by Mike Kilroy
As with most nice moments in this place, it didn’t last.
Harness, a harbinger of gloom, doom and constant ridicule, sauntered into the kitchen like he always did: chest puffed out and full of bravado. He saw the scene at the table play out before him and scoffed. He filched the paper football off the table and stuffed it down the front of his tattered jeans.
“If you want it, Jenai, come and get it.”
Jenai stood and folded her arms. “You are so gross.”
Harness laughed. “Zack, you can come get it, too. You’re probably a fag anyway. You’d enjoy it.”
Zack had known many Harnesses in his life and their method of operation was always the same. He was a bully, maybe because his father put too much pressure on him to win at everything, maybe because his mother didn’t love him enough, or maybe because he was just as insecure as Zack, but was blessed with better features and physical prowess.
Whatever the reason, Zack had never really stood up to a bully before. The fear of repercussion was one of the reasons. Self-loathing was the other—he always thought he deserved it in some way.
If coming to this place had done him any good at all, it made him unafraid of bullies like Harness. Bullies aren’t quite as terrorizing when you have died twice —perhaps three times—and been forced to battle strange life forms in a macabre death cage.
That epiphany made him bold. It made him do what he was about to do.
Zack stood slowly. He was attempting to be as serious and as menacing as possible, but was failing miserably at it based on the grin on Harness’ chiseled face.
He stood in front of Harness, tilting his head up to stare into his eyes. “You can keep it. It’s probably the biggest thing down there, anyway.”
Jenai chuckled, covering her mouth.
Harness’ face turned red and that vein began popping on his forehead again. “Get out of my face, loser.”
Zack didn’t budge.
Harness made a fist and flinched. Zack didn’t waver. By now, the rest of the group had filtered in to see what the ruckus was about. Zack could feel them press into the small dining area behind him. Harness’ eyes veered off his glare at Zack and to the group. Zack held his breath in the hopes Harness would not call his bluff.
“Whatever, man,” Harness said, grabbing a red apple off the bowl on the corner of the table. He pushed past Zack, the force of his shoulder ramming into him nearly knocked Zack to the floor, and took a big bite of the apple as he disappeared down the hallway.
Zack twirled to see the others, all, except for Cass, with half smiles on their faces. Jenai simply clapped and giggled.
“Wow,” Jenai said, half mockingly and half seriously. “My hero.”
Cass was as snooty as always. “You’re bloody lucky he didn’t kill you. He could have seriously buggered you up, you know.”
“All right. All right,” Brock said. “Drama over.”
Jenai began laughing again, prompting the others to look at her strangely. Even Zack was at a loss to explain her giddiness until she finally made it clear. “He still has that paper football thingy in his pants.”
Cass shook her head, rolled her eyes and sighed, disappearing down the hallway again. Brock smiled. Mizuki just stared at her, slack-jawed, and Zill grabbed an apple and took a bite, completely ignoring the situation.
She had other concerns. “When are they gonna test us again?” She asked between chews of her apple. “Like, we’ve been in this cabin for days with nothing to do. I’m so bored. I’d almost rather be fighting creepy aliens with nunchuks or something.”
Even though Zack had only been with the group for a short time, he could tell it had been a much longer interval between experiments than normal.
There were many explanations for such a hiatus. Few of them were good and that fact was apparent on the faces of his companions.
“It’s never been this long before,” Brock said with apprehension. “What are they waiting for?”
Jenai blurted out, “Maybe it’s the Gorn.”
Zill cocked her head in confusion, a mush of half-chewed apple visible in her slacked mouth. “Like, what are you talking about?”
“The things Zack and I saw when we went on that walk the other day. They looked like Gorn from Star Trek. Lizard people. Maybe there is something wrong with them. I hope so. I don’t wanna kill them or be killed by them.”
Zack had made a choice not to tell the others about what he and Jenai had seen on their excursion—he thought it would just add to the already high level of anxiety. Jenai had agreed, but perhaps she thought it needed to be said now.
Brock did not see Zack’s logic. “You should have told us.”
He tried to explain. “It’s not like we could do anything about it. There was a barrier. They’re over there. We’re in here. It’s like a zoo. We’re in a zoo. Would that have made you feel any better?”
Brock was Brock-ly again—contemplative, analytical. “No. Probably not.”
Zill did not agree. “We so had a right to know lizard people were living next door. God!”
“No, Zack is right,” Brock said, rubbing his hand over his head in thought. “It would have only freaked us out more. But now that we know, it is curious. It appears we are just part of a collection like Zack said. Species of all kinds brought here for some sort of experiment.”
After a contemplative pause, Brock continued. “Or a competition. What if this is a contest? Perhaps we’ll be rewarded eventually with our freedom. Perhaps the ultimate reward is we get to go home.”
Brock was quite logical, almost to a fault. Zack, though, didn’t see the logic in ripping teenagers from their homes, placing them in a macabre festival just to reward the winners with a one-way ticket home.
The most likely scenario was that the winners would actually stay.
Before Zack knew it, he was letting his theory fall from his lips.
All the eyes in the room snapped to him: big, round and fearful.
This is rather uncomfortable.
They wanted to hear more. “I mean, maybe they need something and they are testing all of us to see who the best options are to give it to them.”
It was a sobering thought and one that was not lost on the others. Zack’s theory meant one thing: they were never going home. Either they won and provided whatever these beings who kept them here needed, or they were discarded—left for dead on some fabricated battlefield.
“That’s certainly a possibility,” Brock said, soberly.
Jenai began to panic, waving her hands in front of her face as she began to weep loudly.
Zill rolled her eyes and shook her head. “God! Don’t be so emo. No way that’s true”
Brock had a knack of making things worse with his logic. He sugar-coated nothing. “It’s just as plausible as any other theory.”
Mizuki had remained very quiet throughout this conversation and Zack had just now noticed that she was still here, listening.
She stood and crossed her arms on her chest. She gazed down at Zack with a curl of her lips—a strange mix of a frown and smile.
It was very odd.
“Well, Zack. What do you say we go for a little walk?”
†††
Mizuki walked so fast toward the tree line Zack had trouble keeping up. He had to break into a jog a few times to keep pace.
“What’s the hurry?” Zack barked.
“I gotta see this for myself.”
“They aren’t going anywhere. This isn’t a race.”
Mizuki stopped and twirled. Her nostrils flared and Zack was taken aback by that. “You’re leading that poor girl on, you know.”
Zack took a step back in shock. “What do you mean?”
“Jenai. She’s like a puppy dog. I know you don’t feel the same way toward her, but you’re encouraging her. It’s wrong.”
Zack stammered. “I … I’m … what? I’m not doing anything. I like Jenai. We have a lot in common.”
Mizuki mutte
red, “Whatever,” and began her rapid march again.
Their boots crunched the branches and the cones loudly as they reached the woods. Mizuki was the first to cut through the bramble and reach the hedge barrier. She crouched to glean a closer look.
Zack, huffing from the brisk pace, did the same.
It was a vastly different scene than the one he had seen days ago. The habitat on the other side of the barrier was very much like this one. The shack was the nearly identical to theirs. Yellow dandelions sprouted on the sunlit, sloping hills of grass that surrounded the cabin.
Mizuki pulled her head back; her lips quivered. “There are no Gorn here.”
“This is different than what Jenai and I saw.”
Zack peered through the gaps again to see people who looked very much like Mizuki milling about on the porch. He could make out an Asian girl, her black hair pulled into a pony tail, wiping her face with an unsteady hand. An Asian boy, who had a thick crop of black hair, rubbed her shoulders and leaned down to say something into her ear.
Mizuki pulled away from the hedge. She had a rather intimidating scowl on her face. “I’ve seen enough.”
She stomped away even more swiftly than before. Zack hurried to make up the gap between them.
Part I
Chapter Five
Bitte. Bitte.
Zack held a lead pipe in his right hand and had brass knuckles secured to his left.
He eyed his surroundings. It looked to be an old warehouse. Dust covered the floor and large hooks hung from beams high above him. Windows, clouded and grimy, spanned all four walls. He smelled a hint of motor oil.
He wore jeans and a tank top tucked into them. The tank top only accentuated his skinny arms.
Harness’ arms were not skinny, his exposed muscles bulged and flexed as he beat a figure about the head and face with his lead pipe, grunting with each furious blow. Splatters of blood covered his face and tank top.
He seemed to enjoy it way too much.
“Take that, you dirty bastard.”
Zack walked carefully toward the figure Harness had just brutally bludgeoned. It was lying motionless in the dirt and dust and wore green cargo pants and a T-shirt that had some peculiar writing on it, partially obscured by blood and what Zack thought could only be teeth and brain matter.
It was a humanoid, pale and thin.
And very much dead.
Zack turned to look at Harness, who smiled almost giddily as his chest expanded with each of his deep breaths.
“Harness, where are the others?”
“Too busy taking these asshats down to freaking care. C’mon. We have some hunting to do.”
Harness pressed ahead, dodging large, sharp hooks. Zack followed closely behind, his eyes wide as he anxiously surveyed his surroundings.
Don’t want to be bludgeoned to death by a T-shirt-wearing humanoid.
Harness turned a corner, stopped and lowered his pipe. Thick blood still dripped off of it and began to pool next to him.
Zack pushed past him to see what had stopped Harness in his tracks. It was a sight he wished he had not seen.
It was Zill hung on a hook, her eyes open, but lifeless, streams of red flowing from the corners of her mouth. The hook had pierced her between her breasts.
Harness heaved and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Jesus!”
Before he could say another word, a figure bolted out from a darkened corner and smashed Harness in the back of the head with a pipe. Harness fell to the floor. He dropped his pipe and it rolled away loudly, echoing throughout the warehouse. He grasped at the back of his head and moaned before another swing from the humanoid silenced him. The humanoid muttered something in a language Zack did not know —it sounded a lot like German—and swung the pipe again. It connected with a disturbing crunch across Harness’ jaw.
A few teeth flew out.
Zack slipped deeper into the shadows and cowered. He watched the humanoid—a boy himself really, skinny with mussed black hair and a few whiskers on his chin—slam the pipe into Harness over and over again.
Zack felt a tug on his shirt and he swung around wildly. He cocked his pipe behind his ear and Jenai put her hands up to cover her face.
“Whoa,” she said in a whispered yell. “Follow me.”
Jenai bolted off and Zack followed the best he could. His legs quaked at the sights he had just seen and he felt his stomach churn and cramp.
Jenai led him to a door that was propped open by brass knuckles. She opened it slowly and quietly and slipped through it; Zack followed closely behind.
It smelled of cigarette smoke and papers littered a metal desk. Zack picked one up and it was a thick stock paper, the kind resumes were usually printed on, but it was blank. There were small hooks fastened to a two-by-four nailed to a wall. Jenai hid behind the desk, pressing her knees into her chest and rocked. A few tears escaped her eyes and she brushed them away with a trembling hand.
She whispered, “They’re all dead. Except for us.”
Zack sat next to her and threw his arm around her. She leaned into him, putting her head on his shoulder and sobbed, sniffing the snot back into her nose so loudly he feared the humanoids would hear her.
“They are vicious,” she said, hushed. “They hung Zill on a hook, and then beat Cass and Brock to death. I hid, and then saw you and Harness, but before I could get to you that guy beat the bejesus out of Harness. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“Where’s Mizuki?”
“The last time I saw her, she didn’t look good. Her face was pale and her eyes were bloodshot. She was sweating. I can’t imagine she made it, as sick as she was.”
Zack held her even more tightly. “They look … normal.”
“They are. They’re speaking German. I could understand them.”
“You speak German?”
“A little bit. My grandma lived there when she was young. She came over when she was a teenager. She taught me some German. I’m a bit rusty, but I can understand most of it.”
Zack didn’t know what to make of this latest revelation. If they really were German, then that meant their captors had taken at least another group from Earth, not just he and The Six.
“Are you sure they are speaking German?” Zack had to be certain.
Jenai whispered “Yes. They’re German.”
What are the odds of an alien race developing the same language that was spoken on Earth, presumably light years away? Probably minuscule, if not zero.
Zack was encouraged by this development. “Maybe we can reason with them, then. Work together. Maybe if we both refuse to participate, it will get our captor’s attention.”
Jenai scoffed. “They didn’t look in a talking mood.”
“How many of them are left?”
“Harness went all Rambo on most of them. Two are left.”
Two against two—at least the odds were even. At least they had a chance.
Zack heard the muffled voices of a male and a female coming from behind the door. The more closely he listened, the more he could tell they were indeed speaking German. Jenai listened intently as well; He could tell she was translating in her head.
The door knob jiggled and Jenai scooted away in fear. Zack motioned for her to be still. The knob jiggled again, but it was locked. The voices became loud and increasingly terse.
The Germans were arguing.
The voices faded.
“What were they saying?” Zack asked.
“They are looking for us. The German dude is not happy. He said something like, ‘Where could they have gone?’ The German chick was like, ‘I didn’t see where they went.’ Then the German dude said something to the effect that they were screwed if they didn’t find us, that he didn’t want to go back to that cell. I think we’re safe here for now.”
Zack knew they could not hide in here forever. Eventually they would need food and water. Eventually the Germans would cycle back to the door and break it down. Eventually there
would have to be a winner and a loser.
That’s how these contests worked. There were no draws in these arenas.
Zack sensed Jenai was well aware of that fact as well. She rocked sullenly and stared straight ahead. She no longer cried. She no longer whimpered. She was stoic.
That concerned Zack more than if she were still weeping.
“Hey,” Zack said abruptly. Jenai flinched as if torn out of a trance and looked at Zack. “Tell me about your grandma.”
Jenai smiled and pressed her chin into the gap between her knees. “She is so cool. When I go visit her around Christmas, we bake together all day. We make this pastry called a Bethmannchen. It’s so delish. She lets me do things my parents would never let me do, like drive. I drove her car once even though I don’t have a license. It was incredible. I hope I get a chance to drive a car again.”
Zack thought clinging to such mundane things helped her cope. Zack had hoped to see Caroline again, to go fishing at the lake with her and to watch stupid movies and make fun of them with her.
It was those little memories that meant so much to him now. He supposed they meant as much to Jenai.
Zack found it troubling that he had no grandma to pine for. “I wish I had a close family.”
“Are your grandparents alive?”
“Yes. But one set lives in California, about the furthest they can be away from us. The other set lives in Texas. It’s quite the drama around the holidays. The rest of the time they call maybe once a month. My parents go through the motions. They go through the motions on a lot of things.”
“I wish mine did. They are so overprotective. I can’t do anything.”
“Mine are the opposite. I don’t think they really care what I do sometimes. Maybe it’s because they know I won’t do anything crazy or stupid. I never do anything crazy or stupid.”
“I don’t either. I’m just a loser.”
Zack protested. “No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am. I’ve never done anything extraordinary. I don’t play sports. I don’t belong to any clubs. I just exist. I just take up space.”
Zack searched for something comforting to say, but came up empty. “I’m sorry.”
Jenai lifted her chin from the crack between her knees and eyed Zack oddly. “What are you sorry about?”
