by Lilly Black
Since Sheri and I had food and water, we decided to stay in the house and wait for the police or the national guard or the army to come and tell us what to do. I mean, this was America, not some third world country. Whatever was going on, our military would grab it by the balls and get things back on track in no time, right? So, we hunkered down. We'd see a few dead people running around the street during the day, but at night, we stayed quiet and hung blankets over the windows to block the candlelight from inside because we didn't want anyone to know we were in there. We figured we'd hear sirens or tanks when they came to rescue us, but we never heard anything more than a car or two as the neighbors who survived started to bug out.
We ran out of food about two weeks in, and I started to sneak into the houses of the neighbors I knew were gone to take what I could scavenge. I hated leaving Sheri alone, but it was safer than taking her with me. I never knew how she was going to react, and if she got frustrated, sometimes she would start banging her head and making a bunch of noise. I had to keep her as calm as I could, so I would mostly go out while she was asleep. I did that for about a week, and it worked pretty good until one morning when I was three houses down and heard motorcycles driving through the neighborhood.
It made me anxious. Sheri is scared of loud noises but not the sound of motorcycles because she associates them with our Uncle Steve. She loves Uncle Steve and always used to come running when she heard his Harley. So, I dropped everything and ran home across the neighbors' backyards. I went in through the basement door, but when I got upstairs, the front door was wide open. I looked out to see a man put my little sister on the front of his motorcycle and drive away.
I got in my mom's car and tried to chase after them, but they were just gone. I couldn't even hear them anymore when I stopped to listen. It was like my little sister vanished into thin air, and there wasn't anything I could do about it.
From that point on, my life became solely focused on getting Sheri back. Every day I listened for motorcycles. I thought maybe they believed they were rescuing her, and since she can't really communicate well with strangers, they didn't realize she had a brother in there to take care of her. I had to think it was something like that because the alternative was too hard to imagine.
It was six days before I heard another motorcycle in the neighborhood. Without even thinking about my own safety, I went running out and chased after the sound. I found three Harleys parked one street over, and I stood nearby and waited for their riders. They came out of the house with bags of supplies and loaded them in the trailer hitched up to one of the bikes, and when they saw me standing there, they drew guns on me. I wasn't even scared. I just told them what happened to my sister, and one of them said he was there last week when they took her. He said that they thought they were helping her, then he offered to take me to the group where she was living, so I went with them.
They tied a bandana over my eyes and put me in the trailer with the supplies. They made several stops, and I heard other people - women crying and fighting as they were placed in the trailer so close to me, I could feel their body heat. They were scared and shaking, and later, I spent an entire night tied up in a closet, listening to them as they screamed and begged for hours. The next morning, when we were back in the trailer hitched to the bike, they were different. They sobbed quietly, and if any part of them came into contact with any part of me, I could feel them flinch away so fast that even blindfolded, I knew what was going on. I knew what happened to them, which meant as sick as it was, the men had a use for them. I couldn't figure out what use they could possibly have for me, and by the time we made it to our destination, I had become convinced that I was going to be killed. Then someone finally took off my blindfold.
We were in front of the prison down in Beaver. I recognized it because I'd been there before when Uncle Steve got out. We were at the same place where we'd picked him up, but it wasn't being run by the guards anymore. That's when I got really scared.
Something terrible had happened at this place. Between the fences, there were dozens of zombies wandering all around, and I could see that a large section of the prison had been burnt down. The dead came toward us as we were driven through the first gate, but we got to a second gate before they could catch us. The men teased them as they lined up along the fence, trying to get to us, but this was a prison, so it was pretty sturdy.
When we were safely out of the zombies' reach, I got a better look at them, and that's how I figured out what happened to the prison guards. There were dead prisoners out there, too, but it was mostly guards who were charred like they'd been in that burnt-up section when the fire happened.
While we sat in the trailer with our hands tied, more men came out and started unloading, carrying off boxes of food, water, and alcohol. They treated the women just like they did the cargo, yanking them up and carting them off as they kicked and screamed. I was the last person in the trailer, and one of the men looked at me and asked where I was supposed to go.
"That depends," said one of the guys who had brought me here. He glared down at me and pointed to the last woman who was fighting as a man tried to carry her through the door over his shoulder. "You got a problem with this?"
Yeah! I got a fucking problem with it! You're treating that woman like an animal! She's terrified!
But she wasn't the only one, so I just said "no, sir" like a coward. I kept telling myself that none of it mattered because I was just one kid. I couldn't save the world, but I could save my little sister, so as long as I focused only on Sheri, I could pretend I didn't see what was going on around me. She was all that mattered. Of course, I had no idea how bad things were in that place.
They took me inside to a man called Rundo, who was their leader, and he asked me a bunch of questions that I had to lie to answer. They were awful questions, things that decent people wouldn't be able to answer the way he wanted, and I was so afraid for Sheri. When I had the first chance, I asked about her and the other women. He told me that they recruited new members for a bigger group run by a guy called the Sinner, and the Sinner's group came by every six days to bring them supplies in exchange for the people they rounded up. I wasn't going to ask what they wanted the people for because I didn't want to know, but when he told me that he remembered the Sinner taking my sister, I had no choice. He said the Sinner needed workers to build a society, get the electricity running again, things like that. It didn't sound so bad, though I couldn't imagine what help an autistic 10-year-old could possibly be in that situation, but Rundo said there weren't a lot of kids who survived, so she might have been adopted by a family. He also said that if I did my part at the prison and worked hard, maybe I would get to join the Sinner, so of course, that was my plan.
At first, it didn't seem so bad at the prison. They had plenty of food and beer, liquor, whatever, and it was a lot like Never Never Land for adults. I didn't see the women much. Some would cook and serve the food, but otherwise, they were kept in a different area of the prison. When I did see them, they looked really scared and unhappy, but they didn't seem like they were abused or anything beyond the catcalling and skirt-grabbing that went on in the cafeteria. It wasn't funny like it had been when we did that to the girls in the high school lunchroom. Hell, maybe what we did in school wasn't really funny either. I don't know. I just tried to keep my head down while telling myself that it was none of my business as long as I was able to rescue Sheri.
Then when I'd been there about a week, Rundo said it was time I was initiated properly.
That night, instead of going back to the cell where I slept after dinner, they took me to a different section of the prison they called Death Row. It was on the other side, through the burnt-up part, and on the way there, we passed cells with inmates still locked inside who had died and come back. They got riled up when they saw us, which really amused the men who were escorting me. What amused them exactly and why, I couldn't say, but once I got to Death Row, I realized I would probably never understand what
went on in the minds of those men.
There was a large common area with tables and attached stools bolted to the ground, and the men all sat around laughing and drinking like it was a party. Once I joined them, I noticed that we were surrounded by cages just like in any other cellblock common room, but these cells weren't open like the ones we slept in. These were locked, and inside them women cowered beneath blankets and in corners.
"Line up, bitches!" Rundo shouted at them as he banged on the bars with a club, making a sound that caused me to cringe with every blow, and slowly the women got up and came to the front of their cages. There were ten of them, and they weren't the same women I'd seen in the cafeteria. These were tortured, broken women whose eyes were too painful to look directly into.
Then Rundo told me to pick one. I didn't want to because I was scared of what was going to happen to her if I did, but I was more scared not to. I closed my eyes and pointed to a cell.
Rundo pulled out his key ring and unlocked it, and four big guys went in and dragged out this tiny woman. She was older than my mom, and when they ripped her clothes off, she was covered in bruises. She was screaming and begging, and I felt so horrible. This was my fault, but I knew if I said anything to try to stop it, I'd just get hurt, too. These guys were prisoners, some of them career criminals, and Rundo had warned me that first day that I'd either be one of them or I'd be on the menu. He said, "If you don't have a cunt, these boys'll make one for you." I didn't want to know exactly what that meant. At the time, I just pushed it out of my mind like I tend to do when something gets too hard, but the night Rundo took me to Death Row, I knew I couldn't stick my fingers in my ears and sing a little song to tune it out anymore because it was staring me in the face. Suddenly, that poor woman my pointer finger landed on was sprawled out on one of the tables and tied down so she couldn't move.
"She's all yours, Ozzy boy," Rundo said, waving his arm as an invitation, and I knew what they expected of me. I was supposed to rape her. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to rape her. I didn't want to rape anybody. I had to get out of it somehow.
"I can't do it in front of everybody," I whispered like a shy, little boy, hoping Rundo would understand and let me go somewhere private with her, but that's not how things went down.
"Our man, Oz, needs a demonstration, boys. Who's up for it?" he shouted, and they all volunteered. They were cheerful and excited. It was the sickest thing I'd ever seen, and when Rundo picked one of them, he just walked right over, dropped his pants, and went at it. Then when he was finished, Rundo picked another one. There were five, maybe six - I don't even know how many guys raped her before he pushed me at her again and told me not to disappoint him. It was a threat, and honestly, if I thought they would have just shot me in the head for not doing it, I would have taken the bullet. But I knew if I didn't do it to her, they were going to do it to me.
I walked over to her and unbuttoned my jeans, pulling them and my underwear just barely down, praying for something to happen to get me out of it. I don't know how those men could get turned on because when I looked between her legs, it wasn't sexy. It was red and raw, and there was blood on her thighs. I felt sick, but everyone was watching me, so I had to think up something fast. I leaned over her and got real close, then I grabbed my crotch with one hand and her hair with the other.
"You want some of this?" I asked, and the men all cheered me on. She started begging me not to, and I yelled at her. "Stop whining, bitch!" When I said it, the men got loud again, and it gave me a second to whisper in her ear.
"Fight me, scream at me, pretend I'm raping you or I'll fucking kill you," I threatened her, and when I stood back up, her eyes told me that she understood. I think maybe she thought me refusing to actually rape her meant that I was here to help her somehow, but I was just a scared fucking kid who wished he was dead.
She did what I asked, and I faked the whole thing because I couldn't get hard. It was everything I could do not to throw up. My head was swimming from the smell of blood, and even though I wasn't really raping her, I hated myself for going through the motions. I still hate myself.
But what could I do?
If I died, there was no chance anyone was ever going to save Sheri. Of course, now that I knew what those men were really about, I wasn't so sure about Rundo's story that she had been adopted by a family in that other group. I was scared as hell I was going to find out that what happened to this poor, bleeding woman strapped to a table might have happened to her, and that idea stuck in my mind as the night went on, especially when they got bored with the first woman and brought out another. It was a girl who looked like she wasn't a day over fourteen, and suddenly I couldn't take any more.
The men were all so drunk or fucked up on drugs at that point, nobody even noticed as I snuck off. I went back to my cell, threw my bloody underwear in the trash, and tried to cry myself to sleep. I just wanted it to go away. I'm a fifteen-year-old kid, and it was all too heavy for me, you know? Plus, now that they had initiated me, I knew they were going to expect me to go back. I couldn't go back there. Just the thought of it made me feel like I was going to throw up.
I don't know how I got to sleep that night, but in the morning, I woke up knowing that I had to do whatever I could to help those women. I started talking to the other guys and asking questions, and I learned some things that I could use. I found out that as long as I did all my work, I didn't have to wait until night to go back to Death Row. I could go back there anytime I wanted because there was always a guard on duty with keys to the cells. Then I found out that anyone willing to go on the kidnapping missions could have a private sex slave that none of the other men could ever touch. It made me wonder if that's where my sister was, so I needed to see who was in the rooms where they kept them, but that privilege required earning more of the men's trust.
I also had to earn trust before they'd let me have a gun, but they were usually so fucked up, it was easy to steal them. Since everyone there was a criminal, they all etched their own, personal marks into the weapons so everyone would know who they belonged to, and that gave me an idea. It took a few days, but I finally got an opportunity to lift a couple of small guns off a pair of morons who had shot up heroin. It was really early in the morning when almost everyone else was still passed out drunk, so I taped the guns and a pair of wire snips to my stomach under my shirt and headed for Death Row. I had the guard let me in the cell with the woman who looked the strongest to me. Her name was Frisco, and she was short but muscled and kind of dangerous looking. She had a scar on her face, and her hair was half shaved, though growing back in. I was a little scared going into her cell, but she was actually really nice and happy to scream and pretend I was assaulting her while I whispered my plan.
When the sound suddenly stopped and I didn't leave the cell, the guard came over, and she shot him in the chest. She took the keys and unlocked the other cells, then holding a gun pressed against my face like I was her hostage, they followed my directions into the burnt-up section, then out the back through the first fence and toward the second. They made it all the way there and were snipping through the chain link when we noticed a guard up in the watch tower, and I just stood with my hands in the air like a scared rabbit while Frisco kept the gun to my head. The other one finished cutting the hole in the fence, and it looked like we were going to get away until the men came out on motorcycles. They ran directly into the women while snipers began shooting at them. I realized I was screwed, so I pretended to wrestle the gun from Frisco, and I rolled us toward the opening in the gate. When I got the gun away, they didn't have a clear shot with me blocking her, so she managed to get through while I pretended to try to shoot her, missing on purpose. A total of four of them escaped into the woods, and when the men went out chasing after them, they only managed to bring Frisco back. She surrendered so the others could get away.
So, I helped save three women, but it wasn't worth it because now the others had it even worse. Many of them were wounded, and
the men wouldn't give them so much as a bandage. At least I was in the clear. The two men whose marks were on the guns got their weapons taken away from them because the women said they left them the last time they were in their cells, and the men had been too fucked up to say it wasn't true. Since I fought to get the gun back from Frisco, I was trusted with my own piece because these men are not bright. I was never an A student myself, but I felt like Stephen Fucking Hawking in comparison to most of them. Even though the prison break didn't go as planned, I had still outsmarted them, and the missions would be another opportunity.
Rundo rounded us up to announce that they needed more men to start going out, and it wasn't to find food or supplies. It was because they didn't think too many of the women were going to survive their injuries, and they wanted to replace them. It was all my fault for not planning the escape better. I felt terrible.
Then when I went on my first mission, I felt even worse. I had to watch these men round up women and girls. They stole some from small groups that couldn't defend themselves. Others, they found hiding in houses when they'd troll through neighborhoods at night looking for light in the windows. Most people covered them up with boards and blankets to keep from attracting the dead, but it's easier to trick a zombie than a real person. We'd watch more closely for the tiniest glimmer of candlelight to show through a crack or a pinhole. Then we'd raid the place.
We went in groups of three, and the only time I ever saw them hit a compound like the Deadfall was at this church complex outside of Princeton. Those people barely even protested, so that's where we'd go if other plans fell through.
We had to come back with at least three women, more if any of us wanted to keep one as a private slave. Two of them would go to the Sinner, and the other one went to Death Row. That knowledge gave me more hope for Sheri, yet it also caused me a great deal of grief. I was playing along to learn more so I could figure out a way to put a permanent stop to what was going on at the prison, but there were a lot more women who had to suffer and even die for my learning curve.