Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  I reached through the small opening in the cage, cuffs and key in hand. Eyepatch held his hand open beneath mine. I opened my fist and what he wanted dropped into his palm.

  “Doc will be by to see you all later,” Eyepatch said, seeming ready to turn away before pausing and grinning. “No point in trying to get out. You can’t. And if you could, we’d kill you.”

  He left us, the outer door closing behind, locks being set, clicks and bangs that signaled we were officially prisoners. Of who, we didn’t know.

  I went to Elaine and held her. Neil reached out and gripped my arm.

  “Did you find anything down there?”

  Despite the present situation, I smiled at my friend and nodded.

  “Seeds,” I said. “Lots of seeds. And some kind of notebook.”

  “His research,” Elaine said.

  She’d been the one to realize that the professor would have documented his work.

  “It looks like that,” I said.

  “Is it still there?” Neil asked, suddenly worried.

  “No,” I told him. “They got everything. It’s in my pack.”

  “Do they know what they have?” Elaine asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They didn’t notice anything when they searched it. But they were in a hurry. They were looking for food. Then they saw what was in the greenhouse and their attention shifted.”

  “But they have your pack,” Neil said.

  “Yeah,” I had to confirm.

  Neil stood and went to the door of the cage. He gripped it and pulled, shaking the barrier. It rattled, but didn’t budge, the welds robust, concrete anchors at the base certain to hold the walls in place.

  “Damn,” he swore quietly.

  He quieted, staring from our cage to the others. To the people within.

  “They talked about someone calling the shots,” I said. “Did you hear anything about that? About who this person is?”

  Elaine shook her head where it lay against my shoulder. A few feet away, Neil said nothing, his attention fixed on our fellow captives.

  “Neil...”

  He didn’t respond to my question, or to the prodding. Instead he drew back a hand and slammed it hard against the chain link, metal vibrating loudly.

  “Hey!” he screamed toward the other cages. “Hey!”

  A few forms shifted in the shadows across the way. But no replies came.

  “Are you all just giving up?!” Neil challenged them.

  “Neil...”

  He spun toward me now, spittle bubbling on his lips, an anger about him like I had rarely witnessed.

  “I am not ending up like that,” he said, stabbing a finger toward the other cages.

  “None of us are,” I told him.

  “I have to get back,” he said, gulping air now, like a landed fish. “I have...”

  He teetered forward. Both Elaine and I rushed from the bench and grabbed our friend before he fell. We lowered him to the floor so that his back was against the solid metal wall at the rear of the cage.

  “Take it easy,” Elaine said.

  His breathing slowed. He looked up to me, apology in his gaze.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about,” I said.

  “They took us by surprise,” Neil explained. “They got close before I even knew it.”

  “A pair of them rode up on electric motorcycles, of all things,” Elaine shared. “Left those behind the greenhouse and snuck up while we were looking down the shaft.”

  “The two that grabbed me had a couple bikes, too,” I said. “Some sort of hybrid things. They had friends on gas bikes, though. They talked to them on the radio.”

  From outside somewhere a pair of motorcycle engines revved to life and sped away.

  “How many are there?” I asked.

  “I’ve only seen the four that grabbed us,” Elaine answered. “Our two and your two.”

  “And a bunch more out there,” I added.

  Out there. ‘Hunting’, if what Eyepatch had said was to be believed. Looking from our relatively clean holding cell to the horrific cages across the way, I knew what their prey was.

  “I found someone else,” I said, explaining about Ben.

  “So he just took off?” Neil asked.

  “I think he’d been in here,” I said. “Doesn’t surprise me he ran.”

  Neil looked out to the other cages.

  “Me either,” he agreed.

  “What is this place?” Elaine asked.

  Neil gave her the answer she didn’t want to hear, but that seemed the closest to the terrible real we were witness to.

  “Hell.”

  At that moment, I saw no way to disagree with my friend.

  Twenty Nine

  I woke to the glare of a flashlight, beam slicing into our cage from the walkway outside.

  “Stand up,” a man said.

  I nudged Elaine and Neil. Both woke and squinted at the harsh light cast upon us.

  “Up,” the man repeated, his voice tired. “Or I’ll have them shock you.”

  A blue flash sizzled, sparks erupting from a point on the chain link barrier containing us. I rose, Neil and Elaine doing the same. The light that had blinded us lowered and I saw three men beyond the cage. Gruff and Headcase, the two who’d snatched my friends, stood next to another man, lean and tall, dirty white lab coat draping his frame. A cigarette smoldered in his lips. The glasses he wore, small and round, lay low on his nose, soulless blue eyes above them.

  “Do what the Doc says,” Gruff told us, a stubby, buzzing prod in hand.

  “Stand straight,” Doc instructed, pushing his glasses higher on his nose and peering through the filmy lenses at us. “Straighter.”

  We did as instructed. To Gruff’s side, Headcase held an old AK across his chest, one hand stroking the wooden stock as if it were a cuddly pet.

  “Arms straight up,” Doc said.

  We raised our hands, grabbing toward the top of the cage, a foot above my reach.

  “What do you think?” Gruff asked.

  Doc took a moment to study us, as an appraiser might an old piece of furniture, gnashing internally over its value, true versus perceived.

  “Two dozen,” Doc said, turning briefly to Gruff. “Maybe three if I’m careful.”

  “You’re always careful,” Gruff said.

  “An artist,” Headcase added, his comment hardly a whisper.

  I had feared they were referring to Elaine. But their gazes were fixed directly on Neil.

  “Three times that with all of them,” Doc said.

  “Only two of them,” Gruff said, looking to me now. “He’s got plans for that one.”

  I lowered my hands and met Gruff’s gaze. He didn’t smile, the expression seeming impossible for him to manufacture.

  “Tomorrow night we’ll start with the other one,” Doc said, gesturing to Neil.

  Now my friend lowered his hands. Elaine followed.

  “Bon Appetit,” Gruff said, and touched the prod to the cage, sparks showering us.

  When the blinding glare cleared, Gruff and Doc were already walking away, just Headcase looking at us now, a sick, leering grin parting his lips. Blackened teeth and holes where more had been showed as he stared at us. And stared. In the distance around the corner, a door opened.

  “Come on,” Gruff said from the unseen door. “Dinner time.”

  A tongue slipped past Headcase’s rotting teeth and licked his lips, then he turned and left us, the door closing soon after.

  Elaine walked to the cage door and looked to the horrible specimens of humanity cowering and cut up across the way.

  “That’s going to be us,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not.”

  “Hell of a system,” Neil commented. “The animal rights people would have had a field day with three legged cattle back in the day. If only there was someone around to complain about this right here.”

  My frie
nd looked to me. In his eyes I saw more surprise than resignation, as if he’d stumbled into a dream gone bad.

  “We have to get out of this cage,” I said. “That’s priority one. If we can’t do that, we won’t make it.”

  “You have an idea how to do that?” Elaine asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking to the other cages. “We wait. They have to take us out eventually.”

  “And then?”

  That I didn’t have an answer for. Yet.

  “Fletch...”

  I turned to Neil. His nose was twitching as he sniffed the air.

  “You smell it?”

  I did. That smell. The same we’d noticed on the wind near my refuge soon before we’d departed.

  “Damn,” Elaine said.

  Dinner was being prepared somewhere close. Some choice piece of flesh taken from one of those in the other cages. I reached out and pulled Elaine close. She looked up at me and spoke, softly, wanting what she said to exist only between the two of us.

  “If that’s going to happen to me, kill me.”

  I looked into her eyes and held her, knowing I could never do what she’d just asked me. That made it all the more vital that I get us out of this. Somehow.

  Thirty

  Hey...

  I thought the voice was in my dream, calling to me from behind a swaying berry bush on the edge of a dewy meadow. But it was not.

  “Hey...”

  I opened my eyes where I lay in the floor, nearest the cage door, Elaine curled up against my back and Neil stretched out on the bench.

  “Can you hear me?”

  It was a woman. In the closest cage. She’d pulled herself with her only remaining arm to the front wall of the pen that confined her.

  “I can,” I said softly, trying to not wake either of my friends.

  “Did they send you?” the woman asked.

  Her eyes were almost blinding white against the filth that skimmed her face. It was as if her soul was shining through, unburdened by her plight.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The four men in red,” she answered.

  Her eyes widened, and I wondered now if it was not some purity of self I’d sensed emanating from the woman, but rather some simple, fevered gaze. Seeing what was not there. Speaking of phantoms. In her state, it was easy to believe that was so.

  “No,” I told her.

  “They sent me,” the woman said, and then her eyes began to glisten, the dim light spilling from our cage glinting off the threatening tears. “I failed. I can’t go back now.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked, for no reason other than to, hopefully, allow some connection for the woman.

  But she didn’t answer. She didn’t say another word. Almost silently she slithered back across the stained floor until she was swallowed fully by shadows.

  First it was capture. Then pain. Then misery. Then madness.

  Death only came when it was too late to matter. Too late to stave off the worst of what life could be.

  “Good night,” I said softly to the nameless woman.

  I fell back to sleep, a dreamless slumber this time, my mind unable to conjure any pleasantness that night.

  Thirty One

  A few hours after we woke a youngish man with a revolver strapped across his chest and an apple in his hand came to the cage, Eyepatch and Chuckles flanking him.

  “You,” Eyepatch said to me. “Up.”

  I stood. So did Elaine and Neil.

  “Step forward,” Eyepatch commanded me.

  I did as he said so that I stood closest to the cage door. The man with the apple took a bite and chewed as he eyed me.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  The young man with the revolver strapped across his chest considered the question for a moment as he swallowed.

  “If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you,” he said, holding a straight face for a moment until that façade cracked and he doubled over with laughter.

  To either side, the thugs who’d delivered me to this person, to this place, giggled lightly, their glee nowhere near as raucous as the man before me.

  “I slay me,” the man said, straightening, his eyes watering from the belly laugh that had rocked him.

  “He’s Moto.”

  It was Eyepatch talking. Other than the cyclopic gaze he sported, he seemed interchangeable with the others, dirty and frail, hair thin and matted, skin somewhere between translucent and jaundiced. Each one seemed to have already boarded the slow train to oblivion. Death by starvation or illness was just a bit down the tracks.

  “Moto,” I repeated. “Your parents must have hated you.”

  He smiled. That kind of joyless expression of happiness some through history had mastered. Hitler. Stalin. Hussein. It was more amusement that one without any power might challenge one with all of it.

  “You think names matter,” Moto observed. “That is precious. You see, in the world now, we are what we want to be. Or what others will make of us.”

  “Let’s call him lunch,” Chuckles said, cackling.

  But only until Moto whipped the back of his gloved hand across the man’s face. He ducked after the blow, then recovered, feeling Moto’s glare upon him. A few seconds passed with nothing said, the silence both awkward and anxious. Something was coming. I could see it in Moto’s eyes. I could sense much about him. He was no Major Layton. No, he was too far gone for such a formal place in the hierarchy of a ruler. His was a leadership that existed because so few were left to assume such a mantle. He, it appeared, was just crazy enough to make himself seem different. Or capable. Or dangerous.

  “We saw you when you came out of the mountains and into my territory,” Moto said. “I have people everywhere. Watching. Waiting. Hunting.”

  I glanced past him to the other cages.

  “We know what you hunt,” I said.

  “Survival of the fittest,” he pronounced. “I have to compliment you. We never knew how many of you there were. Two. Three. Ten. Maybe there are more of you out there?”

  “Maybe,” I said, withholding all I could about our status.

  “Right,” Moto said, knowing that what he saw before him was the extent of our number. “I have to thank you for the apple. And the other fruits. Is that what you and your friends came looking for?”

  I didn’t answer. Neither did Neil or Elaine.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Moto said, unperturbed by our reticence to reply. “Honestly, if we’d known the old man had this out at his place we would have made a bigger push to get to him. But the sucker was just such a damn good shot. I mean, pow pow, and my people would drop like flies. Do you remember flies? I remember flies. Nasty, annoying things.”

  He stopped talking then and took another bite.

  “But I do like some bugs,” Moto said, bits of apple spitting as he spoke. “Isn’t that right?”

  “That is very right,” Eyepatch said.

  Eyepatch was either a favored one in the hierarchy of whatever Moto was running here, or he knew enough to humor the head nutjob’s ranting.

  “Tell you what I think we should do,” Moto said, gesturing past me to Elaine and Neil, as if the host at some event with space for additional invitees. “All of us. We should meet in the courtyard and have some fun. How does that sound?”

  I heard a breath catch in Elaine’s throat behind. Neil gave no response.

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  “Good,” Moto said, staring at me for a moment before he turned and left.

  When he was gone, Chuckles approached the cage with three pairs of handcuffs.

  “Turn around and put your hands through the opening,” Eyepatch ordered. “One at a time.”

  “I’m not—”

  I didn’t let Elaine finish her refusal. I turned and faced her, putting my palms to her cheeks.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Getting out of this cage will be nice.”

  She absorbed my words, and the hope they suggested. But
in that contemplation there was doubt. And fear.

  I backed away from her and put my hands through the opening. Cuffs slapped on them and clicked shut. Neil was put in restraints next. Elaine still hesitated.

  “We can do this another way,” Eyepatch said, fixed on her.

  “Elaine,” I urged her gently.

  Finally she relented and backed to the door. A minute later the cage was opened and we were led at gunpoint out of the holding area. I had hoped that, wherever we were being taken, I would be able to find some way to make our escape possible.

  That didn’t happen.

  We were led along a maze of corridors, then out into daylight that blinded, squinting at the glare as we were lined up in what was exactly as Moto described, a courtyard, formed by the outer walls of three connected buildings and one high, sculpted iron fence. A few yards in front of us a chair sat, empty.

  Then, as our eyes adjusted to the daylight, it was not, Moto coming from a door and sitting, something in his hands.

  Something alive.

  Thirty Two

  The insect buzzed in the jar that Moto held on his lap. Small holes had been poked in the metal lid, much like I’d done when capturing butterflies when I was a boy, letting the sound escape. The frantic, almost electric buzz as the creature batted its wings continuously against the glass that confined it.

  “Oh, she wants out,” Moto said, lifting the jar and scratching at it with a dirty finger, teasing the agitated insect within. “You want out, don’t you, pretty girl?”

  He looked to us. To each of us. Neil first. Then Elaine. Then to me.

  “Which one does she want?” Moto asked himself. “Which one?”

  The man stood, carrying the jar as he walked to where we stood, pacing up and down the short line we formed, holding the jar out, putting its cold, smooth surface against each of our cheeks for a moment. As the glass pressed to my skin, bones beneath growing more pronounced by the day, I felt the insect launch itself at me, the barrier jolted by the impacts.

  “She likes you,” Moto said, smiling, his rotting teeth bared. “She chooses you.”

  “No!” Elaine shouted, making a move toward Moto.

  “Elaine...”