She wouldn’t have done this for all the gold in Fort Knox. She wouldn’t even have done it for a T-bone smothered in mushrooms and onions.

Somebody said, “What’ll the Japs do if it looks like they’re gonna get kicked out of Wahiawa?” There was something new to talk about after all.

“Please, God,” somebody else said, “and soon!” A woman sitting near Jane crossed herself. That anyone could still believe in God impressed her-and horrified her, too. What did it take to get you to see nobody was on the other end of that telephone?

“Maybe they’ll let us go,” Beulah said.

“Not the Japs!” Jane said. “They never do anything for anybody. They do things to people instead.”

“So what’ll they do to us?” Beulah asked. “What can they do that they haven’t already done?”

Jane winced. That question made altogether too much sense. After weeks of having to lie down for endless men she hated, what was left in the way of degradation? But someone had an answer: “They’re liable to kill us all. That way, we won’t be able to tell anybody what they made us do.”

No one spoke for a little while. The unwilling comfort women weighed the odds. Would the Japanese murder them in cold blood? It didn’t strike Jane as the least bit unlikely. Dead women told no tales. She said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“How?” three women asked at the same time. The windows were barred. The doors were guarded. The Chinese women who ran the brothel for the Japs-their boss was a snake named Annabelle Chung-kept their eyes open for trouble all the time. Even talking about escaping was dangerous. Some of the miserable women in this room informed. No one knew who, but the fact seemed inarguable. What could they get that would make squealing on their fellow sufferers worthwhile? Not more food, the usual currency of betrayal in the rest of Wahiawa. Fewer horny Japs? After a while, what difference did that make? But Jane couldn’t see any other reason to snitch except general meanness. Of course, that wasn’t impossible, either.

No matter how many women asked the question, nobody answered it. An answer did occur to Jane: give the guards some of what she had to give the other Japanese soldiers. Before she landed here, sucking a stranger’s cock to get something she wanted would no more have occurred to her than killing herself.

She probably would sooner have killed herself. She remembered that, as if from very far away. Now… She’d had to get down on her knees so often for nothing at all, why not do it once more if she really needed to? And it wasn’t as if suicide were a stranger to her thoughts nowadays.

She looked around at the other comfort women. Were they thinking along with her? How could they not be? A few weeks of this had coarsened the women it didn’t kill. Some of them hadn’t even bothered to put on clothes before they came to supper. There had been evenings when Jane didn’t bother, either, though she’d thrown on a muumuu now. Would they all be thinking, Well, why not? What’s one more after so many?

And if by some accident they got out of this, what would their lives be like? Jane tried to imagine wanting a man to touch her. The picture refused to form. And she tried to imagine a decent man wanting to touch her if he knew what the Japs had made her do. That picture wouldn’t take shape, either. She shook her head. What was left for her? Nothing she could see.

Sometimes a woman broke down and sobbed here. Sometimes crying jags ran through them all, contagious as chicken pox. Not tonight, though. Maybe they were all trying to figure the odds.

Artillery and small-arms fire through the night didn’t keep Jane from sleeping like a stone. One more thing nobody’d told her: screwing all day was hard physical labor. And it wore out the spirit much worse than the body.

No rooster announced the dawn. As far as Jane knew, all the roosters in Wahiawa except one saved for stud were long since chicken stew. Since coming here, she’d wondered once or twice if he got sick of fucking strangers all day every day. She figured the odds were against it. After all, he was a goddamn male.

Usually, the breakfast gong took the rooster’s place. The women woke for that. If they didn’t get breakfast, they couldn’t eat till suppertime. Today, though, just as the eastern sky was beginning to go pink, four 105mm shells slammed into the brothel.

That got Jane out of bed-literally. She woke up on the floor, with one of the walls tilted sideways and with chunks of plaster falling on her head from the ceiling. Somebody was screaming, “Fire!” at the top of her lungs. Somebody else was just screaming, the agonized, unthinking cries of the badly wounded.

Jane scrambled to her feet. She cut one of them on broken glass, but she hardly cared. She let the muumuu fall over her head, then rushed out the door. It had been locked from the outside, but the blasts blew it open.

Beulah’s door had come open all by itself, too. Jane looked into the room. “Let’s get out of here!” she shouted. “We’ll never have a better chance!”

“I guess not,” Beulah said-she must have been in another line when they were handing out brains. All she had on was a pair of panties. She didn’t stop for anything else. Come to think of it, that wasn’t so dumb.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Annabelle Chung stood in the corridor, hands on her hips. Jane wasted no time on conversation. She hauled off and belted her oppressor in the chops. The Chinese woman shrieked and staggered, but tried to fight back. Jane gave her a pretty fair one-two. Maybe she’d been listening after all when Fletch went on and on about Joe Louis and Hank Armstrong.

The Chinese woman went down on hands and knees. When she started to get up, Beulah kicked her in the ribs. That wasn’t in the Marquis of Queens-berry rules, but it sure as hell worked. Annabelle Chung stayed down. “Way to go!” Jane shouted.

The side of the building had a hole in it you could drive a bus through. Comfort women streamed out. Some wore muumuus like Jane; one or two were buck naked. Several of them were limping or bleeding. None of that mattered. Getting out did.

Out in the open. Two Japs had stood nearby. Only the bottom part of one of them was left. The other had had his head almost blown off. Jane looked longingly at the Arisakas by the dead men. She knew how to use a bolt-action rifle. But lots of Japs still occupied Wahiawa. Even with a rifle, she couldn’t kill them all. Oh, but I want to! she thought. They could kill her, though, and they would if they saw her with an Arisaka in her hands. She hated to leave the rifles there, but she did.

“Let’s get away!” she said. Her partners in misery didn’t need the advice. They were already scattering as fast as they could. Some of them would have friends and families to go back to. Would they still be friends, would the families stay loving, when they found out what the women here had had to do? Maybe. Some of them might, anyhow. The rest? Well, they couldn’t be worse than the Japs.

Jane had nothing and nobody here. Fletch was a POW if he hadn’t died since she last saw him. For all practical purposes, he was an ex-husband, anyway. Would I take him back now? Jane laughed as she ran. That wasn’t the question, was it? Would he take me back now? She had no idea. Everything she’d done, she’d been forced to do. Everybody had to know that. Would anyone care, or would she stay soiled in the eyes of the world for the rest of her life?