by Jack Jewis
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Eric
When he woke the next morning, Eric saw that Martin Wrench’s bunk was empty. Cold mornings and vacant beds weren’t unusual in Camp Dam Marsh, but he knew what it meant. Guards had probably taken him away in the night, putting a hand over his mouth to avoid alerting the other DCs. Eric had learned to accept things like that and ignore them, because getting upset over each disappearance would weigh him down. Martin’s absence was different. He couldn’t ignore this one.
He got out of bed and walked over to Kim. The cabin floor was so cold that it stung his bare feet. The smell of cooking drifted through the window, carried across camp by a chilly wind. Food was the last thing he wanted.
He shook Kim awake. She rubbed her eyes, making the skin around them red.
“Martin’s bed is empty,” said Eric.
“Maybe he’s in the yard.”
“The guards aren’t even up yet, Kim. They don’t take us out for another hour at least. Something’s going on.”
Kim sat up. She glanced across the cabin and saw Martin’s bunk. His covers were dishevelled, as if he had been dragged from them.
“What happened?” she said.
Eric sighed.
“I can’t believe it. Today of all days. We need him.”
“We can’t think about that now.”
Eric’s heart skipped every other beat. He tried to keep his mind focussed, but it wandered out of the cabin and across camp. He imagined the fences with the infected patrolling in-between, and the kennels where hungry dogs sat tense in their cells. Today was a day where he needed certainty. He needed the guards to keep their schedule and for everything in Camp to go the way it usually did.
“Say it to me,” he said.
“What?”
“The plan. Tell it to me again.”
Kim looked around her, as if one of the other DCs was listening to them.
“Eric…”
He cut her off. “I need you to go over the plan, step by step.”
It seemed as if their plan was built on a foundation of wet tissue paper, and any second it was going to fall apart into a mushy mess. There were so many things that depended on chance, and the idea of it going wrong made him short of breath.
“Okay,” said Kim. “First we rile up the dogs. Get them so excited that the guards in the yard are distracted.”
“And where are you when this happens?”
“I’ll go and get Marta.”
“Good. She told me she wouldn’t drive the train, but when she sees you, she might change her mind. She’s a kind lady, but I think she’s scared. Seeing how bad you look might be enough to change her mind.”
“Thanks a lot,” she said.
“Come on. You know I don’t mean it like that. But you don’t look good. So you go to Marta’s cabin. And then what?”
“We need someone to sneak across camp to the canteen and start a fire.”
Eric sat on Kim’s bed. When the hard mattress took his weight, tiredness washed over him.
“Yeah. And that was Martin’s job.”
“Can we ask someone else?”
Eric looked around him. The other DCs snored into their pillows. The guards made some of them work harder than others, and these inmates needed their rest. Tiredness wasn’t the only reason they didn’t stir. For most people in camp, sleep was the only escape they got.
He’d thought about involving others. He’d even gone as far as talking to some of them about the idea of escape, but saying it in a way that could never get him into trouble if they told the guards. Some seemed interested, but he saw the fear behind their eyes, and he had learned that being scared made you do stupid things. In the end, he knew he couldn’t bring anyone else into the plan.
“No,” he said. “I don’t trust anyone else.”
“We’ll just have to figure something out.”
He shook his head. “Okay, tell me what happens next.”
“That’s down to you, isn’t it? You said you’d do something about the guards near the train.”
“Yeah, I will. And then we get as many people to the train as we can before the guards realise, and Marta can drive us away.”
“This all seems…”
“Like it’s not going to work?” answered Eric.
Kim looked down at her chest. Her collar bones stuck out against her shirt. If her mum saw her like this, she’d cry. Eric wondered if she blamed him for everything that had happened. If Heather had never taken him in, then the Capita wouldn’t have come looking, and she and Kim would be safe.
This is why it was so important to escape. He needed to get Kim back to her mum. Somewhere out there, too, he just knew that his own mum and sister were still alive. He couldn’t explain how, but he just knew it. He imagined that if they’d died already, he would feel something. A darkness weighing him down.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s run through it again.”
Kim glared at him.
“I’m not a baby, Eric. I’m older than you. And I’m not weak. Sure, the food makes me sick, but I don’t need you to hold my hand all the time.”
Eric bristled at her tone.
“Okay. Give me my rations back if you’re so tough.”
Kim sighed. “I only let you look after me because it seemed like you needed it. Same as I did with mum. She thought she was keeping me safe, but I know how to take care of myself. I’m not weak.”
Anyone who could survive in Camp Dam Marsh had strength in them. You spent your day working under the cruel eyes of the guards, and at night you laid in darkness, listening to the barking of dogs and moaning of the infected. It was hard enough to survive as it was, let alone with a stomach condition. He realised that he’d been treating her like a baby.
“I know. I know you’re not weak. I’m sorry.”
Kim sat up further. She pulled her cover over her chest. Whether it was to block the chill or to hide the way her bones protruded against her skin, Eric didn’t know.
“You need to admit that you’re the one who’s scared,” she said. “Not me. You’re terrified of being caught and what will happen to us if we are. But you need to realise that what they do when they catch us isn’t going to be worse than if we stay.”
He didn’t know what to say. She was right; that was the truth. He was a scared little boy, and he just knew deep down that the plan was going to fail and the guards would do things to them, and it would all be his fault. What else could he do, though? Just give up like the rest of them?
“Mum and me were going to escape, you know,” said Kim.
Eric nodded. “She told me about your plan.”
“We were going to leave the Capita and the Dome and find somewhere safe. And it’s still going to happen. But first we need to get out of here, and I don’t mean you getting me out. I mean both of us escaping together.”
“Okay.”
“So you’ll stop treating me like a baby?”
“Yeah.”
Kim got out of bed. She stretched her arms behind her head and yawned. Suddenly, she seemed taller than Eric remembered. It was as if she’d grown a few inches overnight, and she actually looked older than him for once.
Eric stood up.
“I’ve been saving my food for the escape. Let’s see how much we’ve got.”
The cabin door burst open. Eric turned round to see two guards marching across the floor. Martin Wrench trailed behind them, looking at the ground and then the walls; in any direction but Eric’s. At first he thought that the guards were just bringing Martin back, but when he looked at the harsh expressions on their faces, he knew that this was something else.
“Which one was it?” one of the guards asked Martin.
Martin raised his arm. He gulped, and then pointed at Eric. One guard nodded at the other.
“Take him to Scarsgill,” he said.
Eric didn’t even have time to move before the guard gripped him by the shoulders and dragged him toward the door.
He flailed in the guard’s grasp, but when strong fingers dug into his shoulders, he knew that it was useless.
Martin looked at one of the men.
“Can I go home tonight?” he said, eyes wide. “Like you promised?”
Eric knew what had happened. He realised that he had trusted in the wrong person, and in doing so he had ruined any chance of escape. As the guard dragged him out of the cabin he looked up and met Kim’s stare. Although he didn’t say it, he hoped that she understood that the look in his eyes meant that he was sorry.
~
The walls were so spotless that it was as if the grime of Camp Dam Marsh couldn’t touch them. The air smelled like the stuff that Mum had once cleaned Dale’s house with. Such a sterile room couldn’t have been more different to the stains and filth of the DCs cabins. It almost seemed wrong that a room should be so clean, and it made him feel cold.
The guards had dragged him across camp, past the kennels and into Scarsgill’s lab. They took him into the room with walls so white that the light bounced off them. One of the guards pushed him down onto a big chair and held him, while the other tied ropes around his feet and wrists.
He strained against the ropes, but all he got was scratched skin. The chair was so big that even stretched out, his feet didn’t touch the end. The guard pumped something with his foot and the chair rose up off the ground. He walked to the back and pulled a lever, and the chair dipped behind him and forced Eric to put his head back. The only thing he could see now was the tiled ceiling, which was nowhere near as shiny as the walls.
He knew that he had ruined everything. The escape was supposed to happen today, and Eric had made a mistake that seemed so obvious now. He was so desperate to escape from the camp that he’d trusted in the wrong person. If it were up to Kim, she wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. He wondered why she ever listened to him. After all, what good had he done?
He tried to calm himself. He thought of Mum’s advice. There wasn’t a wasp or a search light in the room, but maybe if he was calm and stayed still, something would come to him. He took in his surroundings.
Aside from walls so white that they glowed, there was little else in the room. To his right there was a metal stand with a plastic tray on top of it. The plastic was covered by green cloth, and things were placed on it in a line. He saw a scalpel, scissors and a saw with edges that looked like teeth.
The ropes burned his skin as he squirmed. He remembered to calm down. Pretend there’s a wasp. If only mum was here now. Or even Luna. He remembered how much she used to annoy him. Always wanting attention, forever tugging on his hand and asking him to play, when all he wanted was to read the books that Mum had given him. He’d give anything to see her annoying face.
The door opened and Dr. Scarsgill entered the room. Eric expected guards to follow, but instead the doctor shut the door behind him. His boots tapped against the porcelain floor as he walked over to Eric.
As the doctor crossed the room, Eric felt how cold the chair was against his neck. He was engulfed by its size. He couldn’t understand why someone had made a chair so large that he could lay on it fully stretched out, nor why they’d put levers on it so that it lifted off the ground.
Scarsgill walked over to the metal tray. He ran his fingers over the scalpel and scissors. He picked up the saw and traced his thumb along the jagged blades, and then he put the tool down and faced Eric.
“I remember you,” he said.
His voice was as cold as the porcelain floor. His waterproof coat looked more stained than usual, and Eric saw trails of red running up one of the plastic sleeves. Despite the appearance of his coat, the doctor’s hands were clean, and his fingernails had been snipped to a uniform size, accurate to within a millimetre.
“You’re the boy from the train, aren’t you? Did you find your mother or sister?”
Eric lifted his right hand, but the rope only allowed him a foot of movement. He stared at the doctor and then spoke. He knew it was useless to lie.
“No. I looked in all the cabins, but nobody had seen them.”
“And how did you manage that?”
“I sneaked past the guard outside my shed and made sure nobody saw me.”
Scarsgill perched down on the end of the chair, centimetres away from Eric’s foot. The plastic cover crunched as he sat.
“When I was your age, I used to sneak around,” said Scarsgill. “My father wanted me to study, even when I was barely old enough to lift the books he told me to read. He used to drink in the afternoon though, and when he fell asleep, I would creep out.”
The doctor looked at the ceiling, a wistful smile on his lips as though he saw the images playing out on the tiles above him.
“I used to collect moths. I’d catch them with a net, and at first I tried to get them out of the net and hold them in my hands, cupping them like this.”
He held his hands out so that one palm closed into the other, leaving a tiny gap in between.
“But I didn’t like the way it felt when they fluttered against my skin. You get used to it after a while, like you do with everything. I mean, I don’t always find my work here easy, either, but there you go. Eventually, I became so comfortable that I could pinch the moth’s thorax until it relaxed. That’s what we used to call it: ‘relaxing the specimen.’”
He leaned over and took hold of the ropes tied to Eric’s feet.
“Similar to what we’re doing to you, I suppose. Listen, I don’t want to hurt you, Eric.”
Eric remembered how nice Goral had seemed at first, but he would never forget what he had seen him do. He knew enough to be certain that few adults in the world could be trusted. If his hands weren’t tied, he could stretch his hand out in front of him and count on it how many he would place trust in. Mum, Dale, Heather…and maybe Marta. His thumb would just have to miss out on the counting until he met other adults who didn’t wear a Capita uniform.
“I wanted my children to take up the hobby too,” said Scarsgill. “But I was going to start them on butterflies. They’re much nicer, and they flutter less. Or at least, it looks better when they flutter. A moth is an ugly thing to most people.”
He stood up off the chair. His legs were long and skinny and his head almost reached the light bulb dangling from a fixture on the ceiling.
“I never got the chance, though. I won’t let what happened to my children happen to anyone else. You can be sure of that, Eric. And as it turns out, you are very important in that regard.”
Before Eric could even think about what that meant, the door opened. He expected a guard to walk through, but instead of the heavy boots of a man in a Capita uniform, he saw a walking stick prod against the floor.
Goral Vitch followed it, taking hobbling steps as if he’d fall without the stick to support him. Eric had seen that the old man didn’t need the prop. He knew what he was really like. And now, tied to the chair in the white room, he suddenly realised how Allie had felt. Although he was still wearing his clothes, lying there restrained under Goral’s gaze made him feel naked.
“Goral,” said the doctor. In public the guards all addressed the old man as Mr. Vitch, so it was strange to see another adult use his first name.
“I need a word in your ear,” said Goral.
Scarsgill crossed his arms. His plastic coat was starting to fray at the elbows.
“Go on,” he said.
When Goral cast his glance at Eric, he was sure that there was a sneer on the old man’s face. The thought had barely registered before Goral turned his stare back onto the doctor. Scarsgill was a foot and a half taller than Goral, but he didn’t fill Eric’s chest with dread in the same way as Mr. Vitch did.
“The girl,” said Goral. “Kim. She’s not well. We’re having her taken to the infirmary.”
Without thinking, Eric tried to sit up. The ropes tugged sharply on his wrists, and pain shot up his arms. Scarsgill turned to him.
“Settle down,” he said. Then, looking back at Goral, “Do what
ever you have to. Just make sure she’s fit for tomorrow. We need her.”
Goral gave him a knowing look. “Oh, I will, doctor,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know I was moving her, so that you wouldn’t fret.”
He hobbled back across the room, tapping his walking stick on the porcelain. When he reached the doorway he turned around, and he looked beyond Scarsgill and locked eyes with Eric. For a second, Eric saw a smile curl on the old man’s lips, and then he was gone.
Scarsgill shut the door and walked back over to him. He started to speak, but the words were lost as Eric worried about Kim. What was wrong with her? Deep down, he knew that Goral was lying, and that it was an excuse to have her removed from the cabin. Eric wished that he was stronger so that he could just move his arms and snap the ropes.