by Jack Heath
‘Samson hated his parents,’ Zara is saying. ‘We don’t owe them shit.’
‘Well, we can’t just put him into the grinder like the others.’
‘I know. I just can’t believe it.’
‘Me neither. He seemed so …’ Fred trails off. Maybe he’s just remembered describing Samson as ‘gloomy’ a few hours ago.
I could tell them not to feel guilty. I’m pretty sure Samson didn’t commit suicide. Someone came in here, shot him, and then put the gun in his hand.
But who?
When Donnie sees Samson’s body, he screams out, ‘No!’ and punches the open door so hard that we later discover it won’t close. His fist leaves a perfect imprint in what looks like plywood—apparently Fred’s commitment to bamboo only extends to the unpainted surfaces.
‘I’m sorry, pal.’ Fred puts a hand on Donnie’s shoulder.
Donnie shrugs it off. ‘Why the fuck would he do this?’
‘I don’t know.’
Donnie stares at the bed. His eyes are pink with rage or grief, I’m not sure which. He doesn’t bother to pick the splinters out of his knuckles. I watch his blood fall to the carpet. Drip, drip, drip. It’s mixing with the fallen stir-fry. Would the others think it strange if I started eating off the floor?
Kyle is next to arrive. He says nothing, looking at the dead body for only a moment before turning to the rest of us. Like he doesn’t want to react until he can see how everyone else is responding. It’s not until he sees Donnie crying that his own eyes tear up.
‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘Something terrible.’ Zara hugs him. If Fred is Kyle’s surrogate father, Zara is his mother. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
Kyle hugs her back. His hands are stiff against her spine. They don’t slide down to her butt, but I can see them considering it. Zara might see herself as Kyle’s mom, but he doesn’t think of her that way.
‘We should get the body out of here,’ I say.
‘Are you sure we should move him?’ Fred asks.
‘Why not?’
Fred looks uncertain. ‘I don’t know. We just need a plan.’
Cedric appears in the doorway. Looks at Samson. ‘Sleeping on the job, huh? Sounds about right.’
Donnie storms out, shoving Cedric out of the way.
‘Hey!’ Cedric complains.
Donnie doesn’t slow down.
Cedric laughs awkwardly. ‘What’s his problem?’
No one says anything.
Cedric sits next to Samson. ‘Hey, wake up, asshole. We’ve been searching all day.’ He slaps Samson’s face lightly.
Sees the bullet hole.
‘Oh,’ he says.
None of the other Guards comforts him in the silence that follows. I scan their sombre faces. None of them looks like they killed Samson.
So was it the hiker? Or is one of them a very good liar?
Fred has noticed the way I’m looking at the others. His eyes narrow.
I turn away. ‘I’ll take care of the body.’
‘You don’t have to do that, Lux,’ Zara says.
A plan spills out of my mouth while a very different one forms in my head. ‘I didn’t know Samson as well as the rest of you. I can bury him tomorrow, and everyone can say a few words. A proper goodbye. But we can’t leave him in the house. Do you know what happens to a body in the first twenty-four hours after death?’
‘We do,’ Zara says.
‘Right.’ I force a smile. ‘Forgot who I was talking to. Anyway, you don’t want to remember your friend like that. I just need someone to help me carry him to the slaughterhouse.’
‘I don’t want him out there.’ Cedric’s voice is soft and measured. ‘Not with those animals.’
‘If we take him anywhere else, he’ll be eaten by literal animals,’ I say. ‘And the slaughterhouse is cold enough to slow down decomposition. I’ll wrap him in a sheet so the prisoners don’t see him, okay? It’s just for one night, so I have time to dig the grave.’ And to figure out how I can butcher him in secret.
Focus. You should be trying to work out who killed him, and why. You don’t have time to eat anybody.
Shut up, I tell the annoying voice in my head.
‘What did you say?’ Fred asks.
I blink. ‘What?’
‘Did you just say, “Shut up”?’
I sometimes think out loud when I’m hungry. ‘No. I said I need help carrying the body.’
When the police came to the motel I worked at, they found the suicide note and matched the handwriting to Holden, the occupant of the room. The devastated widow, Melanie, confirmed that he had attempted suicide once before. But she said she had thought he was doing better.
The police guessed Holden had leaped from the Fred Hartman Bridge, which wasn’t far away and was ‘popular with jumpers’. They told Melanie that it was likely the body would never be found.
The bathtub was immaculate.
CHAPTER 16
What happened to the cannibal who arrived late to the party?
Donnie is the strongest, but he doesn’t volunteer. In the end, it’s me and Kyle hauling the body out towards the slaughterhouse. I’m holding the legs, Kyle has the shoulders.
Carrying a body is harder than most people think. It’s not just the weight—about two hundred pounds in Samson’s case; it’s all the joints. Limbs have a way of flopping around, like the corpse is trying to stop you from dragging it away. First-timers often stop to double-check that the person is actually dead.
Kyle doesn’t check.
‘Has this happened before?’ I ask.
‘Here? No.’
‘Somewhere else?’
‘Some asshole brought a gun to my school.’ Kyle is panting as we carry the body towards the slaughterhouse. ‘He shot six people, but only one died, so it barely made the news.’
‘And you ended up carrying a body?’
‘The shooter’s. He wasted himself with his last bullet. We weren’t a hundred per cent sure he was dead, so we carried his body to the closet and barricaded him in. Didn’t matter. He was totally dead.’
‘That must have been traumatic.’
‘Nah.’ Kyle puffs up his chest. ‘I didn’t even know any of the people who got shot.’
One of Samson’s legs jerks unexpectedly. The folded bedsheet over my shoulder slips down. I pause to readjust.
‘Offing yourself rather than going to prison, that I get. But this?’ Kyle looks down at Samson’s cryptic expression.
‘He and I were messaging each other a few weeks ago,’ I say. ‘He sounded a bit beat up about his parents and how they still wanted him to pursue medicine. But he didn’t sound, you know, suicidal. Just pissed.’
I don’t know if Lux actually exchanged any messages with Samson. But now that both are dead, I can pretend the friendship was strong and use that to infiltrate the group more effectively.
‘I guess he was lying to all of us,’ Kyle says. ‘Figures.’
‘Figures?’
Kyle dumps his end of the body next to the slaughterhouse door. Samson’s skull cracks against the concrete foundations.
‘Well, everybody lies, right?’ he says, and looks me up and down. I don’t think I’m imagining the suspicion in his voice.
‘Fred tell you that?’
‘Just life experience,’ says the seventeen-year-old. ‘You reach a certain age and you realise that everything your parents and teachers and the government told you was bullshit.’
I unfold the bedsheet and we roll Samson onto it. There wasn’t room to do this on Samson’s bedroom floor. The snow and dirt speckles the sheet, like a salt and pepper rub on a chicken breast.
Kyle fishes two masks out of his pocket. A mummy, the bandages made of rubber, and a vampire. He tosses the mummy to me.
‘I want to talk to the prisoners,’ I say, as I put the mask on.
Kyle frowns. ‘Why?’
‘Someone might have heard the gunshot. They might know what time it happ
ened.’
‘Why does it matter what time it happened?’
‘I just want to know.’ It might help me figure out who killed Samson and why. I can’t eat all the Guards if one of them might be on my side.
‘Well, okay.’ This time Kyle lifts Samson’s feet, and I get his cold, stiff shoulders. ‘While you’re in there, pretend like you won a competition.’
‘What?’
‘Every month there’s a “lottery”.’ He does air quotes. ‘We pretend to select one of the subscribers to come to a secret location and—’
‘I know. But why would a subscriber want to know what time the prisoners heard a gunshot?’
‘We can edit out the actual question.’ I can only see Kyle’s eyes through the vampire mask. ‘We do a lot of editing. Just pretend with your body language, you know?’ He mimes looking around with awe, like he’s at the Louvre, then he gets out the keys. I didn’t see Fred give them to him.
‘I thought you never knew your father,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘You said your parents told you bullshit. But—’
‘My mother told me a lot of bullshit. Like, for example, that my father was a lawyer.’ Kyle unlocks the door. ‘On my sixteenth birthday I requested his name. Tracked him down through the donor service.’
‘I thought you had to be eighteen.’
Kyle ignores this. ‘When I met the guy, he did have a law degree, but he said he wasn’t my father. Told me he’d never donated sperm. So either he was lying, or my mother was, or both.’
Kyle drags open the slaughterhouse door. The metal shrieks across the concrete.
I stare at Kyle. ‘Your father was a sperm donor?’
He raises a finger to his lips. The prisoners can hear us now.
I follow him inside. Nobody is screaming or crying this time, but everyone seems to be on edge. Last night one of their number died. This morning, a new Guard fed them. In between, they saw someone sneak in here and sabotage the cameras. They don’t know it was me, but it was something different, something outside the pattern they’ve been trapped in for however long, so they’re acting different.
Kyle looks around. ‘Quiet in here today.’
The silence stretches, like drool beneath a dog’s chin. Kyle shrugs. ‘Works for me.’
We carry Samson into the corner. The indifferent way Kyle handles the corpse reminds me of myself. It’s not a flattering reflection. He might not see it as food, but he sure doesn’t see it as a person. Kyle resembles me in other ways, too. His bowed head, his shuffling gait, his life-is-crap attitude.
I tell myself it’s impossible. He’s the right age, but so are millions of other people. He looks like me, but that’s not rare either. And the odds against me meeting my son like this have to be astronomical.
And yet …
Kyle glances up at the ceiling through sunken eyes that look eerily like my own.
He stares. ‘What the fuck happened to the cameras?’
CHAPTER 17
I have eyes, and a mouth, and a nose, but I’m not a face. What am I?
‘How do you know they were sabotaged?’ Fred keeps his voice low. ‘They could just not be working.’
Kyle blushes. ‘I’m not an idiot. All the cables are cut. Like, chopped in half.’
Me, Zara, Fred and Kyle are huddled around outside the back door of the house, like smokers sheltering a cigarette from the wind.
‘How about the feed on the Pedo?’ Fred asks.
‘I checked. Still working fine.’
I didn’t see the Pedo among the other prisoners, but it sounds like he’s not dead. Maybe there’s a second prison somewhere else—but who is operating it?
‘It has to be the hiker,’ I say.
‘What about Samson?’ Kyle suggests. ‘He could have damaged the cameras before he offed himself.’
Fred dismisses the idea. ‘Samson wouldn’t have done that. He was proud of what we’re accomplishing here.’
‘Did you check the chains?’ Zara asks.
Kyle opens his mouth, then closes it again.
‘You’re thinking one of the prisoners got loose and sabotaged the cameras?’ Fred chews his lip. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘No point hurting them if we can’t stream it.’ Zara’s dark, watchful eyes turn to me. ‘And they know that.’
She’s wrong about the perpetrator but right about the reason, and that makes me nervous.
‘They all looked secure to me,’ I say.
Kyle looks baffled. ‘Why wouldn’t they just escape?’
‘If only one of them got loose, they might not have been able to free the others right away,’ Zara says. ‘We’re miles from anywhere, so they couldn’t have gone to get help.’
‘Well, there’s one way to find out.’
Donnie comes back from the armoury. He’s carrying a pistol that I didn’t realise was in the house—a Taurus PT132. Maybe he didn’t want to touch the gun that killed Samson.
‘Where’s Cedric?’ Fred asks.
‘Who gives a fuck?’ Donnie is already walking towards the slaughterhouse. Fred falls into step behind him.
Kyle follows like a puppy. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Getting some answers.’
Zara and I hurry after them. ‘Freddie,’ she says, ‘this is a bad idea.’
‘Yeah, well, we’ll see.’ Fred hands out some masks. I get the vampire again. Kyle is the witch, Zara is the mummy, Donnie is a clown.
My heart is racing. I sabotaged the cameras to stop the Guards from hurting the prisoners. It looks like my plan is about to backfire.
Fred pulls on the Frankenstein mask and hauls open the slaughterhouse door. Donnie walks in first, brandishing the pistol.
‘Hello, piglets,’ he says. ‘Who feels like squealing?’
The prisoners stare at him in silent terror.
Fred examines the shredded cables overhead, then looks around at the prisoners. He doesn’t speak, just nods to Donnie.
‘I want to know what happened to my cameras,’ Donnie says.
He didn’t say our cameras. Maybe he gets possessive when he’s angry.
Hailey, the KKK Queen, speaks up. ‘We didn’t see anything.’
‘Wrong answer!’ Donnie takes aim with the pistol, then thinks better of it. He picks up a brick instead and hurls it at her.
Hailey ducks, and the brick crashes through the fake wall behind her. She tries to scramble behind the bed, but her chain goes taut.
Zara and Kyle exchange worried glances. Donnie could easily have killed her.
‘The votes aren’t in yet,’ Zara says.
Ignoring her, Donnie picks up another brick. ‘Somebody knows something. How many bones do I have to break to find out what it is?’
I grab Donnie’s arm. ‘Hey! It’s dark enough in here during the day. Even darker at night. She’s probably not lying.’
Donnie glares at me for a second, his eyes burning behind the clown mask. ‘Okay.’ He tosses the brick from one hand to the other. ‘I can be nice. How about this? The first person to tell me what happened gets a vacation. One week. No shows.’
Silence.
‘No cutting, no beating. Real food,’ Donnie continues. ‘Aspirin. Toilet paper. Sounds pretty good, right? All you have to do is tell the truth.’
Silence.
‘A vacation for one person only. And if you’re thinking that I won’t hurt the rest of you because the cameras are off, then you’ve underestimated how much I enjoy it.’ He glances at his watch. ‘This offer expires in thirty seconds.’
There’s a pause. And then:
‘We’ll tell you.’ The voice comes from the middle-aged man—Gerald. The Rapist. He’s chained to a water pipe in a fake pharmacy. ‘If we all get a vacation.’
‘Oh, really?’ Donnie says.
Gerald’s voice wavers. ‘Two weeks. All of us. No beatings.’
Donnie hurls the brick at him.
‘No!’ I shout.
Gerald doesn’t duck in time. The brick caves in half his skull and splits the pipe behind him, showering the set with water. The man slackens immediately, ending up as flat on the floor as a chalk outline. His blood turns the water pink.
There were six prisoners when I first arrived. Now only four are left.
I step between Donnie and the others. I keep my voice low. ‘You’re hurting, I get it. But these people are our livelihood. You have to stop this.’
Three sentences. One appealing to his emotional side, one to his greed and one to his instinct to follow orders.
None of it works. He pushes me aside.
‘There will be no negotiation!’ he bellows at the prisoners. ‘I will kill every single one of you if that’s what it takes. There are plenty more rapists and murderers where you assholes came from.’
He picks up another brick. I get ready. He’ll pull back his arm to throw it, just like before. When it’s all the way back, I can knock the brick out of his hand.
I just don’t know what he’ll do after that. He still has a gun in his other hand.
Donnie pulls back. I reach out—
‘A guy came in last night,’ a woman says quickly. The one with the dark hair and the swastika armband.
I drop my hand quickly. Donnie keeps hold of the brick. ‘Tell me more.’
‘He didn’t say anything. He had a flashlight—’
The moustachioed young guy in the rags—the Terrorist—interrupts. ‘He was normal height, normal weight. Looked like he was favouring one arm. He was in here for about thirty seconds.’ The Terrorist sounds desperate to share in the vacation, or to avoid the punishment everybody else will get.
In the corner, the Abuser starts crying. I watch the blood spread out from Gerald’s shattered skull. His brains look like raw pork.
‘How’d he get in?’ Donnie keeps the brick raised.
‘He cut through the wall.’ The Terrorist points.
Fred goes over to investigate the hole. I stand still, sweating into my mask, hoping none of the prisoners counted the saboteur’s fingers.
‘What time was he here?’ Donnie asks.
‘Eight o’clock,’ the Nazi says.