If I Lose

by Kelsey D. Garmendia

  I lift my shirt and rub the ointment on my cattle prod wounds. Already the heat has subsided. They look a

  little less irritated too. The rest of my skin is still red from the water.

  I’ll take a break from my routine today—I don’t want to melt into a puddle.

  Day 11

  “Who is he working with?” Gunnar yells.

  Water mixes with blood creating snaking red lines down my body. My skin crawls with pins and needles from the fire hose. Gunnar’s hand whips me across the face—it takes all my willpower not to make a sound.

  “Who let him out of the Fort?” he spits into my face.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I croak. My lip bleeds into my mouth—I smile for effect.

  “I will get the information I need from you,” he says. “Even if it means killing your children to get you to talk.”

  I laugh letting blood from my lip boil over. He can’t kill my kids because it’s his only leverage for keeping me here. Keeping me from killing him and everyone else in this god damned Fort.

  “I’ll do it!” Gunnar roars over my laughter. “All I have to do is give the signal—”

  “And then what will you use as leverage?” His face goes rigid, and the veins bulge from his neck. “You kill them—it’ll give me all the more reason to slit your throat and watch you drown in your own blood.”

  Gunnar’s nostrils flare, and his mouth opens several times before he reaches for the fire hose. He lets the water blast against my skin.

  I should be screaming, I should be begging him to stop, but instead, I’m laughing. Laughing so loud I can hear an echo above the rushing water.

  Day 12

  There’s a place in everyone’s head that is contained in a fine glass wall. Some people call it your breaking point. Some people say that you snapped, or you went crazy. They accuse you of being a whack-job because that glass wall shattered somewhere along the way.

  Mine shattered thanks to a fire hose and a masochistic man.

  In a regular world, they throw you in a white room with padded walls and drug you until you’re too numb to function or until your liver gives out. What those doctors and psychiatrists back in that world don’t realize—drugs and a straitjacket won’t fix you.

  That glass wall wasn’t there to protect your sanity. It wasn’t there to keep the darkest things you ever thought from bleeding into your reality.

  No.

  That wall was there to protect everyone else from what you’re really capable of.

  Day 13

  My torso throbs with my heartbeat. I’m laying in the middle of the floor on my back. I can’t do much of anything after the last fire hose session. Gunnar sprayed me down for much longer than I’m used to.

  One of the soldiers actually stopped him. They took the hose away and said, “Keep this up, and she’ll be dead.”

  Now instead of death, I’m in the worst pain of my life. I can’t move from the spot where they dropped me and my water and food is near the door.

  Oh well—I’m finding a bit of amusement in the shapes and patterns of the bloodstains on the walls.

  That one looks like an airplane.

  Day 14

  I sleep light. Gunnar’s torture sessions have ceased. I’m sure they’re trying to decide what to do with me. A girl who’s cracked isn’t easy to get rid of.

  I look at the message I wrote on the wall in my blood from yesterday. “I will kill you all,” I say. My voice pierces through the silence. I laugh and say it again.

  And I will kill them all. With or without help. Gunnar especially. He’s the one who brought down my glass wall.

  I breathe in and think of Nolan and Aisley. It’s the only thing keeping me from rocking back and forth in a corner or doing pushups until I die.

  When I get out of here, that’s the first thing I have to make sure is ok. Then, I’ll kill Gunnar and anyone else who gets in my way of getting out of the Fort.

  There, that feels much better.

  Day 15

  “Ms. Henderson,” Gunnar says. “Are you willing to cooperate with us and tell us anything?”

  My lungs aren’t working right. I lost count of how many times I’ve been poked with that damn cattle prod.

  “Anything at all?” he continues.

  “You want the truth? Well, first I have to ask, where’s my ring?” I growl. The duct tape on my wrists pulls at my skin.

  “What ring, Ms. Henderson?” a voice from the darkness asks. Gunnar steps forward and towers over me. “What ring?” he says again.

  “The ring Xaiver gave to me!” I yell. “You have no right to take that from me. You can’t fucking keep me here!”

  Gunnar pulls brass knuckles onto his hands. He lays into my jaw with his fist. Pain explodes from the side of my face down to my toes. I look up and another blow to the other side of my face paralyzes my neck. My head hangs down with my chin resting on my chest.

  “Disgusting,” Gunnar mutters throwing the brass knuckles onto something metal. “You’ve been lying this whole time to us and I knew it! Everyone thought I was crazy for thinking that. Turns out I was right. What else you got jumbling around in that head of yours?”

  He grips my chin and tilts my head up to his face. His breath is hot on my skin. “It’s impolite not to answer someone’s question, Ms. Henderson,” he says. Blood pools into my mouth with my lips creating a dam. I keep my lips in a straight line. “Did you lie for Isha too?”

  I spit the blood in his face. He lets out a disgusted cry and falls backward into a metal table. The door kicks open and two soldiers come in with M16s.

  “Sir!” one says. “Are you hurt, sir?”

  The other one takes the butt of his gun and rams it into the bridge of my nose.

  Day 16

  The door to my room swings open. I sit up against the wall and hum with my eyes closed. It doesn’t matter who comes through that door anymore—I’ll kill them eventually.

  “Ms. Henderson,” a female’s voice says. “You’ve hereby been sentenced to exile.” I let out a raspy laugh that scratches against the walls of my prison.

  “What the fuck are you laughing at?” a man’s voice says. I open my eyes and see the two shadows standing in front of my exit. The larger one steps forward and picks me up under my arms like I’m a kid. “You want to go out in The Wild? That’s what you get for lying to us. Good luck trying to get past the forest out there—”

  The male soldier crumples on top of me. My head whips against the floor, and my vision doubles.

  “Hayley!”

  The pressure from the male soldier lifts off of me. I swing my arms out grabbing the female soldier by her hair. I try and slam her down, but she pushes my hand away and pins me to the ground.

  “Hayley!” she says again.

  “I’ll fucking kill you!” I scream. I swing my head forward catching the bridge of her nose on my forehead. Blood pours down on me, but she doesn’t let up on my hands.

  “Jesus Christ, Hayley,” she yells. “Fucking look at me!”

  The light shines against her face. Behind the blood and most likely broken nose, she looks like a ghost that went missing years ago.

  “Keturah?”

  “Holy hell,” she says and collapses on the floor next to me.

  Run.

  “Where have you been?”

  “That’s a loaded question,” she responds.

  “It’s been four years since I’ve seen you—”

  “Four years—” she says trailing off. Her face goes blank for a few seconds. She wipes the back of her hand across the blood dripping from her nose. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

  She pulls me to my feet, and we’re running through concrete hallways in a blur. A siren sounds and vibrates my eardrums. Keturah stops at a corner and holds her hand up.

  “Get down,” she mouths. I scrunch down behind her. She whips a pistol from her side and aims it in front of her. A group of soldiers run by us. Keturah keep
s her gun

  pointed up at their heads as they go by in a blur. The muscles in her hand don’t seem too forgiving.

  I hold my breath as the last few trickle by. Keturah lunges past the last one and sprints down the hallway. I push my legs forward until I’m by her side. We reach another crossroads in the hallway, and Keturah crouches looking around the corner.

  “Come on, let’s—” her eyes go wide and she raises her pistol.

  She lets off two rounds, and my hearing blanks out. I duck and sprint around the corner. My balance is completely thrown off as I crash into the walls next to me. Chunks of the concrete bricks fly off in a disorganized pattern around me, leaving nothing but dust and debris in the air.

  Gunfire begins to fill my eardrums. I force myself to run straight down the hallway. “Go! Go!” I hear Keturah say from behind me. The air from bullets whiz past me littering the walls with holes.

  “Where am I going, Keturah!”

  “Left!”

  We sprint side-by-side down a hallway with a wooden door at the end. The troops footsteps get softer as the door gets closer. Keturah kicks the door open and the cool air blasts into my lungs.

  “Come this way,” she whispers. We run through the darkness in silence. My legs are on fire, but I’m not tired. I’m free, and we’re getting the hell out of here. Nothing will stop me now.

  Keturah opens a door to the building on our left. The room is lit by an oil lantern that is barely burning. Most of the corners of the room are black with dust pluming out of the darkness.

  “Where are we?” I say.

  “Historically, we’re in the room where American’s tortured the British during the Revolutionary War.”

  “Really?”

  “How the hell would I know?” Keturah says. “This is the farthest spot from Gunnar and his brainwashed junkies, and the closest to the third class apartments. And it’s the best place to keep my stash.” She says patting a blue tarp covering something next to her.

  “Your stash?” It better be of weapons because the only way for us to get out is to shoot anything in our way.

  She pulls a tarp off a pile of wooden boxes. Red sticks bundled together with chicken wire fill them to the brim; the faded letters of T.N.T. are branded into the side of each box.

  “What type of stash is that!” I say. “Where are the guns? The ammo?”

  “Weapons are monitored too closely here,” she says. “This was easy to sneak out.”

  “What are you planning on doing with those then?” I say.

  She turns her head towards me and with a straight face says, “I’m gonna blow the doors sky-high.”

  Revolution

  “What about the people here?” I ask. “What about you? How are you gonna get out?”

  “The blast won’t damage them,” she says pulling the fuse spool from one of the boxes. “I calculated that into my math.”

  “And you? How are you going to escape?”

  She lets out a long sigh and places the spool onto the very top box. “I was brainwashed, Hayley,” she says. “Each day is like pulling teeth while I try to keep a grip on what’s real and what Gunnar injected into my brain.” She pounds on the side of her head and lets out a scream.

  “You remembered me, Keturah. That means some part of your memory—”

  “I’m done, Hayley,” she says holding her fist against her head. “I’ve been struggling this whole time, and I’m not going back to be brainwashed.”

  “Jesus, what did they do to you?”

  She straightens out her fist and combs her fingers through her hair. “They cleaned me out. I don’t remember anything,” she says. She turns her back to me and leans her hands on the edges of the boxes. The muscles in her back contract; her knuckles go white in the dimly lit room.

  It’s just now that I notice how much she’s changed. Her body is angular and ripped. The muscles in her arms alone would make me think twice before messing with her. She barely has any body fat on her. Scars on her arms give off a silver glowing pattern like tiger stripes. I was only in that cell for 16 days—I can only imagine what Gunnar did in four years.

  “I just remember being tortured,” she says. “Then, they had me sit duty in your room after your son was born.”

  “Why?” I say. I don’t remember much from those weeks, and hearing that Keturah was there makes me feel guilty. Why didn’t I notice her?

  “They were testing me,” she says. “They wanted to make sure the brainwashing worked. Make sure there weren’t any gaps.”

  “Obviously it didn’t work,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “It worked pretty damn well,” she laughs. “At first, I thought it was just my duty. But one night, you were talking in your sleep. Some feverish dream from The Wild. And you said Xavier.”

  She turns and looks at me with a smirk. “Random flashes of memories came to me after that, and I knew I had

  to help you,” she says. “I couldn’t tell anyone else though. If they found out—”

  “Gunnar.” She nods her head, and the smirk wipes right off her face. “What about Isha? You could’ve told him.”

  She snarls through the dried blood when I say his name. “I hate him,” she says. “He made me like this. He put me in Rehabilitation all over again. Besides, he’s probably long gone by now.”

  “So it’s true, he left.”

  “Yup,” she responds. “Honestly, I can’t blame him knowing what I know now, you know? But they say you helped him.”

  “That’s a crock of shit—”

  “I know,” she says throwing her hand in the air. “Remember? I broke out about 45 minutes ago?”

  I nod my head and pace around the edges of the room. Keturah rigs up a time bomb in the silence. A siren rings out for about 30 seconds followed by a voice over the loudspeaker.

  “Attention residents, this is Corporal Gunnar speaking. We are running a drill with the cadets and soldiers of this Fort. Please remain in your homes until the siren sounds again. Thank you.”

  “Ha! A drill,” Keturah says. “Couldn’t think of anything better, Gunnar?” She mumbles under her breath while fiddling with her contraption.

  “So, what’s the plan?” I ask.

  “You get back to your children, I blow the front gate to hell and die a hero,” she says. “You’ll know what to do once you get out of these walls.”

  “Ok, well what about your little girl?”

  She frowns at me, then laughs. “Do I look like I have a kid?”

  “Keturah, stop fucking around,” I say.

  She shrugs her shoulders and raises an eyebrow at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.

  The clock tower rings out. Keturah lights the fuse and loads her gun with another clip. She pulls a knife from her belt and hands it to me. “You’re gonna need a weapon,” she says.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To create a diversion.”

  She kills the lantern and grabs my arm pulling me through the dark. Troops’ footsteps echo across the Fort. The moon is full and casts a light down on everything—it looks like we stepped into a 1950s black-and-white crime movie.

  “Now go,” Keturah says pushing me in the direction of the apartments.

  “Keturah—” I try and come up with something to say that’s appropriate for the moment. My first friend here at the Fort is a complete stranger to me now. This is the last time I’m ever going to see her. “Thank you.”

  She smiles and says, “You know, if I did have a kid, I’d want her to be like you.”

  She turns and wraps around the corner like a ghost. I take off in the opposite direction, gripping Keturah’s knife until my hand throbs.

  December 20, 2017: Freedom

  “Aisley,” I whisper. She groans in her sleep and rolls over, smothering her face with the pillow. “Wake up,” I say shaking her.

  “Jesus,” she mutters. “What do you want, Nolan?” She throws the pillow off her face and opens her
eyes.

  “Mom—”

  I slap my hand over her mouth and shake my head. Her eyes wash with fear. She rips the covers off of her and pulls me to Nolan’s bed.

  “Nolan,” she whispers. “Come on, get up!” He groans in his sleep and reaches his arms out.

  “Grab a bag,” I say to Aisley. “Fill it with all the food you can. I’ll grab the rest.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I’ll explain later—”

  “No,” Aisley says. “You’ve been missing for weeks, Mom. Now you show up in the middle of the night and tell me to pack a bag? You need to explain now!”

  “Mommy?” Nolan mumbles.

  “Aisley, I promise I will explain everything,” I say with such a steady voice that I swear a computer is speaking for me. “All you need to know is that we have to get out of here. It isn’t safe for any of us anymore.”

  I know she’s probably grinding her teeth down to nubs. I suck on the split in my lip until I taste blood. She lets out a long sigh and runs out to the kitchen.

  “Nolan,” I whisper. “We need to go. Change into your gym clothes as fast as you can.”

  “Mommy, what’s going on?” he asks rubbing his eyes. “Where have you been?”

  The innocence of the question stings more than I expect. Here I am talking to my five-year-old son, and that’s the first question he asks me. Where have you been—I swallow and force a lying smile across my face. “I’m here now,” I say. “I’ll explain everything, I promise.”