by Jack Lewis
“And Eric,” said Heather.
“Point is, you look after yourself. I do what I do for everyone on the Mainland. Listen, Heather. You need to toughen up. You need to take on some of the dark. There are things we have to do that might not taste right, but you swallow them down anyway. If that’s what it takes to get rid of the Capita, then that’s what you have to do.”
Heather found herself shaking her head, as if the action would expel Max’s words. Having a cause didn’t just excuse everything you did to achieve it. There was a lot of darkness in the world, and Heather wouldn’t thicken it by pouring in some of her own. She was going to get Kim back, she was certain of that much. She wouldn’t lose herself in the process.
~
Five miles later she saw buildings in the distance. They were standard two-story houses, grouped together and then hemmed in by a wall which ran around them. There was a large, black metal gate in the centre. Thin streams of smoke rose up from a few of the chimneys. It looked like a quiet place. She imagined the people inside. They would be self-sufficient, spending all day gathering food and water and doing what they could to keep safe. She pictured a community where everyone knew each other’s names, where meals were shared and town meetings were held.
As they got closer, she saw wooden stakes driven into the ground in front of town. Max pulled on the reins and slowed his horse.
“Lady and gentleman,” he said. “Welcome to Kiele.”
“Cue the dramatic music,” said Charles.
Heather saw the wooden stakes clearly now. They surrounded the walls of Kiele, each one twenty feet away from the next. The wood looked sturdy, and the tops of them had been carved into spikes. On top of the spikes, wedged down so as not to fall off, were decapitated heads.
At first she thought they might be fake, but looking closer, she knew that wasn’t the case. Blood had dried at the tops of the stakes. The heads had their mouths open, and the wood was driven through their neck, into their mouths and then up through their brains until it punctured their skull. Their eyes were wide open, as if they had died in a state of terror.
“The spikes are normal,” said Max. Since glimpsing Kiele, he had looked full of nervous energy. “It’s to scare people away. Don’t worry; most of the heads are just our people, the ones who died of natural causes.”
“Most?” said Heather.
Max looked at her gravely. “We aren’t the only ones who use spies. The Capita have tried to infiltrate us before.”
“What a delightful place,” said Charles.
“It shouldn’t be this quiet around here,” said Max. “We normally keep a couple of guys on watch.”
When they reached the town gate, Max climbed down from his horse and took off the saddlebag. Heather walked behind him, edging away from a stake that was a few feet away. She took a glimpse at the head that was stuck on it. It was a man with brown hair that curled down to his neck. His mouth was open wide, and his teeth were shattered from where the wood had been driven through.
Max walked into a dark archway just in front of the gate.
“Give me a minute,” he said.
He took a step forward, and then stopped. He dropped his saddlebag to the ground. Something grabbed hold of him and jerked him back. A man moved out of the shadows with a knife pressed against Max’s throat.
“Rushden,” said Max, his words strained.
The man had ginger hair that stuck out in sharp tufts, the kind of mane that resisted all grooming. He held the knife so close to Max’s throat that Heather thought he might puncture it. Rushden looked at Heather and Charles, and he nodded. Heather wondered what he was nodding at. Then two strong arms gripped her from behind, and a cold blade pressed into her skin.
Rushden pulled the knife away from Max, turned it in his hands and then brought it crashing down on his skull. Max fell to the ground.
“Good to have you back,” said Rushden, looking at Max on the floor.
Heather’s pulse fired, and she wanted to break into a run. Before she could make a move, something blunt thumped the back of her head. The last thing she saw was the ground as it rushed toward her.
Chapter Five
Eric
He kept his head low, only raising it to check on the guards in the watch towers. He moved by the side of a cabin, ducking under one of the windows so that the other DCs, if there were any in there, didn’t see him.
Over the last couple of days in camp he’d kept looking around, hoping more than anything that he’d see his mum with her warm smile or Luna who, even though she was his twin, was taller than him. They had to be here somewhere. Charles Bull had stolen them away, and there weren’t many places the Capita men took the immune.
In a watchtower to his right, thirty feet above the fence, a guard rested with his arms across the barrier. He bent down, grabbed a water bottle and lifted it to his lips. Water, thought Eric. I never thought I could be so thirsty.
It seemed like the only water they were ever going to get was what the guards spared them at feeding times. The first time they were all brought into a large canteen and served a bowl of slop, Eric had been too nervous to eat. He didn’t even have the stomach for a swig of water.
“It’s the de-icing powder,” a man leaned across and told him. His sleeves trailed across the gruel in the bowl in front of him. “Bet you inhaled some, didn’t you?”
The guard in the tower drank the water. As he gulped, he turned his head and glanced in Eric’s direction. Eric’s heart pounded. He slammed back against the cabin wall and stayed low. He barely dared lift his head to check if the guard had spotted him. All it took was one glance. A single move seen by the wrong eyes.
It seemed like the guards were everywhere. You could barely move around camp without glimpsing a man or woman in a Capita uniform, weapons in their hands just aching to be used. It was as though they were all clones of each other, because they all wore the same stern expressions. Eric wondered if any of them had families. Who did they go home to at night? Or did they all sleep in camp?
There was no privacy. On the first day in camp they were led away from the steam train and into a processing warehouse. The guards ordered them all to strip naked together, boys in front of girls, men in front of women. Kim shook her head and said she couldn’t do it, but Eric remembered the boy who had tried to run away from the train. He pictured his face pressed into the stone floor, blood dribbling from the bullet wounds on his back.
“You’ve got to do it,” he told her. “Nobody will look. We’ve all got to do the same thing.”
Once they were all naked, three guards went from boy to girl with scissors and a razor. An hour later, the entire floor of the room was covered in discarded hair. Eric put his hand to his head and felt the roughness of his scalp. The floor was cold beneath his feet, and a draught blew between his legs. He looked at Kim. He kept his gaze eye level, focussing on the look of despair in her face. The guards had shaved her too, but there was a tuft on the back of her head which they had missed. Keep it that way, thought Eric. It’s a tiny part of you they haven’t taken away.
He knew that Kim wanted to cry, but somehow she kept it together. He wanted to put an arm out and comfort her, but he didn’t want to touch her bare skin. All around him everyone shivered, even the adults. He saw women with their hands folded across their chests, and men with their hands cupped around their groins.
“I used to pay to see this kind of thing,” he heard a guard say.
“Sick bastard,” answered another. “Why’d they keep pairing me with you?”
The guards walked through the room with brooms and swept the hair into piles of blonde, brown, black and ginger.
Eric couldn’t take his eyes off one of the guards. It was the one who had made the joke about paying to see them naked. His mask reached all across his lips, but somehow Eric read a sneer in the man’s expression. He raced through the room with his broom, sweeping up the shaven hair as if it was a game.
“Eric?”
said a voice.
Allie was next to them. Without his clothes on, Eric could see how much the boy’s ribs stuck out. He saw that his red blotch birthmark didn’t just stop at his neck; it stretched over his collar bone and onto his chest.
“It’s okay,” said Eric. The panic the boy felt was written all over his face.
“Do you think that’s him?” said Allie, and nodded at the guard with the sneer.
“Who?”
“We heard about the camp. Back home in Muske. There’s supposed to be a guard here who wears gloves made of skin.”
After processing they were all set to work. It was done without ceremony; the guards just handed them camp clothes and told them where to go. The camp uniforms were a uniformly grey colour that came in one size for kids, another for adults. Some people were left looking like they were wearing bedsheets.
Eric’s job was in a shed in the northwest corner of camp, next to the kennels. As the barks and growls of the dogs floated in through the window, Eric’s task was to sort a pile of shoes into pairs. A guard was posted outside, but Eric quickly realised that the man was a smoker. Every twenty minutes he’d hear his boots pound on the ground as he walked away for his fix.
He spent the first two days searching through the cabins at any chance he got. There were fifteen in total, each of them fitted with rows of bunk beds. There were four foul-smelling buckets at one end of the room. On some cabin walls were drawings made by inmates who had been long-term residents at camp. Others were nothing but wood and plasterboard. In one of the cabins, someone had scratched help us into the wall.
As he searched the camp, Eric asked the same question to so many people that the words started to lose meaning in his head.
Have you seen my sister? Have you seen my mum? She’s tall and has curly hair. My sister looks just like me. She’s my twin.
All of his questions met with shaking heads and negative responses, and with each dead end his heart sank. He wasn’t going to give up.
The guard in the watch tower put his bottle down and carried on leaning. He picked up a pair of binoculars and made a sweep over the yard, finally stopping on a section toward the east. Eric stuck his head out from the corner of the cabin wall and watched. A group of men were lined up in a row in the yard.
A guard paced up and down in front of them, mumbling under his breath. The DC men and women stood rigid as if pencils had been shoved up their bums. Finally the guard stopped. He stuck his finger out and pressed it into the chest of a stocky man wearing clothes that wrapped him up as tight as sausage meat.
The guard said something to another guard behind him and then walked off to the side. The other guard raised a rifle, pointed it at the stocky man and pulled the trigger. Out of reflex the stocky man put his arms in front of his face as if that would be enough to stop the bullet. Nothing happened. The two guards laughed with each other.
I need to get out of here, thought Eric.
Eric heard voices near him, and boots thumped along the stones. He caught the sight of two Capita uniforms, and they were headed in his direction. His heart started thumping. If he was caught prowling around, he knew what would happen. He didn’t know how Kim would cope if something happened to him.
The sound of the guards’ boots drew closer. Eric turned and headed back on himself and along the side of the cabin. He reached the door and turned the handle. Just as the guards rounded the corner behind him, Eric walked inside the cabin.
Two boys were sat on the floor. On hearing the door open they jumped and got to their feet. One of them ran over to a bed and pretended to be changing the sheets. Another scurried over to the bed closest to him and rolled underneath the frame.
“I’m not a guard,” said Eric.
“Why aren’t you in work?” said one of the boys. His scalp was dotted with tiny red spots.
“I could say the same about you.”
The other boy rolled out from under the bed. “We’re, uh, on rest time.”
“We don’t get rest time,” said Eric.
The boy with the spotted scalp stood up. “We won’t tell if you don’t,” he said.
Eric walked over and sat on the edge of a bunk. He realised that the bunk was in full view of the window. Outside, a man lifted a pickaxe into the air and swung it at the ground. He stopped and wiped his forehead. A guard walked over to him and clipped the back of his head with a gloved hand. Eric stood up and moved to another bunk away from the window.
The air in the cabin smelled the same as his. Sweat and dirt. At the end of the room, one of the buckets had stains all over the sides, and flies buzzed around it.
“I wanted to ask you,” said Eric. “Have you seen a girl who looks like me? And her mum?”
“We all look the same,” said the boy. “Even the girls.”
Eric felt his scalp. He still hadn’t gotten used to how bristly it was.
The boy who had rolled out from under the bed walked across the room and then sat on the bunk opposite Eric. He had the start of a moustache on his lip. Eric guessed that once the DCs had been shaved that was it. The guards wouldn't be paying attention to every hair that sprouted from someone's face.
“So what are you guys doing?” asked Eric.
“We we’re just planning an -”
“We were just telling stories,” said the spotted boy, cutting in.
The hard bed made Eric uncomfortable. The only bonus about the never-ending work was that it tired you out enough to sleep on something so scratchy.
“So go on,” he said. “Tell a story.”
The moustached boy rubbed his head.
“Well there’s one my dad told me about a place down south. As south as you can get without falling off the Mainland. There’s this area called Loch…Loch something. Loch-Deep.”
“All the trees and the leaves are dead, and things scream at night time. There’s something that walks through the shadows at night. It’s always watching. It does nothing but wait for someone to wander in. It stalks them through the trees until they’re so scared that they wee themselves, and then when it gets bored….”
”Whatever,” said Eric. “Cut the crap. How dumb do you think I am?”
The moustached boy looked at the spotted one. The spotted boy sighed, and then nodded.
“We’re planning an escape. Tonight,” said the moustached boy. “You interested?”
“What’s your plan?” said Eric.
The boy went to speak, but the one with the spots stopped him.
“First, are you in or not?” he said.
“I’ll think about it,” said Eric.
~
Camp Dam Marsh seemed to amplify the darkness at night. It took the black of the sky and it poured more tar and emptiness into it until it felt like you were swamped. It seemed as if shutting your eyes actually illuminated everything around you rather than shut it off.
Men and women shifted in their bunks. At the far end a little girl cried in her sleep, and a man bunking above her told her to be quiet. The room smelled of unwashed bodies, and the buckets at the end of the room, full from a day of use, hummed. Every so often a beam of light would swish over the windows as the guards checked the camp.
Eric sat on the end of Kim’s bed. She was wrapped up with the thin blanket, ignoring the itchiness of the fabric in favour of staying warm. Her skin was so drained it would have to brighten two shades to even be called pale.
“You need to eat,” said Eric.
“I can’t.”
“It’s not doing you any good ignoring it. What would your mum say?”
“She’d say, ‘Kim, you have a stomach condition. You can’t eat the slop they put in front of you.’”
“We need to find you something else,” said Eric.
Kim held one hand in the other and rubbed her fingers. Her skin was raw from a day of sanding down the outside of the cabin walls. Whether the wood really needed sanding or it was just a pointless task to keep her drained, Eric didn’t know.
“I think we should go with them,” she said.
“Keep it down.”
She lowered her voice. “If the boys you told me about are escaping, we should join them.”
“I don’t know, Kim,” he said.
She rubbed her hands.
“What’s the alternative? I need to find my mum. It’s worth the risk.”
“And what about my mum?” said Eric. He became aware that his voice was more than a whisper, so he spoke quieter. “What about Luna?”
