Trapped

by Jack Kilborn

  He needed to stop crying. He needed to stop crying right now. The past twelve hours had been the most horrible of Sara’s entire life, and she was exhausted and hurt and hungry and scared and completely overwhelmed.

  Stop crying.

  Stop fucking crying.

  Sara felt a swell of rage toward her innocent child, and prepared to shake him even harder. If this little bastard didn’t shut up they were both going to die.

  Stop crying, damn you! STOP IT!

  Her rage only lasted a millisecond. But it scared her almost as much as the cannibals did.

  Sara choked back a sob, then gently touched Jack’s cheek, her whole hand shaking with tremors.

  He screamed, but it was one of those screams that was so strong, so high-pitched, that the only real sound that came out was air.

  Sara knew the tantrum would be coming next, Jack getting so worked up that it would take him forever to calm down.

  Behind her, the ferals ventured closer.

  Sara wiped a tear off of Jack’s face with her thumb, then reflexively stuck her finger in his diaper.

  Wet. He’s wet! That’s why he’s crying.

  She had his onesie and diaper off in five seconds, a consummate pro at this. In the sling pocket was a fresh diaper, and with cannibals less than five yards away she fastened it onto his little butt, shoved him back in the sling, shoved her breast in his mouth, and rocked him back and forth, hoping for a miracle.

  And then she felt one. Jack sucked in a huge breath, then latched on to her nipple.

  She dropped down onto her side, cradling Jack in her arms as he nursed, pressing her back into a bush as the feral party walked past and joined the feast.

  Jack’s fingers grasped onto her belly, giving her a squeeze.

  Maybe they’d live through this after all. But first she had to find…

  The gun.

  It was only a few feet away, right at the roots of a dogwood bush. Even better, it wasn’t a revolver. It was one of those guns that had the bullets in a clip, which meant it probably held more than just six.

  Sara carefully got to her feet, staying in a crouch. She took one careful step toward the gun, and then she felt her ears get hot, like her body could sense that a person was staring at her.

  She looked up.

  A person was staring.

  In fact, all eighteen of them were.

  Georgia tingled all over. She felt deliciously alive, and though she wasn’t prone to smiling she couldn’t get the smile off her face.

  In one hand, she gripped the bloody filet knife.

  In the other, she gripped something even more exciting.

  She strolled up to the man in the uniform, the one called Tope, the muffled screams in the air almost musical in how they conveyed pain.

  Then, abruptly, she stopped, her arm jerking back.

  She tugged a bit harder, but it was no use.

  Tom’s intestines wouldn’t stretch any farther.

  Cindy had her eyes squeezed shut, and wished she could squeeze her ears shut as well. Of all the horrors of the past day, nothing could compare to when Georgia walked over with that knife. She was humming, actually humming, like this was some sort of game.

  Then, without a word, she cut Tom open.

  It got really bad after that.

  In a perverse way, Cindy was grateful for the mouth gags. If she’d been forced to hear Tom beg, or scream at full throttle, Cindy was sure she would have lost her mind.

  She peeked at Tyrone, who was also closing his eyes.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. Cindy was finally straightening out her life. She finally found a good guy to be her boyfriend. She’d kicked drugs and her sentence was almost up and she was excited to become a waitress, of all stupid things, because that’s what regular teenagers did and she so wanted to be regular.

  Cindy tried to picture her parents, when they used to look at her with love instead of suspicion, tried to hear their voices rather than the voice of that horrible General giving Georgia orders.

  “Now do his eyes.”

  Cindy wondered if her body would ever be found. If her mom and dad would ever know what happened to her. She wondered if they would care. She wondered, absurdly, if there was some way for an autopsy to be done, and it could show her parents, her family, her old friends, the whole world, that Cindy Welp died clean and sober, not a trace of meth in her system.

  “Now do his genitals.”

  Cindy wished she could say goodbye to them. To tell them how sorry she was, but even more than that. To thank them, for all they’ve given her. To make them understand that she could finally understand. To say I love you one last time.

  “Now do his scalp.”

  Cindy chanced another peek at Tyrone, and he was peeking at her. All the potential, all the possibility, they shared it in that one long look. Cindy had a brief, intense fantasy, something far beyond becoming a waitress. She stared at him and saw herself through his eyes, in ways she never dreamed of. As a wife. A mother. A grandmother. Someone who was important to other people. Someone needed. Someone loved.

  A tear rolled down Tyrone’s face. Cindy realized she was crying too.

  “Now do the girl.”

  Taylor blinked. The pain he was in defied imagination. Surgery without anesthesia was agonizing enough, but Lester had hurt him even worse with his squeezing.

  He blinked again.

  They would suffer. Lester, and the doctor. Taylor would take his time with them. Keep them alive for months. Feed them through a stomach tube if he had to.

  He blinked once more, and then twitched his fingers.

  Taylor tried to remember the procedure, those many months ago. He’d been awake for that, too. But it took him all night before he was able to move again. Yet now he was already able to blink and twitch.

  He concentrated, really hard, and jerked his left foot.

  Maybe the procedure had done something to him, to make the paralytic wear off quicker. Or maybe the doctor had given him an incorrect dose, not accounting for all the weight he’d gained.

  Taylor didn’t care about the reason why. He embraced it.

  The sooner he could move, the sooner he could pay them back, tenfold.

  The man known as Subject 33 blinked, then forced his lips into a smile.

  Tom kept waiting for the white light, waiting for the angel choir. But as his blood and breath and life leaked out of his ruined body, he realized there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  His gramma had been frickin’ right all along.

  At first, no one moved. The scene seemed frozen in time. Sara, bending down for the gun. Almost twenty feral people, watching her with a mixture of curiosity and hostility.

  Then one of them said, “More… food.”

  That broke the spell. Sara snatched up the gun and ran.

  The adrenalin spiking through Sara’s system made her leg injury all but disappear. She moved fast and fleet-footed, dodging around trees, hurdling thicket, zig-zagging sharply to throw her attackers off.

  Jack popped off her breast and began to cry again, and she let him, holding him tight, refusing to stop for anything.

  I didn’t come this far to die now. Not now.

  The sounds of pursuit clung to Sara’s heels. It was as if the forest had come alive around her, foliage shaking, blurry figures weaving in and out peripherally, whoops and hollers used to tighten the circle around her, to cinch the noose.

  Sara had no idea where she was going, no idea how she was going to get away. Eventually she would tire, or hit the island’s edge. There were too many of them, and they were coordinating their hunt. She was tired and hurt and had never fired a gun before. This was futile.

  But then Sara got lucky.

  Ahead, tied to a tree trunk, was an orange ribbon.

  Orange ribbons led to the prison.

  A tiny beacon of hope flashed in Sara’s mind. Maybe she wasn’t going to die now after all. She poured on the speed, finding a
second ribbon, and a third, distancing herself from her pursuers now that she had a goal.

  Then the trees parted, the sun shining on the giant gray mounds of the bone yard. Sara ran into it, the piles taller than she was, darting left, then right, then right again, cradling Jack in her arms like he was a football and she was dodging defensive linemen, catching a glimpse of the prison and heading toward it in a roundabout, serpentine way.

  There, on the side of the prison, tied to poles…

  Cindy. Tyrone. Tom.

  Sara didn’t think she had any reserves left, but the sight of her kids prompted a burst of speed and she sprinted toward them like she was running on air.

  As Tyrone watched Georgia work the knife, he remembered a conversation he had with his moms, who told him if he kept up his gangbanging he was going to be dead in an alley with two bullets in him by the time he was eighteen.

  Tyrone hadn’t believed her, but he had recognized the possibility of it happening.

  Neither he nor his moms could have predicted he was going to be done in by a crazy white chick on some cannibal island next to a secret Civil War prison.

  “Can I burn her?” Georgia asked the General. She was looking at Cindy when she said it.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  Georgia, hands red with poor Tom’s blood, reached into a pouch on her tool belt. Lester and Martin also had tool belts, with various items dangling from them. Tyrone figured they weren’t going to use them to build anything.

  Georgia removed a plastic baggie, filled with powder.

  “I made this myself, back at the Center. I’ve been itching to try it.”

  With her other hand, Georgia pulled a cylinder from her belt, the size of a soda bottle. It said PROPANE and a torch was fitted onto the top.

  Cindy’s eyes got wide. Tyrone knew she was afraid of fire. Knew there wasn’t anything worse for her.

  He couldn’t let her go out like that.

  Tyrone screamed, loud as he could, kicking out at Georgia even though she was out of reach. He pulled against the dog collar until his vision went red, thrashing and moaning, knowing he wasn’t going to stop her.

  But this display wasn’t for Georgia.

  “The boy seems to want to go first,” Tope said. “Give him his wish.”

  Tyrone relaxed. Mission accomplished. He could feel Cindy’s eyes on him, but he didn’t trust that he could look at her without completely breaking down.

  Then he realized, fuck it.

  Thug life was all about frontin’, and representin’, and bein’ some bullshit stereotype just like Martin said. Tyrone wasn’t a thug no more. He was just a man. Men didn’t need to be strong 24/7. Not in front of the woman they loved.

  So as Georgia approached him with the torch, he dropped his guard and let Cindy look at him as he really was. And in her eyes—the last thing he was ever going to see before he burned to death—Tyrone Morrow found acceptance.

  Then a gunshot broke the silence, like the handclap of an angry god.

  “Back the fuck away, Georgia.”

  Tyrone turned.

  Sara.

  General Alton Tope wasn’t easily impressed, but the chubby girl’s zeal in mutilating the boy was something to behold. According to the doctor, the serum would be relatively cheap and easy to produce, the procedure simple to teach. Tope doubted he’d get any sort of green light from Washington, but it wouldn’t be the first time the military experiments on troops without anyone’s knowledge or consent.

  Worst case scenario, Tope could scour the prisons for lifers and death row garbage. He’d done so in the past. Putting together a team of several hundred men and women wouldn’t be too difficult.

  And two hundred people with the enthusiasm of this girl would be a formidable unit indeed.

  They would need to do some testing first. Perhaps enhance fifty troops and unleash them on a small town in Mexico. Or even someplace secluded in the US. It was easier to cover-up than one might think.

  Then some other woman ran up to the children and fired a gun into the air, breaking Tope’s reverie.

  What an interesting turn of events.

  Benson raised his sidearm, but General Tope held up a finger, stopping him. This new woman was obviously not a threat. She was haggard and bleeding and out of breath, and she held the gun like it was a snake she wished to throw away, and she had something—an infant—in a sling across her belly. Tope wanted to see how this played out. Wanted to see how the chubby girl reacted to this new threat.

  The chubby girl fulfilled Tope’s expectations. She lunged at the woman.

  The woman twisted to the side and kicked her in the face, knocking her onto the ground.

  A pity. All that sadistic rage, but no skill.

  “I apologize for this,” Dr. Plincer said. “I’ll have Lester and Martin take care of it.”

  Plincer nodded at his men. They advanced on the woman.

  Fascinating.

  The woman was armed. The men only had hand weapons. But they approached her without fear.

  Tope was liking this serum more and more.

  Rather than try to shoot them like she should have, the woman instead ducked around the boy’s pole. There was another shot, and then the boy’s hands were free.

  Stupid. She should have taken care of the threat first, then released the children. This woman was no soldier. She was an idiot.

  The men closed the gap on her, and she wasted even more time freeing the girl by firing at her bonds.

  Then a handful of wild people rushed out of the woods. The ferals. They threw themselves at Lester and Martin, snarling and slobbering and brandishing… was that silverwear?

  What the ferals lacked in technique, they apparently made up for in savagery. Tope became concerned.

  Lester and Martin had much better skills than the pudgy girl. They dispatched several of those wild people with precise, almost eloquent, strokes of their knives.

  But when a dozen more ferals came screaming into the area, Lester and Martin fled. So did Dr. Plincer.

  Benson had his gun out, shooting two of the wild people who ran at him. They fell, but were quickly followed by five more.

  That’s when Tope’s concern became fear.

  He ran, briefcase in hand, back the way he’d come. Benson fired twice more, and it sounded like the woman was shooting as well.

  Then a man cried out, “Help me!”

  Benson, whom Tope had hired to protect him, was calling for help. General Tope found no amusement in the irony, and he certainly didn’t offer assistance of any kind. Tope didn’t even turn around to see what had happened. He was too intent on running for the helicopter.

  Tope rounded the corner and saw the chopper in the distance. He hoped the pilot, Crouch, was paying attention and about to start the engine, because Tope could sense he had several feral people chasing him. He chanced a look.

  More than several. Five or six.

  Tope wasn’t in the best shape, and wasn’t a fast runner, but terror was the ultimate motivator. He reached the helicopter before the savages, yanking on the door handle.

  Locked.

  The turbine engine whined to life, the rotors beginning to spin. That idiot Crouch was staring over Tope’s shoulder at the oncoming horde, his eyes big as duck eggs.

  General Tope banged on the door. Once he got inside he was going to strangle that fool. Revise that; after he got inside and was taken to safety, he would strangle him.

  Then the unthinkable happened. General Alton Tope, the man who was going to make sure the US military maintained world supremacy, was dragged away from the helicopter in utter disbelief.

  The suitcase was ripped from his hand, but these people had no interest in its contents. They seemed interested in him, wrestling him to the ground, pinning him down.

  But why? What could these ferals possibly want?

  The first jolt of pain was in Tope’s leg. It was followed swiftly by an equal pain in his arm.

  They’re b
iting me.

  Typical Army fuck-up. A multi-billion dollar spy telescope, plus a decade of clandestine intel, and no one had known the ferals were maneaters.

  Tope screamed, and a savage stuck his ugly face in Tope’s, flecks of flesh and blood in his filthy beard, mouth open and drooling, his lips moving closer and closer.

  Tope was more revolted by this man’s kiss than by those who were chewing on him.

  But it turned out this man wanted to chew as well.

  General Tope was tangentially aware of a strong wind, the helicopter taking off, as more and more of his body was gripped in the mouths of these cannibals. He began to choke, blood running down his windpipe from the bleeding hole where his nose used to be.

  The helicopter’s speaker system crackled and came to life. The last human voice Tope ever heard was that bastard, Crouch.

  “Sorry, General. You didn’t pay me enough to die here.”

  Tope exposed his neck, praying to be bitten there, praying for someone to pierce his jugular or carotid and end his suffering.

  He had no takers.

  Apparently the ferals liked their meals alive and kicking.

  This was unfortunate. Most unfortunate indeed. Dr. Plincer had been so close to sealing the deal. Who could have guessed the ferals would have showed up?

  Well, actually, he should have guessed it. He was the one who made them that way in the first place.

  But Plincer hadn’t known there were so many. He also hadn’t known they’d been able to organize their group, almost like some primitive tribe. It was fascinating, from a scientific standpoint, but a huge disaster from a financial one.

  Hopefully, General Tope would get away, and they’d be able to try again at a later date. If not, perhaps the military would send another representative. The Russians were also a possibility. Plincer had even been contacted by a former member of the KGB. This situation was just a slight delay—a hiccup—in the overall game plan.

  Plincer hurried through the big iron door into the prison, but before he got a chance to lock it someone grabbed him from behind, pinning his arm up behind his back.