Suffer the Children

by Janden Hale

  He collapses back down to his knees and starts to cry.

  “Amy, I found Caden!”

  It’s his last resort. She’s in there listening, not wanting to emerge, but those are the magic words, the only thing that will work. “Amy, I found Caden,” he says again, this time a ragged whisper. Tears and snot slip out and ease down his face, some of it plummeting through the cold night air, crashing into his knees like bombs. He sniffs and whispers the phrase again. He tries to knock some more but his hand only glances off, falls to the doormat. He lists over and curls into a ball on the porch, shivering.

  He lays there like that, no idea how long, but the murmur of the wind is interrupted by something inside, something that sounds like a brick slamming to the floor. He doesn’t know she was planning to brain him with a baseball bat if it came to that. He doesn’t know she’d just dropped it. A few seconds later he hears the click of the deadbolt being turned. The creak of the door pulling open.

  “What did you say?” Her voice is faint and thin.

  He closes his eyes and thanks God for what is surely the greatest miracle of his life. He swivels his head and sees her looming over him, her own tears tracing vertical paths through the grime on her face.

  “Amy. Oh, Amy. You heard me.”

  “What did you say? Before. What did you say?”

  “I found Caden.”

  She lifts a hand to her mouth and it takes her a long time to respond. “Where? What do you mean? Why would you say that?”

  He heaves himself up onto his elbows. “I’m serious. You need to come with me. Right now. Help me up. Please.” He reaches his hand out to her but she takes a step back, crossing her arms.

  “Don’t.” She tries to subdue her tears but she can’t get them to go away any more than she can get him to go away. “Just don’t.” Her reddened eyes spring a new leak with even more intensity than before. “Do you even know what you’re saying? Do you even know what this does to me? Can you understand that? He’s gone.”

  “Amy, wait.”

  “No. No I will not wait.” She smacks him on top of the head. “You son of a bitch. Do you know what it’s like? To be a mother who lost her son? You can’t. Whatever you’re trying to do, you motherfucker, this is the worst way you could possibly do it. You’re an awful person for doing this. You piece of shit. I don’t know what game you’re trying to pull, but I hate you for it.” He’d never had so much venom leveled at him all at once in his whole life.

  “Amy, stop. Just listen to me. I swear to you it’s real. I saw him. You need to see. Please. I know you’re mad, I get it. But you have to trust me. If I’m lying I’ll go away and you never have to speak to me again. I’ll leave Ashland. That’s a promise. You never have to speak to me or look at me again. But please, please for the love of God just trust me this once.”

  She brushes at her eyes with her fingers and sighs. “Where?”

  “Help me up. I’ll take you there.”

  Rovers

  FIFTEEN

  Dressler found the drug store just fine using the woman’s directions. There were no signs of activity in Soquili at all, no rovers, no random survivors that he could see. They must be all holed up. Peterson’s Pharmacy was deserted, no indication of any kind of trap inside or out. True to the woman’s word, the interior appeared as though it hadn’t been hit by scavengers much. Most of the supplies that were lifted from the pharmacy appeared to be the narcotics.

  He shucks his pack from his shoulder and transfers it to the counter, clenching his small flashlight between his teeth so he can work with both hands. He starts loading it with everything he can find that ends with -cillin.There’s plenty to work with, Jane Landry will be glad to see it. He only hopes they can intercept any infection in time to save Shenk. The urgency encourages him to hurry. He finishes with the pharmaceuticals and decides to sweep the building for other things they can use like bandages and alcohol, water, food, batteries. Scented candles. He’ll fit as much as he can into his pack and tell Ed the location so he and his team can come secure the rest next week. He zips the pack and snatches it off the counter, then starts stuffing a wayward roll of toilet paper into his cargo pocket. He finishing ransacking the shelves of one display and wheels to attend to another one. As he turns, his light finds the barrel of a pistol on the other side of the room. A gloved hand holds it steady and a raspy voice from behind a giant fox mask tells him to drop the pack and put his hands out to the side where they can all see them clearly.

  Fuck.

  They. More than one. He hadn’t heard them come in over the noise of his frantic collecting. What pisses him off most is that he knows better. Being alone in enemy territory, he should have exercised greater precaution. This is why having a solid team behind you is so important. Everyone watches each other’s back.

  He needs to assess the situation before things turn even more sour. He should have trusted his instincts. Those two at the truck stop had to be plants, leading him here to these others. Christ, he’d even considered believing them that the rovers had moved on to some other place for the time being. Yet he also had to risk it, he had no choice. No time to think about every mistake that led to this point. He can do that later, if there is a later. What to do? He knows the best way to survive an ambush is to fight through it, to attack it with intensity, but this is a different kind of scenario altogether. He’s about a minute away from becoming a hostage or ceasing to exist. His greatest weapon now is his mind, but he won’t rule out the possibility of combat just yet. His enemy is likely untrained, so he’ll have a slight edge.

  But still. Even if he dropped the pack he wouldn’t have time to draw down on them before one of them fired, not unless he dove for cover. That could buy him time to pick them off. He counts seven of them in view: fox, bear, wolf, monkey, chicken, goat, pig. All in animal masks like the two at the Pilot truck stop had mentioned, but there could be even more outside. He’d have to choose his shots carefully to ensure he had the ammo to put them on the run, which is when he’d disengage and try to evade. They probably have his SUV, so he would need to go on foot back to Ashland unless he can secure another vehicle somewhere. All these thoughts smash together in two or three seconds. He can’t risk getting captured, that’s a sure dance with a terrifying death. He’ll have to go down swinging.

  He dives sideways and tears the pistol from the holster, firing a round into the fox. A hole erupts in the orange and white mask and a mass of brains and blood and skull jump out the other side. The monkey screams with a woman’s voice and the chicken mask issues a booming fuck. Dressler slams to the floor behind the counter before anyone else can get a shot off.

  “Go! Now!” the chicken commands.

  The bear vaults the counter and Dressler fires again, the bullet punching a hold into the wood of the counter edge. The wolf jumps the counter on the other side as the bear’s boot connects with Dressler’s gun hand, causing him to lose his aim. He rolls to the side to get to a crouch so he has more mobility as the wolf slips a sack over his head and reels him backward to the floor. He reaches back with a sharp elbow and feels the crunch of cartilage. He tries to aim where one of them might be, with only sound to go by, and he fires wildly when his whole body seizes and he slams to the tile in a fit of wild jerks. His finger still squeezing the trigger, all his muscles activated at once, he can’t get another shot off.

  Someone hit him with a taser. He’d been tased before, in training, and he tries to fight through it but this one doesn’t let up. The pulses are coming too fast for him to recover. There is only pain and fear. He jerks until the barbs stop pumping voltage into his muscles. He kicks a leg out trying to find a target, prepares his mind to fight now that the taser is off, but something smashes into his head and everything goes dark.

  ***

  He regains consciousness to the total darkness of the sack. His head is a wall of pain and he has trouble wra
ngling his thoughts together. Right now his mind is his only weapon, and it’s damaged. He tries to focus. He needs to gather as many details as possible. He fights for every scrap of clarity. It would be too easy to panic, because he would be an idiot to think his situation wasn’t dire. He’s hogtied. In a moving vehicle. No one is talking. No idea how many there are now. If he can’t manage to worm free, he is at their mercy. The rovers. The ones who take people. Only one fate in store plays itself in his mind like a skipping record. They are going to eat him. This is how they survive.

  And no one will come for him. That’s the agreement. No rescue parties. He will fail to return to Ashland, the others will assume the worst and move on with their lives. His only option is to emancipate himself somehow.

  The bindings are tight, though, so tight that he is beginning to lose circulation. His fingers are starting to go numb. He needs to wriggle, to loosen the bindings, try and undo some of the knots. He’ll do this for as long as it takes. He sets to work on this task, trying to be discreet. He remembers going through the resistance portion of his training, when they learned what to do if you get captured. The evasion, capture, the interrogation. It was designed to give them a taste of how it happens in the real world. It was designed to help them survive. He had been scared, disoriented, tired, hungry. But then, no matter what, there was always the knowledge that it wasn’t real. That it was a simulation. As valuable as the training was, he finds it doesn’t compare to the real thing, psychologically. Even so, he knows he must escape at all costs.

  The vehicle lurches to a stop. He continues working at the lashes, only much quieter now. He has no way of knowing which direction they took him, since he got knocked out. While he’s been awake, though, they haven’t made any turns, so he had to deduce they are now stopped on a highway.

  “What’s going on?” one of them up front whispers from the passenger seat.

  “I don’t know.”

  At least two people in this vehicle with him and they don’t know why they’re stopped. It must mean they are following another vehicle, maybe in a convoy. If they were in the lead vehicle, they’d be less perplexed.

  Dressler’s hope returns briefly. They haven’t reached their destination. He still has time, though there’s no telling how much. If he gets loose he’ll have to put at least two land features between himself and these people. It’s something he learned in SERE training. Two major land features at least if you’re to have any chance of evading. He can figure out where he’s at later. And of course there’s still the matter of his original objective—Dan Shenk still needs antibiotics. It would be best for everyone if he can secure his backpack before making his escape.

  Someone taps on the driver’s window and the driver cranks it down. And older vehicle. Probably a van of some kind. A cargo van like the one they use sometimes on runs.

  “What’s going on?” They’re talking low still. Dressler can barely hear what they’re saying. He can feel the cool air coming in through the open driver’s side window. It must be nighttime still. He couldn’t have been knocked out for long.

  “Open up. We found two more.”

  “In the truck stop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d we miss them before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  What Others Cannot

  SIXTEEN

  It is a small piece of fortune that Jane Landry still isn’t home when Dan and Amy arrive. The whole way Dan had to reassure her that she needed to trust him, that everything would be revealed soon enough.

  “What are we doing here?” Of course, now she’s suspicious of Dan’s motives. Does he know about her and Ed? What’s he trying to pull here?

  “Come on. This way.”

  “I’m confused. You said you saw Caden. What are we doing here? You better start talking.”

  “Just trust me, all right? I told you already, you’re gonna want to see this.” He ushers her through the house to the smashed door in the kitchen, the three padlocks on the linoleum among splinters and chunks of old wood.

  “What’s going on? What is all this?” The stairs disappear into a mouth of blackness. She covers her nose from the aroma lifting up out of the abyss. She coughs.

  He shushes her, leads her down the stairs using the wall and handrail for support. When they clear the stairwell and see the cage, her breath disappears, but not from the augmented stench.

  “Oh my God.” She doubles over and coughs again, now noticing how potent the air is down here. She spits, trying not to retch, then looks toward the cage, which had ignited with the twitcher’s thrashing when they burst into view. It reaches both gnarled arms through, grabbing at the air. Frustrated groans and whines bubble up from its throat as it wrestles with the bars. It tries to bite at the metal with a mouthful of slavering teeth. Dan has to raise his voice over the cacophony of the beast’s vocalizations and the metal pounding and scraping against concrete.

  “I told you.”

  “You said it was him. How do you know?”

  He shines the light on the portrait, last year’s fifth grade photo interred behind a film of dust. She inches forward into the room closer to the cage. Her movements are hesitant, restrained. She doesn’t know what to think about the creature. She’s afraid, but she doesn’t know if she’s exaggerating the fear.

  Her son’s portrait hangs on the wall near the cage above a crate loaded with half-melted candles. Where did they get a portrait of her son? Did they steal it from his room? She wouldn’t know, she hadn’t gone in there since the morning he disappeared. She shifts her attention to the creature in the cage, commandeering the flashlight from Dan.

  If it’s her son, she can’t tell. The twitcher looks nothing human. Mangy, bristly hair, knobby and distorted features. The soiled shirt it has on vaguely resembles something Caden used to wear. Neither the portrait nor the shirt are convincing. She’d spent so long wishing she knew what happened to her little boy that now, seeing the thing in this cage, she finds herself wishing it’s not him after all. One thing, though, erases all hope of that being the case. The light catches on the crucifix around the twitcher’s neck, held in place by thick hair. A tiny C.R. etched into the crossbar.

  She stares at the cross, thinking how she had told Caden it would help him to have it. She had almost convinced herself at the time that it could be so, that the damned crucifix might actually heal him. When you’re desperate, you seek hope from any source. She almost feels ashamed for trying to bullshit herself so blatantly. Seeing the thing in front of her now, after these months, what Caden had become. Locked in the basement of the Landry house.

  “What do you think they have him here for?”

  She either can’t hear him over the flailing of the creature or she doesn’t care to respond. She just stands there staring at it.

  “Oh, Ed.” She says it to herself, but Dan barely hears it and everything he observed earlier outside her house comes flooding back. He tries to piece together what she might be thinking. At this point he doesn’t really care if she will thank him later. When the Landrys find out Amy knows they’ve been keeping her son caged up down here, it’ll be all the vindication he needs. Everything will all come out in the wash.

  Amy tries to get her breathing under control. Her thoughts are like a runaway tractor trailer. A noose of panic closes around her throat and she feels she’s about to entirely lose what little composure she has. She takes a deep breath, nearly choking from the stench. She lifts a hand to cover her nose and coughs several times into her sleeve.

  “So it’s him, yeah?” Dan points at the twitcher, the tattered remnants of fabric on the torso, still intact for the most part. “Is that his shirt?”

  Amy shrugs. “It’s him.”

  “I told you you could trust me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t believe it. I still don’t want to.”

  Now that he
had shown her, he doesn’t know what to do. At least now the Landrys won’t have a chance to get rid of it before he and Amy can rat them out to the others. Amy will probably want an explanation, and waiting around with her to get one doesn’t seem like a bad idea. He wants to know, too, why they have Caden in a cage in their basement.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my house?”

  They whirl and see Jane Landry planted behind them in the stairwell, confused, raging. Her fists are clenched at her sides.

  “Answer me!”

  She says it so hard she sprays a mist of spit everywhere. They nearly receive the wet shrapnel even from several feet away.

  Dan takes a step back now, not needing to be involved anymore at this point. He merely wants to observe. He leans against a pillar for support, barely able to stay on his feet. He’s sweating even though it’s freezing in here. He coughs, suddenly wishing they could light all these candles.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” Amy replies. “Why do you have my...my son...in a damn cage? In your house?”

  Jane shakes her head. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  Jane takes a breath and leers back and forth between them from halfway up the stairs. What used to be Caden is still clawing at the bars, which are now mostly slicked over with drool. Its frenzy had let up considerably, but the occasional whine still adds a ragged edge to the conversation.

  “All the children,” Jane says. “All of them, that we know of. Were there any who escaped the horrors? Who can say. We only know what we know. All the children. Not some. All. They were innocent. What happened to them was cruel. Unfortunate.” She moves down one step closer on the stairs, holding onto the rail. “We couldn’t let them just perish.”

  “Who is we? You mean there are others besides Caden?”