Beyond the Gates

by Jason D. Morrow

  She grabs the injured woman by the arm and hoists it into the air. The woman screams in pain under Natasha’s grip.

  “Do you all see this? This is what happens when you don’t make sure the skins are dead before loading them. And if it doesn’t happen to you, it happens to someone else who has to haul the load.”

  With that, she shoves the injured woman to the ground. The woman tries to get up, but Natasha slaps the blunt end of the spear against the side of her head. She then flips the pole, sharp end staring down the woman on the ground. Natasha hesitates for a moment, then thrusts.

  What little food I had in me spills out onto the ground. Guards from every corner of the compound come charging to the scene. When I can no longer heave, I look up, vomit and drool covering my chin. The woman is dead, a gaping wound in her head—assurance that she won’t turn into a greyskin. It was her inevitable end, but she should have been given more time. She barely got to process what had happened before Natasha rammed a pole through her skull.

  The guards are livid, but somehow Natasha is able to talk her way out of it. The woman had been scratched. The guards would have shot her anyway.

  “I saved you a bullet,” Natasha argues to one of the guards.

  They instruct Natasha and her partner to load the dead woman onto her own cart, then tell the rest of us to get back to work. No sad faces. Nothing to show that something like this is unusual. Just another day.

  I try to look at Nine, but she won't look at me. Somehow, she knew something. She saved my life. That greyskin would have ripped into me if it had not been for her.

  Neither of us says a word to each other for the rest of the day. In fact, the whole camp seems quiet. Just another reminder of what we have all come here to do: die.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Skylar

  THREE YEARS AGO

  Mama looked at me as she set two rabbits on the counter. Their fur was shiny and silver with a little cotton ball on their bottoms. Their ears stuck straight out, and it seemed they had lived good lives eating some of the plants in the woods near our home.

  “They are cute,” I said.

  With raised eyebrows she answered, “Better than that, they are tasty.”

  “Are you making a soup?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Potatoes. Carrots. Celery. It should be pretty good this time.”

  I felt excited by the idea of a fresh stew. Lately, we had to make do with just veggies because we hadn’t caught anything in the traps. Well, we hadn’t caught any food. This morning, Papa had found a new greyskin, though with a much bigger trap. The noise had woken me. Then I listened to Mama and Papa fighting about it.

  “Why do you have to bring those things to the house?” she had demanded. “Why can’t we build a different building for you to do all that?”

  “I plan on it, Sarah, but right now I think I’m on the brink of something big.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  Papa had been downstairs in the basement ever since.

  “Oh, shoot,” Mama said. “I need to go dig up some potatoes. I thought we had more in here. You’ll cut up the celery?”

  I smiled and nodded. She leaned down and kissed my hair before walking outside.

  My eyes lingered on the door in the main room, then they traveled to the entrance to the basement on the other side. It was cracked slightly open, something that almost never happened. Papa was always sure to leave the door locked.

  I was forbidden to ever go into the basement. That was where Papa did his experiments on the fresh greyskins. Always looking for the cure.

  Of course, having the curious mind that I did, whenever I was told I couldn’t go somewhere, I only wanted to be there all the more.

  Papa had the greyskin locked away. It was safe. I had always wanted to see a greyskin up close without it having the ability to sink its teeth into me.

  I looked out the window and watched as Mama got on her hands and knees in the garden, digging around for big potatoes. I had lived in this house for most of my life, and I had never been into the basement. The only greyskin I had ever seen was from a distance.

  I was always taught that having a curious mind was good—that discovery was to be encouraged.

  “But not at the expense of safety,” Papa said.

  I often wondered if him bringing greyskins into the house was giving in to curiosity at the expense of safety. I never doubted that Papa knew what he was doing, but Mama sure didn’t like it.

  For the moment, I ignored the celery. My bare toes were quiet against the wood floors, and I set my fingers on the cold doorknob and pulled slowly. The stairs down to the basement were dark, but there was a light on below. I could hear the greyskin moving, growling, clawing at whatever Papa had used to keep it caged.

  Each step I took was careful, and I hoped the wood wouldn’t creak on the way down. When Papa came into view, he had his back to me working on something at a bench along the wall.

  The greyskin stood behind a glass door, its eyes fixed on Papa’a back. The glass box must have been strong because Papa didn’t even flinch at the noises the creature made.

  Its eyes were black and dripping with snot. Its teeth were rotted and bit at him over and over. I had never seen one of these things up close. To think that it used to be human—a person with thoughts and feelings…

  That could be me, I thought. That could be any of us.

  Mama had always told me that it was essential to think of the greyskins as creatures or monsters. They were not people. Maybe they used to be, but not anymore.

  “Killing one of those things would be like killing a bear that was trying to eat you,” she had told me. “It’s not something you think about. You just do it and move on.”

  But I always wondered what life the person lived before they became a greyskin. The one in the basement used to be a man. It was hard to tell if he was young or old. He was tall, and there were large gashes in his shoulder where he’d been scratched. They were the wounds that brought him here. But what if this was the greyskin Papa would use to discover the cure? That man never knew that his scratches would help save the world.

  Papa always thought he was close to discovering the cure. Maybe he was, but he never got past close.

  “What are you doing?”

  Mama’s voice made me freeze, and I saw Papa look up at me, his eyes wide.

  “Sky?”

  I looked up at Mama, her hands full dirty potatoes.

  “You aren’t supposed to be down there!” she screamed. She dropped the potatoes to the floor and ran down the stairs and grabbed my arm, yanking me upward.

  In a flash, we were in the main room. Her hands shook as she knelt in front of me. “Sweetheart, what were you doing? We've told you never ever go down there!”

  She pulled me in close and wrapped her arms around me, squeezing me tight. Tears pooled in my eyes, but I wasn’t sure why. I felt embarrassed. Guilty.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m sorry. I just…”

  Papa came through the basement doorway, and Mama held me out at arm’s length. He looked like he was about to say something to me until he saw tears falling down my face. He and Mama looked at each other, words passing between them in silence.

  Papa looked down at the ground, thinking about something, then nodded slowly. He looked at me, disappointed. Then he went back to the basement steps, closed the door behind him, then locked it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Liam

  DAYS GO BY slowly here. If I weren’t trying to be so meticulous with a plan of escape, I may have lost track of time. A week could have been a month. A month, three months. It feels like I’ve been here that long. I feel like I haven’t seen Sky in two years.

  It’s been three days.

  None of the meals have been quite as eventful as my first one here. There is something about Rusty that seems to provide a certain protection. I didn’t realize my fortune until yesterday at lunch. Rusty and I sat down at a table alone. No one bother
ed us. No one tried to sit with us. That is, until Carver and his twin, Alex, plopped down next to us on the bench seats, letting their trays clank loudly against the table.

  Fear snagged ahold of my throat at the sight of them and I half expected a brawl to take place, but Rusty seemed in control of the situation.

  “You’ve landed yourself a pretty good cellmate,” Carver said to Rusty.

  Carver didn’t look at me even though he sat less than a foot to my side, but Alex stared into my eyes almost like he was lost in thought.

  “He doesn’t put up much of a fight,” Carver continued. “He’s got a mouth on him. He’s weak. He doesn’t know where he can and can’t sit.”

  “He knows where he can sit,” Rusty said. “He can sit with me.”

  Alex’s eyes on me felt like someone had set a mattress over top of me. Despite the strength and defiance I wanted to portray, I found myself looking down into my bowl as if the twins weren’t even there.

  “He works in sorting like Alex and me.”

  Rusty sighed. “What do you want?”

  “Permission.”

  “Permission for what?”

  “To mess up your boy.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve done enough of that,” Rusty said nodding toward me. “Those bruises aren’t going away anytime soon.”

  For the first time since they sat down, Carver looked in my direction. “I obviously didn’t do the job I intended.”

  “Let me just say this: you lay a finger on my friend, Liam, here and I’ll make sure someone makes you digest your own toes. Am I clear?” Rusty held the spoon in his hands like it were a knife.

  Carver and Alex were both looking at me like they wanted to eat me for lunch, but I only got a glance at them. I felt like a coward, a small child hiding behind his father’s coat. I wasn’t afraid of what the two of them could do to me. Pain meant nothing to me anymore. I just didn’t want to be a target. I had done nothing to them. I certainly didn’t deserve their attention.

  “You two get out of here, you smell worse than the greyskins,” Rusty said.

  The twins obeyed, but not without staring me down. As they left the table, I met their eyes like I had been the one to win the fight. But I had nothing to do with it. Somehow, these men respected Rusty. For some reason, everyone around here did. Our table was empty because of Rusty. Perhaps he hadn’t given anyone permission to sit near him and to be at his table was a badge of honor given to me by random chance of being his cellmate.

  “Those two are nothing but trouble,” Rusty said. “But you know that already, don’t you.” He pointed at my face when he said this.

  “Why is no one sitting with us?” I asked.

  “Because I don’t want them to right now.”

  “Are you more dangerous than I know? Should I be worried?”

  “You’re in a death camp. You should always be worried.” Rusty scratched at his nose. “As for me?” He leaned in close and whispered. “Sometimes people just have to believe you’re something you’re not. That’s all power is anyway.” He pulled away from me and dipped his bread into his soup, sopping up the broth. “We’re all just lost souls stuck in a bag of bones and skin. Just trying to make it to the end.”

  An ambiguous term, “the end” means different things for different people. I think for Rusty, it’s the day he steps foot outside of this prison.

  For me, it’s the day I step outside the Containment Zone, hand-in-hand with Sky.

  It’s been two weeks and I’m not any closer to escaping this place than I was when I first walked through the gates. My nights are sleepless, despite the exhaustion from working in the fields. Somehow I’ve managed to stay alive even though I have watched as two fellow inmates were ripped to pieces by a group of greyskins. I have learned that sometimes the scrambling pigs aren’t enough to keep the greyskins distracted.

  It’s not my thoughts of escape that keep me awake, however. It has been two weeks since I’ve seen Sky. I’ve looked for her at meals, but haven’t seen her. I haven’t had the guts to look too hard because I don’t want the guards or any of the inmates to get suspicious, particularly Rusty.

  The man has some influence here. I don’t know how he earned it or if he’s even dangerous, but if he is, I don’t want him to have any leverage over me. That’s the danger of anyone finding out about Sky. Even more, I would hate for the twins to learn about her. So, I keep my head down, and I don’t talk to anyone but Rusty. Even then I keep things superficial.

  I have found the older man to be more of an ally than I could have hoped for. I’m starting to think the guard had told me negative things about the man just to get in my head on my first day, but Rusty has been nothing but an asset to me. Apart from the twins leaving me alone at meals, he talks about the various ways he’s tried to escape in the past, but leaves out many essential details. Wouldn’t want me to know too much in case I’m a rat, I’m sure.

  So far, I haven’t had to deal with the twins at work since our groups haven’t merged for any reason yet. Still, when they pass by me, they are sure to give me looks that scream we’re going to gut you. It’s only a matter of time.

  Whenever I try to talk to Rusty about his current plan of escape and even offer to tell him some of the sure-to-fail plans that pop into my head, he gets quiet and acts like I’m not talking to him. He will only talk about escape when he wants to. He doesn’t trust me, and I don’t expect him to.

  One day, over a meal of broth (they had run out of bread when Rusty and I had reached the serving bar), I asked Rusty why he stayed quiet when I asked him about his plans.

  “Trust,” he said.

  “I get that,” I answered. “But there has to be a point where we can work together, right? Our chances of figuring out an escape plan are a lot higher than if you go it alone.”

  We were able to talk more freely since no one ever sat on our end of the table. Most wanted to avoid me like the plague, considering I had a mark on my back the twins aimed to hit. And no one seemed to want to mess with Rusty. Somehow he’d gotten the reputation as someone who needed his space, and the other prisoners were happy to oblige. I couldn’t imagine he’d done anything too bad since he was still alive. Perhaps the guards don’t care what prisoners do to each other. From what I have gathered, the twins didn’t even get scolded for beating me senseless.

  “My experience tells me that I have to go it alone,” he said. “First, you haven’t offered anything to make me trust you. You’ve told me nothing about yourself.”

  “You’ve told me nothing about yourself either,” I said.

  “I’m not trying to get you to trust me,” he countered.

  I nodded at this and stared off toward the women of the camp. I wished I could see Sky without standing up and searching.

  “I’m afraid there’s not much to tell you,” I said.

  “Here’s the thing,” Rusty said as he cleaned under his fingernails with a spoon. “You’re hiding something. Don’t get me wrong, that’s fine. You’d be crazy not to be hiding something. The only problem is, I don’t know what you’re hiding. Could be that you’re a rat. Could be that you killed a whole host of Screven soldiers. If you’d done that and Warden Black didn’t know about it, you’d be a dead man for sure once he found out. So, I get it. But until I know for sure, I can’t trust you. So, my lips are sealed.”

  I thought about countering with, but you are open about trying to escape. Then I remembered the mantra repeated throughout this desolate camp: If you’re not trying to escape, you’re suicidal. The guards don't care if you're trying to escape. But if they catch you, they will kill you, or at least punish you severely. I hadn’t seen any executions yet, so that’s good.

  When the guards turn on the blazing lights in the corridor announcing the morning with yells of insults and commands for us to stand at attention in our cells, I hear a few of them mention something about newcomers and questioning.

  “What are they talking about?” I whisper to Rusty
as we stand next to our beds.

  He wipes the sleep from his eyes and swears under his breath.

  “Every new person has to be questioned by some higher-ups from Screven,” he says. “It’s usually a man named Holbrook. The man’s a crook. Really close to the leadership there. You know about Jeremiah, right?”

  “Not much,” I say. “I’ve heard the name plenty, but I don’t know anything about him.”

  “Well, you should,” he says. “He’s our leader, like it or not.”

  There’s no time to discuss the fact that I had heard about the man since I was a child, meaning he has to be old by now. It’s possible he’s not too old to still be in power, but I was shown a picture of him when I was a child, and he didn’t look so young then.

  “He’s also the reason we’re here,” Rusty says. “Anyway, the questioning is intense.”

  The guards walk the corridors, calling out numbers of inmates to step out for questioning. I know I will be among those called out. What kills me the most is that Sky will be questioned too, I’m sure.

  “What do you mean, intense?” I ask.

  “Holbrook’s looking for something,” Rusty says. “I’m not exactly sure what, but it’s something. He thinks pain will get it, too.”

  “We’re to be tortured?”

  “I survived. You’ll survive.”

  I bite my tongue when my first reaction is to tell him that I’m not worried about me, particularly since I have a way to deal with pain unlike anyone else. But if Sky is going to feel the same kind of pain, I’m not going to dull it for myself. I refuse to numb myself when my daughter is subjected to the same torture.

  There is no time for further discussion. One of the guards calls out my number and Rusty nods at me with a lifted eyebrow. “Good luck,” he says.

  I don’t like not knowing what’s happening and why. My entire life has revolved around reason and understanding. I don’t have that here at Vulture Hill.