[Escape 01.0] A New Life

by David J Antocci

  “Tom is going to let me kill you. Right after your pretty boy is gone. I’m going to love every second of it.” She walked closer still. “I’m going to cut out both your eyes first—but not until they drag his body in front of you. I’m going to make you stare at his lifeless corpse. It will be the last thing you’ll ever see.”

  Abby thought the woman’s calm voice would have been unnerving, had she not already known Eric was fine. She faintly saw him moving through the trees toward the sound of the digging. He stepped on something—a dry stick, maybe—and it snapped loudly.

  The two women turned to look, but he was too well-hidden in the dark trees. To direct her attention away from Eric’s hiding spot, Abby spit at the feet of the scarred woman.

  “You like to start trouble, don’t you?” the woman asked.

  “I like to start trouble? None of us would be here right now if you would have left us alone. I think we would both be better for that.”

  “Oh, that’s bullshit,” the woman spat. “Tom knows why you’re here. We all know why you’re here.”

  Abby was trying to keep them distracted, while Eric pursued the others. She was doing a fine job keeping this woman’s attention, but the redhead behind her had stood up and was peering into the woods. Did she see him? If she did, how come she wasn’t alerting everyone else?

  She could still taste blood in her mouth. Again, she spat on the ground toward the woman’s feet. The woman pointed the knife toward Abby and stepped a little closer, standing within an arm’s-length of her. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, looking at Abby’s feet. “Emily, bring those vines over here. Tie up her feet, so she doesn’t make another run for it.”

  Emily walked over with the vines and tried to hand them to the woman.

  “No, you do it. I’ll hold the knife on her, so she doesn’t pull anything.”

  The two of them argued over who should tie up Abby’s feet, while Abby watched Eric disappear further into the trees toward the digging sounds. When she could no longer see Eric, she looked up at Emily, “So, she’s the one in charge?” she asked, indicating the woman holding the knife. “It seems to me that whoever is in charge should have use of both their eyes, don’t you think?”

  Suddenly, far off in the woods, Abby heard one of the men scream. She knew Eric had made his move. The women turned their attention from Abby for a split-second and swung around to see where the scream had come from. Emily immediately ran into the trees toward the screaming. The other woman remained frozen.

  Her body was turned sideways to Abby, and she still had the knife. Abby had only a second to make a move before the woman would turn her attention back to her. Cocking her right leg back, she kicked out with it, slamming the base of her heel into the side of the woman’s knee. She heard a loud pop and watched the woman’s leg bend out from under her, as if her knee was on the inside of her leg. The woman was shocked and dropped to the ground, screaming in agony, her leg bent in a wholly unnatural position.

  In her shock, she dropped the knife by her side to grab her knee. Abby picked up the knife with both hands to hold it on the woman. It was immediately obvious to her that the woman was in too much pain to pose a threat. While she writhed, screaming on the ground, Abby cut her own bonds and flexed her wrists. She looked at the woman on the ground and considered ending her suffering right there, but she didn’t. The woman probably could not stand up, even if her life depended on it. It would not be right to kill her in that condition. She wouldn’t be a problem anymore.

  Abby looked around the area for the sheath to her knife. She found it next to a rock by the fire that the woman had been using as a seat. She was crouched and strapping it on when Emily came back into the clearing. She didn’t see Abby, but she saw her friend writhing in pain on the ground. Looking around and not seeing their prisoner, Emily started running toward her friend. When she was only a few feet away, Abby sprang from her crouched position behind the rock. Propelling herself forward, staying low, and leading with her shoulder, she crashed into Emily’s stomach.

  As they collided, Abby pushed her small frame upward, flipping Emily over her back and sending her airborne. She snapped her head around just in time to see Emily land on the ground, flat on her back, the wind knocked clear from her lungs. Her eyes closed, and she lay there, motionless.

  “Shit,” Abby said. “Did I just kill her?” She walked over, not wanting to get too close. She eventually saw Emily’s chest rising and falling.

  Hearing another scream from the direction of the men, Abby suddenly pictured Eric taking on those two guys at once. She had to help him but couldn’t risk Emily waking up and surprising them. The vine on the ground caught her eye—the one they had intended to use on Abby. She looked over at the half-blind woman now sporting a busted knee and was struck with an idea.

  She bound Emily’s wrists with the vine, then dragged her over to the other woman. Looking at the other woman, Abby commanded, “Roll over.”

  Between gasps and groans, the woman managed to say two intelligible words: “Fuck… you.”

  “Wrong answer,” Abby said. She swiftly kicked the woman’s wounded knee as hard as she could. This produced an ungodly scream from the wretch lying on the ground. The next well-placed kick felt like it cracked one of her ribs and convinced her to roll over. Using the rest of the vine, Abby quickly bound her wrists as tightly as she could, leaving the two women bound together. Even if Emily did wake up, she would have to drag this anchor with her wherever she tried to go.

  After giving the vine a final tug to make sure it was secure, Abby took off, running toward the sounds of the struggling men. The trees were thin there, and she moved through them quickly. The sky was getting lighter. Dawn would be coming soon. She followed the sounds of struggle to a very large clearing in the trees.

  Fifty yards away, on the far side of the clearing, she could see a massive man on top of Eric, whose feet were kicking furiously. Not knowing what else to do, she screamed, “HEY!” at the top of her lungs and ran toward them. After a moment, Eric’s feet stopped moving. The man sprung up, turning to see her approaching from across the clearing. She saw him look back at Eric, lying motionless on the ground.

  As she closed the distance, he turned away from Eric and faced her. He smiled. The sight of his smile made her stop dead in her tracks about thirty feet away. It made her sick to her stomach. Is he dead? She reached down and lifted her knife from its sheath, then began walking toward him.

  Slowly, she closed the distance. He towered over her small frame. Even at a distance, it was clear he was over a foot taller and well over one-hundred pounds heavier than her. He opened his arms, as if to welcome the fight. Her anger and hate welled up inside, searing through her veins as she broke into a sprint to close the final gap between them.

  Steps away from him, she raised her knife, ready to plunge it into whatever part of his body it might find. Without warning, the side of his head exploded in a shower of blood, flesh, and hair. The huge man collapsed to the ground like a building whose supports had given way.

  Abby froze.

  The man fell to reveal Eric, standing behind him, holding a thick branch the size of a baseball bat.

  Abby was overcome with emotion, and the adrenaline coursing through her veins made her tingle all over. She wanted to scream. She wanted to break down and cry. She waivered for just a second, until their eyes met. He was breathing heavily and his eyes were glazed over, as if he might shed a tear at any moment. She walked close to him, never breaking eye contact. Putting her hands around his waist, she held him close, able to smell the fight, the desperation, and the fear.

  She looked up into his eyes. Putting her hands behind his head, she brought him close and kissed him. It was a moment frozen in time, as though she had never kissed anyone else before. His soft lips met hers, and everything else disappeared. The island, their helplessness, their fight to stay alive; all of it stopped existing for those few moments.

  Finally, they
pulled away. Eric smiled and said, “I’ve been wanting to do that for a while now.”

  “Then, why didn’t you?” She pulled him close and kissed him again. Then, she broke away and looked around. There had been two men digging the graves. “Where’s the other guy?”

  “He’s over there,” Eric said, pointing toward the incomplete holes in the ground. “Making use of the graves.”

  Squinting in the dim light, she saw the man lying in the very shallow hole. “What did you do there?”

  “I did what had to be done,” Eric said. “He was the easy one. This guy was one tough son-of-a-bitch, though,” he said, gesturing toward the huge man lying on the ground in front of them. “Where are the girls?”

  “They’re taken care of,” she said.

  “What did you do back there?”

  “I did what had to be done,” Abby said, smiling. “There is one other thing we have to do, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Get the hell out of here. I’m not quite as ruthless as you, I guess. The girls are still alive. They’re not coming after us anytime soon, but Tom and Sara are going to figure out soon enough that you’re not back at camp. When they come back here and see this mess, I don’t think we should be here.”

  “Where do we go? This island isn’t that big.” The sun was just beginning to crest over the trees behind them. If they didn’t leave the area soon, they would never avoid Tom and Sara, and they wouldn’t benefit from the darkness. “I think we need to go back to Robert and hide out with him for a while.”

  “No,” she said. “They’ll just be waiting to find us when we leave. Right now, we just have to deal with Tom and Sara. Let’s finish this.”

  He asked, “What do you want to do?”

  “You finished the raft yesterday, right?”

  “I did. I don’t know if it floats yet, but I did the best I could.”

  “We go, then. We find out now. If it floats, we don’t come back.”

  “I like a woman with a plan.”

  Abby laughed. “I’m just flying by the seat of my pants.” She brought him close and kissed him one more time.

  “Well, that’s fine, too,” he said with a smile.

  11

  OLIVIA THOMAS SAT on her plush, brown leather couch in her large office in Los Angeles, staring at a giant screen. She was in the process of reviewing the final cut for this evening’s broadcast. They never actually showed a death on network television, but she still cringed when she saw Eric’s makeshift wooden stake slice through the air toward the big man’s neck. The camera cut away a split-second before the stake sunk into his neck, where, as they knew now, it hit an artery, causing him to bleed out within minutes. There was nothing the team on the ground could have done.

  The audio, however, did not cut out. The sounds that were produced left nothing to the imagination. Just in case there had been any doubt in the viewers’ minds that he was dead, the camera then cut to a shot of him lying in a shallow, half-dug grave in an absurdly large pool of blood.

  She flipped off the picture and decided she needed a little break. She never got used to the violence. She was an executive producer now, having worked her way up over the past decade, since the show’s inception. Still, she never got used to it. It amazed her. If you put people in a corner, they would never find a shortage of ways to hate and kill each other.

  Just because they never showed an actual death on the airwaves didn’t mean there wasn’t a public demand to see such a thing. They would make an astounding amount of money on paid subscriptions, where the viewer could see the carnage in every gruesome, super-high-definition detail.

  The show absolutely never intended to be violent; however, some seasons did lend themselves to violence and killing. Admittedly, this was not bad for ratings. In fact, the ratings were always higher in seasons with violence than in the years without. Conflict made for good drama, and good drama made for great ratings. Fortunately, for the network’s coffers, war was far more common than peace.

  The windows across the west side of her office went from floor to ceiling. Standing there, she watched the city skyline, thankful the windows did not open. The air was fresher in her building than it was outside. It had been that way for twenty years, at least. She remembered the fresh air at her grandfather’s strawberry farm up north, where she’d spent summers as a little girl. Part of her missed those days.

  Taking a step back, she was caught in the light and could see her reflection in the window. Her grandfather would be proud to see her today. Pretty, thin, dark features, and pin-straight black hair. She was beautiful. Even in this city that continually redefined beauty, she was very comfortable in her body. But, she wondered if he would be proud of who she was. She could almost hear his heavily-accented voice, and it made her laugh. Of course, he would be. There was one thing that impressed the man more than anything else—money.

  Olivia was the executive producer of “Trial Island”, undoubtedly the most successful show in the history of network television. In one year, she made tenfold what her poor, immigrant grandfather had made in his entire life—and that was being generous. No television show had ever perfected the revenue stream like they had. Sure, some came close. The football league was raking in a huge sum on their biggest game of the year. But that was one show, once a year.

  “Trial Island” commercial time was like having the big game once a week, thirty-eight weeks a year. The few million dollars in prize money the contestants could win was a paltry sum compared to the influx of cash the show brought in. There were two things about the public that were unquestionably true and were the keys to the success of the program. First, in a gamble, everyone thought they were going to be the winner. Second, the viewing public had an unquenchable thirst to see their idols torn down.

  The show couldn’t go on indefinitely, though. Olivia, and really the entire executive team, knew the current season—their tenth—was quickly approaching a tipping point. They might be able to squeeze another two, maybe three seasons out. That was if they were lucky. They were up against a technological block that had no good fix. She had spent the bulk of the morning trying to explain this to the network executives, who just could not grasp it.

  The basis of the show, they could understand. A drawing was held for contestants to enter. They needed to be fit, and they needed to be between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Most importantly, they must have been willing to receive the chip implant that allowed them to have their memory wiped out, retroactive to a specific date.

  That specific date was always the day before the show had been announced ten years ago. Before that happened, they would undergo intense physical fitness and survival training. Any skills that could help them survive on the island, such as swimming or CPR, were drilled into them, until the tasks could be completed on sheer muscle memory. The producers had found this was the most effective way to ensure they would retain useful skills after their memories were wiped out.

  After their memories were wiped, they were drugged and dropped off on the island to fend for themselves. The rules of the game were simple—they had to be. If the contestant survived a year, they won. If they escaped, they won. However, no one had ever escaped the island, and very few survived a year. Just enough to keep people interested in entering the contest and becoming millionaires.

  An ideal contestant was approximately thirty-two years old. They had found the younger ones tended to take too many risks, and often wound up dying on the island, usually by drowning or falling to their deaths. Older contestants often started developing physical problems and couldn’t make it through the training period.

  The memory wipe was the key to the show. However, they did not have the technology to just erase the contestant’s knowledge of the show itself. They had to wipe everything clean, retroactive to before the show was first announced. Due to the ten-year memory wipe, a contestant in their early thirties would believe they were in their early twenties. In the current
season, the contestants were all thirty-two. Physically and mentally, they believed they were twenty-two. Therefore, in another five years, they would have to wipe fifteen years from a thirty-two-year old’s memory, putting them mentally back to seventeen years old. Their psychologists confirmed the shock of waking up in a substantially older body wouldn’t process well enough to produce a viable contestant for the show.

  They could continue to up the ages of the contestants for a few more years, but wiping a thirty-five-year old’s memory back to the age of twenty was as far as any doctor or psychologist believed feasible. However, all the network executives heard was that the most successful television franchise of all time was going away. Their vision was clouded by dollar signs.

  Olivia would, of course, be fine. She was young, beautiful, rich, and running the biggest show on television. When “Trial Island” finally wrapped in the next few years, she would have her pick of jobs. Not that she would ever have to work again, but she loved the game too much to hang it up at this point in her life. She had considered what her next project would be. She was in the enviable position that she could choose to do whatever she wanted: Sci-fi thriller, heart-wrenching drama, quirky comedy; she could choose anything. In her heart though, she knew she would stick with reality television. There was just too much easy money to be made for her to ignore it.

  Her daydream was interrupted by a knock on the door.

  Her assistant, Seth, poked his head in. “Olivia?”

  “Come in.”

  Seth entered with a flourish. He did very little without a flourish. Occasionally, Olivia found this annoying. However, he was the most fantastically organized individual she had ever met, so it was an annoyance she was willing to live with.

  He stood in front of her, holding his tablet. “You’re not going to believe this.” He paused.

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What is it?”