by J B Cantwell
As I realized this fact, though, the excitement that had filled my chest evaporated in an instant.
That taser wasn’t the only weapon Wilson had in his arsenal.
“How could I know where he’s gone if I don’t even know where he was to start with?”
“Don’t waste my time, girl,” he spat. “I know about you two, about your plans.”
Our plans?
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Your plans to escape together, of course.”
There it was again. Relief. But only for the briefest of moments.
Wilson didn’t know anything. Not really.
But then, neither did I. And I knew he was probably itching to pull out his baton, or his knife. Or worse.
I played along.
“We meant to escape, yes,” I said, not completely a lie. “But then we got caught in the river.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said dismissively, pushing back from the table. His metal chair made a screeching sound as the legs scratched across the concrete floor. “You could have just stayed in Canada. No one would have even known. Or cared. Well, maybe that’s taking things a little too far. The boy is of some value at least, being a Prime.”
I might’ve been offended by a comment like this coming from nearly anyone else, but from Wilson, his beliefs about me could only help my situation. If he thought I was just one step up from useless, not worth his time, that was a good thing.
“What I want to know is what your plans are now. You must have made them. What are you up to, the two of you?”
I opened my mouth, but again my voice failed me.
Wilson raised his eyebrows, and his hand slipped down onto the base of his baton.
“Wait,” I said, eyeballing it.
Think.
“We wanted to escape, and we were going to,” I said, praying that my voice sounded convincing. “But it wasn’t until we were in the river that we’d decided to do it. We’d even turned back toward Canada, meaning to swim back. But then the boats came, and we were caught. There isn’t another plan. There wasn’t any time to make one. We had agreed only to seek out Paul Jacobs, to do as he’d suggested and defect.”
In a flash, he was on me, his hands gripping tight to his baton. He came at me from behind and held the wood across my throat, choking me. My hands flew up to my neck, trying to push the baton away. But Wilson was surprisingly strong, and as he cut off my airway and the seconds dragged by, I started to panic.
“Where is he?” he hissed in my ear.
How could I tell him with my airway cut off?
I made a decision then, and released the baton, putting my hands flat on the table again. I nodded as well as I could against the pressure, trying to indicate to him that I was ready to talk. For a moment, his hold tightened, and then all at once I was free as he slipped the baton from across my neck.
My hands flew up from the table and wrapped around my neck. I coughed and wheezed, trying desperately to suck in air, but in those tense moments of being choked, it seemed like my body had forgotten how to breathe. I coughed and coughed, my eyes bulging like one of those awful fish we scooped up every day with our shovels.
The truth was, of course, that I didn’t know where he was. Not now. I only knew where he would be, where I would be, if we both lived long enough to make it to September.
But now, at this moment, he could be anywhere.
Now, what to tell Wilson?
I stole a few seconds as I tried to catch my breath. Eventually my breathing resumed, though it was painful to take in and exhale breath.
“We had a plan,” I said, and this time I was lying. “As the boats came up on us, we made a pact with each other, that if we escaped we would meet back up in the city.”
“Where, exactly?”
I remembered my last moments in Manhattan, watching the Stilts’ destruction as our bus barreled down the road, away from the flood and wreckage.
“Grand Central,” I said, grasping. I had sat in Grand Central Station on that very first day before I’d signed up for the Service. I had felt so lost, a feeling that I’d felt all my life, that had even stuck with me on my way into adulthood. “We said we’d meet at Grand Central on January 5th. It’s a place that’s special to us both. We dreamed of escaping the city together there, before any of this started.”
I watched with relief as Wilson’s hand left the side of his belt where his gun waited in its holster. With this solid intel, well, maybe there was somebody up above watching him. Watching all of us.
He pulled from his belt, instead, a pair of handcuffs.
“January 5th,” he said, confirming.
I nodded.
“Well, girl, you may see your escape from this place yet.”
Chapter Nine
But escape evaded me. There would be no returning to work, no resuming my normal life. If you could call a life at the Burn normal.
Wilson ordered guards to come and take me away from that dismal room, and soon I found myself being guided out of the airlock and across the floor to an empty cell that overlooked the trawler gates.
One of two empty cells.
Where had Eric gone?
The guard shoved a long key into a lock and slid the steel bars aside. I stared.
No bed. A crude, exposed toilet in the corner. He gave me a shove, and I stumbled into the space. Before I even had words on my lips, the door was slamming shut behind me.
“Give me your hands, kid,” one of the guards said.
“What?” I asked, confused and overwhelmed. Nothing seemed to be making any sense anymore. My head ached from where I had knocked it on the concrete half an hour before.
“Your cuffs,” he said, clearly irritated.
I looked down, dazed, then walked over to the bars, sticking my hands through the narrow openings.
“Where’s Eric?” I asked, suddenly feeling desperate. The cuffs slid from my wrists. “Where’s the boy who was in the other cell?”
The guard shrugged.
“Not my business,” he said, turning to leave.
“Wait!” I cried. “Please just wait a minute. I don’t understand. Why isn’t he here? Did something happen?”
But they didn’t speak again, and instead they turned and walked cruelly away, my questions unanswered.
I rubbed my wrists where the metal had bitten into the skin and rested my head against the bars. The last shift was just coming onto the floor. 2200-0400 hours. They called these people the ghosts of the Burn, their skin white from never seeing the light of the sun during their waking hours. Though, the rest of us never really much chance to, either.
In the beginning, I had had a few night shifts. But it soon became apparent that there was already a team that preferred the dark hours. Most of my shifts since then had been during regular waking hours.
Though it didn’t seem like there would be any shifts from here on out. Then again, maybe Eric had been put back into the mix with the other workers. Maybe he had done his time.
But somehow I didn’t think so.
I had taken things for granted. I had seen the boy locked up in this very cell. Had seen when they had come to take him away from time to time. I had never dared approach him; no one did. Now he was gone.
And I was here in his place.
I walked over to the far wall of the cell, turned my back to it, and slid down to the floor. I was exhausted, too tired to cry. I tentatively raised my hand to my injured head and found that a large lump was raised there. I cradled it in my palm, as if somehow covering it would help it to heel faster. Or, at least, provide some protection against further injury.
Soon, I found myself slumping to the floor. I laid the other side of my head against the concrete just as the sound of a trawler backing into the dock reached my ears.
How long? Would I be here for days? Weeks? Months, even? With no protection whatsoever, I would be dead soon enough. Even those people who shunned their respirators and g
oggles still wore their suits. But I had nothing.
As I lay there, all thoughts of escape drained from my mind. My hopes of survival were falling away with each glance at those steel bars that surrounded me. With each sound of a shovel raking against the floor. I was trapped here, more so than I had ever been anywhere else in my life. Behind bars, and with no key.
No, there would be no escape now. I closed my eyes, and flashes of memory flitted through my mind. The throbbing of the lump near my temple reminded me of the two times I had had my lens chip forcibly removed from my skull. Boom. Boom. The blood from my beating heart pulsed through it, though I could’ve sworn that my heart was broken.
I must have slept, because some time later I was awakened by the sound of a metal door sliding shut. I sat up, and immediately my hand flew to the lump on my head. Whatever relief I had felt in sleep did not follow me into waking.
Two guards, different ones than those who had deposited me here, we walking away from the cells. They were talking jovially about something, but I couldn’t hear what it was, their voices muffled through their masks.
A whimpering sound came from the other side of my cell, and immediately I knew it was Eric. I forced myself to my hands and knees and crawled across the floor toward the corner of the wall. I leaned against it and hung onto one of the steel bars to support myself.
“Eric,” I whispered. “What did they do to you?”
The whimpering sound stopped abruptly, and I knew he was listening to me.
“Are you okay?” I went on. “How did you get in here?”
Despite my questions, he did not answer me. I looked up toward the ceiling, but there was no camera there. Maybe there was one in his cell, making it too dangerous to talk. I started keeping my questions vague, to get any information I could from him about what I might expect next.
I tried again.
“How long have you been in here?”
He was silent for a time, but then, just as I opened my mouth to ask again, his quiet voice filtered through the bars.
“Three months,” he said.
Three.
I tried to calm my breathing, to calm the feeling of panic that was rising up inside me.
“And how long will you be in here? Did they tell you?”
He didn’t answer, but I thought I might already know. He would be here, like me, to set an example for the others. To serve as a reminder of what could happen to you if you strayed from the rules of this place. The only question was, how long? Somehow I knew it wouldn’t be a short visit.
“Well, I’m with you now,” I said, slumping down toward the floor again. I reached my arm through one of the bars and rested it as closely as I could to his own cell.
Light was starting to filter in between the great burning stacks above us. Morning.
I felt myself fading into sleep again, my body still wracked with pain from the night before. But just before I dozed off, when sleep was just an inch away, I felt his hand take mine and give it a squeeze. I sighed with relief. He wasn’t totally unreachable. Maybe I would try again, sometime when I wasn’t so tired, so injured.
He released my hand a few scant moments later, and I let myself fall back into the land of terrible dreams.
I felt their eyes on me. After the night shift was over, both Julia and Jeff were scheduled on the morning shoveling crew. I remembered that had been my assignment for the day, too. I had been excited to be with both of them. Down on this part of the floor was a great place to trade information; the noise of the trawlers could mask most any dropped phrases of conversation unless you were close standing too close to the speaker.
But I wasn’t close. I felt more far away than ever.
Julia’s eyes were alarmed behind her goggles. Jeff just stared, shaking his head slightly, disappointment evident in his shrugged shoulders.
They weren’t the only ones. Several others had noticed my new living accommodations, too. But their faces stayed blank, hard. Maybe some of them had signed their names to my list, though nobody gave any show of concern. With me locked up, unretrievable, the plan that they had played a part in was over.
I had been the leader, but with me out of commission, there would be no escape now.
The work alarm sounded. Wilson took his place in his safe, airlocked perch. He didn’t look at me now; instead, he kept his eyes on the workers below. Perhaps my time for being important enough to pay attention to had come and gone.
As the sound of scraping shovels filled the floor, Julia and Jeff had no other choice but to turn their backs to me and join the rest of the crew as they began their shift.
The morning dragged. Surprisingly, someone from the kitchens showed up and passed me a small plate of mash through a delivery chute in the bars. It was Melanie Fleming, a Green who had had the good fortune of being assigned a job away from the poisoned air. I couldn’t remember if she had signed my list or not, though I was guessing not. Why would she risk everything to get out? She was in no real danger at the job she had been given. She just needed to wait it out.
But no, I remembered now. She had signed. I guessed that life in the kitchens was, somehow, not much better than that on the floor. And as she carefully passed me the dish, I saw a large red welt on the side of her cheek.
Maybe that was why.
Nobody had it good in this place.
“What’s going on out there?” I whispered before she was able to stand up and walk away.
She didn’t even glance around, not giving her game away a single bit, and she whispered, “There’s talk. People know you were taken out last night. Now they’ll know what happened to you. It’s over, isn’t it?” She shoved the dish a little closer to me through the hole. “Here, take it. I’ll try to get you more after dinner.”
It was then that I noticed she only had one dish of food, not two.
“What about Eric?”
Her eyes flitted toward his cell, but only for an instant.
“He gets … less.”
She gave the dish one final shove, and I wrapped my fingers around the edge of it, pulling it inside. She stood up and turned to walk away.
“Wait,” I said, leaving the plate on the ground as I stood up. She stopped walking, but did not turn. “It’s not over,” I said. “We can still fight.”
She didn’t move a muscle, not even to shake her head in disagreement. Then, when there was nothing for her to say, she walked away.
I didn’t dare call after her again, but I watched her go, scurrying like a frightened mouse around the corner and out of sight.
Well, she was no mouse. Not to me. It took guts to come out here onto the floor unprotected, and with what certainly seemed like food that shouldn’t have been served to me, a prisoner.
I picked up the plate and sat down at the edge of the wall between Eric and I and called out softly.
“Eric. I have food. Do you want some? I know you’re hungry.”
I heard a stifled laugh come from the other side.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he whispered back. “It’s bad enough that you’re planning … whatever you’re planning. It’s going to get you killed, you know.”
I looked down at the plate of food, suddenly unsure of whether I was even hungry.
“Maybe,” I said. “But we’re already dead in here, don’t you think?”
“True.”
“So why don’t you eat?”
He was silent for a moment.
“You know why,” he finally said. “They’ll beat me bloody if I do. Around here, you take what you’re given and nothing more.”
I heard him shuffle away from me over to the other end of his cell. I wondered what he was doing. Was he curled up on the floor again, just like I had been an hour ago? Or was he standing up now, ready to fight?
Maybe it was neither. The tone of his voice sounded both defeated and hard. If I could just get him out, both of us out, then he might become a staunch ally of mine.
Unless he had truly given
up.
I looked down at the mash and picked up the spoon Melanie had left. I took a bite and immediately grimaced.
Stone cold.
No butter.
Well, what had I expected?
I put down the food and sat up against the wall, wrapping my arms around my legs.
I had to come up with a way to control things, even though I was, by all accounts, not able to control anything from in here. How many people could I expect to see on any given day? Julia and Jeff were just a few yards away, but they may as well have been miles away for all the good it would do me. They would be risking imprisonment themselves if they dared come over to talk to me. That left Melanie and Eric, and maybe the occasional guard. Not exactly a smoking hot team to be dealing with.
But, like the mash, it was better than nothing.
I picked up the plate again and took a bite, trying not to grimace as the cold, gritty grain stuck to the roof of my mouth.
I had to get a message to them, the other people who still wanted out. A message that I wasn’t willing to give up yet, that these bars between us weren’t strong enough to break my spirit.
Wilson. He was the key. He had the key—to this cell.
If only Julia or Jeff or anybody could approach me.
I was starting to panic, could feel the prickly tendrils of anxiety flying over my skin, making it hard for me to breathe. I had to get out. But it was so soon. I’d had such little time to plan.
Maybe the others had their plans, too, though. Maybe I didn’t need to be the only one in charge.
“Eric,” I called softly. “Come back over here.”
No voice came, but I thought I heard a light snore coming from the other side of the wall.
“Hey!” I tried a little louder.
“Hey what?” came his voice, much closer than I had realized, making me jump.
“Geez, I didn’t realize you were still there. Listen. Who do you talk to? I mean, at any given time, who do you interact with here? Like, who brings you food?”
“Melanie,” he said quietly.
