Love and Decay, Volume One

by Rachel Higginson

  “Then become one,” I challenged instead. “Vaughan isn’t going to let anyone that isn’t good near his family. If you want to stay with us, you’re going to have to become a good person.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do?” His voice held the first glimmer of hope I had heard from him in a very long time.

  “Every damn day.” I held his gaze steady and let him see that it was true.

  A shout of pain ripped down the corridor and set us back into motion. Our group stood at once, a rag-tag army of death.

  Vaughan moved to the door and tried to rip it open, but it had been locked. Hendrix dropped his shoulder and slammed into the wood. I heard it splinter and crack, but it was going to take a lot more of that to break through completely.

  And we didn’t have the time to wait for Hendrix to bash himself to unhelpful.

  With a surprising amount of improvisation, Adela let out a blood-curdling scream in Spanish. She screamed out a word I did not understand over and over again and then she continued with rapid Spanish that made even less sense to me.

  The hallway filled with boots racing down the hallway. Whatever she said had a major impact on the people.

  She lifted her head and winked at me. “Be ready,” she instructed.

  I sucked in a fast breath and forced myself to move beyond the reality that we had no weapons and no real way to fight or protect ourselves. I bent low and filled my hand with as much dirt as I could scratch up.

  The door burst open and men tried to push into the room, but we were ready for them.

  We attacked as soon as bodies appeared. They stumbled back, unprepared for us. I fought the only way I knew how, scrappily and viscously. I threw dirt in one man’s eyes and kneed him in the balls as hard as I could. Once his head had dropped, I put my hands on the back of his skull and brought my knee up again. Blood burst from his nose all over my filthy jeans, sinking through the material and making my leg sticky from someone else’s pain.

  The man dropped to the ground and reached out for my legs. I jumped out of the way and kicked at him again. And again and again and again until he finally stopped trying to grab me.

  I stepped away from the unconscious body, morbidly amazed that I had brought a grown man to his knees. I knew it had been the element of surprise. We jumped at them like bats out of hell. There was no way they could have been ready for that.

  The older Parkers did most of the other work for us in the hallway. I only had to take down the one man, but only a handful had come to see why Adela screamed.

  The rest of the party would be waiting for us.

  There was no time for a pep talk or inspirational speech. Who knew what had happened to Harrison and King by now?

  Once we’d subdued the men in the hallway, Vaughan led us to the big room, the party room. King and Harrison had been tied up, arms plastered to their sides, legs wrapped from ankles to thighs. They had been tossed in front of the fires, too close to not feel the heat, but far enough that they weren’t burned.

  Yet.

  They looked up at us as we stumbled in the big cavern and there was such an expression of relief on both of their faces that I felt it like a physical thing.

  The people gathered around jumped at the sight of us, clearly startled by our escape.

  We had no real plan from this point on. We could destroy them all. I wanted to destroy them all. I wanted to kill them all.

  How many others had they killed before us? How many had they eaten?

  They seemed disturbingly healthy. Their women were plump. Their men muscled. The children seemed able-bodied, their little faces showing baby fat.

  “My brothers,” Vaughan shouted. “Give them to me! Mis hermanos! Ahora!”

  Adela took over, shouting our demands in their language. They stared at her slack-jawed and hazy-eyed. No one had escaped them before. The truth of that was written all over their faces.

  But they had to know the risk of so many of us. We weren’t just friends and family stumbling blinding through the end of the world. We were an army. We were life-support for each other. We were death to anyone that came between us.

  Hendrix walked forward and nobody tried to stop him. He dipped down and picked up one of their torches that had yet to be ignited. The thick stick lay near his brothers at the foot of the fire wrapped in some kind of white cloth near the top. He plunged it into the flame and came away with a weapon.

  I wondered why nobody attacked us or what they were waiting for. I didn’t think I wanted to know.

  “Someone untie them,” Hendrix commanded. I might have been the only one that noticed, but his voice shook. Just barely.

  I looked up into his face, startled by the haunted expression that he wore. His brothers lay at his feet and every few seconds Hendrix’s eyes would dip down to them, no doubt making sure they were still there… still alive.

  I raced over with Tyler where we worked together to rip the tight bands off the two boys. There was a knife lying on the ground by King’s head. We used that to cut the tight leather strips. It was dull and barely useful, but finally worked. Hendrix stood over us, swinging his fire stick at anything that moved.

  Harrison and King grunted with gratitude, their voices hoarse and tired. When I had freed Harrison entirely, he let out a huge puff of breath as if he had been holding it for years. I helped him stagger to his feet and held him around his waist while he caught his bearings.

  Harrison leaned down and kissed the top of my head. I felt his relief again, a punch to the chest of intense happiness. He let his lips linger in the tangles of my hair and inhaled deeply.

  His affection couldn’t have been interpreted as anything but brotherly, but still it moved me. In the midst of this chaos, with our lives dangling by the thinnest thread, I was reassured that he cared for me in a profound way. And I for him.

  It was easy to group all of the Parkers together and declare my love for them. That love was a huge, consuming beast that would defend them until my last breath. But as I looked at them, as I examined my feelings for them individually, I realized how deeply I loved each of them.

  I loved Page with her pure innocence and old soul. I loved King with his unassuming brilliance and level-headed outlook. I loved Harrison with his dry humor and mischievous smiles. I loved Nelson with his adoration for my best friend and his transparent authenticity. I loved Vaughan with his unbreakable determination and fierce loyalty.

  And Hendrix. Hendrix was obviously more complicated than the rest.

  I loved this family as much as I had ever loved anything.

  To know they loved me back… that each of them could feel the same way about me as I did about them… that moved me. That gave me a peace I had been lacking.

  “Adela, tell them we’re leaving,” Vaughan instructed our new translator.

  She relayed the message. A man stepped forward, a disgusting smile dancing across his face. He bit his lower lip hungrily and shook his head.

  “No,” he declared.

  Vaughan and Hendrix shared a look. Hendrix swept the fiery stick behind him and held it beneath a table that had been made from doors salvaged from this place.

  It would have been more dramatic if the table had flashed immediately and burned to ash within seconds. That did not happen. Hendrix held the fire beneath the table while more men jumped to their feet and lunged toward us.

  They leered at us with menacing expressions painting their filthy faces. They were clearly trying to intimidate us.

  But I saw what else they were trying to do. They had made a wall in front of their women and children.

  These were the first people we had come up against that had something to protect. It put us on equal footing.

  We had people to protect too, but less than them. Half their numbers were people that could not fight. So far we had only dwindled ours by two- Haley and Page.

  “Tell them not to follow us.” Vaughan gathered Page close to him and stood tall and confident. I wondered if
he had noticed the women and small children cowering along the back wall as well.

  The table finally caught on fire and Hendrix pulled his torch back. The wood crackled in the background and sent sparks singeing the backs of my legs.

  Adela relayed our message. I held my breath until the men looked at each other and grinned.

  One of them spoke back to Adela. He gestured toward the hall and tilted his head questioningly.

  “He wants to know where we plan to go,” Adela explained. “He says we will never find our way out of this mine. And he says that if we do the Dead are waiting for us. We die here, he says, or we die out there.”

  “We’ll take our chances out there,” Vaughan told her.

  She turned back to the men and translated. Another man spoke up and the dark look over his face made me reconsider our plan.

  “He says we will be begging them to eat us in a few days.”

  I tried to ignore Adela’s latest translation. My eyes fluttered closed for just a moment and I imagined what we would be like in three days, stumbling blindly through a never-ending maze of darkness. Our skin would prickle from the cold; our lungs would gargle from starvation and thirst. We would die slowly and alone. We wouldn’t be able to see each other. Our last breath wouldn’t be important, just another in a long mix of unseeing terror.

  The end would not be noble; it would be pathetic.

  A tremble crawled up my spine and settled at the base of my neck. I swallowed thickly and met the eyes of men who planned to eat me. These were men who were not addicted to flesh or tainted by a toxic infection. These were men who should know better.

  “He has no idea how determined we are, Adela. He has no idea what we’ve already been through.” My chin tilted high with a confidence I did not feel.

  She glanced at me twice before she nodded. “Okay,” she agreed. “Then we should go before they become less hospitable.”

  I pressed my lips together and tried not to laugh. Adrenaline mingled with hysteria in my head and I felt my emotions slip and slide precariously from sane to insane with every second longer we stood there.

  “Let’s go,” Vaughan ordered.

  “The table,” Harrison shouted at King. The two boys ran to the table that Hendrix lit on fire and tucked their hands beneath the edges of their t-shirts. Tyler and I ran for the safety of our group as they lifted the blazing wood and threw it at the wall of people.

  Shouts and foreign curses followed us from the room as we turned and raced down the hallway.

  It hadn’t been the smoothest escape, nor had we completely incapacitated our captors, but it would have to do for now.

  Vaughan led the way with the torch Hendrix had passed to him. Not one of us felt like running blindly through a Mexican mine maze. But we didn’t have a choice.

  I just prayed they were wrong. There had to be a way out.

  We had to be able to find the exit.

  And if we couldn’t? Well… I didn’t want to think about that right now.

  We ran forever. My lungs ached and stung with each breath that rattled through them. The cold air had dried out my throat and made my nose run. Our footsteps echoed uselessly in the narrow corridors, taking us away from something, but never to something.

  The dirt-packed walls started to press in on me. My head felt suffocated by them. I would close my tired eyes for a brief moment, only to open them to visions of ceilings caving in or walls swallowing me whole.

  I tried to breathe through the panic and focus on the waving light in Vaughan’s hand. I tried to think about anything except begging those sick psychopaths to eat us. I really tried.

  But I wasn’t necessarily successful.

  This escape, more than any others, had become a mind game. Were we traveling deeper into the earth? Or out of it? Were we running in circles? Or directly by the exit and had no idea?

  Were they laughing at us? Waiting for us to come back because it had happened so many times before… because they were used to this routine.

  Maybe it was part of their meal plan- let the food run around for a bit before ripping them apart with their chipped, jagged teeth.

  I really couldn’t think about that.

  “Vaughan, take us somewhere!” Hendrix shouted at him.

  “I’m trying!” Vaughan bit back.

  We were no longer concerned that they were following us. They had set us up perfectly and we had willingly walked into the labyrinth.

  Manmade tunnels snaked around and around the bowels of this place. I tried to figure out how it had gotten so big. The only caverns were the ones situated toward the cannibals. The rest of this place was nothing but endless rounded tunnels supported by wooden crossbeams.

  What had ever been the point of this place?

  Eventually Vaughan slowed down. “We should rest for a minute,” he said.

  We leaned against the walls and let the silence and stillness of this place blanket us. It was hard not to be claustrophobic in such confusion. I pictured us miles below the earth’s surface, the weight of the ground and desert and all of Mexico pushing down on us. I felt hysterical from the vast unknown.

  I didn’t think I managed to stay sane in those hours. I felt my coherent thoughts slipping away while I tried to run after them. They would duck through my spread fingers and dance just out of reach, taunting whatever was left of my mind.

  Hendrix’s hand landed on my shoulder and anchored me in place. I took a deep breath and realized that I hadn’t taken one in a while.

  I might have stopped breathing completely.

  He leaned down and dipped his head into my neck. I felt his lips at my ear. “Don’t give up,” he whispered to me. “We will find a way out of this place. Stay with me.”

  I shook my head, shaking off cobwebs and other unseen creepy crawlies. “I’m here,” I whispered, breathless.

  He pulled back and looked at me. I couldn’t see his eyes very well, only their outline. But I could feel them. “Stay here.”

  “Okay.”

  We set off again but this time at an easily manageable pace. We wound through the thick earth, staying on the main path. Occasionally, it would break off into something else, but rarely did those corridors lead anywhere. This was the main road. We were sure of that.

  The torch eventually died, plunging us into absolute darkness. We grabbed each other’s hands and continued to walk forward.

  I had never been more frightened in my life. I thought I might seriously have a heart attack from the ferocious, stuttering pounding in my chest.

  We stumbled often, but there was always a hand to lift whoever had fallen back up. We never let go of each other. Every thirty seconds Vaughan would start a count and down the row we would go. I was always ten. Hendrix was always eleven.

  We counted ourselves with a dedicated obsession. Nobody wanted to get lost. If someone didn’t answer their number right away, we would all panic. Hand holds would grow painfully tight, all breathing would stop. And then that person would jump back in, as if they had forgotten what we were doing and we would take a collective breath.

  Those hours wandering through the dark were miserable. I had never felt fear quite like that before. Evil had never felt like such a tangible presence, following after us, waiting for us if we turned back, whistling down the stagnant tunnels.

  I had been surrounded by it for years now, but I had never been submerged in it so completely.

  “This has to end,” Nelson growled. “It can’t go on forever.”

  Hendrix tightened his grip on my hand and I did the same to Adela, who was in front of me. I agreed. It had to end.

  And it did.

  Eventually. After an indeterminable amount of time later, the darkness became less oppressive, less constant. The fading starlight sprinkled into our black hole and offered a way out. The temperature started to warm and a gentle breeze tickled my skin.

  We stopped counting. In fact, we exited the mine in silence. My throat was dry and scratchy from soun
ding my number over and over again. My feet dragged as I pulled them out of tunnels that represented certain death to me. My fingers shook as we let go of each other’s hands to shake out our limbs and stretch our stooped bodies.

  The night sky turned gray overhead. Dawn would come in minutes and this horrific night would be over. I sunk down next to Haley. We stretched out our legs and leaned on each other with a rocky cliff at our backs.

  We had exited the tunnels and walked straight into an actual mine. The land made a deep bowl with winding pathways along the side. It reminded me of those red penny slides where the penny would spin around and around and around until the funnel at the bottom would drop it into a pile of other pennies. We had somehow made our way into a human version of that.

  “This is a copper mine,” Adela explained.

  Rusted, dilapidated equipment still sat parked along the sides and at the bottom. There was a lookout tower on the other side where I imagined a wealthy man used to perch, watching his minions make him more money.

  The air smelled tangy and sweet, a heady scent compared to the stale, damp air of the tunnels. I tipped my head and inhaled the freshness, reveling in hard-won freedom.

  “Will they come after us?” I asked after long minutes.

  “They are cave-dwellers,” Adela answered. “They will not leave their tunnels.”

  “Why not?” Page asked with more curiosity than bitterness, as if she were merely curious about a different culture. As if that culture hadn’t planned to cook us and then eat us. As if they hadn’t planned to take care of my friend until she gave birth, just so they could eat her baby.

  I turned my head to the side, afraid I would be sick.

  “They are not part of a territory,” Adela told us with her exotic accent. “And even a man like Diego finds their practices despicable. They are left alone because everyone is too afraid to go in after them. But nobody wants them to live. If they came out, they would be hunted.”