by Jack Heath
Sweat glitters on her forehead. It would be nice to imagine that she’s scared on my behalf, but really, she knows that if I die, she and the others have no hope of escape.
‘Wait,’ she says.
The Guards ignore her.
Donnie takes his hand off my throat so he and Fred can load me into the chute. I try to struggle free, but they’re too strong.
‘If I was a cop, I would have arrested you all by now,’ I rasp. Talking is my only option. ‘You’ve done plenty of illegal things. I helped with some of them. I’m just like you.’
‘Don’t listen to him,’ Fred says. ‘He’s done nothing but lie since he got here.’ He and Donnie lift me up, feeding me headfirst into the chute.
It’s barely wider than my shoulders and made of slippery steel with a cheap shimmer. Just enough light to see what lies ahead.
I cut my own hair, so I’ve seen electric clippers up close: two serrated blades, one lying flat on top of the other. The bottom one slides back and forth while the top one doesn’t, opening dozens of little gaps and then shutting them over and over, slicing the hairs in two. The inside of the grinder is like that writ large. Enormous jagged blades whirl in the shadows, row after row of them. Like huge teeth, designed to shred me for easy digestion by the finer gears below. The square chute amplifies the racket, funnelling it into my brain.
I brace my arms against the walls, trying to stay clear of the sharp edges further down. Fred and Donnie push me in. It must be hard work. This disposal method is designed for the dead, who don’t struggle.
‘Druznetski is lying!’ I shout. ‘Think about it! How would he even know what I look like?’
Four strong hands are holding my torso and legs. I don’t know whose is whose, but I feel two of them hesitate.
‘I sent him a photo,’ Fred says to someone. ‘Snapped it while Lux—Blake—was asleep. I felt bad at the time for invading his privacy. Now I’m glad I did.’
I’ve been sleeping so little and so lightly that I’m amazed Fred pulled this off.
The hesitant hands—they must have been Donnie’s—become firm once more, pushing me deeper into the grinder. The swirling blades get closer. The noise is stabbing me in the eardrums. The wind blasts my hair. My hands are slippery against the walls. I can’t hold on.
At least my head will go in first. There will only be a moment of pain before I’m pulped.
‘He will have called for backup,’ Donnie says.
‘Yeah.’ Fred sounds disappointed. ‘We have to shut this place down and move on.’
Shut this place down. He’s talking about killing the prisoners. Thistle will go through the grinder, right after me. I can’t let that happen. But I don’t know how to stop it.
Hands crush my calf muscles, thrusting me deeper into the chute. The blades are deafening, only inches away now.
‘I know who killed Samson!’ I scream.
I don’t. I’m not sure where the words come from. But in my desperation to save Thistle, it’s like I’m slamming against the walls of my own brain, and a half-formed idea is shaken loose.
One of the Guards killed Samson. And the other four will want to know who.
I keep yelling the same sentence over and over. ‘I know who killed Samson! I know who killed Samson!’
Someone loosens their grip on my leg again. But this makes one of my hands slip off the wall. My arm disappears into the spinning blades. Hot blood splashes my eyes. There’s a split second of agony—
And I snatch my arm back out again, just in time. I can’t see it, but I can still move all my fingers.
I’m getting dizzy. My blood pressure is dropping.
An argument is happening outside the grinder. I can only hear bits and pieces of it, echoing down the chute.
‘… thought Samson committed suicide?’
‘How would he know?’
‘Maybe he did it.’
‘… doesn’t make sense …’
Then Zara says the words that save my life: ‘You know, I saw him eating a human foot the other day.’
‘Eating?’ someone else says incredulously.
‘Yeah.’ I can practically hear Zara shrugging. ‘It just doesn’t seem like something an FBI agent would do.’
Finally convinced, Donnie drags me back out of the grinder. Maybe he was just sick of holding onto my legs. I fall to the concrete floor with a wet splat. I try to protect my head with my arm, but I miss somehow and my skull hits the floor. The world starts to spin and fade.
Donnie looms over me, boots ready to kick. ‘Who killed Samson?’ he snaps.
I’m too nauseated to respond. His gaze shifts to my arm, and his expression changes.
I look down. I can still feel my fingers—but they’re not there. There’s just a bloody stump where my elbow used to be.
‘Oh,’ someone says.
Then I’m gone.
I’m on a bed/the ground/a table. The sun/moon/kitchen lights burn my eyes. Chills ripple across my flesh. I’m cold/ hot. My arm is here/gone.
Pressure. A tightening/loosening around my bicep. Someone/something is squeezing it like a frosting tube.
A demon/angel looms over me.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ he/she whispers/ shouts.
My lips move/are frozen. Doesn’t matter. The creature isn’t talking to me.
‘Remember when Donnie cut that guy’s foot off?’ another voice says. ‘I helped Samson keep him alive.’
‘For about two weeks, sure. Then he died of infection.’
‘Two weeks is plenty. It won’t take long to find out what Lux knows.’
‘He’s not Lux.’
‘You sure about that?’
I try to look at my arm, but my head doesn’t turn. The world spins instead. Nausea floods up my throat like wasps.
‘What if he’s not a cop?’
‘He is.’
‘But what if he’s not? We can’t just let him die. Not if he hasn’t done anything wrong.’
‘Everyone’s done something wrong. No one’s innocent.’
My head finally turns. I’m on the kitchen bench. The room is full of people. Samson is here, watching me, his mouth a straight line. The real Lux is right behind him. The Scammer is here, too, and Gerald, and Charlie Warner, and the old FBI director. They’re all waiting for me.
The voices are starting to fade. The lights in my eyes don’t seem so bright now. I can’t feel my arm anymore. Can’t feel anything else, either.
‘Oh, shit,’ one of the monsters says. ‘You’re losing him.’
‘I know! Shut up. Grab that, will you?’
Something plastic/iron covers my mouth. Air/poison is forced into my lungs.
‘Just breathe, you fucker,’ someone says.
The world goes dark and quiet once again.
‘Blake. Blake. Blake.’
The voice is like a recorded distress call: once urgent but now automatic, and probably irrelevant. No sense coming late to an urgent problem. They solve themselves, depending on your outlook. Yes, they do.
‘Blake. Blake.’
I try to stay asleep. Whatever they want, it can wait a few minutes. I need to get back to the nightmare I was having. Gotta finish it. If I don’t finish it, the nightmare will still be there when I wake up. It will escape into real life and exist forever.
‘Blake.’
It’s the determination that makes me finally recognise the voice. Anyone else would have given up fifty Blakes ago. Only Reese Thistle would keep going, trying to wake me up.
I blink and try to rub my eyes with a hand that isn’t there. My other hand is cuffed to something. So my eyes go unrubbed. I blink them instead. I’m in an industrial kitchen. No—I’m on a movie set rigged up to look like an industrial kitchen. My wrist is chained to the door of a fake oven. The door is welded shut and the inset window is just a sticker.
I lean sideways, peering between the ingredients on some metal shelves. Thistle is right where I left her, handcuff
ed to a table leg in a replica of a pharmacy.
‘Thank God,’ she says. ‘Are you okay?’
I swallow a tickle of laughter.
‘Sorry,’ she says, looking at my arm.
A bandage is wound tightly around the stump. Some asshole has drawn a smiley face on it with magic marker. No blood is visible, but I can smell it beneath. And there’s a hot throbbing, which probably isn’t good news. Without antibiotics, I’ll be dead in days.
Of course, depending on what the Guards decide, I could be dead in hours.
Two weeks is plenty. I recognise the voice now. Donnie. He was trying to save me, at least temporarily. Therefore, he’s not Samson’s killer. The killer would want me dead before I could expose them.
Zara tried to save me, too. And I know the killer isn’t Fred, because I was with him when Samson was shot. That only leaves Cedric and Penny.
And Kyle. I don’t want to believe it was him. But I have to accept that it’s possible.
When the Guards realise I don’t actually know who murdered Samson, they’ll put the rest of me through the grinder, followed by the other prisoners. Even if I somehow figure out who the killer is, they’ll still puree us after I tell them.
I touch the bandage gingerly. A flash of pain, and I can feel something pointy underneath. A curved shard of exposed bone. They haven’t filed it off, like a surgeon would, or stitched anything up. They’re not interested in helping it heal properly. Just doing the bare minimum to keep me alive.
How much did my arm weigh? I’ve never wondered before. Ten pounds, maybe? I don’t know why it matters, but I can’t stop thinking about it.
My voice comes out as a croak. ‘How long was I out?’
Thistle gestures at the dark slaughterhouse and the fake clock. ‘Impossible to know. A day, maybe? They fed us. The rest of us.’
I look at my hand, the one I still have. The cuff is too tight to slip off. Almost too tight for circulation. My fingers are swollen and going purple. A few days here and I could lose that hand as well.
It’s the one with the missing thumb. Those sons of bitches didn’t even leave me with my good hand. I’m down to only four digits.
‘Do you have a key?’ The hope in Thistle’s eyes breaks my heart.
‘No,’ I rasp. Samson’s key may still be in my pocket—I can’t reach down to check—but it was for the house, not the cuffs.
‘A hairpin? Anything?’
‘There’s nothing we can do. This is the end.’
‘I get that you’ve been through a traumatic experience,’ she says. ‘So have I, believe it or not. But we don’t have time for you to sit there feeling sorry for yourself.’
‘As opposed to what? I have nothing. I have less than nothing. My arm is gone, I’m probably dying of infection, unless those assholes inside decide to kill me early—’
‘You still have your brain,’ Thistle says. ‘Use it.’
I think, long and hard. Only one solution comes to me.
‘We can kill ourselves,’ I say.
Her eyes are hard. ‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I.’ I swallow the hard lump in my throat and keep talking. ‘It’s our only option. Find something sharp. Cut the radial artery. Bleed out. It’ll be better than going through the grinder alive.’
Thistle looks disgusted. ‘If I had something sharp I’d pick the lock in these fucking cuffs,’ she says. ‘And if that didn’t work, I’d keep it close and stab the next one of those motherfuckers who comes within reach. I’m not giving up.’
The utter helplessness makes me feel sick. My face gets hot, and I turn my face away from Thistle, not wanting her to see me cry. But the tears don’t come. Maybe I’m dehydrated after losing so much blood.
Or maybe it’s a sign that things could still get worse.
CHAPTER 37
The people of this nation shine. Who are we?
Hours pass. Maybe days. I find myself thinking of Abbey Chapman, the young woman I rescued from Lux’s homemade prison. She described to me the sense of hopelessness that came from being so totally at someone else’s mercy. I thought I understood, at the time. Now I realise that I understood nothing.
The cameras above us blink, blink, blink. They’re not transmitting anything—just recording our fear and pain for the later enjoyment of strangers. Knowing that doesn’t lessen the feeling of being watched.
Thistle has given up on talking to me. She’s interrogating the other prisoners instead about the movements of the Guards, the weapons they carry, the meal and shower schedules. She must have asked them about all this before, but she’s doing it again, hoping to stumble upon a secret solution that none of them has thought of in all the months they’ve been here. I’ve reached despair, but she’s stuck all the way back at denial.
‘Which ones don’t always do what the others tell them?’ Thistle is asking. ‘Any sign that one of them has a conscience? Or a rebellious streak?’
She’s not getting far. The prisoners are more interested in condemning me than helping themselves.
Hailey, who only days ago suggested she and I could run away together, is throwing granules of concrete in my direction. It wasn’t a problem at first, but her aim is getting better. The granules are blunt and nearly weightless. They don’t hurt, but the impacts are stopping me from sleeping.
‘Will you cut that out?’ I snap.
She leers, satisfied to finally get a reaction. ‘Nope.’ She tosses another stone at me. I raise my hand to block it, but the hand isn’t there anymore. The stone bounces off my hair.
‘Explain to me how this helps you.’
‘You kept me prisoner. You fed my friends into a meat grinder. You watched me shower. That’s how it helps.’
This time, the rock hits me in the eye. ‘Ow! Fuck.’
Hailey cackles.
I doubt it would help to tell her that it was the other Guards who put her friends through the grinder. I try a different tactic.
‘You know what it’s like inside?’ I ask.
‘In the house?’
‘No. The grinder.’
She throws another rock. I twist my head far enough to dodge it.
‘We’re all going in there eventually,’ I tell her. ‘Thought you might appreciate some advance warning. I can describe it. Vividly.’
‘Shut up,’ she says. Clenched jaw, eyes averted. Trying to block out anything else I might say.
You can’t ignore someone and throw stones at them at the same time. The rocks stop. I close my eyes.
Thistle hasn’t given up, though. ‘Hey, Amar.’
A grunt from elsewhere in the room. ‘What?’
Amar, the Terrorist, has a swollen eye and a mangled ear. The skin of his legs bears dozens of puncture wounds. If I had to guess, I’d say he’d been whipped with barbed wire. My fault, for rigging the election. No regrets. That could have been Thistle’s eye. Thistle’s ear. Thistle’s legs.
‘That nail sticking out of the wall behind you,’ Thistle is saying. ‘Can you get it out?’
A pause. I can hear groaning and puffing. ‘No.’
‘Keep trying.’
‘Trust me, it’s not going anywhere.’
‘Okay. Maybe it doesn’t have to. Hold up your hands. Can you get the nail into the lock in the cuffs?’
Some jingling. ‘Now what?’
‘Are they single-lock handcuffs or double?’
‘How should I know?’
‘They didn’t teach you that in Syria?’
‘I’ve never been to Syria.’
‘I thought you were—’
‘I didn’t run off to join Isis, okay? It’s all bullshit. The Guards made it up to get subscribers.’
My eyes pop open. I need to look at Amar as he says this.
Thistle doesn’t believe him. ‘I’m not here to judge you, okay?’
‘It’s all bullshit,’ Amar repeats. ‘I was born on Long Island. I moved to Texas when I was six. I’ve never been any place else. I’m not a
fucking terrorist.’
In the dim light, it’s hard to see his face clearly, but I can see his eyes, glowing with frustration and anger.
‘You confessed,’ I say.
‘Stay out of this, Blake,’ Thistle says.
Amar is looking at me now. ‘Yeah, no shit. Whatever the Guards say you did, you have to pretend to be sorry. The things they hurt you with are so much worse if you tell them you didn’t do it.’
‘You stood up for a terrorist online,’ Hailey points out.
‘I said he had a right to a trial,’ Amar says. It sounds like they’ve had this argument before. ‘Do you not get how that’s different?’
I look around at the other prisoners. ‘What about the rest of you?’
‘Oh, so now you care?’ Hailey snaps. ‘You get yourself chained up so you can’t help us and suddenly you care that we’re innocent?’ She throws another rock at me. ‘I was just a podcaster. It was a conservative show, sure, but I was never in the KKK.’
Her contrition seemed insincere before—perhaps this is why.
‘Did you really tell people to murder doctors on your show?’
‘Being pro-life is not the same as being pro-murder, asshole. The opposite, in fact.’
I let that one go. ‘How about Gerald?’
The Nazi, Emily, speaks up. ‘He told us he didn’t attack that woman. But really, how are we supposed to know? He sure seemed like a creep.’
‘Are you really a Nazi?’
‘No.’
‘Not exactly,’ Amar adds, eyebrows raised.
‘No,’ Emily repeats. ‘I shared a meme, okay? It was just a joke.’
‘What was the joke?’
Emily rolls her eyes. ‘Does it matter?’
Thistle is watching her closely. ‘It might.’
Emily sighs. ‘There was a woman removing her nail polish with chemicals. And then it said, “But when Hitler removed Polish with chemicals, people lost their minds.”’
Silence falls.
‘I didn’t make the meme,’ she says defensively. ‘I just shared it. Anyway, that’s what I thought they were talking about when they kidnapped me. I didn’t hear about the attack at the Jewish school until I’d been here for weeks.’