by Burks, John
She pulled her jumpsuit back up, feeling humiliated by his rejection on top of everything else, and darted for the pile of food, hoping to snatch something and get away before he could move. He was lightning quick, though, and grabbed her by her blonde hair, causing her feet to fly out from under her. He held her down on the ground by her throat and leaned in very close.
“You don’t want to be labeled a thief here, girl. You really, really don’t. Now get out of here. You’re testing my patience.
She scrambled away from him, and then turned, crouching like a feral cat. “I’m going to kill you,” she told him, rage replacing her fear and hunger. “I’m going to kill everyone responsible for me being here.”
Block didn’t laugh at the threat and only nodded solemnly. “Good. Keep that,” he told her. “That’s what you’ll survive the Cave with. Now go on before I find a rule you’ve broken.”
Amanda backed away into the darkness, never taking her eyes from the man. He’d pay, along with Darius. They’d all pay.
* * *
“It’s not nearly as bad as you’d think it would be,” John said, licking the remnants of the bowl he’d found. “It tastes a bit like pork boiled for a long time. It could use some salt, if anything.”
Darius looked on curiously. He wasn’t as opposed to eating human flesh as he’d made out, and certainly not as freaked out about it as Steven. His biggest problem at the moment, staring at the people soup, was he didn’t particularly want that piece of human flesh. He looked down at his own bowl and tried to determine what portion of the poor fool from the Game he was looking at. It was a chunk of skin, with soft blonde hair and the edge of a tattoo. He hadn’t noticed the man’s tattoos, and with his luck, it was probably ass. He couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought. Here he was, in the middle of a cavern packed with cannibals, and he could possibly be about to tear into the ass cheeks of a man who’d died in the Game.
“Salt would be good. Maybe some Tony’s,” he said, referring to the classic Cajun spice in the green bottle. He stirred the soup with his finger, sipped the broth and let the warm liquid flow down his throat. “But I can dig this just like it is. Man that’s good.”
John looked up at him, eyebrows furrowed. “Well, I don’t know if I’d say that or not, but it’s definitely better than the hunger.”
Darius wasn’t surprised by the ease with which John had fallen into cannibalism, despite his urgent protests against it. He knew hunger and he knew what hunger did to a man. There was no more base instinct, no more purer form of survival instinct than the urge to beat the demon hunger. Darius had been hungry before, in his days before prison, and he knew from experience that if he went a long time without eating that he’d start losing muscle mass. He couldn’t have that. Muscle mass, he figured, along with general street skills, were what were going to keep him alive during the Game.
“Anything is better than hunger,” Darius agreed.
“Are you going to tell the others?”
“Why would I care?”
“I don’t know,” John answered. “I was thinking it might be awkward, but eventually, they’ll be in the line as well. I don’t guess it really matters.”
“No,” Darius said, taking a careful bite of the boiled flesh. It didn’t particularly taste like anything he could think of, though the texture was somewhat like pork. It hadn’t been boiled enough, though, and was chewy. He chewed on it for a few minutes until it was finally soft enough to swallow. The watery soup he downed in one shot and though his hunger was temporarily abated, he knew he could eat a lot more.
“Well, I don’t feel any different,” he told John.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought once I ate people I’d feel different.”
“Evil or something?”
“At least guilty,” he said, wishing he had another bowl. “Like in that movie where the soccer team has to eat its teammates to survive. I thought I’d feel like that.”
“I think they felt guilty because they were caught. Or, not so much caught as exposed. At the time I’m sure they were just like us—doing what they had to in order to survive. I’m not going to feel guilty about surviving this place. And if this is the worst of what I’ll have to do in order to make it,” he said, holding up the empty bowl, “then I’m already most of the way there.”
“This is cake,” Darius told him. “All you have to do is swallow your pride and eat. There’s got to be much more to this place.”
“It doesn’t have to be everything,” John said, quieter and leaning forward. “We could have everything Block has.”
Darius smiled internally. He knew this conversation was coming, he could feel it in the Arab’s demeanor. John Hussein was a man used to getting what he wanted from a family of men who were used to getting what they wanted. He suspected that he, like Darius, would do whatever it took to get what he wanted. If in a place like this that meant half-spoiled fruits and vegetables, then so be it.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he lied.
“Sure you do. It’s like prison, or what I assume prison must be like. There are ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. How do people in the second group get what the people in the first group have?”
“They take it,” he said easily. That was the only way you got anything in life.
“Exactly. We don’t belong here, with this rabble. We belong over there, on the throne. I suspect there is probably more to your life than running a grocery store. And I tend to doubt that a meager middle class income is what you’re striving for in life.”
The grocery store was a lie. A complete and utter lie that he thought was necessary to put the people he arrived with at ease. When white people woke up in a cage with a six-foot-four, 350-pound scared black man, they tended to get a little nervous. He’d always been tickled at how white people—hell, he thought, most people—got nervous around him. He liked the feeling of power he got just from his sheer bulk, and he liked when people got out of his way because of fear. That was the real power in life, the only real thing worth having.
“What are you getting at?”
“You’re bound to do well here, Darius. This is a situation, I’m guessing, custom built for your talents. I, on the other hand, am not suited for something like this. Maybe in a corporate boardroom, or on Wall Street, I’d have a chance, but here I don’t. Honestly and realistically, I don’t see me surviving here.”
The man’s candor was interesting, Darius thought, and he was right. This wasn’t the place for CEO’s and bankers. This was the place for blood and sweat and, he laughed inwardly, glory. That was the silliest thing he’d thought in a long time, but it was true. Like the gladiators of Rome, this place was about glory.
“I still don’t know what I can do to help you,” Darius said. “Even if I wanted to help you, which, at the moment, I don’t.”
John chuckled. “No, there isn’t any apparent reason to help me, is there?”
Darius shrugged. He was going to have a hard enough time watching out for himself through all of this.
“Well, do you think this is the rest of our lives? Do you intend to grow old and die in this cave, eating human flesh and rotted vegetables?”
Darius really hadn’t thought any further than surviving. That’s just the way he was. Waking up tomorrow would be nice, but if it didn’t happen, he didn’t think he’d know or care. “I don’t know.”
“I do know,” John responded assertively. “I know that I’m going to get out of here, and I suspect that you will as well. We don’t belong here, Darius, not like these old people, the amputees and cripples that have spent no telling how many years in this cave trying to survive. I plan on leaving.”
“That still doesn’t tell me why I should help you with anything.”
“You have to think further down the line, Darius. You have to look into the future. We won’t always be here, in this pit of crap.”
He though the Arab might be a bit overly optimistic. “And?”
“And,” John began, looking him straight in the eye, “if you help me here, I’ll help you there.”
There it was, he thought, out in the open. “Meaning you’ll pay me if I can keep you alive, correct?”
“Among other things. I see you advancing here, Darius. I see you running this place shortly,” John told him, and Darius felt the bullshit getting so deep he might need waders. “I can help you in that extent. I know how to manage people, if nothing else, and I know how to run a business.”
“But this isn’t a business.”
“Well it should be run like one.”
“What are you getting at?”
John pulled a small piece of drift from his pocket and handed it to Darius. It had 10,000 scratched in it along with John’s initials, JAH. “Consider it a retainer, if you will. I’ll hire you to help me, payable when we both get out of here.”
Darius laughed out loud, turning the small wooden chit over in his hand. “This is absolutely worthless. For all I know you could be some conman just trying to convince me you have money. Even if I could help, which I don’t know if I can or not, how would you expect me to redeem these if you die? Is your father going to pay up on some wooden coin you scratched out here?”
“I can’t prove my family’s wealth here, obviously. I don’t have credit cards or a cell phone for you to call our bank. I guess you’ll have to trust me, though I’ll warrant that my assisting you in your endeavors here will be just as valuable. I think that together we could make a great team.”
Darius thought John was full of shit and there was little, if anything, that he knew of that he could do to help the man. He could give him some tips on fighting, maybe show him a few dirty tricks, but he couldn’t help him in the Game itself. He was sure that would be outside the rules. He was equally sure that the chit was worthless, but there was something about John he liked. He had the passion required to survive here, he just didn’t know how to put that passion to work.
“Add a zero to this, and it’s a start. I can’t help you in the Game itself, but I can give you some pointers on the fine art of dirty street fighting,” he said, handing the chit back to John. “And there will be more markers. That won’t be enough, not by a long shot.”
John nodded in agreement. “Whatever it takes, Darius.”
He nodded and then looked to where Block and his small group sat, the area slightly raised above the rest of the cavern. Block looked like a king sitting in his throne, watching his subjects. As long as he had to be here, Darius thought, he could be king.
Hell, he said to himself, I should be king.
* * *
Steven wandered back to where their group’s impromptu camp was and tried to distract himself from worrying about Rebecca and what they could do to make things better. Many of the shantytown buildings were made from palm fronds and driftwood and were more like fences than homes. You didn’t need a roof in the Cave, but if you wanted privacy from your neighbors, you needed a wall. He thought they could start gathering stuff from the dump after the Game, like garbage bags and whatnot, to produce satisfactory walls. He could even fashion some sort of bedding for Rebecca from scrap paper and cardboard.
His feet ached along with his heart as he sat next to Darius and John, and the way the two men looked at him, he was sure he’d interrupted a conversation they didn’t want him in on. Steven just didn’t care. The incision on the left side of his abdomen was healing poorly and the tattooed numbers burned and itched. He was exhausted, in pain, and depressed about not just the situation, but his wife in general. He didn’t care if he interrupted their conversation.
“Did you find Rebecca?” John asked, and Steven wondered if his concern was genuine.
“She’s…” he began, unsure of how much to tell them, “…she’s having a rough time of it.”
“Give her some time,” John said. “She’ll make it through this. She seems like a tough woman.”
Tough, and, at the moment, crazy as a loon, he thought. “She is.”
“She’ll find you when she’s ready,” John added. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“There are more than enough things to worry about,” Darius said, sliding out of the top half of his jumpsuit. “I think this damn incision is infected.”
The black man’s skin was roiled and red around the incision, a puffy section crisscrossed by the stitches. He pushed at it gently and it oozed green pus. “That can’t be good.”
“It isn’t,” John agreed. “Maybe you should go see Richard Nixon.”
“So are we sure that’s what they did to us?” the big man asked. “They put some sort of tracking device in us?”
“It’s the only explanation for the alarm when Cassandra fled to the beach. I didn’t see any sort of wire running to the gate. Unless maybe they had a watcher of some sort,” John said, feeling his own incision.
Steven was sure his own stitches were infected as well. He could feel it every time he walked, the stretching and pulling burning like fire under his arm pit. There was nothing he could do about it, though, so he left it alone. If he could find some clean water, he’d try and clean it.
If.
“So if they put them in,” Darius said, “there’s a chance we can take them out.”
“I don’t know if I want to risk that,” John said. “Your side is already infected. How much more damage do we do if we try, and even if we wanted to, where are you going to get the instruments to do it? We very well can’t do surgery with sharpened bamboo and tin cans from the garbage.”
“And if we did get them out,” Darius agreed, “where would we go? We don’t even know what hemisphere we’re in.”
Amanda wandered into the camp, wide-eyed and exhausted looking. She sat down next to Steven, staring at her feet. “I know what the marks are for.”
“Oh?” John said. “I thought they were just a measure of how many Games you’d won?”
“They are that,” she said, still not looking up. “And what’s the most you’ve seen on one person?”
“Four, I believe. On Block.”
“That’s because with five you get out of here.”
The three men were silent for a moment, contemplating. John leaned towards her. “And how do you know this?”
“I overheard it while I was scavenging for food. That’s why Block’s in charge. He has more marks than anyone else.”
“And when you get five, they’ll let you go?”
“Or you can go up into the Castle.”
“What’s the Castle?” Steven asked, his interest piqued.
“I don’t know for sure, but it sounded like that was where whoever gives the instructions for the Game is. A man was talking about eating a real steak in the Castle if he won enough games.”
“So the reward for participating and winning is either to run the whole affair or leave the island?” John asked dubiously. “And the entire population is penalized when one tribe member doesn’t participate?”
“Like the man that wouldn’t fuck his buddy,” Darius agreed, nodding. “That is some twisted shit.”
“I think it’s also why we haven’t seen any, for lack of a better term, crime inside the Cave. If you commit a crime, you end up in the pot.”
“It’s simple and effective,” Steven added, trying to keep his mind from his wife and participate in the conversation. These three other people, Amanda, Darius, and John, were all that he had in the Cave, besides his wife. And they were a group simply because of the timing of their arrival. They’d latched onto each other quickly, except for Amanda, who still looked at Darius as if he were a steaming pile needing to be scooped up and put in a doggie bag. “It’s probably the most effective form of government I can think of.”
“That’s sick,” Amanda spat.
“Sick but true. If the penalty for any crime is death, how much crime do you have?”
“It’s like the Nazis,” John said. “They were an incredibly efficient form of government.”
“No one said it was good, Amanda,” John told her. “It’s simply the way it is. We’ll either adapt or die. You, my dear, will adapt or die.”
“I see you’ve adapted pretty well,” she said, pointing to the wooden bowl at his feet and making the accusation without saying a word.
“And I will continue to adapt and evolve here. I will survive this. If that means I eat you, then so be it.”
Steven was shocked when he finally caught on to what Amanda was saying. John, and probably Darius, had eaten from the cauldron. They’d eaten their fellow humans, and, at least in John’s case, were smug about it. He didn’t know what to think about that. His stomach was grumbling so much he’d almost become used to it, but the thought of eating the flesh of another person still revolted him. But now that they had made that leap, he knew, they had an advantage. Not only were they adapting and surviving, they were going to have at least some of the nutrition required to keep going. It might make the difference in a fight in the Game if one person was hungry and the other not.
