by Keri Lake
In single-file, we stumble along, through a narrow path between a building and a long row of fencing, the pounding of our shoes against the dry dirt hardly carrying over the surrounding moans and growls. To the right, a bloody maw snaps at us, like a dog, as we pass. The bones of the Rager’s jaw peek beneath wet glistening flesh, which has been peeled back, revealing the roots of his teeth. Dozens of others reach through the fence at us, their deformed fingers snapping out at each passerby.
A screech hits the air, as one of the younger boys is snatched. His body drags across the dirt, before a fast-thinking older man in our lineup grabs hold of his leg and sets him back. Sobbing, the boy keeps to the building side of the path, dodging the outstretched hands.
I pull Abel closer to me, out of their reach, as we march alongside the wall.
The monsters behind us laugh and sneer, mocking the boy’s screams, and the sound of their amusement heats my cheeks with anger. If I were my father, I’d have killed one by now. Taken his gun and shot the other. There’d be a flurry of gunshots and people taking cover. Some might escape. Maybe I’d die, but it’d be better than doing nothing. It sickens me that the older men who march along with us, the ones most capable of fighting them, follow their commands like sheep.
The narrow path widens to a courtyard, and we reach the entrance of a dome-like building, the walls of which are lined with some kind of shelving, four levels high with ladders interspersed between. More of the men in black suits stand sentry inside, as though waiting for us to arrive. All of them have removed their masks, revealing they are human beneath, oddly enough. Soldiers, it seems, based on the way they all stand at attention, though I never thought a human being could be capable of such cruelty.
Murder carried out as indifferently as if they were Ragers.
A soldier with a long, black stick swats at the legs of each person, directing them up the ladders and into the shelves.
“Five to each bunk!” he shouts, and brings the stick down hard on my calf. I grit my teeth, the pain traveling straight to my eyes as they blur with tears.
Better me than Abel, because if he’d hit my brother, I’d probably turn psycho on him and find myself in a pool of blood.
Hands set at each side of Abel, with my book tucked beneath my armpit, I allow him to climb before me, waiting as he pulls himself up each rung, until we’ve reached the next open bunk at the second level. It takes a half hour to get all of us settled in, and I notice the bunks across from us hold men and boys I don’t recognize, perhaps from another hive.
“Welcome to Calico, shitheads! No talking, or moving. Should you need to piss in the night, you’ll hold it until morning. In the morning, you’ll be sorted and sent to assigned buildings. Anyone tries to escape? I, or my colleagues here, will shoot you on sight.” He glances back, exchanging a sharp nod with two soldiers, who stand behind him. “That, or we’ll toss you to the Ragers.”
“Why are you doing this? Why are we here?” A voice calls out from one of the bunks.
The soldier’s head shifts back and forth, his stick pointed up. “Who asked that question?” When no one answers, a wicked grin stretches across his face, and he shakes his head. “Nobody, huh?” Stick flat to his back, he paces in front of us, and when he stops, he pulls the gun from his side, racks the chamber, and shoots without bothering to look where.
The pop rattles the crowd, startling Abel, who covers his ears, and someone below curses.
I peer over the edge of the bunk at where blood seeps onto the concrete floor.
“Understand one thing,” the soldier continues. “Here? You are nothing more than cattle. Why are we doing this? Because we can, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Now, I suggest you all shut the fuck up and go to sleep.”
He twists to one of the soldiers and waves his gun toward the entrance. “Toss this one. Bastards haven’t eaten much in weeks. I’m sure they’ll appreciate the meal.”
A shiver races up my spine as I watch the soldier drag a man from the bunk below us. A trail of red marks his path through the building, until he disappears around the corner.
The growls from outside grow louder, more excited, and the rattling of the fence brings on visuals of all the Ragers in a frenzy over the discarded body.
I roll onto my side, pulling Abel in close to me. “Be quiet tonight, Abel. No going potty. No talking. Understand?”
“’Kay.” His fingers curl into mine, wrapped around his midsection, and I try not to think about the fact that complete strangers lie at either side of us. One I can hear sniffling behind me. The one beside Abel stares up toward the underside of the bunk above us.
It’s the most uncomfortable I’ve been in my whole life. Even before we stumbled upon our small hive and settled into our apartment, we braved winters in the desert and the threat of Ragers. Even still, that didn’t hold a candle to the fear and distress of lying among strangers, praying that my brother won’t wet himself in the night.
Above us, dust shivers from the top bunks with the movement of others, the small specs tickling my face as they land. My feet touch the concrete wall, and I lift my head to examine markings scrawled across there, which glow in the floodlights shining in from outside.
Es mejor la muerte. Death is better.
When I was a baby, we traveled a few years in a caravan of mostly Spanish-speaking families, who’d lived as immigrants. It became something of a second language to me, and eventually useful, as many of the survivors we stumbled upon mostly spoke the language.
The man next to Abel turns away from us, thankfully, and shifts with abrupt movement. He coughs and sputters. Gags. For about five minutes, he sounds as if he might hurl, until he, thankfully, quiets again.
It takes a good two hours before the men at either side of us fall asleep, and Abel starts twitching, as he does sometimes. This is when the events of the day crash over me, and my mother and Sarai push through visuals of the last four hours.
Burying my face in Abel’s soft curls, I cry until I’m exhausted.
“Get up! Get the fuck up!”
The shouts, coupled with hard thumps cracking against the wooden frame, snap me from sleep.
I wake to bodies scrambling down the ladder, and can feel the man behind me, nudging his chest into my back. A horrid stench leaves me wanting to gag, and not even covering my mouth can stave off the urge to throw up as the putrid aroma tugs at the back of my throat.
Pushing myself to a sitting position wakes Abel, and the whimper that escapes him tells me he’s forgotten about the events of the night. The man on the other side of him doesn’t move.
“We have to go!” The gray-haired man behind me gives another nudge, but the one beside Abel continues to sleep. I shake him, and his head lolls to the side, exposing a puddle of blood and vomit on the other side of him.
Not wanting Abel to know the man might very well be dead, I scramble to my knees and lift my brother over the vomit.
“Ugh. He sick,” he says, one hand clutching the ladder, the other squeezing his rabbit.
“He’s sleeping,” I counter, noting the pallor of the man’s skin and the telling blue of his lips. Positioning myself on the ladder, with my book tucked high into my armpit, I clutch either side of the rotted wood and allow Abel to step down between my arms.
“He puketed all over.”
“Abel, watch what you’re doing. Don’t look at him, look at the ladder.”
The moment our feet hit the ground, we’re ordered into a lineup.
Two men approach, wearing long, white lab coats and black slacks that peek from beneath. One has dark hair, the other is blond.
Harsh lines in dark-hair’s face puts him somewhere in his late forties, perhaps as old as my father was, with a Roman nose and lithe build. His hair lies perfectly slicked against his head, and his posture is that of a proud man. A respected one.
The blond is slightly younger. Not as poised as the elder, but still as clean cut and well groomed. Clean-shaven and pal
e-skinned, neither of them look as if they’ve been forced to survive in the Deadlands.
As unbelievable as that sounds, if it’s true, then they have no sympathy for us.
My heart beats like a drum that’s off rhythm with my breathing, and it becomes a battle of quirky movements, as I try to remain upright and as stiff as all the other men lined alongside me.
This is when they’ll discover my secret. I’ll be called out and shot dead in front of everyone.
More guards stand off to the side, with large dogs that bark and growl, baring sharp teeth.
Abel’s hand squeezes mine. The dogs frighten him, as they should, since he was nearly dragged off by a coyote infected with the Dredge when he was only a year old. My father slaughtered it in front of me, and from then on, I realized a split second could be the difference between life and death.
“What about that one?” One of the soldiers points to the balding crown of the man we left up in the bunk.
My mouth opens to answer, but my nerves are rattled, squeezing my voice box to remain silent.
“Sick, I think.” Thankfully, the man who slept beside me answers.
The soldier approaches, eyeing him up and down. “Go get ‘im.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You. Now.”
He steps out of line and climbs back up the ladder to the second level. Wearing a grimace, he hoists the dead over his shoulder, and carefully steps down each rung. The tremble in his muscles is visible, even from where I stand. A patch of brown, spattered with red, trails up the backside of his cargo, where the dead guy must’ve crapped himself in the night.
When his boots hit the concrete, he spins around, and the man dangles over his shoulder, arms reaching down his back. “Where do you want him?”
The soldier taps his stick to the ground, and the man shrugs the sick one off his shoulders, laying him on the floor, before taking his place back in line.
Blond hair steps forward, shines a flashlight in the sick guy’s eyes and mouth. “Looks like a small stone lodged in his throat. Must’ve swallowed it.”
“No shit?” The soldier belts out a laugh. “Crazy bastard. Saw him pick up a handful of gravel out by the trucks. Mostly sand. Didn’t think it’d do much harm.”
A tug at my shirt draws my attention down to Abel, who crooks his fingers for me to bend down.
“Is he died?” he asks.
“He’s very, very sick, Abel,” I whisper. “They’ll take him to the hospital so he gets better.” The lie is what little bit of a shield I’m able to construct, in this place that has no morals, or humanity.
The soldier whistles, and two more men in black, led by two dogs, enter the building. The first signals to one of the soldiers guarding the entrance. “Rager bait,” he says, and the guard drags the man away.
In two days, I’ve witnessed more death than in all of my fourteen years.
One of the two guards approach the dark-haired man, stripping his mask to reveal a face as well-groomed and clean cut as the others, framed by sandy brown hair. He leans in to whisper something, and a commotion tears my attention toward the end of the line.
A prisoner steps forward and falls to his knees. I recognize him from home—a quiet man who often carried around a Bible. It surprises me that he’s not holding it now, as he kneels with his hands clasped in prayer.
I can’t make out exactly what he’s pleading for, but the brown-haired soldier breaks from the two in lab coats, aims his gun, and shoots the beggar square in the forehead.
The thump in my heart is a beat of shock, as the beggar jerks with one spasmodic twitch, before his knees buckle and he falls, face-first, onto the cement floor. Blood pools around him, a halo of red around his head.
Silence follows, as I watch the soldier slip his gun back inside the holster, his lip crimped with disgust as he lifts his forearm to his nose.
“Bastard wreaks of Dredge.”
Abel hides his face in my leg, and I squeeze his shoulder, a silent order to remain quiet.
In the short time since we were taken, I’ve come to know one fact about these men: they have little patience, or tolerance, and will not hesitate to kill for any reason.
The sunken, serious eyes of the dark-haired man scan over us, as he makes his way toward the end of the line. From beneath his arm, he glides a short stick that resembles a pointer. Some, he examines closely; others, he skips. Some, he points to; others, he doesn’t. His pointer lands on the head of an older man, the one I spoke to in the truck, and two guards yank him backward, dragging him out of the lineup. The old man slams his heels into the dirt, fingers grappling for the arm banded around his neck and elbow, tugging him along.
I study the men segregated from the rest of us, noting all of them are older, graying and bald.
Dark hair plucks all the elders, one by one, including the man who slept behind me in the bunk, until he reaches me and I’m the center of his attention.
When his eyes fall on me in a scrutinizing sweep, I focus my gaze beyond him, the same as one might if they happen upon a lion. That’s what he is, a lion—fierce, proud, and undoubtedly hunting for a victim. I don’t know if the older men are pulled for killing, or saving, but dark-hair’s eyes don’t hold a single ounce of mercy, either way. Heat flames my cheeks, while his eyes burn over me. In the next breath, he moves on, skipping over Abel to the next male in line.
Seconds later, the blond passes me and crouches in front of my brother.
“What is your name?” His voice is softer, much more calm than the first, and his eyes don’t carry the harsh lines of the dark-haired man. He’s eerily pleasant—a personality that doesn’t fit well with the soldiers. When he pulls a red object from his pocket, my first instinct is to bat it away, until the blonde man smiles. “Do you like candy?”
Abel nods, accepting the treasure from the man.
“That’s a cute little bunny you have. What’s his name?”
“Him Sawai’s.” Abel bows his head and sniffles, but before I can nudge him not to cry, he lifts his gaze to the man. “Him name Flopsy.”
“Flopsy.” The blond chuckles, petting the rabbit’s head. “I like that name. Would you and Flopsy like to come with me? With other boys your age. You can play, and we have games and candy. Does that sound like fun?”
It sounds out of place here. He’s lying.
He takes my brother’s hand, and I grip Abel’s shoulder, tugging him back to me.
Those once-friendly eyes slide over to me, and like a gold-tipped blade, they cut into me, as if he’d waited for this very moment.
“He stays with me.” My voice quivers with the terror trapped in my throat.
The man yanks at Abel’s arm.
I yank back, a tug of war for my brother, and hold him beneath his armpit to keep him beside me.
“You will let him go, or face the consequences, boy.”
“He. Stays,” I grit, wondering if they’ll be the last words I speak.
The man relents, dropping his gaze from mine with a sneer, but the knots in my stomach don’t concede so easily. Particularly when he slides his gun from his side, and the cold metal presses into my forehead. “We don’t tolerate insolence here. It complicates things.”
Figured I’d be staring down the barrel of a gun at some point. I squint my eyes as they burn with the sting of tears, mentally apologizing to my mother. I failed her. She told me to stay alive, protect my brother, and I failed.
Waiting for the flashbacks of my life seems to take forever, as all I can muster is a blank void where the ticking seconds seem to keep pace with my frantic breaths.
For some stupid reason, I wonder if the bullet will hurt when it drives through my skull, but the thought is quickly tamped down, when I open my eyes to the dark-haired man standing beside the blond, pushing the gun toward the ground.
“Name.”
“Daniel.” I hate that my voice is weak. Soft. Frightened. If not for Abel, I could’ve faced death with more dignity, but
as it is, I’m feeling as if I could piss myself.
His gaze flicks from the book in my hand and back to me. “You like books? Daniel.” His voice almost seems distant, an echo inside my head that hardly carries over the chaos of thoughts swirling there.
I mindlessly rub my thumb across the cover without looking up at him and nod.
“You can read? Write?”
Again, I nod, keeping my gaze from his. Because schooling isn’t mandatory, many of the children in my hive can’t read, or write.
“Who taught you?”
The top of the book blurs with the tears in my eyes, and as if I can still feel my mother’s arm wrapped around me, while she points to words on the page, I subtly rub my thumb against the phantom touch that lingers on my skin. “My mother.”
“Tell me why you would die for this child.”
“He’s my brother.” I lift my gaze, and in that moment, all the venom pushes out of my veins, spilling across my skin in a hot wash of anger. “I would kill for him.”
The corner of his lips lift with a mirthless smile, and I wonder if he’s ever truly smiled, at all, in life. If the man is so evil that his eyes have never creased with genuine laughter. “You’ll come with me.”
I don’t know what that means. Perhaps my death sentence wrapped up in four simple words.
He continues on down the line, picking up where he left off, and the blond’s jaw shifts with what I can only guess is a silent hatred stewing behind his eyes. I don’t like this man, or the way he looks down at my brother, like a child who’s found another’s toy to ruin.
“Hey,” I dare to blurt, a tight fist of panic in my chest, when dark-hair’s eyes slide from the next prisoner back to me. “My brother … can he stay with me?”
The man glances down to Abel and back. “No,” is all he says when he walks off, and my head spins with the need to figure out a plan.
Begging will get me killed, but I won’t let them take my brother.
My mother’s words from before slip through my mind. You have to live. I do, and I will, for Abel. I’ll fight for him, too.