by Brom Kearne
19
For Thorn it was a slow climb back to consciousness. He rubbed the back of his neck where he’d been hit and his fingers closed around a swollen knot. He touched it tenderly. It was sore, but not as sore as he would have expected. In fact, aside from the excessive grogginess that had left a thick haze in his head, he wasn’t feeling too much pain at all. He smiled as he remembered the opiate injection from the doctor that morning.
That morning! It seemed like such a long time ago. And now, looking around, it was night. Thorn didn’t know how long he’d been out. It could have been a full day, or it could have been just a few hours.
He found himself curled up on the floor of an iron cage just large enough for him to sit in. Fires were burning outside. No, they were bonfires. Dozens of black and amber-clad people were partying around the flames.
Thorn brushed his knuckles on his shirt to get the sand off before rubbing his eyes. He tried to get a bearing on where he was, but his view from the cage didn’t afford him much of a perspective. The bonfires cast enough illumination so he could see that they were in a large sandy bowl. A rocky outcropping on the western side, and Thorn knew it was west by the position of the stars, covered what could have been a cave. He couldn’t see for sure because there were too many tents in the way. Tents were all over the place. Towards the bottom of the bowl was a race track that wound its way around the bonfires and the tents. Thorn watched several bikers racing in the glimpses he was able to catch between the obstructions. They were brutal, openly punching and kicking each other. One of them got shoved off his bike and flipped over the handlebars, tumbling down the incline. It was a wonder he hadn’t broken his neck.
More than anything else that struck him as he was looking around, Thorn was surprised by the numbers of the Amber Bones. He had expected a small gang, but from where he was he could count at least two dozen. And those were just the ones he could see. The real number was probably closer to thirty . . . or forty.
He’d been focused so intently on figuring out where he was and getting an idea of the lay of the camp that Thorn had ignored the smaller details of his immediate surroundings. He became aware of movement near him and realized that he was not alone. Len Dietrich was lying unconscious in the cage next to his.
The Amber Bones were drinking, shouting, laughing, racing, and smoking Mr. Pith’s cannabis flower long into the night. Thorn was able to shut them out enough to get some sleep after a while. It was difficult to get comfortable in the cramped confines of the cage, but by lying on his back, with his legs braced against the bars and his neck crooked in the corner, he managed a few hours’ sleep.
Thorn was awake before dawn, but there wasn’t much for him to see. The gang members were passed out and sleeping in their tents. The incessant buzzing of the dune bikes, which had continued long into the night, was silent. The only sound was the eastern wind whipping over the ridge. It was bringing with it the sun. Already Thorn could make out the long shadows of the tents over him. In a few hours that sun would come blazing over the ridge and he wouldn’t have any protection at all from its fury.
Len Dietrich was awake but he was sitting so stolidly and motionless that at first Thorn didn’t notice that his eyes were open. Neither of them spoke.
As the sun peeked over the ridge the sounds of the gang’s awakening began to stir in the great sandy bowl. Nearly everyone was hung over and moving slowly. From deeper in the bowl came the clanking sounds of tin on tin as someone began making breakfast. A few dune bikes were kicked to life, and carried their riders one way or the other on missions that were unknown to Thorn and his companion in the cages.
Thorn had dozed into a light sleep when someone knocked on the cage door. He found a bowl was being offered through the bars. Looking past the bowl Thorn recognized the young man offering it to him, from the hazel eyes to the sandy hair and swarm of freckles over his nose and cheeks.
Thorn was about to say something but Scott Tanning shook his head adamantly. He never met Thorn’s eyes. Thorn had difficulty reading Scott’s face. The one thing he could see was fear, and that emotion clouded everything else.
Scott moved to Len Dietrich’s cage and pushed a bowl through for him as well. Dietrich grabbed Scott’s wrist. The sudden movement caught him and Thorn by surprise.
“I demand to speak with Melina Bann,” Dietrich hissed.
Scott swallowed hard and shook his head.
From behind a few gang members were coming out of their tent, stretching in the morning sun. Someone had passed out on the ground and was waking up in a pool of vomit. One of the gang members called to Scott, “Hey, kid! Get over here and clean this up!”
Scott tried to pull away from Len Dietrich, but he was held fast.
“I’m not letting you go until you promise to bring Melina Bann to me. She’s still in the camp?”
Scott nodded once.
“Hey, kid, I’m talking to you! Get your butt over here, now.”
“Yessir,” Scott said over his shoulder. Then more quietly to the man who had his wrist, “I can’t. She’ll kill me.”
“You will,” Len Dietrich said and threw Scott’s wrist back at him.
Scott scurried away to where the gang member had been calling him and began cleaning. The gang member put his boot on the back of Scott’s head and pressed his face into the vomit.
“Next time I give you a job you better do it, kid. Understand me?”
“Yessir,” Scott said meekly.
Some of the other gang members standing nearby had a good laugh. Scott looked like he was going to puke himself, and had scrunched his face up to hold it back. When the gang member removed the boot from Scott’s head, Scott pulled himself to his knees and began cleaning again, ignoring the sand and vomit sticking to the side of his face.
“Did I give you permission to get up, kid?”
“N—no sir.”
Scott slowly lowered himself back into the nauseating puddle.
“I swear, these kids they keep finding. No way this one will make it through the trial by strength. No way he’s getting into the gang. I’m going to stake you out for cleaning myself, kid.”
They abused him for a while before getting bored and sending him to find something else to do.
The tin bowl Thorn had been handed contained oatmeal with a few pieces of boiled cactus meat in it. Thorn began eating with his fingers, as they hadn’t given him any utensils. Len Dietrich didn’t touch his.
“Looks like you’re going to have to find some new help,” Thorn said between slurps.
Len Dietrich didn’t say anything for a while. It wasn’t until Thorn was nearly done with his oatmeal and cactus that Len Dietrich finally said, “I trusted her. She was my personal bodyguard and assistant for five years.”
“Then you don’t know how long she’s been working against you?”
Len shook his head. “I made her liaison to the gang. I couldn’t allow anyone to know what I was doing lest word leak out. If the trade caravans discovered my plans too soon it would have been disastrous. So I relied on the one person I thought I could trust to oversee all communication and planning with the gang. I gave her too much power, and allowed her too much secrecy. I see that now.”
“You think?”
“When I get out of here I am going to destroy every last remnant of the Amber Bones Gang. I’ll enlist my own army out of the people of Webster Grove. That’s what I should have done to begin with. Give them something to fight for.”
“Are you going to eat that?” Thorn pointed to the untouched bowl in Len’s cage.
“I don’t know how you can stomach this slop.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think about it. Food is food.”
Len shook his head and looked away at the sunrise.
“If you’re not going to eat it then give it to me.”
Len spilled some of the oatmeal when he turned the bowl to pass it through the bars, but Thorn was grateful for the extra food.
“I suppose that I m
ight have to rely on your strength to get us out of here,” Len said. “Make no mistake, you will be well rewarded for your efforts if you help me.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What about the leader of the gang? The guy you hired me to bring back?”
“I met the man calling himself Court Raleigh almost a year ago. As I told you before I don’t know his true name. My father’s health was ailing and I had begun to take more and more responsibility over the business. I was, however, still running some of my more delicate shipments personally. I was attacked by Court Raleigh and a small band of his misfits. He impressed me greatly. He was charismatic, strong, able, and ruthless. I had already been formulating my ideas on where I wanted to take the company, and circumstance had delivered the perfect candidate into my hands to begin forming for me a personal army. I told him the outline of my plans. I promised him money, guns, supplies, and power if he agreed to help me.”
“With a pitch like that, how could he say no?”
“It would appear that he found a way.”
Len Dietrich lapsed back into silence, and he became more morose as the hours passed and Melina Bann never appeared. Thorn attempted to get more information out of him about the gang, but Len was resolutely silent. He sat in his cage staring straight ahead.
Thorn watched the Amber Bones as best as he was able from the low vantage point, gathering what information he could about their numbers and strength. Len Dietrich truly had raised a small army, not that he was seeing much use from it at the moment.
Besides watching the gang Thorn spent most of the day poking at his confines, looking for a way to escape. The cage was old and showed signs of rust in a few places, but it was otherwise strong and solid. Judging from its size and shape, it looked as though it had been designed to hold livestock. Thorn lay on his back and tried kicking the door, but he couldn’t generate enough leverage in the small enclosure to make any kind of dent. He reached around to feel the hinges that held the door in place: there were two of them and the hinge pins had a wide head. Thorn could feel the tiniest amount of space between them and the knuckles. He tried pressing a pin with his thumb but it wouldn’t budge. If he had a screwdriver, or at least a flat piece of metal, he might be able to work them out. But Thorn had neither so for the time being, at least, he was stuck.
