Land of Dust and Bones: The Secret Apocalypse Book 7 (17 page)

“How?” I ask.

“We wait for them to come back,” Jack says.
“I’ll hide behind the door…”

“What if they’re armed?”

“They will be,” he continues. “So we’ll
have to be quick. But this is our only choice. If he’s going to kill us, if
he’s going to cook us, one by one, and then eat us…” Jack trails off because he
can’t say it. “But there’s just no way. No way in hell. I’m not going out like
that.”

He then adds, “I’m not going down without a
fight.”

He adds this because he knows the odds of
actually surviving are not good.

“I can’t even think about that,” Maria
says. “Them killing one of you. Leaving the rest of us here for weeks. Eating
us one by one. Eating us limb by limb.”

“What if they don’t come back for a few
days?” I say. “We’re already malnourished. We’re already dehydrated. If they
starve us, we’ll be too weak to fight.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Jack repeats.
“We’ll have to stay ready. Because if we give up, we are dead. So we have to
fight.”

“We’ve got nothing to lose,” Kim says.
“We’re dead either way.”

“What about your leg?” I ask Jack.

“Forget about my leg. I can do this.”

“Remember how weak we were,” I say to
Maria. “When General Spears held us prisoner. He starved us for days.”

Maria lowers her head. She knows. She
remembers. She will never forget.

We were so weak at that point. We were so
weak that escape, that running away, even walking away would’ve been all but
impossible, let alone fighting our way out.

“Look, I know it’s going to be hard,” Jack
says. “But we have no other options. If we give up now, we are dead. Kenji is
dead. Sarah is dead. We can’t give up. So I’m going to fight these guys. I’m
going to fight them with all of my strength, every last ounce of it. If we work
together, maybe we can over power them. Maybe we can surprise them and get our
hands on a weapon. We only need one, just one gun. And we can turn this all
around.”

“This is so risky,” Maria says. “What if….”

“They’ll shoot,” I say. “Marko will. The
others won’t do anything unless Marko tells them to. This gives us an
advantage. The other two will hesitate.”

“How do you know that?” Kim asks, turning
her attention back to us. “How can you be so sure?”

“Marko is their leader. He’s the eldest
brother. You’ll have to trust me. I say we go for Billy. He’s the weakest link.
The other brother… Ivan. He’s too big. He’s too strong. Sarah shot him in the
back. She shot him at point blank range. He didn’t even flinch.”

“Was he wearing body armor?” Kim asks.

I think it over. “I guess it’s possible.
But still, I mean, Sarah shot him. She was only standing about three feet away
from him. He barely noticed. It was crazy.”

“OK, so we avoid the big guy,” Jack says.
“We take Billy down. Or Marko. We get our hands on a gun. Shoot our way out.
Shoot the big guy in the head. See if he notices that.”

“And there’s something else,” I add. “I
don’t think they’ll shoot to kill. At least, not right away.”

“They won’t shoot to kill?” Maria asks.
“How is that even possible?”

“Something Marko said to Ivan. When he
attacked Kenji. He said something about, ‘fresh meat’. We have to remember that
we are food to them. And live meat doesn’t rot. They won’t shoot to kill. Not
at first. And trust me, they have the skill to do this. Well, Marko does.”

This realization gave us a tiny spark of
hope. If we all rushed them together, if we worked together, we could maybe
pull this off.

“The only reason they got the jump on us
the first time is because they let us think we were in control,” I say. “We had
the guns, we had the upper hand. They gained our trust. They saved our lives
for crying out loud. And once we trusted them, that’s when they made their
move. We won’t make that mistake again.”

They had lured us in.

And slowly but surely we had lowered our
guards.

Slowly but surely we had used up all our
bullets.

And then they made their move.

And when they did, when they revealed themselves
to be monsters, fear and panic and confusion made it impossible to think
straight, impossible to plan or organize.

Seeing Ivan take a point blank shot to the
back and remain standing didn’t help matters either.

We began to see these people as stronger
than they actually were, as demons, something supernatural, possessed by dark
magic.

Something that cannot be killed.

But they are not demons.

They are human.

They bleed.

And we can kill them.

For a brief moment, I feel confident, I
feel renewed strength.

But this feeling, this false sense of
security, is only short lived.

The door to our prison cell flies open.
Something small and dark is thrown into the room. Initially I think they are
rocks. Or maybe even coals. But they are not rocks. They are not coals. They
are flash bang grenades. At least three of them. And they all erupt in a
continuous burst of what sounds like a damn machine gun going off.

The flash of the light is blinding. The
noise is deafening. Debilitating.

We huddle together in the far corner of the
room. And I think to myself, so much for fighting our way out.

Marko enters the room with a gun in his hand. The hammer is cocked and ready.
“You guys talk too much.” He then points at me. “Get her.”

Billy rushes forward with his knife. He
grabs me by the shirt and pulls me out of the room.

“What are you doing?” Kim asks. “Where are
you taking her?”

“We’re going to pay a visit to a fellow
inmate of the Boneyard.”

I grab onto the doorframe. I fight. Marko
steps towards me and kicks me in the stomach. I double over and instantly let
go.

Marko kneels down next to me. “Stop
fighting. If you fight, if you do that again, I will cut both your arms off.
Ivan will keep you alive. He’s done it before.”

And I know this is not an empty threat. I know
he will do this. I know he
wants
to
do this.

I look at Marko. I search his face for any
semblance of humanity. I find nothing. “What do you want from me?”

“I want to know everything you know about
this thing in the mask. I want to know where he is from. I want to know where
he was going. Would you like to meet him?”

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,”
I say. “You need to kill him. You need to kill him right now. You won’t
survive. Not even you…”

Marko ignores me.

As Billy drags me out of the room, out of
our cell, Marko stands up and closes the door, locking the others away. Billy
continues dragging me further down the hallway. There are rooms spaced evenly
apart. I guess these rooms were once used for storage of aircraft parts. Now
they are used for storage of a different kind.

We arrive at a room at the very end of the
hallway. Down the other end is the room of torture. The light is still on, a
flickering kind of light.

Candlelight.

I see shadows moving. I imagine Ivan
working diligently. Butchering. Carving.

I wonder if Sarah is actually still alive.

The hallway continues on around the corner
to our right. And I can’t believe it. I see an end to the hallway. I see an
exit door. It is open. I see the outside world.

Marko notices as well. “Billy, what the
hell? Shut the door, would
ya
? What kind of bloody
amateur operation do you think we’re running here?

Billy runs off to shut the door. “Sorry,
Marko. I really am.”

He says this with fear in his voice. I get
the feeling that Marko has a short fuse.

Marko slaps Billy on the head. “It’s not a
bloody bed and breakfast, mate.”

Billy has his head lowered.

Marko turns his attention back to the door
immediately in front of us. “This guy has been giving me the silent treatment
since we picked him up,” he says. “But maybe if I give him a little extra
motivation, he might be inclined to speak.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, the thing I’ve realized is that
people, normal people, they hate torture. They hate suffering. That’s why I
know Ivan is a big softie. He bloody hates that stuff. He hates it with a
passion. Anyway, if you start torturing a human being, especially a girl, in
front of someone, they will crack. They will talk. They always talk.”

“You’re making a mistake. This won’t work.”

“Are you left handed or right handed?”

Marko has the butcher’s cleaver down his
belt, and when he slides it out, the blade scrapes against the leather strap,
and the noise, the sound gives me chills.

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,”
I say, trying my absolute best to ignore Marko’s threat of cutting my hand off.
“He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Marko doesn’t realize what he’s up against,
he doesn’t realize what he has stumbled across. He doesn’t realize how lucky he
was to have survived meeting the man in the gas mask.

He has no goddamn idea.

“He would’ve killed you,” I say. “If he
wasn’t injured, he would’ve killed you.”

Again, Marko doesn’t believe me. He pays no
attention to my words of warning. “Trust me, he’s harmless. He so weak, he
can’t even stand up.”

Marko takes out a key from his pocket and
opens the door. Billy pushes me inside.

Marko enters. He is shining a torch in a
wide, swooping arc. Searching.

But the room is empty.

It is completely empty.

The man in the gas mask is gone. He is
nowhere to be seen.

Marko shines the torch at the wall.

And written on the wall is a message. It is
written in blood…

His own blood…

Welcome
to the New World…

Marko is in shock. His eyes frantically
search the empty floor in front of him. “Where the hell is he? Where did he go?
How did he get out?”

He is a ghost. He cannot be caught. He
cannot be caged.

“What have you done?” I ask. “You should’ve
killed him. You should’ve…”

And out of the corner of my eye, I see a shadow.
It is moving slowly. It is moving with purpose. With precision.

It… he… the man in the gas mask, he lowers
himself from above the doorframe. Like a spider. He does this slowly.

So slowly.

He moves without a sound.

I am at the same time mesmerized and
terrified. But for some unknown reason, I don’t shout an alarm. I don’t do
anything.

I do precisely nothing.

And then he moves so quickly, like an apex
predator, like something at the very top of the food chain. He moves like a
killer, like a thing capable of creating an extinction level event. He
continues to move without making a sound. He grabs Billy’s knife from his hand,
twisting his arm behind his back. Billy’s shoulder pops out of the joint. And
now the man in the gas mask has the knife, and now that knife is in Billy’s
back.

And Billy opens his mouth to scream. But he
can’t.

And it all happens so quickly. And the only
reason Marko knows something is wrong is because he hears Billy’s arm pop out
of its socket.

Marko turns around, raising his gun in one
motion.

Billy falls to his knees, gasping in pain,
gasping for air.

And for a second, the man in the gas mask
is silhouetted in the doorway. And he says, “You are free.”

And then he’s gone.

Marko fires a shot anyway. The bullet
smashes into the doorframe.

I back up against the wall. I see Marko the
Maniac kneel over his brother. “Billy. Stay with me, mate. It’s going to be all
right. You’re going to be fine.”

Billy is coughing up blood and it is
definitely not going to be all right.

“Are you going to eat me?” Billy asks. “Are
you going to cook me?”

“
Shh
. Don’t talk.
You’re not dying. It’s just a scratch.”

“I don’t want to be cooked, Marky. I don’t
want to be meat. I don’t want to be eaten.”

“How the bloody hell did he get your knife?
Doesn’t matter. We’ll get him. We’ll get him together. Don’t worry, little
brother.”

“You should’ve killed him when you had the
chance.” I say this to Marko, to myself.

Marko looks at me. His eyes are burning
with rage. Or maybe hate. Or maybe he is just in shock that someone could hurt
his brother, his family, his own flesh and blood. Shock that he is not the only
thing to fear in the night, he is not the only predator in this desert.

“You keep your mouth shut,” he snaps.
“Unless you want to eat a bullet.”

“Fresh meat,” I remind him.

He turns his attention back to his brother.
He slaps him in the face. “Stay with me, Billy.”

“There were cannibals in the Fortress,” I
tell him. “The military base where we came from, where
he
came from. They said they were desperate. Hungry. They said they
didn’t have a choice.”

Marko drops Billy on the ground. He just
drops him like a piece of garbage. “I don’t eat people because I’m hungry. I am
Marko the Maniac. And I’m going to cook this son of a bitch. I’m going to cook
him alive. Skin him alive. I’ll do it in front of a big mirror so he can watch
the whole damn thing. The last thing he’ll see is his own skinless body, his
own skinless face.”

“You can’t kill him,” I whisper. “He’s a
ghost. You know that fresh wound he has? I did that to him. I stabbed him with
the world’s largest hunting knife.”

I shake my head as I tell Marko this. I
still don’t fully believe what I saw.

“He didn’t react,” I say. “He didn’t
flinch. He didn’t scream in pain. He grabbed onto the knife handle. He wrapped
his hands around my hands, and he pushed the blade in deeper.”

Marko raises his fist. He wants to beat me.
But he doesn’t.

“You should’ve killed him when you had the
chance.” Again, I whisper this to myself, to Marko. “You should’ve shot him
dead.”

Marko turns away from me and drags Billy
out of the room, leaving a trail of blood. He shuts the door, locking me
inside.

But the door is ajar. It no longer fits in
the frame properly on account of Marko firing a single bullet that smashed into
it.

Marko doesn’t notice. He is too angry, too
offended.

Does a monster like Marko feel fear? Is he
afraid for his brother’s life? Is he ever afraid for his own life?

I tell myself that it’s probably not a good
idea to try and get inside the head of Marko the Maniac. He is not like me… or
anyone. He is a psychopath. He thinks like a psychopath,
feels
like a psychopath.

He is a monster.

Thinking about how his mind works, how his
heart works, is a waste of time.

I am reminded of what Ben said right before
he abandoned us, right before he saved us. He said, “Fight monsters long enough
and you’ll become a monster.”

And we’ve been fighting monsters since the
beginning of the plague, since the beginning of the outbreak, since the Oz
virus took over. And right now I’m wondering at what point will I turn?

When do I turn into a monster?

I put my ear up to the door. On the other
side, I can hear Marko struggling with Billy’s mortally wounded body.

I hear him swearing.

I hear him getting angrier.

He is so incensed, he is so consumed by
exacting his painful revenge on the man in the gas mask, that he doesn’t
realize the door to my prison is broken.

And he doesn’t know, he doesn’t understand
that he is about to fight a ghost.

He doesn’t know what he is up against.

I count in my head.

I count the seconds.

Minutes.

I put my ear up to the door and listen for
silence.

Marko is gone and I am alone.

I take a step back and take a deep, deep
breath. I prepare myself.

I start kicking the door.

Over and over.

My attack is relentless. The door frame
buckles.

The wood around the deadlock is starting to
splinter.

I keep kicking.

This is how the infected do it.

They keep coming. They don’t stop.

They never stop.

I hear the door crunch. The deadlock comes
loose.

I kick the door open.

I am free.