Escape The Dark (Book 2): Fearful World

by Fawkes, K. M.

  “What did this place used to be?” Adam asked. “It wasn’t always a slaughterhouse, was it?”

  “It was, actually,” Chase said. “The Santa Joaquina had a staff of people who would take your kill if you’d been hunting and prepare it for you so you and your family could have venison that night and you could say you’d provided it.”

  “You could say you had?”

  “Well, you know.” Chase shrugged. “One deer is too much for a family to eat. If one was killed, they’d carve it up and package it and put it into deep freeze, and then they’d take out some venison steaks that were a little bit older and serve those. That way nothing got wasted.”

  “I see,” Adam said. “And the country club members knew that was what was happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Chase said. “We didn’t talk about it, but anyone who gave it five minutes’ thought must have known, right?”

  “And they still wanted to go out hunting?”

  “You didn’t go hunting because you needed something to eat,” Chase said. “You didn’t go hunting because you had a taste for venison. You went hunting because you wanted to kill a buck.”

  Ella caught Adam’s eye and raised her eyebrows significantly.

  But that didn’t prove anything, Adam thought. So Chase had wanted to kill a buck. It wasn’t an urge that Adam personally could identify with, but it wasn’t exactly strange. Lots of people enjoyed hunting. Lots of people enjoyed pitting their wits against those of animals. That wasn’t the same as wanting to torture an animal.

  According to Richard, whoever had killed the deer he’d found had skinned it alive, or at least gotten started doing that. Chase’s words sounded like those of someone who would want a picture of himself with his kill to hang on his wall. He sounded like he would be proud to go inside in an hour and announce that they’d brought down this boar. Killing far away from the house, in secret, in a way he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about—that didn’t fit.

  Adam helped Chase lift the boar onto the table, but found his appetite for butchery was low. “I’m going to head up and take a shower, if it’s all right?” he asked.

  “Weak stomach?” Chase smirked.

  “Do you need me for this part?” Adam countered.

  “Not really.” Chase admitted. “Livvie can hold the boar while I do the cutting.”

  Adam nodded. “All right, then. Thanks for including me in the hunting party. We should do it again sometime.”

  “I’ll go start cutting up some vegetables to go with the meat,” Ella said. “When you’ve finished out here, Chase, bring in enough for everyone and we’ll cook them up. All right?”

  Chase nodded, already looking away from them to select his carving implement from the wall.

  Adam and Ella departed the building and headed up the grassy slope that led to the main clubhouse.

  “I hate watching that part,” Ella admitted. “It’s creepy.”

  Adam nodded. “I could handle it if I had to, but I think it would get in the way of enjoying my dinner. I’d be thinking about the process of turning the animal into steaks the whole time I tried to eat.”

  “Chase is kind of creepy himself,” Ella said. “Don’t you think? The way he talks about his mother, the way he seems to enjoy butchering?”

  “I don’t know,” Adam said. He didn’t want to tell Ella what he’d learned about Chase’s addiction—he’d just promised Chase that he would keep the secret, after all. “He’s going through a lot,” he said. “We all are. And people cope in different ways. Chase might just be repressing his real feelings about his mother because he finds them too hard to talk about.”

  “Well, somebody slaughtered that deer Richard found,” Ella said.

  Adam nodded. “I just don’t want to leap to any conclusions about it,” he said. “Maybe it was Chase, but maybe it wasn’t.”

  Ella sighed. “You’re right. I shouldn’t assume anything.”

  “I’ll come and join you in the kitchen after I shower up and give you a hand getting dinner ready, okay?” Adam said.

  She smiled. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  Adam headed toward the stairs to his bedroom, wondering if the closet or the dresser might contain any more clean clothes—he had a pile that had been washed, but they’d all been cleaned in the salt water, and his skin had finally started to feel normal again. On his way, he passed a door he hadn’t entered before. Until now, it had always been closed.

  Today, it stood open.

  Adam peered in, wondering what was going on.

  A figure knelt in the middle of the room, hunched over what looked like a shoebox and rummaging around inside it.

  Adam stepped into the room. “Is everything okay here?”

  The figure looked up, startled. It was Kathryn Birkin. The item in her hands dropped and clattered back into the box.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just…I’d never seen this room open before.”

  “Come and sit,” she said faintly.

  Adam crossed the room and knelt beside her.

  “This used to be the champagne room,” Kathryn said, pointing to the bar in the corner. “Only VIP members were permitted in here. We’d come up after dinner and enjoy as much champagne as we liked. The furniture was nicer then…” she looked around helplessly. “I suppose it’s because no one is taking care of it.”

  Adam thought the furniture looked perfectly nice, if a bit dusty. “Were the McTerrells VIP members also?” he asked.

  “No.” Kathryn smiled slightly. “They were too new. You had to have belonged to the Santa Joaquina for at least ten years before you could gain VIP membership. They wouldn’t have been allowed in here.”

  “Do you come up here to get away from them?”

  “I come up here to get away from everyone,” Kathryn said. “None of the others come here. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s in the middle of the house, and Richard is so determined that we should stick to our side. And of course, the McTerrells always stick to theirs.”

  “Except at dinner?”

  “Except at dinner. The men all seemed to think shared dinners would be a good idea.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I don’t know. Everyone keeps fighting.” She sighed. “I’ll be relieved when we can get out of here.”

  “What do you have in the box?”

  Kathryn reached in and pulled out a smartphone. She held it up for Adam to see, then pressed the button on the side of the device that he knew would turn it on—or would have, prior to the EMP.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “One of these will start up,” she said.

  “One of what?”

  She handed him the dead phone, reached into the box, and pulled out a laptop computer. Opening it, she tried to power it on, but the screen remained black.

  “I keep all my family’s electronics in this box,” she said. “All our phones, all our computers, the boys’ tablets. Every evening, before dinner, I come here and try them all. When something finally turns on again, I’ll be able to bring it to the dinner table and surprise everyone with it. We’ll be able to make a plan together instead of arguing.”

  Adam frowned. Did she really think that one day these devices would just start working again? Unless he was very much mistaken, the EMP would have killed all of these things permanently.

  “Kathryn…” he started.

  She held up one of the phones in the box. “This phone was mine,” she told him. “I took all the pictures for our family. So many wonderful pictures. And I never deleted them. I have pictures on here going back to the boys’ school days. When the phone comes back to life, I’ll share them with you.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “You won’t believe how much they always looked alike,” she said, talking over him, and he almost felt as though she knew what he was trying to say and was preventing him from getting the words out. “Of course, I could alwa
ys tell them apart. I’m their mother. Sometimes they’d change the way they parted their hair to try and fool me, but I always knew right away.”

  “Kathryn, I don’t think—”

  “Rhett was the ringleader. He came up with all the pranks they played. I wonder if all sets of twins are like that, with one who takes charge. Do you know any twins? My friend Betsy has twins, but they’re fraternal. A boy and a girl. And I think that’s a very different dynamic. Her daughter married young and has a baby of her own, and her son is in an Ivy League school studying to become a doctor. Isn’t that something? I wonder how Betsy is doing.”

  Adam put his hands around Kathryn’s and eased the phone away, feeling chilled. This was too reminiscent of how Cody had been in his final days. Kathryn didn’t seem to be turning violent, at least. But she had clearly been pushed to her breaking point by everything that was going on.

  She surrendered the phone willingly enough but picked up a tablet from the box. “Once I get back on social media,” she said, “I’ll be able to check in with all my friends. I’ll find out where everyone is. Maybe they’d like to come out to the Santa Joaquina. We’re relatively safe here, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” Adam agreed cautiously.

  “I should invite everyone to come. We have plenty of food, and Ella will cook for them. It would be such a relief to have some friends in this place.” She smiled up at him. “My friend Margaret has a daughter just about your age. Isabel. You’d like her. Maybe something good could come out of all of this. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “Sure,” Adam agreed.

  Kathryn sighed. “It doesn’t look as though anything’s turning on today, though, does it? Maybe tomorrow. Do you think they’ll work tomorrow?”

  What could he say? He was virtually certain that the devices would never work, thanks to the EMP. But would she be able to accept that? Or would it push her over the edge?

  And then there was the matter of her friends. Kathryn seemed to believe that if she could just turn on her devices, she would be able to get updates about their well-being again. Adam didn’t think any of that was true. For one thing, the servers that ran her social media platforms were almost certainly down. He doubted the internet was out there at all anymore. Even if she could turn on a computer, Kathryn Birkin wouldn’t be able to connect.

  Also, her friends were most likely dead.

  But he didn’t want to tell her that. The last thing he wanted was to see another person snap the way Cody had, to see another person pushed to violence or self-destruction. He wasn’t sure he could stand it again.

  Could Kathryn have been the one to mutilate the deer?

  No. He couldn’t believe that of her. The woman sitting in front of him might have been mentally fragile, but he had yet to see any sign of aggression from her. Whether she could be driven to that point remained to be seen, but she wasn’t there now. Kneeling in a darkened room and fantasizing about the old life she’d once enjoyed coming back to her was a hell of a lot different than torturing animals.

  This, he supposed, was just how she was coping with everything that had happened. Everyone had different strategies, some more effective than others. Cody and his friends—and, it seemed, Chase McTerrell—had responded by losing themselves in the world of narcotics. Kathryn’s denial wasn’t any more dangerous or harmful than that.

  “You never know,” he told her, because really, you never did. He might be wrong about everything he had guessed. He didn’t think he was wrong, but he could be. “Something might turn on tomorrow. The power might come back.”

  “Do you think I should plug them into their chargers, just in case?” She held up a power cord and motioned toward the wall outlet.

  The idea of plugging in a bunch of phones and tablets when electricity was nothing more than a dream of the past seemed beyond tragic to Adam. “I don’t think you need to,” he said. “If the power comes back on, we’ll just come in here and do it then.”

  “But what if it only comes back on at night? What if we sleep through it?”

  He shrugged. It didn’t matter, really. He pulled out a cord of his own, matched it to one of the laptops, and plugged it into the wall. Looking relieved, Kathryn followed suit.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” she said, getting to her feet and looking much more herself. “Maybe tomorrow things will start to work.”

  “Maybe,” Adam agreed, thinking of Artem. The captain would have counseled him never to give up. When you give up, Artem would have said, that’s when you start to die.

  Maybe Kathryn was onto something, after all.

  Chapter 12

  The shower was cold, of course, and Adam had to wash himself quickly, scrubbing furiously to make sure that all the soap was removed from his body before he allowed himself to climb out. Still, he felt refreshed when he was finished. Hunting wasn’t really for him, he decided. It had been nice to find success out there, to kill that pigeon and realize that he was capable of providing something for dinner. But maybe from now on he would try to stick to fishing. He could still smell the gunpowder on his hands.

  When he was finished in the shower, he checked the dresser and found to his delight that it was full of flannel pants and T-shirts. What was more, they looked like they would fit him. He would still have to wear the salt-washed clothes during the day, but he could dress comfortably at night. Even though he knew he would be the worst-dressed person there and would impress nobody, he decided to put on some of the fresh clothes for dinner. This wasn’t a fashion show.

  He took a moment in front of the mirror to trim his facial hair, which was becoming unkempt again, and then headed out of his room to see if there was still work to be done in the kitchen with Ella.

  But he never made it to the stairs.

  “I said mop it all!” someone was yelling. “You missed that spot there! This place is a sty, and it’s all your fault!”

  What was going on? Were the Birkins and the McTerrells fighting again? Adam edged along the wall until he reached the corner and peeked around.

  Ella was crouched on the floor. She had a small rectangular hand mop and was moving it vigorously against the baseboard. One of the Birkin twins stood over her, his back to Adam. Adam consulted the part of his hair. Left. Langley.

  “The dinner will burn,” Ella said, still mopping. “I need to get back downstairs.”

  “You should have thought about that before you were lazy with the mopping,” Langley said. “This should have been a five-minute job! I shouldn’t have to come back to you over and over with these things. They should be done right the first time!”

  “I really don’t see any dirt here, Langley,” Ella said.

  “Well, are you blind? Or are you an idiot?” He squatted beside her, gripped the back of her neck, and shoved her face down toward the ground.

  Ella let out a little yelp of pain and fell forward out of her squat, her knees striking the floor as she went down.

  Adam felt his blood boil.

  “Clean it right,” Langley said, standing upright. “If you mess up the dinner you can just start over.” And he strode off down the hall, stepping on Ella’s fingers as he went. She winced and pulled her hand to her chest, and Adam saw her eyes fill with tears.

  He couldn’t believe what he’d seen.

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  Langley and Ella both turned. Langley looked surprised. Ella looked fearful.

  “What the hell was that?” Adam demanded. “You can’t treat her that way. What are you thinking?”

  Langley laughed. “She works for me, Adam.”

  “Does she? How much do you pay her?”

  “Adam, stop,” Ella whispered.

  “I pay her in the food she eats,” Langley said.

  “You mean like the boar she killed today?”

  “Yeah,” Langley said. “That’s what I mean. The boar she killed. With my bullets. And my gun. The boar that was here because of my country-club membership dues. And if she doesn’t l
ike it, she can leave, and frankly, so can you.”

  “Even if you had a point, which you don’t,” Adam said, “you can’t treat people that way just because they work for you. That’s abuse.”

  “Oh, and what’s she going to do, go on strike?” Langley scoffed. “Bring a lawsuit against me? Quit and get a better job? That’s not the world we live in anymore, bro.”

  “I’m not your bro.”

  “It’s survival of the fittest now,” Langley said. “Weren’t you listening the other day on the boat? The strong are going to rise to the top. And the small, the meek, the hangers-on,” he gestured vaguely toward Ella. “They’re just going to have to find their place in the new world we’re building. And that starts with mopping that floor!” He leaned around Adam to shout the last three words at Ella.

  Irate, Adam shoved Langley back into the wall. “You’re nothing but a smug kid,” he said through gritted teeth. “You think you know so much about the world, but you don’t know anything. You haven’t had to live through anything. You haven’t fought for so much as an ounce of what you have. You call yourself strong, but you’re nothing.”

  He expected outrage. To his surprise, Langley just laughed.

  “I’m nothing?” he said. “I’m nothing? What do you think you are, then? You’re a has-been, Adam. You’re a child actor who washed out early and has been living on the money you made a decade ago. You’ve got no useful skills. You don’t know how to fish. You don’t know how to hunt. You wouldn’t even be alive if my family hadn’t shown you kindness and taken you in. And now you’re going to stand there and tell me things have been handed to me? You’re crazy. You’re actually crazy.”

  There was nothing Adam could say to that. Langley was right. He had washed up on this island with no useful skills. He had only survived this long because of the things other people had done for him. First Cody had gotten him away from the mainland, and now the Birkins and the McTerrells had allowed him to stay at the Santa Joaquina. If he had been left to his own devices, he would have died a long time ago.