We are met by a man who wears the same inmate outfit as me, though streaked with mud and dark, dried greyskin blood. The man is shorter than me, thinner than me, but the muscles he does have are pronounced.
“This is Justin,” the guard on my right says. “He will be your crew leader.”
Justin nods at me, his eyes studying my bruises. “You sure he’s ready to be out here?”
“Boss says so,” the guard answers.
Justin sighs loudly and murmurs something to himself that I can’t hear.
“From what I understand, the twins did this to you?”
“Word gets around quickly here, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah it does,” Justin says. “Especially when you’re in charge of the twins.”
I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. “They’re on your crew?”
Justin shakes his head. “I’m Crew A. Booker is in charge of Crew B. The twins are on Crew B, but we often have to work with them.” He looks at both guards. “I don’t want to have to deal with conflicts all day. We already have to deal with greyskins. I can’t worry about inmates fighting inmates.”
A guard shrugs. “This comes from Davis. Nothing I can do.”
Justin clenches his jaw and breathes deeply again. It’s apparent that he has a position that affords him some respect from the guards. At least, enough respect to be able to question their orders, though not enough to override what they say.
A guard releases me from the chains, and the two of them walk away quickly, leaving me with Justin.
He looks me up and down again. “They really did a number on you,” he says. “They did that yesterday? How are you walking right now?”
With a lot of concentration.
Justin holds out his arms gesturing to the open field behind him. “Welcome to the worst job in the camp,” he says. “Hope you’ve got no delusions of making it out of here alive because chances are you won’t make it through the day, much less a week or a month. The average new worker makes it about a day and a half.”
I wish he was just making a joke, but the look on his face tells me otherwise. He turns slowly and stomps in the opposite direction as he beckons me to follow him.
“The job is pretty simple,” he says. “Truck comes in full of greyskins, unloads them into the holding bay, then we let them go into the field.” He points to a fenced in area beyond the loading dock. “From there, we determine which ones meet certain criteria. The ones that don't, we decommission and load onto a second truck, which is then taken to another field.”
“By decommission you mean kill, right?”
Justin shrugs. “We do what we can, but we see so many coming through it would be impossible to kill them all with the tools we have.” He shakes his head. “It's our job to weed out greyskins, and all we get are blunt weapons. No guns, obviously. No knives or long blades.” He looks at me over his shoulder. “You can see why it's so dangerous.” He waves for me to walk next to him. “We’re separating a bunch of healthy skins in the field right now.”
“Healthy?” I ask, lifting an eyebrow.
“Not already hacked to pieces or half rotten,” he says. “I guess fresher works too. The more recent they’ve been infected, the better.”
The thought is sickening.
I decide not to tell him that I would know better than anyone on how to look for a fresh greyskin. How many of them had been locked in my basement over the years as I performed tests on them? Never more than two at once, of course, but after a certain amount of testing, they were useless to me. This job wouldn’t be my first time to decommission greyskins.
However, when we get to the fence, my face drains of blood and I want to run away to a dark hole and hide. There has to be a hundred of them or more.
To the right, three trucks have dropped their ramps, and the greyskins are piling out. To the left, some twenty or so men hold them off with long wooden poles, each with a curved end to catch a greyskin at the neck. Next to each person with a pole is someone with a set of chains meant to subdue a greyskin.
In the middle of everything, however, is a group of about seven small pigs, fat but not too fat to run. Each of them squeals and sprints in a random direction. The ruckus of the pigs keeps the greyskin’s attention off the mostly silent men who mean to capture the healthy greyskins.
In one area, three men wrestle a greyskin to the ground. One man holds it down while another carefully chains its wrists behind its back. The last man fastens a chain around the greyskin’s head, sliding a metal bit into its mouth like a horse. Once the greyskin is secured, the three men let it go and it stumbles around the compound fighting as hard as it can to be released from its bonds. Now I can see that there are quite a few greyskins bound like this, unable to claw or bite a victim.
“The hard part is getting the chains on them,” Justin says. “Taking them off for their going away party is easy.”
“Won’t they attack once their chains are off?” I ask.
“Not if they’ve got something more interesting to go after,” he says, nodding toward the pigs.
Given what I know about this place and what I’ve heard, I have an idea about what Justin means when he says going away party. I am now part of the government’s operation of control. Where they get these new greyskins, I have no idea. I’m actually afraid to know the answer to that question. Where they go, I don’t know specifically, but I understand the premise. I understand that the leadership sets them loose on small villages and towns. Those townspeople think the attacks are random, but they aren’t. They wonder why they keep getting attacked and attacked. We must be in a hot zone, they’ll think. But it’s not the truth. The truth is, they are in the hot zone because greyskins were sent there. Because that town or village has resources that the government wants.
If the government takes the town by force, people will start an uprising. If the people go to the government and willingly hand over everything in exchange for protection, then the government has them in its grip forever.
Oh, if people outside the Containment Zone only knew about this operation! If they could see what was happening. Soon, there would be no government to fight, because the people would burn Screven to the ground.
I fear it will take too much time for that to happen. If the Screven government has a program set up like this, then it might already be too late. They are already too powerful to stop. The best we can do is escape. Escape and never look back.
As I watch the workers fight the fresh greyskins to the ground and realize that I will be down there to join them in a matter of minutes, I can’t help but think about Sky.
My thoughts are almost always on Sky. I pray she isn’t assigned to a job that involves greyskins. We are all here to eventually die, but surely someone has some compassion for a small girl and will give her a job washing dishes or even digging in a mine somewhere. Anything so long as she doesn’t have to be a part of something like this.
I look behind me toward the north part of the camp as though I would somehow be able to see my daughter walking in the distance. I would hope for a smile, something to let me know she was still all right.
I don’t even know if she’s still alive.
CHAPTER NINE
Skylar
WHEN I FOUND out from my cell block leader, Marta, that I would be working alongside Nine in disposal, I was both relieved and terrified at the same time. Relieved because I wouldn’t have to go to my new job alone. Terrified because the last thing I wanted was to work around greyskins.
Nine recognized my fear and tried to soothe me by telling me that most of them were already dead and couldn’t hurt me. The job may be gross but, it is less dangerous than a lot of jobs throughout the prison camp.
“The sorting crew is really good at making sure the greyskins are dead before they get to us,” Nine told me. “Our job may be disgusting, but we don’t lose someone every day.”
Every day? I was supposed to be comforted after she tacked on the words
every day? That means sometimes someone was killed in the disposal job. I knew I needed to get ahold of myself. I was never allowed to go into Papa’s basement, but that didn’t mean I had never seen a greyskin. I knew what they were. I knew what they could do. I also knew that if they were older and rotting they were less dangerous than those that were fresher—with their strength and speed intact.
Papa had warned me against being around fresh greyskins.
“But,” he would always say, “greyskins are always at a disadvantage because they can’t use their minds like you can. You have to outsmart them, which isn’t hard to do. When you see one, think first. Then act. Greyskins react. People calculate.”
Papa was always calculating. I was sure he’d been calculating every square inch of this camp ever since we got here. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had already devised a way for us to escape, but hadn’t had the chance to come get me yet.
I don’t really know why, but for a moment I had thought that maybe getting to the field where I would work in my disposal job would help my anxiety. It didn’t. Instead, getting here made it worse.
The scene in front of us couldn’t have even been from my worst nightmare. There was nothing in my imagination that could have thought up the sight before us. The entire field was covered in corpses. Corpses of people who had already died once—those who had been taken by the greyskin virus—and then killed again.
The bodies lay in heaps, some of them missing limbs, others so decomposed they were little more than a pile of black mush on the ground. And the smell… The smell made me want to vomit.
Nine and I were a little late since she had taken me to Marta after breakfast. (Though I would hardly call a moldy piece of bread dipped in thin gravy a breakfast.)
There was already smoke in the distance from fires that burned the corpses. I couldn’t imagine being the one who had to work the fires, considering the heat of the relentless burning sun above us. I already felt like I was in an oven.
When Nine followed my gaze, she explained that the fires were outside the prison gates.
“We all get a chance to work the fire,” she said. “We work on rotation.” Her stare lingered on me after she said the words as if I was supposed to capture some hidden meaning.
Of course, hearing that I would be going outside the prison gates for my job made my ears perk up, but I already knew I would be guarded, and I wouldn’t leave here without Papa, so it didn’t matter much to me. Still, if I ever got the chance to talk to Papa, I would need to tell him about it. Me getting outside the gates might help somehow.
We were given sharp wooden sticks, or spears, by the guards who liked to keep their hands resting near the triggers of their rifles. With guards in the watchtowers, near the fences and in various posts throughout the compound, I couldn’t imagine they would be worried about a handful of half-starved women with pointy sticks. Or perhaps it was the greyskins they feared.
Training for my new job consisted of Nine telling me to be careful when helping her pick up a body. “If you get near it and it doesn’t move, we’re good to load it onto the cart,” she said. “If it moves or if you so much as think it twitches, stab it through the head.”
The entire morning I felt like I was on the verge of throwing up. We were given no gloves—no protection at all but for the sharp sticks. The corpses were slimy as we picked them up one-by-one to load them onto our cart. Often a limb would fall off, or my hands would simply slide right through a liquefied body. In such cases, Nine and I would simply smear as much of the rotten corpse into the ground with our shoes and pick up the bones we could find and load them onto the cart.
Hours have gone by and now I’m waiting next to Nine, the two of us on either side of the cart. There are three carts ahead of us because only one can be taken outside of the fences at a time.
My arms are colored black up to my shoulders, my legs are covered up to my thighs. Nine has managed to get by with far less gore on her. I guess she has a better technique than I do.
I look all around me, exhaustion taking over, the feeling of being beaten already starting to set in. I can’t imagine this life for years on end. Perhaps all the people who die here aren’t killed by the guards or Warden Black. Maybe we all just reach a point where we can’t take it anymore, and we wish we could die. So, somehow we all end up committing suicide.
If you’re not trying to escape, you’re suicidal.
There aren’t enough carts for us to leave this one behind and start making more piles. Besides, the guards don’t seem picky. They know standing in a line offers us some rest. However, standing around when not in line, or going in line with a less-than-full cart, is a no-no.
The slime on my legs and arms scares me a little. Nine watches me trying to wipe it away, then offers a suggestion.
“Your safest bet is to keep it off your clothes,” she says. “There’s a chance to wash down before lunch and before we’re taken to our cells.”
“Can the slime get into my bloodstream? Am I in danger?”
“I haven’t seen anyone die from getting slime into their bloodstream,” she answers. “I wouldn’t be careless, however. The biggest danger you need to watch for is something that moves.”
She has already told me this today, but I am thankful for the extra warning. The idea of there being a live greyskin out here makes me shake. I cannot even comprehend that there are fresh roaming greyskins in another section of the camp at this moment. I cannot understand a place like Concord where people are caught and made to become greyskins. Were all those people criminals? Am I? All I ever tried to do was leave. Was that so wrong?
Nine doesn’t seem like a criminal. Katherine and Janet don’t look like criminals. Papa isn’t. So far, anyone I know here probably isn’t. That means whoever is in charge of places like these is evil. They have to be.
Warden Black had said we were all here to die. And the way he talked so coldly about it made me shiver.
And here we are scooping up the sloppy remains of old greyskins that may or may not be dead.
The two women in front of us are next in line to dump out their cart. Apparently, Natasha, Janet’s cellmate, is the one in charge of taking the greyskins to the burn pile outside the camp. Nine had already warned me ahead of time not to give her eye contact if I could help it, and to step away from the cart in hopes that Natasha didn’t see me. Nine didn’t say as much, but I know it’s because I’m just a kid. Natasha will see me as weak and probably try to make my life harder.
Nine sighs and looks down at her feet, the sun beating down on us like a million-degree spotlight. I look in her direction and notice something strange in her expression. At first, she’s just looking at the ground, waiting, but then her eyes widen as though someone just told her the worst news.
Her head jerks upward in my direction, and she clenches her jaw, almost as if she’s debating in her mind whether to tell me something.
“What?” I ask.
Her lips part and her head shakes ever so slightly. “I just…” She shakes her head harder this time.
“Is it the heat?” I ask.
“No,” she says.
I can see in her chest that she’s breathing harder. Sweat trickles down her face, though I doubt that’s from her onset anxiety.
“Something is happening that I can’t really explain to you right now.” She says this barely above a whisper, maybe to herself.
“What is it?” I ask.
In a split second, Nine jumps at me, grabs me by the shoulders, and shoves me to the ground away from the cart. Anger and confusion scream through my head when I slide through the mud and muck. I’m about to yell at her, demand that she tell me why she shoved me so hard, but a movement to my right distracts me.
Three greyskin bodies slide off the cart in front of us, and a live greyskin reaches out to the spot where I had stood. Its black and yellow teeth chomp, its claws raking the air. The two women at the cart grab their sharp spears, but the greyskin lunges at t
he woman on the right. Its fingers catch the edge of her shoulders and the greyskin clasps as tightly as possible.
Nine and the other woman at the cart stab at the greyskin furiously, aiming for its head and missing several times before Nine finally shoves her spear through the creature’s eye and out the back of its head.
For a few seconds, there seems to be chaos in the line of carts behind us, but a sudden hush falls over the crowd as the woman at the front of the line checks her shoulder.
My eyes travel to Nine who pulls the stake out of the greyskin’s head and steps back toward our own cart. She has saved my life. She threw me out of the way as if she’d known what was about to happen.
Her eyes avoid mine, but it doesn’t matter because I’m drawn to the woman ahead of us. Her disposal partner examines the shoulder closely, her face formed into a tight grimace that can only mean bad news.
Tears stream down the injured woman’s face. Had the greyskin’s claws broken the skin? I don’t see any blood, though that doesn’t mean anything necessarily. I’d heard of small cuts caused by a greyskin turning into the full-blown virus.
I get to my feet and try to wipe off the mud, but there is no use. I stand closer to our cart, but not before giving it a good once-over.
More movement at the front of the line. This time it’s Natasha and her disposal partner coming in from the fires. Natasha looms large over the other woman. I had seen her from a distance this morning, but seeing her up close… The woman is a giant. She probably stands a foot taller than Nine. She’s gaunt and thin from lack of nutrition like the rest of the women here, but she somehow has more muscle mass than the rest of them.
She terrifies me.
“What’s going on?” Natasha yells with a deep voice as she storms to the front of the line, her wooden spear in her hand.
The woman on the left points to her partner’s shoulder. “It came up out of the pile,” she says, her lips quivering. “We had no idea.”
Natasha’s eyes widen and her cheeks burn red. “Do you not realize that it’s me who has to face off with these things if you’re not making sure they’re dead? You see this?”
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