by Jack Heath
There’s no sign of the Pedo, who was profiled on Cedric’s computer as a priest with exactly the rap sheet you’d expect. Altar boys. Communion wine. A sudden move to a new parish whenever a parent complained. Maybe the Guards killed him before I arrived. There’s no way to ask that won’t sound suspicious.
Gerald is still talking. ‘You know why it’s ironic? They feed dog meat to the humans and human meat to the dogs.’
It takes me a minute to realise what he means. Where the food for the watchdogs comes from.
‘You see that machine behind you? Do you get what they’re gonna do to us?’ He’s shouting now. ‘Do you understand what you’re implicit in, Lux?’
‘You mean complicit.’ I don’t turn around, but I know the machine he’s referring to. The huge steel box with a chute at one end and a spout at the other. Like a woodchipper, but not designed for wood.
I hand some food to the KKK Queen.
‘Shut up, Gerald,’ she says as she takes it, ignoring me completely. I recognise her voice from last night, when she introduced herself as Hailey.
‘You shut up,’ Gerald says weakly.
The sixth prisoner doesn’t take his bowl. I quickly realise that he’s dead. I’ve been holding out a bowl for Scammer’s corpse.
Everyone stares at me in shocked silence, embarrassed on my behalf, like it’s a dinner party and I’ve just farted. Then the Nazi laughs darkly and throws a dog biscuit into her mouth.
CHAPTER 14
I’m one of a kind, and yet no matter where you go, I’m always at your fingertips. What am I?
‘This was the spot, right?’ Fred asks.
I examine the footprints. The hiker had the same size feet as me and similar shoes. It’s basically impossible to tell what happened. ‘Right.’
The others—Donnie, Cedric, Zara and Kyle—scan the forest. Branches creak. Birds twitter. Sleet blows through clearings, settling on leaves. Visibility isn’t much better than it was last night.
‘He was just a hiker,’ Kyle says. ‘Why do we have to find him?’
‘Because Samson attacked him with a knife and Lux with a gun,’ Fred says matter-of-factly. ‘If he makes it back to civilisation, he might tell somebody.’ He frowns. ‘Has anyone heard from Samson?’
Blank looks all around.
‘Thought he’d come back for something to eat,’ Donnie says.
‘Me too,’ Fred says. ‘He seemed kind of gloomy this morning. Zara, can you send him a message?’
‘On it.’ Zara gets out her phone. ‘I hope he’s okay.’
‘Yeah. Everyone else, keep an eye out for him. You see anything, post it in the group chat on your phone. Everyone got push notifications and location sharing switched on?’
Everyone nods. There must be wi-fi repeaters in the forest. Makes sense, otherwise the cameras wouldn’t work.
I nudge Fred. ‘Can I stay with you? I don’t have a phone.’
‘What happened to yours?’ He looks concerned, probably about my data falling into the wrong hands.
‘I swallowed it.’
This might be the first true thing I’ve said to Fred, but he doesn’t look like he believes me. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Police can force you to unlock your phone with a fingerprint, but they can’t cut it out of your stomach.’
‘How are you gonna get it back out?’
‘I already did,’ I say. ‘I figured I had two main options—’
Fred cuts me off with an alarmed wave. ‘Jesus, okay. You can stay with me. But we’ll have to walk twice as fast to cover the same search area. Let’s get moving.’
We all march our separate ways into the forest. I’m the only one without a weapon.
Ferns scrape my arms and legs. Something is crawling over the back of my neck. I swat at it. I’m still hungry. I can eat vegetables until my stomach bursts and still feel empty.
The forest looks different without the night-vision goggles. The constantly shifting shadows on the forest floor create fake holes and conceal real ones. Some blood-red flowers light up the gloom, despite the season. I spot a familiar shrub up ahead, shaped like a giant ribcage. I turn—there’s another box camera, nailed to a tree opposite it.
‘Do I need to impress upon you the seriousness of this situation?’ Fred asks, when we’re out of earshot of the others.
I shake my head. ‘No, I get it. If this guy tells the cops about us …’
‘Not that. What you were saying to the others, at breakfast.’
I frantically fast-forward through this morning’s conversation. What did I say?
‘About the prisoners,’ Fred prompts. ‘I know you like to play games, Lux. But if you want to stay here, you have to rein it in.’
He thinks I’ve been feigning ignorance by asking about things Lux would already know. He wouldn’t be pleased to hear that my ignorance was genuine.
‘Sorry, bro,’ I say. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
He holds up a hand for silence, scanning the trees around us like a Terminator. Then he says, ‘Don’t sweat it. Let’s keep moving.’
As I trudge through the shallow snow, I try to think of things to say. I want to keep him talking and gather as much information as I can, but there are so many pitfalls. Are you and Zara a thing? Lux might be supposed to know that. Where do you keep the keys for the cars? Too suspicious. Does anyone have any blood-borne diseases I might need to worry about?
‘Kyle seems to look up to you,’ I say cautiously.
Fred laughs. ‘Cute, huh? He never knew his father, and I think for him I’ve kind of stepped into that role. Ridiculous, right? He’s practically our age.’
Actually, I think Fred’s about thirteen years older, and I’d be older still. ‘But he makes himself useful?’
‘Hundred per cent. He cleans and repairs the sets, and he does all the supply trips for us, picking up stuff that keeps us running. He delivers the flash drives to the post office for our mailout subscribers, as well. I don’t want anybody else doing that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Everybody else knows too much. I don’t want their faces on camera.’
I get it now. Kyle is expendable.
‘The kid knows what we all look like.’ I’m trying to keep the conversation going. ‘And our names.’
‘He won’t talk. He loves me and hates cops. I’ve also made a few transactions in his name, and the police are bound to find something at his old home.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like whatever. No one’s innocent.’ Fred says this like a mantra. ‘It probably won’t be enough to make the police think they’ve caught the ringleader, but enough that they can pretend they have. They get to arrest someone, we get to walk away, and Kyle gets to sacrifice himself for me. Everyone’s happy.’
If he’s telling me this, he and Lux must have been even closer than I thought. I need to tread very carefully. ‘Do the others know about this plan?’
‘No. But they’ll go along with it, when the time comes.’
We continue searching for a few more hours. Nothing but dirt and trees. No sign of the hiker.
‘I think we’ve lost him,’ Fred says finally. ‘You think he’ll tell anyone?’
‘I don’t know.’ This is true in every sense. I have no idea what the hiker was doing so far from the trail, how he knew my name or what he might do next.
‘It’ll be a shame if we have to move on.’ Fred turns, cutting back across our winding path towards the house. ‘But we’ve been living in a sandcastle. The tide was always going to come in eventually.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re with me? For whatever comes next?’
‘Of course.’ I think of last night, when Fred was about to push that button on his phone. Compared to the other Guards he seemed so calm, even as he was about to … do whatever the button does. Even now, talking about abandoning a business he spent years building, and he still exudes only an air of mild regret. ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone more
in control of their emotions.’
‘Than me?’ Fred looks surprised.
‘Yeah.’
He smiles. ‘Well, my group leader always said you can’t choose what happens to you, but you can choose how to feel about it.’
I think of the moment I realised Thistle was gone forever. What I experienced in that moment didn’t seem like an emotion. It was a physical thing, like a flu, making my throat close up, my eyes burn, my stomach twist. No way could I have turned that off.
Fred thinks he’s more enlightened than me. I think he’s never experienced real pain.
‘I’m not sure it’s that simple.’ I watch a distant crow wrench the innards from a squirrel’s carcass.
‘Okay,’ Fred says, like he knows I’m wrong and will graciously allow me to stay that way.
‘How long has it been since you last went to group?’ I try to frame the question so if he’s still doing the therapy—and if Lux is supposed to know that—he’ll think I mean how many days.
‘Getting close to three years now,’ he says, giving me no clue as to what kind of group it was. Drugs? Anxiety? Grief? ‘Before I went, I had a lot of misplaced anger. I thought I was pissed at my wife, but they taught me that those feelings were mostly about my mom. By the time I left, I wasn’t mad at anyone.’ He glances sideways at me. ‘You thinking about joining?’
I wasn’t. ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘You think I should?’
‘I think everyone should,’ Fred says. ‘Life’s too short to be unhappy.’
I wonder what kind of man Fred was before group therapy. Sadder, by the sounds of it. Maybe he felt guilty about running a dark web torture site. Now he can choose not to feel bad.
This makes me think I shouldn’t go to therapy. Feeling bad about the things I’ve done is my one redeeming quality.
When we get back to the house, Zara meets us at the door. She’s shaking, and there are tears in her eyes.
‘Samson is dead,’ she says.
CHAPTER 15
Someone hires me to discreetly take your things, even though they don’t want the things I take. Who am I?
I once worked as a cleaner at a motel in Baytown. I’d push a little cart filled with sheets, bleach and rolls of toilet paper from one room to the next, scrubbing and tidying the things inside. There were only two of us, and a lot of rooms to clean between the hours of ten and two. We didn’t have enough time to be thorough, which meant the carpets never got vacuumed and the semen stains on the dressers never got anything more than a cursory wipe.
I did find the time to examine any jewellery guests left in their rooms during the day. Anything simple, like plain gold wedding bands, I could swap for cheaper substitutes later. Diamonds became cubic zirconia. Pearls became plastic.
The other cleaner, Helena, preferred to clean the smoking rooms so she could work with a cigarette pinched in the corner of her mouth. She didn’t talk much—each morning she would give me a wary nod and scan me with her hard little eyes—but on my first day, she did warn me that I would eventually come across a suicide.
‘Every cleaner finds one eventually,’ she said, in a Russian-accented rasp. ‘It’s part of the job. Don’t let it get to you. Just call the manager, and don’t touch anything.’
I had never met the manager. He was just a shape behind the venetian blinds in a little office up the back of the lot and the name on the emails that I never bothered to open.
One day I knocked on the door of room twelve, called out, ‘Housekeeping,’ and unlocked it with the master key. Within ten seconds I knew something was wrong. All the personal belongings were missing—there were no clothes scattered about, no chargers plugged into the wall. It looked like the occupant had already checked out, except that I knew he wasn’t supposed to leave until Friday. I soon found a suitcase behind the bed, closed and zipped, as though the occupant had packed all his belongings away in case the cleaners were thieves.
This reminded me to check his desk for jewellery to steal. There was none, but there was a note, written on motel stationery. It said:
Tell Melanie I’m sorry. She deserves better. I hope she finds the man she deserves. Holden
I pushed open the bathroom door and found a man floating in pink bathwater. He was pale, shiny and deflated, like an inside-out football. A steak knife lay on the tiles next to the bath.
If you measure it by years of life lost rather than lives lost, suicide is the leading cause of death in America. Nothing else comes close. And it leaves behind a certain kind of grief among the victim’s friends. It’s not just the loss of the person, it’s the realisation that they were so unhappy.
The way Zara is crying, I feel like I already know what happened to Samson.
‘What do you mean?’ Fred is asking. His Zen smile is gone; now he just looks worried.
‘Did I fucking stutter?’ She did, actually. It’s like she’s choking on the words. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Hey, hey.’ Fred puts his arms around her. ‘Talk to me. Tell me what happened.’
‘I just wanted to give him some food,’ Zara sobs into his shoulder. ‘That’s all I wanted.’
Fred kisses her hair and rubs her back, too fast to be relaxing.
‘Where is he?’ I ask.
Zara points wordlessly, without looking. I walk through the living room, the kitchen and around the corner towards the bedrooms. I don’t know which room is Samson’s, but one of the doors is ajar. I put my palm against the wood and push.
Samson’s room has the same packed-away feel that motel room had. No abandoned clothes, no books. But maybe it’s just sparsely decorated. There’s an aloe vera plant on the bookshelf and a framed photograph of a bodybuilder on the wall. A ukulele propped up in the corner. A bowl of stir-fry upside down on the carpet in front of the door. The window is padlocked shut.
Samson is lying on the double bed in the middle of the room. His shins are hanging down over the side of the bed, like he was sitting and then flopped backwards. A pistol is still clenched in his hand. There’s a small, round hole in his temple.
‘Oh, shit.’ Fred is behind me, his voice muffled, his hands covering his mouth. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘I sent him a message, like you said.’ Zara’s voice wobbles. ‘He didn’t reply. So when I got back after searching the woods, I sent him another one. I heard his phone go off in here. I realised I hadn’t seen him all day, so I thought maybe he was sick and he might like some food. He didn’t say anything when I knocked, so I just …’ She sniffles. ‘If I’d gotten back earlier, maybe he …’
A hundred clues assault me at once. Not much blood around the bullet hole, so he probably died instantly. No blood on the walls or the ceiling or the sheets, so the bullet is likely to be still in his skull. When I walk around him, the lack of an exit wound confirms my theory. It’s common for low-calibre bullets to stay in the skull. Less common for nine-millimetre rounds, like the P320 in Samson’s hand would take.
No smell of gun smoke in the air, so he’s been dead at least half an hour. I put my hand in his armpit.
Zara slaps my hand away. ‘You really need to check his pulse, Lux?’
‘Room temperature, or close to it,’ I say. ‘He’s been dead for hours. Wouldn’t have mattered if you came back early.’
Samson must have killed himself at about one-thirty pm, right after we all left to search the woods. Any later and there would still be body heat, any earlier and someone would have heard the gunshot.
‘I could have checked on him last night,’ Zara sobs. ‘I knew he was acting weird. Maybe he wouldn’t have done this.’
‘What are we gonna do?’ Fred’s hair is a mess, as if the stress has unravelled it. ‘How do we … oh God.’ He bends over, like he’s going to hurl. So much for choosing how to feel. He’s no stranger to violent death, but when the victim is one of his friends, he doesn’t take it well.
I open my mouth to tell him not to puke on my crime scene, and then I remember that’s not my life anymore.
‘I don’t know. Still out searching, I guess.’
‘How long ago did you find him?’
‘Right before you got here.’
Makes sense. Otherwise she would have called Fred, I assume. I touch the upturned bowl of stir-fry. Still warm. Consistent with her version of events.
Samson’s face is slack and oddly peaceful. I know from experience that people don’t look like that when they’re about to commit suicide. Death does loosen the facial muscles, at least until rigor mortis, but the expression makes me start looking for other clues. Things that don’t fit with the narrative.
Like the gun in his hand. He didn’t drop it when he died. Unusual but, again, not unheard of. The bullet hole is neat. No burns around it, meaning he was shot from a distance of at least a foot. Possible, but very unlikely … unless he was shot by someone else.
When I was a kid I found an old longboard next to a dumpster. It took me a while to work out how to ride it—you swerve gently left and right to keep your balance and your speed, but eventually it feels like the board is in control, not you. The curves get too wide, too steep, and you know you’re going to get thrown off.
This situation feels just like that. Every time I think I understand what’s going on, I have to swerve again. And the crash, when it comes, might be the kind you don’t walk away from.
‘We have to get the others back here.’ Zara is texting.
‘Right.’ Fred visibly pulls himself together. ‘And we have to tell his family, I guess. Except we can’t, because we don’t want the police anywhere near this place. What a mess.’
He takes the gun from Samson’s hand and checks the clip. ‘The whole house could have gone up. Jesus.’
I guess he means that the bullet might have set fire to the propane tank which powers the fireplace. But that seems unlikely, up this end of the house. Maybe there’s something else flammable around that I don’t know about.
