by Katie French
I spend some time mulling over the many awful ways they might torture us tonight—snakes, that torture rack, a human chess game—but I give it up. No sense in imagining terrible ends to my life. As Auntie would say, No sense in poking the pie before it’s cooled.
Mister lays on a bunk somewhere. His partner, too, Garrit. There are guards stationed around to make sure none of us attempt to remove the other from competition. No worries there. We’re all too terrified to move at this point.
I keep thinking Doc will come in and give us one last pep talk, but he never shows.
“Time to go,” a guard finally calls.
I push up with shaking legs. The terror is so big I’m afraid I won’t be able to walk, but I do. I walk. Mister walks. Garrit walks. We walk across the square and get into Jeeps, Mister and Garrit in the back of one and me in the other. Then they drive us through the desert. I stare out at the swirling tail of dust that blots out the compound. Maybe I’ll never see it again.
The rocking of the Jeep lulls me into quiet thought, so I almost miss the driver of the Jeep saying my name. I look into the rearview. “Doc?”
“We don’t have much time,” he says. “You need to watch out for Mister. I overheard two guards talking. Merek’s betting big money on Mister. I guess Merek told him if he wins, he’ll move Mister up to one of his body guards. That means a free life with wages, status. It’s the chance of a lifetime.” Doc raises his eyebrows as he glances in the rearview. “Mister will try to kill you.”
“What’s new?” I say, trying to sound light, but feeling sick.
Doc turns the steering wheel and the Jeep veers right. A huge cluster of people stand off in the distance. I want to tell Doc to keep driving, just gun it and peel off into the sunset, but I know he won’t leave Nada. Is Nada even alive? What did they do to her?
“There’s something else,” Doc says, slowing down. The other Jeep has already pulled up to the crowd.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Lord Merek’s birthday is April 4th, 2087.”
I frown. “Why do I need to know that?”
“I don’t know, but Ulrick, the announcer, was asking someone at dinner.” He sighs as he looks out at the crowd. “I wish I could help you more.”
Get me out of here, I think, but he’s already exited the Jeep.
I stare out at the crowd, wishing to God someone would save me. Rescue me from whatever awaits. No one does and I force my shaking hand to pull the handle.
We step out to a crowd of onlookers ringed around something in the dust. Everyone is here—the benders, the guards, the few female attendants. Lord Merek is seated on the wooden platform with his wives. My eyes scan the very bare landscape, scrub grass, weeds, cactus, and dirt. Off to one side is a mechanical digging machine, with a long, angled arm and huge bucket. Will we be forced to use that for something? To dig our own graves?
We’re waved out of the Jeeps and the three of us walk toward the crowd. It parts and I see what they’re clustered around—a giant pit dug into the hardpan. When we get to the edge, I stare down.
The pit is twelve feet down and one hundred feet across, the size of a small gymnasium. In the center, four swords in various states of decay are stabbed into the dirt. Other items—a dented shield, a rusty helmet, one metal glove, a wooden folding chair, a broken spear—lie around the circle. Beside me, Mister snorts, a smile flaring on his face. Hand-to-hand combat.
A knot clenches around my gut. They mentioned it before, but I’d hoped they’d changed their minds. This is the worst possible scenario.
But I’m wrong. A Jeep backs up to the hole with cages strapped to the back. Guards lower their whining, yapping freight into the pit. I cringe as cages thunk into the pit’s hardpan. One guard jumps in and goes around unlatching all the crates, running like mad as coyotes burst forth. When the last animal is freed—five bags of fur with sharp canines and hungry eyes—the guard scampers onto one of the cages with a coyote on his heels. Looking down, the crowd laughs and points for a while as the guard barely manages to fend off the dogs. Finally, one of his comrades pulls him out of the pit. Then they draw the cages back up. The coyotes leap at the edge of the pit, snapping.
Oh God. Oh God.
“Lords and ladies. Contestants. We have come to the final birthday game!”
Cheers from the guards, the wives. The benders stand stone-faced. I find Doc in the crowd. His worried eyes bring me no comfort.
“We have four contestants tonight, all ready to win our glorious prize.”
Four? My eyes scan the crowd. Being pushed through, a small hunched form stumbles up to the pit limping. Nada. She’s been beaten. The black eye and split lip are one thing. The arm around her waist that suggests broken ribs and the hobbled walk are another. I run to her and grip her shoulders.
“Oh my God, Nada, what did they do to you?”
She lifts her cracked lips in a smile. “They were worried I would win too easily.” Tears pool in her eyes. She drops her head and won’t look up at me.
A sob is catches in my throat. But there isn’t time to be furious. There isn’t time for anything as they shove us toward the pit. The crowd is churning around us. There’s too much dust and Nada slips from my hands and all I can see, all I can hear is the pit. The pit. The pit. The pit.
Then they push us in.
Chapter 21
Clay
“Wake up. Clay, wake up.”
The voice floats like a kite just outside my consciousness. Someone’s callin’ me, but I can’t for the life of me figure out who.
“He’s not waking up,” the voice says again. It’s a small voice filled with fear.
“Well, I told you I only assisted in these things,” says another voice. Female and pouty.
I focus on the voices, try to go toward them, but really, there’s no movement where I am. No up or down. I’m in a black fog. My head, if it really is my head, feels like a throbbin’ cotton heart. I try to locate the rest of my body and fail.
“Do something,” the little voice says.
“Fine,” says the female voice.
A burnin’ rushes through me hotter’n any brush fire. My eyes fling open and I sit up.
Two faces watch me, eyes wide, mouths open. A girl and a boy. Both look… familiar.
“Clay,” the boy says, leaning toward me. “You okay? Can you talk?”
I open my mouth, not really sure how to answer him. Can I talk? “Who…are you?”
His face falls. He looks at the girl. “I thought you fixed him!” He slams his fist into his leg and looks like he’ll cry.
Her face wrinkles with frustration. “How can you expect me to work miracles? I’m just an assistant!” She screams this last word, her face flush and red like a swelled apple.
I’m still tryin’ to figure out where I am. Light from a window streams in, lined by metal bars near my bed. Clean white sheets cover me, but a spot of blood near my arm draws my eye. Did they…do something to me?
A boom rattles the whole room and both the boy and the girl look to the window and then to each other. Sirens go off outside. The girl’s hand goes around the boy’s arm.
“What do we do?” he asks her.
She presses her lips together and opens them with a poppin’ sound. “We can’t stay here. They’ll kill us.”
I lean forward. My throbbin’ heart-head beats like a drum. “Who’ll kill us?”
Her eyes flick to me. “Can you walk?”
“How should I know?” I say, lookin’ at the two white lumps under the blanket.
She pulls back the sheet and hands me a pair of denim pants. “I guess we’ll find out. Get dressed.”
But she has to help me because my legs and arms are weak and don’t respond to my orders. She pulls on my pants, a shirt, and stiff shoes all while the deep booms rattle the house and make the little boy more and more nervous. I want to comfort him, but I can barely operate my limbs and a strange lady is zippin’ up my fly.
“There,” she says, pattin’ the inseam of my pants. “All set. Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Another boom rocks the building, closer this time. The window panes rattle. Something downstairs falls off a shelf and shatters.
The girl looks out the door. “We got a Jeep, but neither of us know how to drive.”
“That’s not true!” the boy says.
“You can’t even see over the steering wheel!” she scolds.
“Can, too!”
“Hey,” I shout, makin’ my noggin throb harder. I place a hand on the bandages. “Sounds like the world’s crashin’ down around us, and you two are arguin’ over this?” They both look at me. “Can you drive?” I ask the girl. She shakes her head. “Well, then”—I say, slowly walkin’ around the bed—“I guess the boy will hafta see over the steering wheel.”
They say nothing and lead me out of the room and down the hall. The house is silent. For some reason, I keep thinkin’ someone will pop out, someone who wants to stop us, but no one does. We walk down the stairs, me pausin’ once to steady my head.
I stop on the front stoop. In the dusk, fires throw up light off in the distance, a thick smoke, too, like the whole place is burnin’. I search my brain to see if I know where this place is and come up blank. As I’m starin’ at the smoke and orange fire, gunfire rattles down the street. Someone screams. I stumble back into the girl who grips my arm tight. She thrusts something cool and solid into my hand. I hold up the gun and look at her.
“I hope you remember how to shoot,” she says, her eyes trained on the road.
“What’s happenin’ out there? I scan for the source of the gunshots. A Jeep tears by a couple of streets away with armed men on the back. “Maybe we should go back inside.”
“No!” they both say at the same time.
“There’s someone even worse than those guys.” The boy points after the Jeep.
I furrow my brow, thinkin’ about the person I kept expectin’ to pop out and stop us. I can’t come up with a face, but a bad feeling surfaces quicker than a bloated body. “Okay,” I say. “Boy, you drive and I’ll try to shoot.” I look down at the gun, testin’ the weight of it. “Did I know how to shoot before?”
“Yes,” they both say again.
“All right then. Let’s go.”
The boy does know how to drive the Jeep, but not very well. He takes out two mailboxes and a bush before straightening the vehicle out on the road. I grip the door handle and try not to tumble out the open doors. Behind us, the girl moans.
“You’re gonna kill us!” she says.
“No, they are!” He gestures at the headlights tearin’ our way.
A green army Jeep barrels toward us like we’re playin’ chicken. Two men in white surgical masks hang off the sides and wave guns in the air. They aim at us as we get closer. My hand goes out before my brain gives it a signal. Three shots crack out of my gun—one blasts through the windshield and into the driver’s chest, another hits a headlight, but the third blows a giant hole in a gunman’s head. The Jeep veers off, crashes into a building, and erupts into flames.
Pumping a fist, the boy cheers. I remind him to keep his eyes on the road, tryin’ to stay calm while my heart’s blastin’ against my ribs. I look down at the gun and wonder how in the hell I did that.
But there’s no time to wonder because another group of mask-wearin’, gun-totin’ fools flies out at us from inside a building. These ones have drawn gruesome skeleton grins on the paper masks. I grip the Jeep’s rollover bar, stand up, and twist back. My body takes over as I stare at the masked attackers. Time slows. My heart thuds in my ears. I feel my arms go out, the cool trigger against my index finger. Three more shots slip out of my gun easy as breathin’. I hit one masked man and clip another. The third drops to check on his injured friends.
“Well, he remembers how to shoot,” the girl says matter-of-factly.
The boy shouts back over the rush of the wind. “If there was anything we needed him to remember right now, it’d be that.”
I sink down in the passenger seat, but my body feels too hot and my head too cool. These people act like I’m some broken machine the girl has fixed. But I don’t feel fixed. Even if I can shoot, I still feel like my brain’s scrambled eggs.
We drive down barren streets, the sun now gone and the stars appearing above. The booms and screams and gunshots seem to have subsided, but we still see people with guns and smoke from fires. The boy takes a few wrong turns, gets stuck in a dead end and runs into the remains of a Jeep with crispy carcasses hangin’ out of it. I wanna ask why the hell they’ve taken me here and who these people are and why they wanna kill us, but the boy concentrates on drivin’ and the girl is mutterin’ crazy talk.
I look over at the boy barely able to see. “You want me to take a hand at drivin’? Maybe it’s like shootin’, it’ll come back to me.”
He flicks a glance at me, runs over a curb, and finally nods. “Give it a try. Can’t seem to figure out how to get outta here.”
He pulls over on a quiet street near an old brick building that reads Post Office, but the windows have been boarded up for ages. I get out, walk around the Jeep, and sit in his seat. I stare at the controls and will myself to remember.
“You should go.” He looks nervously over his shoulder.
“Who is it we’re runnin’ from?” I put the Jeep in gear and let my body do the rest. It seems to remember.
“You don’t know who’s after us?” The boy asks, bucklin’ himself in. Apparently he’s not so confident about my ability.
I shake my head. “Nope. All I know is I’m Clay and you’re…”
“Ethan.”
“Ethan and she’s…”
“Betsy,” he says, glancin’ back.
“Betsy,” I repeat. “Oh, and I can shoot like a son of a gun. Hopefully, there’s more bad-ass talents like that stored away in here.” I pat the bandage on my head. It still throbs, but the excitement of gettin’ shot at took my mind off it. Now the pain consumes me. I wince and try to focus on findin’ a road out. I take us through another subdivision of abandoned houses. One garage door reads 2 DEAD in big red letters.
Ethan points right. “Try down that way.”
I turn down a two-lane road, past a burnin’ building, and turn right again. Ahead, a guard post looms large, with high brick walls on both sides.
“There!” Ethan points.
“I see it, little man.” I lean forward. But this ain’t no easy exit. Something big, a big machine, blocks the only opening in the wall. Around it are lumps that I soon can tell are corpses as we drive closer. There must’ve been an epic battle here. An awful feelin’ of dread steals over me. All those people and no one to put them to rest. What kind of maniacs are we dealin’ with here? Are any of ’em still alive?
Behind me, Betsy leans forward. When she sees what we’re drivin’ towards, she leans back and begins to mutter loudly. Something about, “Never, never, never” and “Miss Nessa.”
“Clay”—Ethan says quietly—“are we gonna have to stop?”
I don’t answer for a minute, thinkin’ and lookin’ over our exit. The tank is huge and blocks our whole escape route. We’ll have to move the tank or leave the Jeep and run past all those dead bodies.
“I don’t know, bud”—I say—“but it looks like it.”
Ethan chews his lip.
I sigh big and ease up to the tank framed by corpses. None of this feels right.
When I can go no further, I brake the Jeep. We sit inside, lookin’ at the carnage. Bodies riddled with bullet holes lie in pools of dried blood. One man lies on his side, facing us, his paper mask blown up and his eyes open. Half his chin and neck are gone. Another, a woman, slumps over the nose of a Jeep, her hands still clawed ’round a hole in her chest. I wonder if I should shield the boy, but he seems to be takin’ it as well as it can be taken.
“Do we…get out?” he asks.
I glance back at Betsy and then at the tank
. “I guess,” I say, testin’ my legs. They work okay so I get out of the Jeep and offer a hand to Betsy. She looks at my hand and then at me.
“We go on foot from here, little lady.”
She stares at me. “Go where?”
This stops me cold. Go where, indeed. “Well, I don’t know,” I say. “You two woke me up. I thought you knew where.”
“To Riley.” Ethan climbs out of the Jeep and comes to stand beside me.
“And where is that, Ethan?” Betsy asks, one lip curled up like a taunting sister. I wonder if they’re related, but they don’t look alike.
Ethan shrugs. “We’ll find her.”
“We’ll find her,” she mocks, crossin’ her arms over her chest. “You have no idea where she is.”
“What d’you wanna do, Betsy?” Ethan asks angrily. “Stay here?”
She shakes her head but stays in the Jeep and pouts.
Gunshots from the back of the compound make her jump. Finally, she climbs out and stands beside us, lookin’ at the bodies. “I won’t touch them.”
I look at the corpses and sigh. “Hopefully, none of us have to touch ‘em.”
But hope fades as we walk closer to the tank. More bullet-riddled souls clog the space to the left and right of the tank. We walk up to the tank, hands over our mouths because of the putrid stink, and assess our options. The wall’s too high to scale in my present condition, but I’ll be damned if I am going to crawl over the dead and bloated to get out. My eyes travel up the tank.
“I think it’s our only way out.” I nod toward the giant green tank. “Up and over.”
“If we go up there, we’ll be exposed. Anyone with a gun will be able to shoot us.” Betsy casts a nervous glance over her shoulder.
I look back. The roads behind us are dark, silent, and empty. “You see anybody?”
She shrugs.
“Look, we’re sittin’ ducks right now. We’ll go up and over the tank nice and easy and then we’re on our way.” I give her what I hope is a reassurin’ smile.
