by SLMN
And that’s when Lainey saw the deep ditch, the sharp spikes and heard the dogs.
She staggered to a halt and raised her hands, the breath still hot and rapid in her throat, her mouth dry. She let out an aching whine of defeat that keened and wailed like a snake of sound between her lips.
The airstrip was surrounded by a twelve foot deep concrete-lined ditch.
The floor was dotted, every two feet or so with razor pointed iron spikes at varying angles. Among the spikes were German Shepherds that roamed and snarled. Their muzzles were slick with foam, their eyes dulled by a furious hunger. It was clear to Lainey that the firing over her head and the shouting hadn’t necessarily been to warn her, but to bring the pack of dogs to the area where someone was trying to escape.
If she’d been running at night she would have fallen into the ditch in the darkness, more than likely to be skewered on one of the spikes and then eaten by the starving dogs.
As it was, if she tried now to ease herself down the slope into the pit, the dogs would have been on her in seconds, and her handcuffed wrists would have not been able to put up any defense against the fearsome animals. They jumped and barked at her, eyes fixated on her, with their ears back and foam shaking loosely in huge white gobbets from their muzzles.
“Cute aren’t they? I have them fed once a week. It’s just enough to keep them hungry without eating each other in the meantime. I think that one wants your guts.”
Carla was standing beside Lainey now. She was holding a handkerchief against her forehead where it had bounced off the Jeep. There was blood on her cheek, and some had dripped down onto her cream suit.
“Now do you get it, Lainey?”
There was no fight left. Not one piece of it in Lainey. They’d managed, in just a few hours, to kick it all out of her.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get you to the boat.”
Carla gripped Lainey’s arm, turned her around and walked her back to the Jeep.
Huey’s hand wouldn’t stop shaking.
It had been over a day now and the tremor had not abated. He couldn’t hold a glass to his lips with his right hand without it rattling against his teeth.
Brenda hadn’t stopped screaming until the Doctor had come to sedate her, and even then, she would wake every few hours and her sobs would travel through the house like a ghost in an old castle.
In the end, once he’d gotten a handle on his own panic, Huey had to get out of the house. He walked stiffly down to the white fence of the pasture and stood there as the day fell toward night, shaking with an unaccustomed mix of fear and fury. Those two emotions met in a confluence of red hot anxiety in his guts, then flared behind his eyes, turning his thoughts into jagged shards of shame.
The breeze off the farm was warm and sweet with the tang of hay and grass. In the distance the cattle were eating, their oblivious nature accepting of whatever befell them. Huey could have gotten his shotgun, gone over there and killed ten of them. And the others, spooked for a while, would still come back to him if he held out some sweet grass for them to chew on.
Everybody in his life until now had been like those cattle. Whatever he did, whatever terrible things he had visited upon them, they would still come back and feed from his hand.
Brenda was the prime example. However much he humiliated her, scorned her, punched her or reviled her, she knew exactly where her bread was buttered.
Huey was used to having the drop on everyone, and now in the space of one phone call, every table had been turned.
Huey was cattle now: big and stupid and willing. However much he was beaten or humiliated—and he could sense what was coming—he would always have to return to the place from where his bread was going to be buttered from now on.
Rosa made everything clear to him.
Rosa spelled it out.
She hadn’t even given him time to tell her that he needed to book a visit to the island. She’d cut him dead and told him to shut up.
No one told Huey Ralston to shut up, and that was his first inkling that his world was about to fall apart.
When she told him the rest, he just wanted to die.
Huey knew he was too much of a coward to check out that easily, but even if Huey wasn’t dead, he knew his life was over.
13
Getting out of the dormitory on D-Wing was a more difficult challenge than getting under the wall.
Sliding out of the sleeping quarters unnoticed was in many ways the more critical part of the escape. It relied not on clever strategy, but on the actions of others within the system who ran the island, specifically the guard Parrish.
So it wasn’t a case of D-Wing having a vulnerability that could be exploited. It’s a very rare thing that a building fails. For the human systems within, however, it’s another matter entirely.
Mary-Joy knew that Parrish—who worked the night shift on alternate nights to Schmidt and Karpov—was not only a creature of habit, but one of dark and terrible desires. She had noticed him many months ago, letting himself into the dormitory sometime between three and three thirty a.m.
On the surface, it looked as if he were checking on the girls in their bunks, counting heads and making the rounds. But Parrish—fat, balding, and flabby-faced, with eyes that looked like thumbs had been pressed into old dough and a sheen on his top lip that was always there—had an ulterior motive to be moving stealthily through the rows of bunks, like so many other guards.
Guards on D-Wing did not have the same rights and privileges to break new girls in as those on E-Wing. That was the first point where the system broke down in a way that Mary-Joy might be able to exploit. The girls on D-Wing had been deemed ready to go out to the clients and be used and abused by them and so guard activity was entirely supposed to be just that. Guarding.
Whether Parrish would rather be on E-Wing where his sickening desires could be fed to his heart’s content, or if he enjoyed doing the things he did illicitly and hidden on an island where everything illicit and evil was permitted, Mary-Joy didn’t know. But she had suffered from many nocturnal visits from Parrish—dreading the shift in the mattress when his weight had been lowered onto it, the snake hiss of his breath and the oily squirm of his hands moving beneath the covers.
For Mary-Joy, the relief that Parrish’s attentions had moved on from her to other girls in their bunks after a time was tempered by knowing that someone else was suffering in the same way. That hurt Mary-Joy’s heart, but she knew that to intervene and help the other girl would lead to her being taken to the punishment cells in B-Wing. She had only tasted the horrors of that place once, a year after she’d come to the island and had slapped a guard who had cornered her against a wall as he was reaching out to touch her.
The punishment cells were cubed cages.
Clothing was denied, as were the most basic rations of food and water. Mary-Joy was beaten hourly—visited by the most sadistic clients on the island. These clients were given almost free reign to act out whatever perversions they could imagine. Mary-Joy’s arm had been snapped at the elbow—deliberately and within extremely slow precision. It was only the medical facilities and the ministrations of Doctor Driessen and his team of nurses who saved the movement in it. Mary-Joy’s arm still ached in the rainy season on the island, and when it did, she would be back in the cage in her mind, screaming, though not loudly enough to cover the crackle of a snapping joint.
It was enough to make Mary-Joy stay in her bed when Parrish moved through the dormitory at night, but she didn’t hate herself any less.
The click of the door opening came at 3:15 a.m.
Mary-Joy had not allowed herself to sleep, keeping her mind occupied with images of Benjie and his beautiful face when she had read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to him. Even though she had lived in a shack in a slum and made a living digging with bare hands through the detritus of Davao City, it was still better than this life. It was still more secure, and the thought of it brought a warm nostalgia to Mary-Joy’s thin body even on the coldest nights
in the unheated dormitory.
Mary-Joy heard Parrish’s feet moving across the bare concrete floor. He was trying to move as silently as he could. It seemed his thing was reaching beneath the covers of girls who were either asleep or pretending to be asleep, not daring to say anything. Mary-Joy shuddered to remember those hands moving over her body. Gentle and caressing at first, and then growing ever more insistent and painful.
Parrish moved past Mary-Joy’s bunk. For his last few attempts at twisted nocturnal pleasure, he had concentrated on Judith, two beds down from Mary-Joy.
Judith was barely eighteen, a Jewish girl snatched from a settlement in Gaza two years before. She and Mary-Joy had struck up the nearest thing to a friendship that could happen in captivity. Judith tried to observe the tenets of her faith whenever she could, and would swap out pork or seafood from her plate in exchange for vegetables from Mary-Joy’s. Judith would sleep with her head covered by the sheet to observe a tradition she was denied observing during the day. She was a gentle-minded and kind young woman who Mary-Joy would have felt naturally drawn to in any situation. So when Parrish’s attentions had switched to Judith one night three months ago, Mary-Joy had explained to Judith—because she felt she could trust her—what she had found at the base of the compound wall, and what she intended to do with it.
She’d been honest with Judith from the start, telling her she would not be able to follow Mary-Joy out of the compound. It was only a fifty-fifty chance that Mary-Joy would make it out anyway, but Judith’s larger stature and chunkier frame made her escape from the camp impossible.
They had learned from Macy’s attempted break that any further attempts involving guards, helicopters, and the Enchanted Forest would end in failure. Even if Macy’s avowed intention was to die and she’d achieved that at least. But Mary-Joy knew that Macy had been caught way before she’d reached the ravine. It made getting out of the compound by stealth, at a time when the guards were otherwise occupied, imperative to the success of Mary-Joy’s mission.
So Judith agreed to help in any way she could, even if it meant a trip to the punishment cages.
Through the corner of the only eye she dared open, the one nearest to the pillow on which her head lay, Mary-Joy held her breath as Parrish reached Judith’s bed and sat his considerably-sized backside down on it. Judith would have been keeping herself awake in the same way as Mary-Joy. She shifted dreamily on the bed, and began to snore in the prearranged moment.
The snoring would have two outcomes Mary-Joy had planned: it would keep Parrish interested, as the more asleep a girl seemed to be to him, the more it drove him on to concentrate on expressing his black-hearted desires. The second outcome was that Judith’s snoring would cover Mary-Joy’s footsteps.
Not towards the door, but towards Parrish.
She moved quickly as Judith’s pretend snoring snuffled and caught in her nose. Parrish’s hands were already under the blanket. His head was bent, his eyes intent on the sleeping girl.
Mary-Joy hit Parrish on the back of the head with the rock as hard as she could. There was a popping sound that was not unlike the crackle of her snapping elbow, and a spray of blood. Parrish fell face first onto the bed. Judith, eyes open now, head out from under the blanket, helped Mary-Joy lower the fat guard’s body onto the floor. His eyes were half closed, the pupils had rolled up to white, and his eyelids were fluttering as if there was activity in his brain that was confused and random.
The rush of adrenaline in Mary-Joy’s frame was shattering. Her heart was leaping and she couldn’t believe the sound of it would not wake the other sleeping girls.
But it didn’t. Or if the girls were awake, they didn’t show it. Understandably the other inmates of D-Wing would know that any sense they were involved in this break out would lead to punishment and even death. Those who were awake, Mary-Joy reasoned, were laying paralyzed by fear or indecision. That suited Mary-Joy’s plan too. A mass break out would raise too many guards and security in the compound. Mary-Joy wanted to get to the wall unnoticed.
Blood continued to pump from the shattered wound in Parrish’s skull. Mary-Joy reached down to the guard’s belly strained belt, pulled his pistol from his holster and lifted the bunch of keys from the hook where they hung, glinting in the moonlight coming through the high, barred window by Judith’s bed.
Mary-Joy felt a hand on her shoulder and the shock was enough for her to turn savagely, with the rock she’d used to poleax Parrish held high.
Judith smiled.
The hand was hers.
She leaned forward, kissing Mary-Joy on the cheek and then whispered in her ear, “Go. I’ll give you ten minutes to get clear then I’ll raise the alarm. I’ll say I just found him like that. I’ll tell them he slipped. Hit his head on the floor.”
“Thank you.”
“Come back for me.”
“I will.”
Mary-Joy knew she had to. There’s no way she could kill Rosa if she did not.
Mary-Joy saw the island pig’s burrow from the closest chalet window in Charlotte’s room, yet Charlotte took no notice of Mary-Joy now that she was already finished with her. Charlotte was laying on the bed, breathing hard, still in the throes of orgasmic aftershock. She was 58, thin and bony, her ribs showing through. She’d lost a breast to cancer at some point in her life and there was a livid mastectomy scar across her chest. Her fingers were long, bony, and cruelly tipped with witch nails. Mary-Joy was forced to spend hours between Charlotte’s legs, wrists pulled painfully as the thin disfigured woman used the Filipino’s position to grind and sweat on her. Mary-Joy could spend that time floating away back to Benjie and the book, or once she’d noticed the island pig’s burrow, plan for how she would use it.
She didn’t know how long it would be before the Owners and their guards found the island pig’s breach—so her plan would have to come to fruition very soon. She couldn’t risk drawing attention to the burrow during the day by going to it, so would have to risk a onetime opportunity to go there after escaping the dormitory on D-Wing.
That evening, the last of Charlotte’s on the island, she requested for Mary-Joy to join her at the chalet. Mary-Joy had almost yelped in happiness at the call. She knew that once Charlotte had finished with her, she would get a chance to see that the burrow was still there in the scrubby weeds growing up against the wall.
And it had been.
Using Parrish’s keys to get her out of D-Wing was easy enough, but carrying the unfamiliar weight of the pistol was not. She had no idea how to use it for real, but figured she’d need it once she got to the landing stage and the steamer.
The compound beyond D-Wing was quiet at 3:30 a.m.— there was enough moonlight for her to move in the shadows it cast, but it was still dark enough to provide cover.
She skirted E-Wing and jogged in a deep well of shadows toward the guest chalets. Lights were on in some windows, and she could hear music playing from a few of them, where partying long into the night was not unknown.
The silhouette of a man standing with his back to an open window was talking with animated ferocity into a cell. “I don’t care. I wanted that girl. Not a different girl. That girl. Egypt got in the way – for the last time. Find them both, and kill them both. I want to see Egypt’s dead face. Make it happen.”
Mary-Joy continued past the window, ducked down to the grass. Death was a constant companion on the island, and it didn’t surprise at all it was reaching its chill fingers back to the mainland.
The edge of the perimeter wall behind the chalets was fully in shadows and providing excellent cover. Mary-Joy moved on, keeping low, the gun heavy in her hand.
“Hey!”
She froze. Dropped. The dry grass digging into her eyes and nostrils.
“Who has the gak?”
The accent was British.
A man, in his late ‘40s maybe, stripped to the waist. With his belly draped over the belt of his pants, lilywhite and bloated, he strutted towards Mary-Joy.
There was a black liquid smeared on his chest that in the dark Mary-Joy couldn’t tell was gravy or blood. He would be on her in seconds if he carried on and she bunched her muscles, ready to get up and run. But without warning, he jumped up onto the veranda of another chalet and approached the door. He hammered on it with his fist with a furiousness that was bound to wake everyone up, and might even bring guards to investigate. He was no more than fifteen yards from where Mary-Joy was laid, hand shaking on the butt of the pistol, heart yammering, knees trembling.
“Come on y’fuckers! I want the gak. We’ve run out!”
The chalet door opened, and a woman in her ‘30s, her hair awry, and her body naked except for stiletto heels, appeared in the slice of red light from within.
“Fuck's sake, Phil. Why do you always use more fucking gak than is humanly possible?” British too, and pissed off to the max.
She slapped a small plastic packet in Phil’s hand.
“Now fuck off. We’re busy.”
“Cheer’s babe,” and with that fat Phil turned with his prize and waddled back to the chalet next door, opening the door with a rebel yell and running inside like someone doing a lap of honor after a race, holding the packet aloft like a sports trophy.
When she had calmed enough to make her legs move, Mary-Joy got to her feet and ran toward the back of Charlotte’s chalet. The windows there were pleasingly dark. Once Charlotte had finished her activities with Mary-Joy, she always fell into a deep sleep. Mary-Joy would, like tonight, get dressed and turn off the lights in the bedroom. She would then call the guards from the chalet telephone, as she was ordered to, and then they would escort her back to D-Wing.
Mary-Joy thanked whichever god was looking over her now, keeping those windows dark. The same gods who made Phil unable to see her hiding in the shadows.
She jogged past the chalet to the place by the scrubby bushes where she knew the island pig’s burrow was hidden.
Moving forward, she inched between the branches on her hands and knees. So close now. So near to the route of escape that would take her out of the compound, onto the island and the short journey across the fields to the dock.