by S G D Singh
Her arm was nearly pulled from its socket as strong hands hauled her back to safety, then let her go the next instant, falling hard to the weed-covered ground once again. Panting, Hanna looked up at Lukango scowling down at her.
“Watch your step, your Great Titaness,” he said. “It's not safe to walk here.”
Hanna sat up, rubbing her shoulder. Whatever the hell a Great Titan was, she wasn't it.
“Hey,” called the boy with four knives tied around his legs and arms. He offered Hanna his hand but spoke to Lukango. “I resent that. You implying we're the Six Furies? Because I'm pretty sure our gorgeous complexions guarantee we'd never be issued passports, praise Lord Jesus.”
Hanna blinked up at them. Were they all nuts? She had no idea what they were talking about. But then she remembered Adam saying something about passports.
“What's this passport for, anyway?” she asked him.
“You know, Liebling, Klan membership cards,” he said. “Name's Mike. That's Kevin.” Kevin saluted with a curved knife. “And that handsome young man there is Malik.” Malik raised his giant butcher knife.
Hanna nodded at Lukango, rubbing her shoulder. “Thank you,” she said. “Again.”
“Don't.” He turned to peer through the hole in the ground, and Hanna followed his gaze. The dim emergency lighting in The Resort revealed that Hanna would've fallen twenty feet to the tennis courts. “I didn't do it for you.”
Darnell shone light on the ground with one of his phones. At least the flashlight apps still worked. He straightened, turning it off. “Here,” he said. “There's some kind of steel beaming holding up this false ground, see? You can see it when light shines from inside like that.”
They all stood gazing across the ground, and Hanna knew the way back inside lay on the other side of the false ground.
“Who wants to try walking across it first?” Mike asked, grinning at Hanna. “Honigbiene?”
Why the fuck not?
Adjusting her rifle's strap, she took a deep breath and ignored Kevin as he bent at the waist to indicate the way with a sweep of his arm, and Hanna stepped onto a dark path in the weed-covered ground, keeping her step between its glowing edges. She expected to feel nothing but air beneath her feet again at any moment, knowing that with each step Lukango and the others were falling too far behind to pull her back.
No one spoke as Hanna continued across the dimly lit ground, the beams giving slightly with her weight. After what felt like an eternity, the weeds stopped glowing in patches around her, and the ground felt once again solid beneath her feet.
Hanna turned to see the five boys standing about forty feet behind her, their silhouettes casting dark shadows against the dying flames of the chopper behind them.
“It ends here!” she shouted. “Only one person should cross at a time, though.”
“You're still not in charge, schnucki!” someone shouted back—probably Mike—but all the same the five of them moved one at a time across the fragile ceiling below. She noticed Lukango came across last, seeing everyone else to safety first.
“Okay, who read Nadifa's maps?” he said when he met them on the other side. “I'd rather avoid any more surprises.”
Mike shook his head, and Kevin added, “I don't do maps.”
Darnell raised his hand as if he were in class. “I didn't get a chance to read them… ”
“Is that why he was always wandering around writing on trash?” Malik asked. “Huh.”
“We have about two miles to go,” Lukango said, looking at everyone but Hanna. “Let's move.”
“I'm thirsty,” Mike said, and Kevin nodded in agreement.
Lukango scowled. “So? What the fuck am I supposed to do about it?”
Shaking his head, he broke into a jog, and Malik fell into step at his side a moment later.
They jogged across farmland, staying mostly alongside the row of trees that Hanna realized actually hid a tall electric fence, its hum matching the sick feeling in her stomach perfectly. They circled around patches of lettuce and waded through muddy sections of flooded weeds. They walked single file between lines of blueberry bushes, grabbing fruit to quench their thirst, but they didn't stop moving until they reached a cherry orchard. There, Lukango motioned for everyone to take a break, and they reached to grab as many cherries as they could hold, panting and shoving the fruit into their mouths. They sat on the ground and Hanna copied them, realizing how absolutely famished she was as the sweet juice tickled her burning throat.
“What do you think, Luk?” Darnell asked, once they'd all caught their breath, his gaze searching beyond the trees. “We're definitely out after lock down.”
“Klexters might be out,” said Kevin.
“Klexters?” Hanna asked, and everyone looked at her as if they'd forgotten she was there at all. “What is a Klexter?”
“You are extremely ignorant about your own culture and people, you know that?” Mike spit a bunch of cherry pits onto the ground. “You need to educate yourself if you're gonna go around vacationing in white supremacist slave camps and shit.”
Lukango made a sound of irritation from where he stood leaning against a tree. “Don't waste your breath, man,” he said, adding something Hanna didn't catch.
She remembered the chains holding Adam in place and she shivered, the cherries suddenly bitter in her mouth. Slave camps were a thing, and she'd been benefitting from them.
But whatever a Klexter was, apparently there were none around, because a few minutes later they turned a corner and entered a wide concrete tunnel without seeing another person.
“Nadifa said they give us a breakfast one hour before dawn on every fourth day.” Darnell said as he disappeared into the darkness, and Hanna struggled to follow the sound of footsteps on cement. “This is the fourth day, right?”
“Sure,” somebody answered. The voice sounded exhausted, frustrated. After missing only one meal Hanna was beginning to imagine what it was to starve. What it meant to be controlled by hunger. Eating fruit only seemed to make her hungrier.
The first thing that hit Hanna as they left the moonlit orchard and entered the darkness of the tunnel was the smell. It was a nauseating mix of manure and something she realized was the stench of unwashed humans. They moved deeper beneath the earth and she lurched forward blindly, trying not to stumble on the steep footing. The darkness grew thicker as the ground leveled out beneath her feet, and it took Hanna a disorienting moment to realize that the boys' voices were behind. They'd gone down a side tunnel. She turned around to see light spilling from a doorway, illuminating a dingy room filled with benches. Hanna followed the others through it, and into the sudden brightness of a room straight out of a nightmare.
Hanna fought the urge to cover her nose. Hammocks like something from a sadistic pirate's dream hung in tight rows, so many they nearly reached the ceiling. The occupants of the hammocks huddled under ragged blankets, and a few stirred and sat up at the sound of their arrival. Their green clothes were as threadbare and filthy as their blankets, their hair and beards long. Someone started coughing, the sound hoarse and painful.
One by one their gazes fell on Hanna, dark eyes narrowing in suspicion, and Hanna suddenly understood what Adam's warning had meant.
This wasn't a slave camp. It was a death camp.
“It's the morning of the third,” she heard herself say, her voice little more than a whimper.
“What?” Lukango said.
“The third means Closing,” she whispered.
“Closing?” Darnell asked.
“Every year on July third, the morning after Banquet Night, The Resort shuts down for the year. This year they're saying the closing is indefinite, and whatever year-round program is run out of here will be shut down for good.” She looked around at them. “But they can't let you go, not after what they've done to you. Word would spread. Careers ruined. No. Closing means… ” She remembered Adam's words. “The end.”
“So… the end end?” Darnell asked.
Lukango rolled his eyes. “Man, the minute they picked us up was the fucking end end.”
Hanna looked around, desperation filling her chest, choking her. They were running out of time, but she couldn't see how. Where—what—was the face of their deaths?
White. Everything in the room was painted a thick, shining coat of white. The brick floors, ceiling, walls, even the poles holding the hammocks. It was all the same, as if the entire room had been dipped in a bucket of mucilaginous white paint. Why bother? Hanna thought. Why clean it up at all?
There were no windows, of course. Hanna crossed the room. The toilets were mere cement porta-potties, beyond usable, the sinks false, out of water. The only openings besides the single door itself, were a row of perfectly round holes no larger than golf balls in neat lines along the edges of the white ceiling. One of them, at the center of the room, was larger. The size of a chimney.
Here it was, the face of death. Her own father's legacy.
Studying the room, Hanna was certain. This place was a crematorium.
She strode across the room, heart pounding, claustrophobia threatening to suffocate her, and smashed the butt of her rifle into the wall. A thick chunk of paint flaked off to the floor, revealing brick burned dark as charcoal. Hanna moved across the room as everyone watched, scraping her rifle across the floor as she went, the sound deafening in the thick silence. The weapon left a dark gash along the bricks in its wake. Reaching the nearest empty bunk's frame, she scraped off the paint with her pocket knife, revealing scorched metal.
She turned to look at the five boys who'd saved her life. Finding that she couldn't hold Lukango's cold gaze, Hanna asked Mike, “Breakfast is in an hour?” He nodded.
“Here?”
He nodded again.
“What's your point?” Lukango growled.
“That's how they make sure everyone will be in this room. Food.”
“Every fourth day.” Mike pointed to the chimney-sized opening in the ceiling. “Actual real food is delivered through there. Burgers with actual fucking bread—cheese, even. Fries. Once there were muffins.”
“Yeah,” Kevin added. “Sounds pretty suspicious, come to think of it. Probably would've thought of that earlier if only we weren't all fucking starving, you know?”
Hanna noticed a girl around her age standing at the back of the room. A hijab framed her sharp features and she stood perfectly still, like the calm in the eye of a storm. She watched Hanna intently, her arms crossed, her head tilted to one side as if she were figuring out a complex equation. Her dark eyes were hard. Hanna got the impression this girl wasn't afraid for herself, but rather for those unfortunate enough to give her the wrong answers to her questions.
Hanna turned away from the girl's gaze to examine the doorway, and ice filled her veins as she found what she expected but dreaded to find, the last piece of the puzzle falling into place.
“This?” she told Darnell and Kevin, pointing. “It will close, trapping everyone inside. And then—fire. Clean, effective, done. That is what Closing means.”
Lukango moved to examine the dorm's entryway for himself, his eyes widening for a fraction of a second as he saw what Hanna saw. While there was no door, there was a gap in the ceiling where a door would've been. Lukango reached a hand out to Darnell, and the other boy handed him a phone, its flashlight already on.
Everyone watched in silence as the five boys in charred and filth-splattered suits studied the sliver of metal hidden in the darkness of the doorway, and when they looked back at the others, their expressions got even the weakest person out of their bunks.
Hanna saw the moment they nodded in silent agreement not to tell the others about the zombies. Everyone had been through—was going through—enough already. The memory of rotting faces lurching toward her sent a shiver down her spine, and she envied their ignorance.
“All right,” Lukango said. “Everybody move outside. Now. Take anything you can carry with you.”
“Wait,” the girl in the hijab finally spoke, one word like a gunshot that stopped the group in their tracks.
“All I want,” she got in Lukango's face, “is to know this. Where is Nadifa?”
Lukango met her gaze, and Hanna saw kindness replace the rage in his eyes. And sorrow. “We'll explain once we get to the orchard, Zahi,” he said softly. “Please.”
She glared up at him for a tense moment, and then the girl—Zahi—turned to grab three blankets off a bunk in the far corner. She left the room, slamming her shoulder into Mike's as she passed him. When she was gone, everyone else started to move again, hurriedly gathering blankets and clothes—mostly green linen, faded and torn—but also shoes, jackets, jeans. It didn't take long.
Hanna stood alone with nothing but her shame in the empty dorm. She reached out and touched the broken piece of brick, her lungs refusing to work as she studied it, the layers of baked-on paint clinging to it like tar, telling the twisted and undeniable story of years of destruction.
As she passed Lukango in the doorway, she saw no surprise in his eyes at all—no shock or horror that what he'd just discovered had been their fate as he said, “Don't expect any fucking gratitude.”
Nadifa scrambled to his feet, terrified he'd somehow crushed Hanna's brother to death. Adam looked young, no more than eighteen, and as pale and fragile as a porcelain doll. Nadifa wondered if he'd ever been in the sun. His pants were folded up at the legs, his short sleeves empty at his sides. He looked utterly helpless.
“I'm guessing by the look on your face that you've never met anyone with phocomelia.”
“N-no.” Nadifa shook his head, surprised by how cheerful and calm the dude seemed, considering he was just thrown out of a helicopter into an underground house of horrors. And how the hell was he supposed to carry Adam to anywhere even remotely resembling safety?
“Phocomelia,” Adam said. “A rare, usually congenital deformity of the extremities in which the hands or feet are attached close to the trunk, and the limbs are grossly underdeveloped or absent. As you see.”
“Oh… kay,” Nadifa said, finding that wording unnecessarily harsh. Deformity? Grossly? After an awkward silence, he asked, “Does it hurt?”
“Hurt? No.” Adam grinned. “Pain in the ass when you grow up with people who believe racial cleansing is a feasible way of life, yes. Now, can we go before the zombies find us?”
“Right. Yes. Let me just—” Nadifa turned to look back at where they'd left the golf carts, but Adam interrupted him.
“Not gonna work where we're going. Use your jacket.” Adam's voice was matter-of-fact. “Think of me like a talkative backpack.”
“What?” The dude was nuts. Was he seriously making a joke?
But without a better idea, Nadifa took off his stained uniform suit jacket and, following Adam's instructions, buttoned the other boy into it. Next, he used the kitchen knives to carefully cut the material at the bottom of the jacket into strips, which he tied into knots to provide a base. He knotted the sleeves into a kind of loop, and then lifted Adam onto his back, holding onto the sleeves. The “backpack” did not seem comfortable in any way, but Adam didn't complain.
“It's not far,” he said. “We just take the service elevator in the clubhouse down to Level 9.”
Nadifa tried not to think about what would happen if they ran into a horde of infected in their current vulnerable condition, and then it was precisely all he could think about. He jabbed his knives through the material of the sleeves, weaving the blades in and out to hold them in place, the sharp side facing outward and made his way toward the clubhouse, hoping he didn't trip and impale himself in the process.
“The name's Adam, by the way,” Adam said from within the jacket.
“Nadifa.” An awkward silence. “So… you grew up down here? As in… ”
“As in, I've been imprisoned in this hellhole for about eleven years now, yep,” Adam answered easily, pointing the way behind the bar. “Varied attempts from the resident mad scientist
to torture the deformity out of me since I was eight.”
“Holy shit,” Nadifa hissed. He shifted Adam's weight, approaching the elevators, blending with wood panels beyond the kitchen. “And… you think the infected are zombies? As in, actual zombie-zombies?”
“I think one of Doctor Kaiser's—AKA evil mad scientist—experiments went wrong,” Adam said. “I think he finally messed around with something he couldn't control. Doesn't mean he isn't happy about it though. Guaranteed he's already got big plans for how to use this for the cause—if he isn't already infected himself, that is.”
“Shit.”
“No, this is good news,” Adam said. “Things have gone to total shit down here, Nadifa my friend. Everyone is either infected or distracted, and that means that finally there's no one to stop us from figuring out a way out of here.”
The elevator stopped, and they entered a deserted hallway even more utilitarian than the one Nadifa had seen before, all exposed piping and cement, lit only with dim emergency lighting.
“First things first,” Adam said. “Last door on the right. The code is 4201889.”
“Hitler's birthday?” Nadifa shook his head. They should've at least tried those numbers on the subway train, not to mention the locked doors inside the loading ramps at the prison camp. He thought of Zahi then, hoping that his cousin would have faith he was still alive.
“From what I've seen, that code only works on this door,” Adam said, as if he'd read Nadifa's mind. “Although, April 20 is also the date The Resort opens every year—well, used to open. They're shutting down for good this year, even before everything went to shit. My father and his cronies claimed it was only temporary, but everyone knew Dr. Kaiser was permanently out of a job and a lab.” Adam thought for a second. “I'll bet my right leg that vote had something to do with this whole zombie thing.”
Nadifa shivered as he pushed the door open. Every year. No one at the camp, besides the butcher, had been there before April. He didn't want to think about what that meant.
Nadifa entered the code, and the door slid open to reveal some kind of security control center, all computer screens, surveillance images, and keyboards. He let his eyes adjust to the gloom for a moment, then nearly let go of the jacket sleeves when he saw a set of robotic arms on the desk. The intricate detail of the metal was like something straight out of a science fiction movie, every joint and bone perfectly sculpted around movable plates. The arms were attached to a complex-looking contraption covered in buckles and buttons made to fit around the torso of a human.