A dog emerges from the jungle, though to describe it as a dog doesn’t really do it justice. The Irish wolfhound is like a horse with canine teeth. On all fours, it’s taller than Mandi. On its hind legs, it would be much taller than me. Its shaggy gray fur looks like the man’s hair, and I realize that if it laid down, it would blend in perfectly with the forest floor.
Biscuit doesn’t do anything outwardly aggressive. No snarling, growling or lowered ears. But it also doesn’t take its pale gray eyes off of me. Not for a second. It is locked on target.
“You’re a fit bird for a Point,” he says. I’m not sure what that means, but the way he’s looking at me when he says it makes me uncomfortable. “Fancy the hair. Not quite regulation, so you must be fresh meat, eh?”
He squints at me, waggling the gun in my direction for a moment. “Why’d they send kids like you to a place like this, I wonder.” He shrugs. “S’pose all that matters is that you’re here. Thanks to Unity for the early Christmas gifts, right?”
A network of tattoos on the man’s arm, the colors dulled by grime, leads to a triangle that started as a symbol for hope, but has become a harbinger of death, violence and betrayal. At some point in the past, this man, who I suspect is no older than twenty, was part of Unity. The orange sides of the Unity brand identify him as a Support.
His head twitches. “Say, what is the date, love?”
“December twenty-fifth.” I lie, but the man is clearly insane, and the date might distract him. To what end, I have no idea. Anything to keep him talking, maybe let his guard down.
The man freezes in place, his bit lower lip smiling like a Halloween mask. Then he bursts out laughing. The dog doesn’t even flinch.
Mandi is crying now, her tears rolling over the man’s hand, leaving clean streaks.
“We’ll be okay,” I tell her, and the man’s laughing stops.
“Okay?” He swishes his mouth around like he’s sucking on a lollipop. “Nothing is okay anymore. Did you see the sky last night? They’ve come early. Like Christmas! Oh, Christmas tree. Oh, Christmas tree.”
The gun against Mandi’s ribs points downward while the man sings.
“How lovely are your—” The man’s eyes snap toward me before I can lift my gun up and around my back. But he sees the violent intention in my eyes.
“No,” he says. “No, no, no. You’re no good. Spoiled meat.” He sniffs the air. “I can smell you from here. You and your spoiled friends. Not like the others though. They’re still fresh. Tasty.” His voice shifts, sounding almost childlike. “But those are for Quinlan. He gets them first.” He squeezes Mandi’s cheeks harder, making her cry out. “Always first!”
He cranes his head from side to side, looking me over again, this time in disgust. “You’re trouble, love. I can see it in your eyes. A real Point. No breaking you, is there? You’re already broken.”
He giggles.
“Don’t look so surprised. You’re all the same. Bad meat. Tough and bad.”
“Please,” I say, and I’m ashamed of the quiver in my voice. “We’ll come with you. We’ll be your friends. Not Quinlan’s.”
I’m desperate. Trying to stall what’s coming. The man’s intellect is questionable. Probably malleable. Broken by whoever Quinlan is. Turned into this strange creature of a man.
He bites his lip again, laughing a hiss through his teeth. “My friends.” The leer in his eyes returns. “My meat. Ohh, that sounds...” He looks behind him. “The others will know. Bugger. They...” Back to me. “You... You see? Cor, blimey, you nearly had me, you did. But I ain’t daft, despite appearances to the contrary. And Quinlan, he’s my Point.”
The gun returns to Mandi’s ribs. He looks at her with hungry eyes, then to me, and then to the dog, Biscuit. The beast is stoic and silent, waiting. “Points are bad meat. Spoiled, like I said. But Biscuit isn’t choosy, are you, mate? And it’s a small island. Grub can be tough to come by.”
The man whistles three times and shouts, “Din, din.”
The dog is suddenly alert. It’s ears perk up. Mouth open. Tongue unfurled. Drool dangling.
“Go get ’er!” the man says, and the dog barks so loud and deep that I can feel it in my chest.
What happens next is all instinct. There isn’t time for thought. I just act.
I spin with the gun, lifting it.
The man sees it and shouts, “No!”
But it’s too late to stop the wolfhound’s assault, and my defense.
The dog lunges.
My finger squeezes the trigger.
A loud bang is punctuated by a yelp that seems impossibly high-pitched for an animal this big.
The dog lands in a heap at my feet, its head a bloody mess.
“Biscuit!” the man shrieks, and a second gunshot punches my ears.
And it’s my turn to scream. “Mandi!”
A puff of pink bursts from Mandi’s chest. The bullet snuck between her ribs, slipped through her body and emerged from the other side. And then she falls, discarded, like meat, by the man now turning his gun toward me.
18
Instinct propels me sideways.
Had I thought about what I was doing, I probably would have stopped.
I’d also be dead.
The bullet buzzes through the air, slicing the arm of my flight suit and the skin beneath. It stings, but it’s nowhere near as unpleasant as where I’ve landed. I slide across a slick floor, bumping into the foot of a dead boy. Jostled flies burst into the cabin, frantically looking for a new place to land. And eat. And spawn.
My hand slips through clammy sludge, like pudding with lumps, as I push myself up. When I see the congealed blood ooze up between my fingers, my stomach lurches. But a shadow draws my attention. The man is coming.
His voice warbles as he screams. “Biscuit! God, no!”
Two rounds ping off the transport’s interior, fired wild. They ricochet and then nestle inside the bodies of two corpses who no longer feel pain. The man walks in front of the open hatch. He’s looking at the dog while holding the gun in my direction, firing off shots without looking.
“Biscuit!”
I return fire, squeezing off two shots, and I prove that hitting the dog with one shot was a fluke. Both bullets miss and neither frightens the man away from his mourning.
“Open your eyes, mate!” Six more shots into the cabin and six more misses. Not that he’d even know. He’s focused solely on the dog. But he’s eventually going to realize that Biscuit can’t open his eyes. Then he’s going to turn toward me. Going to aim.
Leaning back in the muck, I make myself as small a target as possible, hold the gun in both hands and aim between my feet. If I miss this time, I might punch a hole through my foot.
Don’t miss, I think. Please, don’t miss.
I pull the trigger.
The round finds a target of flesh and blood, but it’s not the man. I’ve shot Biscuit. Again.
The man lets out a heart-wrenching wail that manages to make me feel bad for him. He might be a psychotic murderer, maybe even the person responsible for all those dead kids in the field, but he definitely loved that dog. His pain is real, and deep.
My hesitation nearly gets me killed.
“You bloody trollop!” The man thrusts his weapon at me and pulls the trigger. The bullet sparks off the metal wall beside my head. He pulls the trigger again, but all it does is click. He’s emptied the magazine.
I blink at the sound of the gun clicking empty, fully expecting to be dead. Then I fire again. And again. Pull, pull, pull. A bullet connects with the man’s left shoulder and sends him into a clumsy pirouette. I get off one more shot, but miss, as the man falls atop his dog.
My feet slip through gore, scrambling as I try to stand. I run from the transport on unsteady legs, planning to circumvent the wounded, insane man and make for the jungle. But he’s not about to let that happen.
Tendrils of drool stretch from his snarling mouth as he heaves air in and out, sounding mor
e ape-like than human. Blood covers the mud and tattoos on his left arm. When he leaps to his feet, pounds his bare chest and screams, “C’mon, then!” I realize he’s mistaken my retreat as attack.
And now I have no choice.
Blood and stench chase me out of the transport, fueling my own mania. But I don’t lose control. I don’t get tunnel vision. While being on the receiving end of a gun unnerves me, I’ve been looking down the barrels of my own fists for years. The only difference now is that I’ll be fighting for my life.
I’m not sure what kind of attack the man is expecting, but it’s not what he gets. He’s totally caught off-guard when I tackle him around the waist, lift his hundred and sixty-ish pounds and then slam him down on his back. His chest compresses beneath my weight. Air expels as a voiceless wheeze. And then there’s a moment of resistance followed by a sudden give, as one of his ribs breaks.
But I’ve only just begun.
While he sucks in a breath, I get to my knees and launch a fist into his face.
Then another.
I aim for his temple, knowing I possess the strength to end this fight with my next punch.
But my fist sails past his head, as I’m yanked back. The man’s feet, wrapped around my neck, slam me to my back. My head lands atop Biscuit’s torso, sparing it from an impact with the ground.
Then he’s on top of me, straddling my waist and delivering the hardest punch I’ve ever felt—the kind I normally dole out. And that one hit nearly ends the fight. Through a cloud of spinning lights, I see the wound in his shoulder like a target, and I launch my finger toward it like an arrow. The tip of my finger slips over his bloody skin and pokes the wound. For a moment, I think I’ve yanked my hand back in revulsion—because: gross—but the man has sprawled away like he’s been struck by lightning.
We stand in unison. Both wounded. Both feeling the anguish of loss and the thirst for vengeance.
“You’re a scrapper. I like that.” He wipes blood from his eyebrow where one of my punches opened up a gash.
I’ve got blood on my face, too, but I leave it alone. It will make me slippery.
“I think maybe I’ll keep you, after all. Make you my new pet.” He cuts the fingers of his right hand in the air like scissors. “Snip off them toes and fingers. Then train you how to be a good pup. Eh?”
His left arm hangs low, not quite useless, but he’s definitely avoiding moving it.
“You can try,” I say. “But we both know there’s a reason I’m Point and you’re Support.” I don’t believe a word of what I say next, but the way he spoke about his Point—Quinlan—makes me think he believes it. “It’s because you’re weak.”
He hisses at me, spraying bloody spit. “The military doesn’t make people weak.”
The military?
“It makes us killers.” He lunges, and I’m surprised by his form. He kicks for my head, and when that misses, his other foot comes up in a spin kick. The sole of his bare foot makes a breeze across my face, as I lean back away from it. Before I can fully recover from the dodge, he’s spun forward again. A punch follows, striking my shoulder hard enough to shift the bone out of its socket. When it pops back in, a numbing tingling rockets through the limb and into my chest.
He throws a second punch with the same hand. Instead of blocking or dodging the blow, I move inside it. His forearm strikes the side of my head, but I use the energy, adding it to the thrust of my head-butt, which lands on his left shoulder, bludgeoning the bullet wound with a wet slap.
His body arches with pain, leaving him exposed. I kick him hard, between the legs, drawing a howl of pain from his mouth. But the strike also seems to focus him. Adopting my fighting style, he charges forward, absorbing a punch to his head without flinching. He catches me under the ribs and lifts me up. But instead of dropping himself down on top of me, he pumps his arms and tosses me.
I see him wince as I topple away, and I know he didn’t jump atop me because he’s hurting. Then I land, this time with no dog to cushion my fall. My hip strikes a fallen tree stump, spinning me backwards. I hit the ground with enough force to black out.
Blazing pain brings me back a moment later.
He’s stalking toward me, a manic smile sliding onto his face.
Nausea sweeps through me, lolling my head to the side.
Mandi is there, soaked in her own blood. Her little chest rises. And then falls. I look up. Her eyes lock with mine. Then she glances down.
To her feet.
To the knife.
The blade is partially covered by a palm frond, but I can see the handle.
I turn back to face my attacker. His stalking has morphed into a confident strut. He sings, “Fingers and toes. Fingers and toes.”
I reach.
He dives, arms outstretched, my throat the target.
I’ve never killed a person and have negative desire to do so. Maybe that’s why I missed with the gun? Even though this guy shot Mandi and is trying to kill me, I still feel bad about trying to kill him. When my fingers wrap around the knife’s handle, I find that I lack the will to plunge it into him.
Knowing that I’m going to die if he isn’t stopped, I settle on a middle ground.
I pull the knife in over my chest and turn the blade upward.
He sees the weapon too late. He’s already airborne, and though he tries to arrest his fall with his arms, his wounded arm provides no support. With a cut-short cry, the man impales himself on the knife and falls still. His dead body weight pushes the knife handle into my chest. With a grunt, I roll him off.
The sky above looks impossibly blue, and for a moment, it’s just me and the sky and the fresh memory of killing a man.
Then I hear the raspy breath of Mandi and roll toward her.
The parts of her that aren’t red with blood are pale.
Each small breath sounds wet and ragged. A punctured lung. Along with other things.
Her lips move, lifting me past my pain, drawing my closer.
By the time my hand reaches the back of her small head, I’m a mess, barely holding back sobs. I have never known anguish quite like this. It is sharp and deep. All the way to my soul.
I try to speak, to offer some comfort, but the sounds that come from my quivering lips aren’t recognizable as any language.
She whispers, but the faint breeze of her words are inaudible against the buzzing backdrop of flies, some of which are already settling in on the man’s blood-soaked wounds. I lean in closer, my ears nearly pushed against her lips.
“They’re...coming,” she says.
I pull my head back and hear them. Footsteps crashing through the jungle. Urgent voices. Men. Not kids.
Her hand tightens around mine, and I see her lips moving again. I lean down and hear two words that break my heart. “I’m...sorry.”
“No,” I say, pulling back. “Don’t say it. Don’t ever—”
Mandi’s eyes are staring past me, toward the sun, unblinking in its brightness.
“Hey!” someone shouts.
I’ve been spotted, but the voice is distant. Still in the trees.
I take the time to kiss Mandi’s forehead and whisper, “I’m sorry, too,” and then I’m up and on my feet, pushing past the worst pain I’ve felt in my entire wretched life. I crouch over my fallen enemy and pull the knife from his chest. Then I recover my gun, and I’m chased into the jungle by angry voices and the men—the killers—to whom they belong.
19
Tear-blurred eyes obscure my view of the world around me. I’m like a boulder, rolling downhill, crashing through every unseen obstacle, letting gravity guide me. Despite hitting every low branch on the way down, and stumbling over rocks and brush, I stay ahead of the men behind me. Maybe I’m out-pacing them, or maybe they’re just being cautious after seeing their dead friend.
I think the most likely scenario is that this slope will eventually end at the ocean. I could swim for it, but we’re in the South Pacific. How long would it take for a shark
to spot me? They can smell a drop of blood from what, a mile away? And I’m covered in the stuff. Might as well ring the dinner bell.
I crush my eyes tight for a moment, squeezing the tears away. I can’t escape if I can’t see. But I also can’t stop thinking about Mandi’s face. About how her eyes shifted from life to death. I’ve seen violence in my life. And I’ve known death. But I’ve never witnessed it before.
Mandi had an edge about her that made me want to smack her, but mostly because she reminded me of…well, me. A better me, who is now dead, because of me.
I shouldn’t have shot the dog.
If I were dead, she would still be alive.
As a prisoner.
A slave.
Maybe worse.
The man did threaten to cut off my fingers and toes and turn me into a replacement dog.
My mind is a whirl of contradictions, none of which will help me survive. And I owe Mandi at least that much. To live. To help her friends survive.
The men behind me fall silent. I don’t think they’ve given up. They’re just no longer talking. They’re focused. Moving in for the kill.
I need to change things up.
With my eyes clear, I reach out and catch a palm trunk, using it to shift my course ninety degrees to the right, moving parallel to the beach, which isn’t far off now. I can hear the crashing waves filtering through the trees.
And then I hear a crunch behind me. One of the men has just turned after me, the sudden movement giving his position away. But how far back? I don’t dare look.
Where is the second man? I wonder, and then I get my answer in a blur of motion. He’s coming in from the right, barreling down the hill so fast that he looks almost out of control. In that fraction of a glimpse, as the man flickers between trees, I take stock of him.
He’s short. Maybe my height. Maybe even my age. And skinny. Malnourished. And I wonder if by ‘meat,’ Mandi’s killer was being literal. Maybe these men really are cannibals? He’s dressed in torn pants, but he looks clean. Unlike the first man, this one has a sense of hygiene. He’s also tattoo-less, except for the triangle on his hand—a triangle with a blue bottom.
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