by Adam Cesare
The tall one looked into Harriet’s eyes, the exchange of two sharks regarding each other through a sea of minnows. Maybe there was a shred of respect there, but there were also all those teeth, barely tucked out of sight beneath gray lips.
Yeah, Harriet wanted to say, tried to beam to him without averting her glance, maybe I will follow you, see what you’re up to. Don’t worry, I’m not after your little white girl.
If he got any of this, he didn’t show it, but waited until his lackey was finished and then pushed past her into the rec room. He grabbed one of the table legs that had been stacked against the wall, slung it over his shoulder like a bat, and walked out.
The shorter one rattled as he walked, his pockets loaded with change or keys or something, his tread not exactly stealthy. He walked with his legs spread wide, trying to keep the waistband of his sweatpants over his skinny hips.
She waited until the tops of their heads disappeared down the stairwell before following them.
Chapter 32
“Yo, Miss. You ever heard of Dante’s Inferno?”
This was a change. Martin was usually more interested in talking about a movie he’d seen or the video game he’d been playing since their last session, not epic poetry.
“Yes, I’m familiar. Are you reading it in school?”
“Nah, not the old one. It’s a video game. You play this guy that goes through hell to get his wife back, he’s got this badass sword made of skulls and shit.”
“You should try the poem if you like that.” It was no use correcting the language of some kids; you wouldn’t get anything done in the allotted time if you kept pausing to address every “and shit.”
“Yeah, maybe, but what’s cool about it, and what scares me, if we’re being honest,” Martin said, and paused, choosing his words. He was a sixteen-year-old with a teardrop tattoo who’d spent more time in juvie than he had in middle school, but he still liked to talk about his fears a lot. It had taken her six months of posturing and dead ends to get him to open up enough to use that particular f word.
“It’s a scary game?”
“Not really, more stupid and gross than it is scary. But there’s this idea that as you move on, you go deeper into hell and the levels, they’re all based around the different crimes you do to get to hell, and as you get further and further, the stuff the people did to land themselves there gets worse and worse and the place gets more fucked up.” He paused. “You think that’s true?”
“What’s true?”
“That it’s not just you do bad things and you go to hell, but that you’ll have it worse once you get there depending on all the shit you did? Like misdemeanors versus felonies and shit?”
“I don’t know, what do you think?”
“I think I don’t want it to be.”
That was one of the last times Martin had shown up for his appointment. A few more slips and the judge had decided to charge him as an adult. It had made the papers, hit some review boards, but nobody seemed to take too much umbrage with the decision, not even Nikki.
If they’d been fighting their way out of hell, then the man who’d taken ahold of Dane was Cerberus, the guardian at the gates. His skin was a mass of scabs and burned tissue, speckled over with fresh pinpricks of red blood where new wounds had opened in his skin, just from talking and moving his head. He must have been in extreme pain.
You wouldn’t know it from his laughter, though. It was a sound that she’d forced herself to reevaluate; crouched at the bottom of their piled-up boxes, she was able to hear the laughter so clearly because the door had gone still. She whirled to check that it was still intact, that they hadn’t broken it down. It was still there.
She turned back and could see both of them. When Dane tried to run, he’d made it three steps before being overtaken. It was enough distance from the front of the building that the two of them were framed perfectly by the window, as if Nikki was watching a one-sided wrestling match on TV.
Dr. Dane gasped. The scarred man was toying with him, choking him until he went red and then releasing his grip momentarily, letting Dane suck in air before reapplying pressure.
“Doctor? See Pee Arrrr?” The man giggled, his own jellied blood mixing with the spittle at the corner of his mouth and landing on Dane’s scrubs, dotting the blue fabric a dark purple. Every time he was allowed a breath, Dr. Dane would buck. As he struggled, the back of Dane’s head smacked into the resident’s nose, or at least where his nose would have been, had it not melted off in whatever accident had given him his terrible scars.
“Nice, be nice now,” the man said, crimping his fingers around Dane’s neck a little too tightly, cracking it loud enough for Nikki to hear over her own muffled scream. She pressed her fingers over her face so she wouldn’t be heard. Maybe they didn’t know she was down here, maybe that’s why the banging had stopped, because they figured they’d caught the only escapee.
The resident removed his scarred hand from Dane’s throat. Two of his fingers were connected by a thick webbing of burned tissue, melted and then healed together. Whatever had given the residents their strength hadn’t necessarily been an upgrade for this man.
Dr. Dane tried to breathe but managed only to exhale, a gurgle first, followed by a mouthful of blood. The man had kinked the doctor’s esophagus, and from the sound of his shouts, he hadn’t meant to.
“No!” the man yelled, letting go of Dane, who dropped to his knees, while the burned resident beat his own head with his fists. Self-injurious behavior was something Nikki was familiar with. A few of her kids had fallen on the autism spectrum or had other developmental delays and would flagellate if their sessions began to dwell too heavily on their mistakes; if they felt powerless and worthless and felt they needed a physical reprimand.
The man beat at his thin hair until his own knuckles were bloody and it looked like he might knock himself unconscious. Do it, Nikki pleaded. He stopped and put his hands out for balance, then glared down at Dane. The doctor was clawing at the ground, not moving anywhere fast.
The burned man’s expression shifted as he watched Dane. She’d seen that look, too. The look in the old man’s eyes was the kind that made you depress the button on your phone, the silent alarm that would call for security. The scarred man was looking for someone else to blame for his mistake.
He stomped down on Dr. Dane’s back, the kick ferocious enough to make the man’s chest sink into the gravel. Dust flew up and his rib cage may have even gone concave. Blood poured from his mouth now, but his eyes moved with a fluidity that told Nikki he was still alive.
He wouldn’t be for long. At least she hoped.
With his foot still planted on Dane’s back, the doctor’s eyes seemed to connect with hers in the darkness. She didn’t mouth it, didn’t dare, but she wanted him to know that she was sorry, that she knew he’d only been human, that she might have made the same selfish decisions; Don might have, too, if he’d lived.
Slipping his fused fingers into Dane’s mouth, his other hand grasping at his hair, the man wrenched Dane’s head up. The crack that followed did not end after one pop, but continued until Dane’s body was folded backward, a right angle that ended with his head flat against the man’s knee. There, face to dead face, the man let loose a primal scream that tore at his ruined lips.
He was yelling at Dane, scolding him for dying.
The mutilation continued, but Nikki didn’t watch it. She curled under the boxes, searching for Paulo’s hand, finding it and holding it.
“It’s okay, you’re here,” he whispered to her. He could have misspoken, meant I’m here, but he probably hadn’t. He meant that she was here, still alive, and because of that there was hope.
Until the rattle of keys filled the basement, a metal-on-metal scratch from the other side of the door.
Oh Jesus. They had a set of keys. They’d had them this whole time.
Part V
Skin Trade
Chapter 33
Ivan Frank had c
ommitted perhaps the greatest sin that any enlisted man was capable of: He’d disobeyed a direct order.
He needed a baptism, a way to find his center again, the same way he had after the accident.
Piper, Grant, and he stood inside the kitchen, the two bodies looking up at them. Ivan wished Piper would close their eyelids, but he didn’t dare touch them himself.
Clemson’s eyes were pitched back, not so much rolling in his skull but in the top of his head, which was a separate entity from his jaw, sagging back against the chrome prep table and looking toward the refrigerator door.
The doctor lay next to Clemson, just as dead.
—
After Ivan tossed the bent body up into the second-floor window, he’d tried straightening it out, but done a poor job of it. He’d ended up smearing the man’s clothes with more blood, made him look even worse. Climbing up the wall himself, he’d cut his hands on the drainage pipe and then again on the snipped grating. They’d removed the grate with bolt cutters, making the window the only way in or out of the building, with a good twenty-foot drop. That was, unless you could squeeze through the basement windows, which he couldn’t.
He arrived back at the kitchen before anyone else. Beaumont hadn’t given him any trouble, just sat in front of the door to the refrigerator, nodding as Ivan entered. When Beaumont was given a job, even one as simple as guarding an icebox, he gave himself to it with an unwavering passion.
Maybe Beaumont should have been the one patrolling the grounds. He probably wouldn’t have gotten too rough with the doctor, wouldn’t have destroyed his breathing hole by accident, like Ivan had.
Not only had Ivan broken one direct order, but now he was questioning Piper’s judgment in the handing out of duties. He would need to pay penance for that, too, but not until Piper returned.
They entered a few minutes later, Grant leading with Clemson’s body slung over his shoulder. Behind him came two youths, a man and a woman. The man cradled his bandaged arm and the woman wept quietly. Ivan hoped that the big man’s injury was due to Clemson getting in his licks. The man’s arm looked bad enough that the wound could go septic and kill him. Ivan would like that.
Last to enter was Piper, standing tall. Before looking to the countertop, Piper traded the club he was carrying for his spear. He hissed, brandishing the weapon at the group of jackals who’d followed them to the door before he closed and barred it, leaving them in the dining room.
Grant laid Clemson down next to the dead doctor. To Ivan it seemed like an insult to the brave warrior, his brother-in-arms, to be laid next to this pale worm, the man who hadn’t even been tough enough to survive a slight increase in the pressure around his neck. Ivan contemplated rolling the doctor’s body to the floor but decided against it.
Piper walked the prisoners over to the fridge and, without being asked, Beaumont swung open the door. They’d collected a third prisoner while Ivan was outside, another woman. They’d now have four in total, instead of three, if it hadn’t been for him.
Ivan couldn’t stand the thought, messed up his face just to feel the pain as the plates of scabs shifted against his scars, feeling like razor blades and sand as they split and began to bleed afresh.
“How?” Piper asked, turning out the doctor’s pockets and smashing the man’s cell phone to bits on the corner of the table. He wanted to know why the man was dead, and Ivan didn’t have a good answer.
Ivan tried to form the word mistake but ended up saying “Stupid.” The word was stuttered and slurred, and if Piper understood he gave no indication, nor expressed any confusion, since the word was not a proper explanation.
Just so he could feel the scar on his left knee slide up over the cap and pop, Ivan knelt in front of Piper and began to sob, his tears stinging his cuts.
“Don’t,” Piper said. “Stand up.”
Ivan did, and that’s when he spotted it, up on the shelf with the rest of the items they hadn’t felt the need to stockpile. The familiar yellow and white bag of salt, only triple the size of the one that had been in Ivan’s own kitchen, back when he’d had a kitchen, before this place.
Piper was through talking to him, and had turned his attention to stripping Clemson of his supplies.
Ivan grabbed the bag of salt and hefted it off the shelf.
“Sssssorry,” Ivan said, and then proved it.
He tore open the bag and dipped both hands into the salt, the blood on his fingers streaking the white with brown stripes as he swirled his wrists around. It took a second for the salt to melt into his wounds, for his lazy, torched synapses to send their messages to the rest of his body. That’s when he started screaming, and didn’t stop as he lifted handfuls of salt to his face and rubbed vigorously, trying to get the grit into all the folds.
The pain gave him an almost spiritual clarity, communicated his sorrow to Piper in a way that language never could, even if he could speak properly.
When his eyes finally cleared, neither Piper nor Grant was watching. Neither of them cared.
His baptism over, fresh granules of salt slipping into his wounds, he let the pain burn away the incompetence and resolved to be a better soldier.
—
The situation was becoming untenable, and the gimp’s meltdown wasn’t helping.
Arnold and Ivan hadn’t been friends before the healing, and Ivan didn’t really have any friends. The man couldn’t or wouldn’t speak and he took most meals in his room. He sat in on their veterans’ meetings but never reacted to the men’s stories or the counselor’s advice.
Arnold wasn’t certain where Ivan had gotten those scars, but having himself witnessed men ignite like Roman candles while pulling at the straps of their flamethrowers, he could guess.
Or maybe it had been napalm. It was hard to tell the guy’s age, he was so fucked up. His scar tissue was pink and tight, making him seem younger than his years, and it was because of that that Piper had always figured Vietnam, but he could have been in Korea, same as him.
There was no use asking him now, even though he was capable of answering. Ivan might grab another handful of salt after being reminded of Charlie.
Arnold clapped a hand around the man’s collar and dragged him over to the sink. Ivan stopped rubbing his face and tried to speak. His joints were pliable under Arnold’s grip, the man moving along with his commander, eager to please if only he knew how.
Pulling the hand sprayer out from the faucet, Arnold directed the nozzle at Ivan’s face and turned it to full blast. The water pressure was meant for power washing hardened mac and cheese from pans, but it was cold as it filled Ivan’s mouth and nose, the spray misting the front of Arnold’s shirt.
The water might have been doing more harm than good, not only melting the salt crystals built up in Ivan’s various weeping crevasses but breaking off scabs and causing fresh blood to flow. Arnold cut the faucet and let Ivan collapse in a spasmodic heap.
In the stillness, he could hear voices outside the kitchen. They were surrounded; bodies were behind the door to the cafeteria to the west and the dining room to the south.
He’d worried about this. The residents had short memories, but enough had watched their procession come up from the basement, and some were still pissed that the pharmacy had been closed. He assumed that because there was a gathering outside the kitchen, there were more in the main hallway.
Situations like this could spiral; he’d seen it before and heard about even worse at their meetings.
Add one villager holding a rock that looks a little too much like a grenade to any combat op and that was how you got your My Lais and your Nogeun-ri massacres. And that was a best-case scenario. That was assuming that they’d be the well-armed ones in the equation, able to beat the revolt back with overwhelming force. Outnumbered and without firepower, it was entirely possible that this would be more like a storming of the Bastille, his men and women with their heads on spikes as the residents poured into the room and took what they wanted.
No, th
ere would need to be a solution to this that didn’t require their deaths.
Now all Arnold Piper had to do was think of one.
Chapter 34
Nikki took two bites of the Devil Dog and heaved, not much coming up. They had all the food they could want, but her body wasn’t ready to process the taste of a Drake’s cake.
She was hungry but she couldn’t get the sight of Don out of her mind. She didn’t believe in the afterlife, and had resigned herself to the fact that when they killed him, she’d never see his face again. She’d been wrong.
After finding them in the basement, they’d marched them through the hallway and turned in to the dining room.
“Don’t look,” Paulo said in front of her as they entered the room, but all that did was make her more curious as to what he could be trying to shield her from.
He was right, she shouldn’t have looked.
The resident with the mustache crossed himself as they passed the effigy of Christ.
She thought of the rings of hell, moving deeper and deeper as it got worse. Martin and his video game had been right, that was the way it worked. Once she realized who she was looking at, his face swollen and mottled so that it was hard to recognize him in the red half-light, she had closed her eyes. But even then she was able to smell him.
The processed chocolate of the Devil Dog did little to wash the stink of her dead husband out of her mind, and she considered pushing the cake and frosting up her nose, if she weren’t able to get it down into her stomach.
They’d been left in the walk-in fridge, the air still chilly a day after the power had cut off. There was a large Coleman lantern in the fridge, balanced on one of the shelves, and it took Nikki’s eyes minutes to adjust to it.
They were not alone. There was another woman in the room with them, but no guard. Nobody in here but us humans.
