by Jack Kilborn
When he placed the branch in the flames to ignite it, he chanced another look at the cannibals, just to make sure they weren’t planning another attack.
The cutlery man’s mouth was full, his cheeks distended. Blood dribbled down his face, mingling with the drool. He noticed Tyrone’s gaze, and while watching him, shook some salt onto something red and shiny he held in his hand.
Tyrone felt the bile churn in his stomach. He picked up the torch, tucked the shirt and gun under his armpit, and told Cindy it was time to go.
Twenty yards into the forest, Tyrone dropped the gun, dropped the torch, and fell to his knees and vomited.
Cindy knelt next to Tyrone, patting his back, comforting him until he was ready to go on.
When Lester Paks was a little boy, he was diagnosed with Stereotypic Movement Disorder. Rather than the more common repetitive behaviors associated with SMD, such as hand waving, rocking, or fiddling with fingers, Lester’s affliction was more severe.
He could not stop biting himself.
While SMD was often associated with mental retardation, Lester had a higher than average IQ. But something wrong in his brain compelled him to stick his fingers, hands, arms, and even feet, into his mouth and gnaw.
Medications and behavior modification therapy had little effect. In the first grade, his disorder escalated sharply. Instead of limiting his bites to himself, he began biting other things. Furniture. Appliances. Pets.
It culminated when he locked his jaws onto a classmate named Jesse Sloan, and it took six people to pull him off.
Lester went into an institution after that. They kept him drugged up, and when that didn’t stop the biting, they removed his baby teeth.
When his adult teeth grew in, he was given an orthodontic device that prevented him from opening his mouth more than a centimeter. After more drugs, and therapy, and nine years in the institution, he was finally able to get his disorder under enough control to be released. By then puberty had arrived, and blessed Lester with a large stature. At age fifteen, he stood a foot taller than most adults.
Lester celebrated his release by running away from home, removing the orthodontic block with a hammer and pliers, and abducting a forty-year-old woman at a gas station. During his two days with her, he learned about the joys of sex, of causing fear and pain, and of biting without any restraint at all. Her cause of death was listed as exsanguination—blood loss resulting from over three hundred of his special little kisses.
Lester was caught, tried as an adult, and caught an incredible break. A brilliant doctor testified in his defense, and got him free. Later, the doctor was able to cure him of his SMD. Lester still had the compulsion to bite, but he no longer desired to bite himself. This meant he could finally live out a lifelong dream without fear of self-mutilation.
It took countless sessions, sitting in front of a mirror with a power drill and a nail file. But when he was finished, twelve of Lester’s front teeth had been sharpened into points that rivaled any predator in the animal kingdom.
The biting became much more fulfilling after that.
Lester’s hips spasmed and he came, moaning deep in his throat.
Then he smiled and took a picture.
Prior to this, Lester never had any sexual experience that was consensual. This Georgia girl was the first person to ever come on to him. And though, like the others, she seemed afraid, she also seemed very willing.
Because of that, Lester had no immediate desire to chew her into little pieces. The idea of an active participant was so exciting that he was able to keep the biting urge in check.
He bent down to kiss her, and she didn’t pull away. She opened her mouth to him fully, jabbing at his tongue with hers, even grinding her hips up against him.
Yes indeed, this Georgia girl was something special.
“Lester is taking Georgia girl home.”
Her eyes got big, and she sucked on her lower lip. “To your playroom?”
“Yes. But Lester won’t hurt Georgia girl. He likes her. He wants to show her something.”
Her hands moved down, grabbing him again. “Lester already showed Georgia girl something. And she really liked it.”
Lester blushed, and then felt the stirrings of a second arousal. But this wasn’t a good place for sex. The feral people were around. They feared Lester, but there were too many, so he had to stay on guard.
He zipped up the fly in his overalls. “Lester wants to show Georgia girl the pet. Lester thinks Georgia girl will like it.”
The girl tugged up her pants and stood, and for a brief moment she looked scared and Lester thought she was going to run. That would be bad. Lester would have to chase her, and then he’d take her to the playroom and tie her up and hurt her very badly.
But she didn’t run. Georgia girl reached out and took his arm, resting her cheek against his elbow.
Yes, she would like meeting the pet. And afterward, Lester would introduce her to Doctor. But Doctor wouldn’t give this one to Subject 33. Not this one.
This one, Lester was going to keep.
Sara found the next ribbon in the direction Martin said it would be. After hours of fruitlessly searching for the damn things, her relief was palpable. But so was her fear. Every moment they remained undiscovered seemed like borrowed time.
The trio moved slowly, stopping often to listen if they were being followed.
All they heard was screaming. Meadow’s screaming.
Sara walked with her shoulders rigid, her fists clenched, tucking Jack’s blanket up around his ears so he wouldn’t have to hear it.
Please, stop screaming.
Every wail was worse than a slap. As a psychologist, she knew about the mental processes involved in certain instances of child abuse—research she boned up on to better understand Georgia, who put a child in a clothes dryer. The trigger of Shaken Baby Syndrome was usually a frustrated caregiver who couldn’t take the crying, and began to resent the very life they were supposed to protect.
For God’s sake, just stop.
Then Sara had her son. She was in labor for eight and a half hours with Jack. Toward the end she was exhausted, wracked by pain, and just wanted the whole damn “miracle of birth” thing to be over with so she could get some sleep.
But then Jack finally entered the world, and when she was holding him in her arms and looking into his tiny eyes the implication of it all hit her harder than the labor did. Sara felt love like it was a physical force, and she swore she would do everything in her power to make this little person happy. It was an absolute joy she hadn’t ever experienced, before or since.
The idea that anyone could lose control and hurt a child was monstrous.
But after listening to Meadow’s screams for more than ten minutes, Sara began to lose control. She recognized it happening, knew the reason why, and still couldn’t stop it. Rage coursed through her, and it wasn’t directed at whoever was hurting Meadow.
It was directed at Meadow.
Just shut up, please just shut up. Why won’t you fucking shut…
And then the screaming stopped. Sara stood still, listening.
Crickets and nothing else.
The silence came with a real measure of relief. But at the same time, Sara feared it meant Meadow’s death. The fear trumped the relief, the weight of the realization threatening to sink Sara into the ground. Having one of her kids run away was bad enough. But Meadow actually dying? Dying when it was her job to protect him?
Oh no. Oh no no no.
Sara fell apart.
Laneesha sidled up to her. She’d been walking with her fingers in her ears, and in the moonlight her face glistened like a wet plum. Sara hugged the teen, who hugged back, and they spent a moment sobbing.
Martin touched Sara’s hair.
“We have to keep going, hon.”
“But Meadow… he’s…”
Martin pulled Sara in close, and she felt herself melt into him. “I know. But we have other kids that need our help. We h
ave to be strong for them.”
Sara nodded, wiped a fist across her face, rubbing away tears, and began searching for the next ribbon. As she walked, she raged against the conflict going on inside of her. One part, grateful the screaming had ended. The other, angry at herself for being grateful. Add this shame to the horror of murdering a man, and Sara questioned her capabilities to counsel children, or anyone else for that matter. Her job description required empathy, along with the ability to dispassionately disconnect. Sara seemed unable to do either.
That made Sara even more disgusted. On top of everything going on, she had to throw herself a pity party.
“We should be there soon,” Martin said, coming up behind her. He spoke deliberately, a measure of pain in his voice.
Sara knew this was a completely inappropriate time to bring it up, but she did anyway.
“Martin. You haven’t signed the divorce papers yet.”
He was silent for a moment, then said. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. But if that’s what you really want…”
“What I really want is you.”
In the darkness, his hand found hers.
“Then let’s not give up on us yet,” he said, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze. “Can I hold Jack? That screaming…well…it got to me.”
Sara understood completely. She gave her sleeping son a kiss on his head and passed him, sling and all, over to his father. Martin slipped the straps over his shoulders and patted Jack’s back. It was something she’d seen dozens of times before, and the thought of never seeing it again was devastating.
If—no—when they got out of here, she would do everything she could to make their marriage, and their family, work.
“How many ribbons have you counted?” Martin asked.
“Ten or eleven.”
“If we’re going in the right direction, the campsite should be very close.”
“Or we’re heading toward the lake, and will have to retrace all of our steps. We need to pick up the pace, Martin. If there’s any chance Meadow is—”
Laneesha’s scream cut Sara off. She rushed over to the teen, flashlight bobbling, and aimed the beam at the large hill of rubble the girl was facing.
The hill was well over ten feet high, and stretched on for dozens of yards. It was pale gray, made up of what appeared to be stones and branches.
Laneesha clutched Sara’s shoulder, hard enough to make her wince. It pushed Sara closer to the mound, and in a moment that seemed utterly surreal, Sara realized that those weren’t stones and branches.
It was a gigantic pile of human bones.
The boy wasn’t quite dead yet, but his meat was so tender it practically fell off the bone. They feasted, filling their bellies to bursting, fighting among themselves for the juiciest parts.
Though they hunted as a pack, they had no bonds with each other. Their broken minds reduced them to something less than human, driving them to fulfill their base needs at any cost. Higher mental functioning was gone, leaving only a compulsion to kill, to feed, to kill again.
If there were no strangers on the island, they showed no reluctance in attacking one another. For food. And for something just as primal; the unquenchable desire to hunt and kill.
This was a compulsion buried deep within all creature’s brains, as primitive as the first vertebrates to inhabit the planet, eons ago.
In most human beings, this compulsion was repressed.
In them, it had been liberated.
When the urge came upon them, they couldn’t control it. And if there was no fresh meat to hunt, they hunted each other.
But now there was fresh meat on the island. Plenty of it.
And though their hunger for food was momentarily sated, their hunger for death was not.
When Laneesha was a little girl, she wanted to be a big girl. Or more precisely, an adult. She found children her own age boring, much preferring the company of grown-ups. Dolls and games of tag weren’t nearly as stimulating to her as learning to cook, sew, and knit from her mother, change the oil on the car and spackle drywall like her father, bake like grandma, and repair appliances like Uncle Ralph.
Uncle Ralph wasn’t actually her uncle. He was a friend of Dad’s. He was also the nicest adult Laneesha knew, treating her as an equal even when she was as young as six. He never talked down to her, never reprimanded her, never was anything but 100% cool.
When Laneesha turned sixteen, she realized the next step in adulthood was motherhood. She babysat all the neighborhood kids, and wanted one of her own. So she decided to get pregnant. To accomplish this she sought out the one person who she knew would make an excellent father, and after riding with him to a house to install a satellite TV system, she seduced Uncle Ralph in the back seat of his repair van.
He resisted, at first. But she was legal, and insistent, and Ralph didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. The affair was short lived—a guilt-ridden Uncle Ralph broke it off after only three trysts. But three was enough. Laneesha, now pregnant, assumed that stand-up Uncle Ralph would do the right thing. She was mature enough to know he wasn’t going to marry her, but expected child support and shared custody.
Instead, her father beat the hell out of Uncle Ralph, ordering him to never see her again, and then insisted she terminate the pregnancy. Laneesha refused, and her father kicked her out. Uncle Ralph also refused to see her again, offering her the money for an abortion and nothing else.
Laneesha had no friends because she’d never bothered to make any. She was forced to live in shelters, and eventually gave birth to her beautiful daughter, Brianna. But welfare checks didn’t stretch very far for a young mother. Without a babysitter she couldn’t get a job, and without a job she couldn’t get a babysitter, so she took to shoplifting to survive.
Chicago had many chain department stores, and Laneesha kept her strategy simple. She’d steal something at one store, then return it at another store for the cash. If they refused to give her cash, as they sometimes did without a receipt, she traded the item for something she needed, or something she could pawn.
It worked for several months. Laneesha began looking for a place of her own, and was planning on getting a job and a nanny once she saved up a thousand dollars. She was only sixty bucks short of her goal when a dumb department store clerk became distracted and left a pair of expensive diamond earrings on the counter unattended. It was only for a few seconds, but Laneesha couldn’t resist the temptation. She grabbed them, shoved them in Brianna’s diaper, and beat a hasty retreat.
But she was caught. Even worse, the store had tapes of her stealing four other items over the course of several months. It had been a trap. They pressed charges for grand theft, social services took Brianna, and Laneesha wound up at the Center.
The Center made her realize two things. First, people her own age weren’t so bad. Meadow, for all his frontin’, was actually a pretty good guy. Not daddy material, but they developed a bond that Laneesha could honestly say was love. Second, Laneesha was more determined than ever to get released and get Brianna back. And she was on track to do so. A hearing was coming up, and Sara was going to recommend parole, and once she had a job she was going to begin the steps to reclaim her child. Maybe Meadow would even be in the picture.
But staring at that huge pile of bones after half an hour of listening to Meadow’s tortured screams made Laneesha doubt she’d ever get off the island alive.
Laneesha clung to Sara, digging her carefully manicured nails into the psychologist’s arm, staring at the most horrifying thing she’d ever seen.
“How…how many you think?” she asked.
“Thousands,” Sara whispered.
Martin took the light from Sara, moved closer to the pile. “These bones are old. Really old.”
“Who are they?” Laneesha asked.
Martin shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Sara began to back up, pulling Laneesha along with her. “Martin, those… wild people. They must have retied the ribbons. To lead
us to this place. They’re probably coming right now.”
Martin went rigid, then whispered. “I think they’re already here.”
Laneesha felt like she stuck her finger in a socket, electricity jolting through her and prompting her to run somewhere, anywhere. She broke away from Sara and dashed into the field of bones.
There were no trees here, and the moon was bright, so Laneesha could move much faster than she had in the woods. Part of her brain registered Sara yelling her name, but Laneesha wasn’t going to stop. Not for Sara. Not for anybody. While Laneesha feared those crazy cannibal people, she had more to think about than just her life. If she died, Brianna would be motherless.
Not a day, not an hour, went by when Laneesha didn’t long for her beautiful daughter. Being separated from Brianna was a physical ache that dominated Laneesha’s every action, every thought. She would see her daughter again, and love and protect and raise her, and nothing was going to stop that. Not now. Not ever.
Laneesha turned a quick corner around the mound, kicking something that she realized was a skull, switching directions again and seeking out the woods. She could hide in the trees, wait until morning. Then she would find the camp, radio that boat guy, and live to be with Brianna again. Hopefully, Sara and Martin and the rest of them would make it too. But a part of Laneesha, a large part, also made her understand that if those cannibals were busy eating the others, they would have full bellies and be less inclined to track her down.
It’s all for Brianna, she told herself.
But stupid as it was, she couldn’t find the trees. Earlier, she thought she’d be stuck in the woods forever, never seeing the clear sky again. Now all she saw was sky and bones.
The bones were everywhere, a giant garbage dump of various-sized mounds, some only as high as her hip, others too tall to see over. There was no real path, no real direction, and Laneesha took another turn and found herself standing on top of an unstable pile. She stopped, turned, and her foot got stuck. Lanessha looked down, saw she was caught in some sort of trap.
