by Scott Sigler
He shuts off the flame. Ghost images dance in my vision. The room is pitch-black once again.
“It’s a torch,” Gaston says. “For welding things, I think.”
Spingate again jumps and claps. I’m going to have to have a word with her about that. The way her…her parts bounce around when she jumps, it’s distracting even to me—I can’t imagine the effect it has on the boys.
“So we can use the scepter to light the way,” I say. “That’s great.”
Gaston gives a wincing half-shrug. “Well, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. The fire has to burn fuel, and we don’t know how much fuel the scepter holds. We shouldn’t use it for light, or it might burn out and we won’t have the flame if we need it.”
I sigh. This is so annoying.
“Then what are we supposed to use it for, Gaston?”
He purses his lips. “To set stuff on fire? Maybe the grease on the floor will work as fuel. If we soaked our clothes in it, found some sticks or something, maybe we could make torches.”
Spingate crosses her arms. “What, and have all of us be naked?”
Gaston grins. “If that’s the only way, that’s the only way.” He gestures around the room. “Do you see any other fabric around here?”
There is a pause, then I look up. Bishop and O’Malley do the same.
The flags.
“Bishop,” I say, “do you think you can get those down?”
He nods.
“That tall boy in your tribe,” he says. “What’s his name?”
“Aramovsky?”
“Aramovsky,” Bishop repeats. “Will he let me and Visca lift him up? We’ll have to get our hands under his feet. He might fall a couple of times, but hopefully it won’t hurt him too bad.”
Aramovsky heard his name. He cranes his head, peering into the room, wondering what’s going on.
I look at the floor. The light from the hallway reflects off the smeared grime. I smile. He isn’t going to like this, but I won’t give him a choice.
“Aramovsky, get in here,” I call out. “Time for you to finally get dirty.”
SEVENTEEN
We walk uphill. We carry torches.
Aramovsky didn’t get dirty. He didn’t fall, not even once. Figures. With the help of Bishop and Visca, he ripped down the flagpoles. I hate to admit it, but Aramovsky did a good job.
Spingate and Gaston used the knife to cut the flags into long strips, then rubbed them in the greasy dirt and wrapped them tightly around the ends of the flagpoles. Gaston used the scepter to set them on fire. Flames lick up from the fabric in soft, pulsing waves that are hypnotic if you look at them too long.
Bello was smart enough to keep one flag whole. She tied the corners together to make a kind of bag that holds the extra grease-soaked strips. Okereke volunteered to carry the bag. Of all the circles from Bishop’s group, I like Okereke the most, probably because he seems to be the hardest worker.
We move through the long room, three abreast. Torchlight makes shadows that twitch and jump. The darkness seems to be a living thing waiting to pounce on us and swallow us alive.
The room ends at a narrow, stone-walled hallway. Bishop and El-Saffani lead us in, Bishop carrying a torch. I’m in the second row, several steps behind them. O’Malley is on my left, knife in hand, and Latu on my right, also carrying a torch. The rest of the group follows after, a long procession of flickering flames lighting up frightened faces.
If I ever get to sleep, if I have nightmares, I know they will happen in a place that looks like this.
Bishop isn’t that far ahead. He and El-Saffani stop, wait for me, and I soon see why: an open archway on the left and another on the right. Past those, two more of the same on either side. The flickering torches seem to make the archways waver like the twitching mouths of giant, bloodthirsty monsters.
“I think we should look in these rooms, Em,” Bishop says quietly. “It’s not a good idea to leave unchecked areas behind us.”
O’Malley shakes his head. “If we look in every room we find, all our torch-strips could burn out and we’d be left in the dark. Better to keep going straight as fast as we can.”
Aramovsky was in the row behind me. He comes closer, eager to be part of the group that’s making decisions.
“O’Malley is right,” he says. “We’re tired and hungry and thirsty.” He half turns, so the people behind us can hear him clearly. “We don’t want to waste time playing games, Em. We want food.”
I hear grumbles of agreement, see scowls on more than a few faces. They are losing patience. They elected me leader—did they think I could use the spear to make food and water appear out of nowhere?
“Be patient,” I say to them all. “We’re going to get out of here, but I need you to be patient.”
I’m going to get us out of here? I’m surprised at how convincing I sound.
Bishop and O’Malley both made good points. The darkness and shadows make this area feel dangerous, though, and my instinct tells me that when it comes to danger, I should trust Bishop.
“We’ll check the rooms,” I say. “There might be water. But we need to do it quick, so we can keep moving forward.”
Bishop nods. “El-Saffani and I will make it fast. Everyone stay here.”
Before I can answer, Latu speaks.
“You take the ones on the left, we’ll take the ones on the right,” she says to Bishop. “Faster that way.”
Bishop stares at her. The shadows dancing across his face make him look much older. Almost…grown up. He starts to speak, stops—he’s not in charge anymore. He glances at me, waiting for me to decide.
“We’ll take the rooms on the right,” I say.
Bishop purses his lips, then nods. “All right.”
He waves someone forward. It’s a circle-star boy with skin almost as dark as Aramovsky’s. Farrar, I think his name is. If it weren’t for Bishop, Farrar would be the biggest person in our group. Everything about him is wide, from his shoulders to his chest to his head—even his nose, which is short and flat.
“Keep everyone here,” Bishop tells him. “We’re going to look at these rooms.”
Farrar nods once. He stands straight and tall, round shoulders back, big chest out. He might as well be a wall that blocks off the hallway. He accepts his orders, but doesn’t even glance at me. My anger wells up again. Maybe it will take a little time to figure out how this works with Bishop, but when it comes to the circle-stars, he gives the orders and they listen. Except for Latu—she seems to be on my side.
But there shouldn’t be sides. I have to keep reminding myself of that.
Bishop grips my shoulder with his free hand. “Be careful, Em. If you need help, just yell. Farrar or I will come.”
With that, he turns and walks into the room on the left, El-Saffani right behind him.
O’Malley huffs. “Like we need his help.”
I hope we don’t, but I’m glad we’ll have it if we do.
Latu, O’Malley and I enter the first room on the right. The layout looks familiar. Above is an arched ceiling decorated with carvings that shift and jitter in the torchlight. There is an aisle down the middle, as there was in our coffin room, and what might be coffins on either side, but they are different from ours. Where we had two rows of detailed, wooden coffins lined up end to end, with space between them, these are plain and white, lined up side to side and packed one against another, the far ends pressed against the wall. At the end of the aisle is another one of those white stone pedestals, this one broken into a dozen pieces.
These coffins aren’t covered. I can’t see into the ones at the far end of the room, but the ones close to us are empty. The ends of these coffins don’t have carvings and jewels, they don’t have nameplates—all they have are two flat metal discs, each the size of my fist. All the discs are scratched and dented, as is the white material around them—like someone with stiff boots kept kicking the discs harder and harder.
Latu walks toward the end of
the room, her torch held up high. She looks down and left, down and right, over and over again. She reaches the wall, then jogs back.
“Empty,” she says. “All of them.”
O’Malley kneels, runs his hand over the end of a coffin. He taps it with the point of the knife.
“Latu, put some light on this,” he says.
She tilts the torch close to him. I notice the light is starting to fade: the flame is slowly burning out.
O’Malley puts his finger into a deep gouge.
“Look at this scratch,” he says, then runs his finger along it. The white material is torn and splintered. It’s not wood and it’s not metal. I should know what it is, but—like almost everything else—I can’t place it.
O’Malley stands. Latu holds the torch over the coffin. More scratches on the inside, both where someone would lie and on the walls that separate it from the coffins on either side. On the flat bed, there are metal fasteners of some kind, but nothing fastened to them. The fasteners are scratched and rusted over.
Cracks, breaks, crumbled bits…so much damage.
“Looks like someone got mad at it,” O’Malley says. “Got mad at all of them.”
“No padding,” Latu says. “Ours had padding. Did people lie in there on that hard bottom?”
O’Malley shrugs. “If these are even coffins at all. We don’t know if they are.”
But we do know.
Why are these different from ours? Why are they packed in like this?
Latu sees something. She reaches into the coffin, tugs at one of the fasteners. It rattles in complaint, then she stands. She holds her hand out for us to see.
It’s a tiny bit of dirty white cloth.
O’Malley takes it from her, holds it close to his face, squinting to see it in the fading torchlight.
“Looks like the same lining that was in our coffins,” he says.
He offers it to me. I take it. It’s hard to tell from this small sample, but I think he’s right.
Memories of my coffin flare to life. Waking up in the dark. The white fabric splattered with my own blood. I can remember nothing from before I woke up, but everything after—including some things I’d much rather forget.
Latu leans down, wipes her hand on the coffin’s hard, flat bottom.
“So where’s the rest of the cloth?” she asks. “Where’s the padding? Did someone take it out?”
I don’t have the answers to her questions. Neither does O’Malley.
“Let’s check the other rooms,” I say.
We turn to go, but on the way out Latu sees something else. She reaches into another coffin, picks something up, holds it near the torch for all three of us to examine.
A thin shard, a pale yellow splinter. It’s the wrong color to have been part of the coffin. I know I’ve seen this material before, though, and recently.
I take it from Latu, pinch it between thumb and forefinger. I look closer.
A coldness washes inside my chest as I realize what it is.
“Bone,” I say. “A little piece of bone.”
I look in the coffins again, as if I might have missed seeing bodies, but there is nothing in any of them.
O’Malley takes the splinter from me, stares at it.
“You’re right,” he says. “So where’s the rest of the skeleton this came from?”
One more thing we don’t know.
I take it back from him and toss it into a coffin.
“Next room,” I say. “Come on.”
EIGHTEEN
Bishop and El-Saffani found the same thing we did: two long rows of empty, beat-up coffins.
Latu’s flame flutters out. Bello wraps another strip of flag around the pole as Okereke watches, holding a torch of his own. He uses his to light ours as Bello starts wrapping Bishop’s flagpole with a new strip.
Latu, O’Malley and I enter the second room on the right.
This one isn’t any different. We find a few tiny scraps of fabric, a few broken bits of bone. We count the coffins this time: twenty-four on each side. If all six rooms are like this, that’s space for almost three hundred people.
So where are they? At the very least, where are their bodies?
I stand in the middle of the room, holding the spear, as O’Malley and Latu move down the aisle. He checks the coffins on the right, she the left. This room also once had a pedestal, but it’s been smashed into a hundred white pieces. Only the flat top remains intact. Mostly, anyway.
“Hey, Latu,” O’Malley says. “That bruise on your cheek, that come from Bishop?”
She nods, keeps looking in the coffins, one after another.
“Yes, but I hit him first.”
O’Malley stops checking. “What? How did that happen?”
“I woke up in a room with Johnson and Cabral,” she says. “The other cradles had dead little kids inside.”
Even in the torchlight, I can see the hard muscles in her arms.
“I bet you broke out of your cradle first,” I say, using her word for the coffins. “Then you broke out the other two. Am I right?”
Latu looks back at me.
“When I woke up, my cradle was already open,” she says. “Same for Johnson and Cabral. Our room door was open, too.”
Why did their coffins open and not ours? And how could their room door be open, when we had to use the scepter to get out?
“We wandered the hall for a little bit,” Latu continues. “Then Bishop found us.” Her eyes narrow at the memory. “He had the others with him. He rushed at us, like he did with you. Johnson and Cabral ran. I didn’t.”
I wonder if she stood her ground because she was so terrified she couldn’t move, like me, or because she is actually brave.
“He rushed you,” O’Malley says, amazed at the story. “That’s why you hit him? To keep him from tackling you?”
Latu shakes her head. “No, he stopped before he got to me, like he did with Em. He told me I had to join his tribe. I didn’t like the way he talked and I didn’t want to join his stupid tribe, so I punched him.”
She’s not brave, she’s out of her mind.
O’Malley starts to laugh. “That bruise on his jaw? That’s from you?”
Latu nods. “I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t think. I hit him, and he hit me back so hard I fell down. I…I don’t remember ever being hurt like that before. He asked if I was done fighting. I said yes, and he helped me up.”
O’Malley goes back to looking inside the coffins, sometimes reaching his hand in and swishing it around, feeling for whatever might be in there.
“Then what happened?” he asks.
Latu also returns to searching the coffins.
“Then nothing,” she says. “We got into a fight, I guess, and he won. So Johnson, Cabral and I joined his tribe and we wandered all over this stupid place for I don’t know how long.”
I see the torchlight play off her tongue as she licks her dry lips, which reminds me of how thirsty I am. It’s so humid in here my shirt clings to my body—there has to be water somewhere.
Bishop hit her, true, but she hit him first. He didn’t hit me. Or O’Malley. Does Bishop have more control over himself than Yong had? For that matter, Latu hit Bishop—does she have less control? I already feel connected to her, like we were close friends before the coffins and we just can’t remember it, but if she’s that unpredictable, is it smart to trust her?
O’Malley finishes with his side of the room and walks back to me. Latu does the same. O’Malley grins at her.
“Your bruise looks like it hurts,” he says. “But I bet it was worth it to punch that jerk.”
She smiles back at him. “Yeah, it was.”
We go back into the hall in time to see Bishop and El-Saffani enter the last room on the left. Latu’s torch is already fading a bit, but enough burning cloth remains to see what’s in the last room on the right before we have to tie on another greased strip.
I look back down the dark hall. Farrar still blocks t
he way, flickering torches lighting up the scared faces and white shirts behind him.
O’Malley, Latu and I enter the last room. It stinks in here like it stinks in the hall, and in the rooms we searched. Without a word, Latu moves to the left, O’Malley to the right, each checking the coffins on their sides. Maybe this is the room with water, or maybe there are more weapons to be found.
I hear something.
O’Malley and Latu hear it, too. They stop. Our ears seek out the sound…a scraping, a snorting…the rattle of a coffin wall as a body bumps against it.
It’s coming from the last coffin on the left.
Is it a kid like us? Or is it something else?
I don’t know what to do. I’m frozen once again. So is O’Malley, the torchlight sparkling against the whites of his wide eyes.
Latu slowly creeps forward, toward the sound.
We should go get Bishop, get more circle-stars. I should say something, but my mouth doesn’t want to work any more than my feet do.
She’s five coffins from the last one…then four…
O’Malley moves to stand next to me, the long knife held out in front of him.
Three coffins…then two…
A deep snort.
That sound—it’s not a kid like us. It’s not an adult. It’s not human.
Something moves, pops up out of the last coffin, something with shiny eyes, something covered in black, greasy hair that reflects the torchlight, and I know monsters are real—because that is a monster.
I take a step away. O’Malley takes two. Latu slowly backpedals, her torch angled toward this sudden threat.
We look at the monster. The monster looks at us.
An old memory flares to life, but not just from what I see—it’s also from what I smell. That awful odor that I couldn’t identify. It’s from when I was little, at school…no, not at school, on a field trip with people from the school, a field trip to a special place.
To…to a farm.
The awful smell is animal droppings.
The black-furred thing standing in the coffin, it’s not a monster at all.