“Now do his eyes.”
Cindy wondered if her body would ever be found. If her mom and dad would ever know what happened to her. She wondered if they would care. She wondered, absurdly, if there was some way for an autopsy to be done, and it could show her parents, her family, her old friends, the whole world, that Cindy Welp died clean and sober, not a trace of meth in her system.
“Now do his genitals.”
Cindy wished she could say goodbye to them. To tell them how sorry she was, but even more than that. To thank them, for all they’ve given her. To make them understand that she could finally understand. To say I love you one last time.
“Now do his scalp.”
Cindy chanced another peek at Tyrone, and he was peeking at her. All the potential, all the possibility, they shared it in that one long look. Cindy had a brief, intense fantasy, something far beyond becoming a waitress. She stared at him and saw herself through his eyes, in ways she never dreamed of. As a wife. A mother. A grandmother. Someone who was important to other people. Someone needed. Someone loved.
A tear rolled down Tyrone’s face. Cindy realized she was crying too.
“Now do the girl.”
Taylor blinked. The pain he was in defied imagination. Surgery without anesthesia was agonizing enough, but Lester had hurt him even worse with his squeezing.
He blinked again.
They would suffer. Lester, and the doctor. Taylor would take his time with them. Keep them alive for months. Feed them through a stomach tube if he had to.
He blinked once more, and then twitched his fingers.
Taylor tried to remember the procedure, those many months ago. He’d been awake for that, too. But it took him all night before he was able to move again. Yet now he was already able to blink and twitch.
He concentrated, really hard, and jerked his left foot.
Maybe the procedure had done something to him, to make the paralytic wear off quicker. Or maybe the doctor had given him an incorrect dose, not accounting for all the weight he’d gained.
Taylor didn’t care about the reason why. He embraced it.
The sooner he could move, the sooner he could pay them back, tenfold.
The man known as Subject 33 blinked, then forced his lips into a smile.
Tom kept waiting for the white light, waiting for the angel choir. But as his blood and breath and life leaked out of his ruined body, he realized there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
His gramma had been frickin’ right all along.
At first, no one moved. The scene seemed frozen in time. Sara, bending down for the gun. Almost twenty feral people, watching her with a mixture of curiosity and hostility.
Then one of them said, “More… food.”
That broke the spell. Sara snatched up the gun and ran.
The adrenalin spiking through Sara’s system made her leg injury all but disappear. She moved fast and fleet-footed, dodging around trees, hurdling thicket, zig-zagging sharply to throw her attackers off.
Jack popped off her breast and began to cry again, and she let him, holding him tight, refusing to stop for anything.
I didn’t come this far to die now. Not now.
The sounds of pursuit clung to Sara’s heels. It was as if the forest had come alive around her, foliage shaking, blurry figures weaving in and out peripherally, whoops and hollers used to tighten the circle around her, to cinch the noose.
Sara had no idea where she was going, no idea how she was going to get away. Eventually she would tire, or hit the island’s edge. There were too many of them, and they were coordinating their hunt. She was tired and hurt and had never fired a gun before. This was futile.
But then Sara got lucky.
Ahead, tied to a tree trunk, was an orange ribbon.
Orange ribbons led to the prison.
A tiny beacon of hope flashed in Sara’s mind. Maybe she wasn’t going to die now after all. She poured on the speed, finding a second ribbon, and a third, distancing herself from her pursuers now that she had a goal.
Then the trees parted, the sun shining on the giant gray mounds of the bone yard. Sara ran into it, the piles taller than she was, darting left, then right, then right again, cradling Jack in her arms like he was a football and she was dodging defensive linemen, catching a glimpse of the prison and heading toward it in a roundabout, serpentine way.
There, on the side of the prison, tied to poles…
Cindy. Tyrone. Tom.
Sara didn’t think she had any reserves left, but the sight of her kids prompted a burst of speed and she sprinted toward them like she was running on air.
As Tyrone watched Georgia work the knife, he remembered a conversation he had with his moms, who told him if he kept up his gangbanging he was going to be dead in an alley with two bullets in him by the time he was eighteen.
Tyrone hadn’t believed her, but he had recognized the possibility of it happening.
Neither he nor his moms could have predicted he was going to be done in by a crazy white chick on some cannibal island next to a secret Civil War prison.
“Can I burn her?” Georgia asked the General. She was looking at Cindy when she said it.
“Yes,” he replied.
Georgia, hands red with poor Tom’s blood, reached into a pouch on her tool belt. Lester and Martin also had tool belts, with various items dangling from them. Tyrone figured they weren’t going to use them to build anything.
Georgia removed a plastic baggie, filled with powder.
“I made this myself, back at the Center. I’ve been itching to try it.”
With her other hand, Georgia pulled a cylinder from her belt, the size of a soda bottle. It said PROPANE and a torch was fitted onto the top.
Cindy’s eyes got wide. Tyrone knew she was afraid of fire. Knew there wasn’t anything worse for her.
He couldn’t let her go out like that.
Tyrone screamed, loud as he could, kicking out at Georgia even though she was out of reach. He pulled against the dog collar until his vision went red, thrashing and moaning, knowing he wasn’t going to stop her.
But this display wasn’t for Georgia.
“The boy seems to want to go first,” Tope said. “Give him his wish.”
Tyrone relaxed. Mission accomplished. He could feel Cindy’s eyes on him, but he didn’t trust that he could look at her without completely breaking down.
Then he realized, fuck it.
Thug life was all about frontin’, and representin’, and bein’ some bullshit stereotype just like Martin said. Tyrone wasn’t a thug no more. He was just a man. Men didn’t need to be strong 24/7. Not in front of the woman they loved.
So as Georgia approached him with the torch, he dropped his guard and let Cindy look at him as he really was. And in her eyes—the last thing he was ever going to see before he burned to death—Tyrone Morrow found acceptance.
Then a gunshot broke the silence, like the handclap of an angry god.
“Back the fuck away, Georgia.”
Tyrone turned.
Sara.
General Alton Tope wasn’t easily impressed, but the chubby girl’s zeal in mutilating the boy was something to behold. According to the doctor, the serum would be relatively cheap and easy to produce, the procedure simple to teach. Tope doubted he’d get any sort of green light from Washington, but it wouldn’t be the first time the military experiments on troops without anyone’s knowledge or consent.
Worst case scenario, Tope could scour the prisons for lifers and death row garbage. He’d done so in the past. Putting together a team of several hundred men and women wouldn’t be too difficult.