JACK KILBORN ~ TRAPPED (81 page)

“
I have no doubt, Mr. Kong. But he wouldn’t enjoy it as much as they do. And he wouldn’t do it on his own if given the chance.”

“
Fine,” Kong said. “The girl. Have her disembowel…” Kong studied at the three victims, then pointed. “That one.”

Sara was torn. Maybe the helicopter was sent by the authorities. Or maybe it was part of all the other bad things happening on this island.

So do I follow it, or search for the gun?

She hoped,
needed
, for the helicopter to be the good guys, coming to the rescue. Even with a gun, what was she going to do? Kill Martin, Plincer, Lester, and Paulie Gunther Spence? Sara had never fired a gun, but she knew most held six bullets, and people could be shot multiple times without dying.
Perhaps she could use the gun to keep them at bay and save the kids, but they’d still be stuck on the island. Could she force Plincer to call Captain Prendick, and then force him to take them back to safety? It was sounding more and more far-fetched.

Or maybe she could save the kids and force the
helicopter
to take them to safety.

That made better sense. Now all Sara had to do was find a lone gun in two miles of forest.

She still had the compass, but realized it didn’t matter because she didn’t know which way to go. The cliff was north. The beach was east. But where was the gridiron?

That’s when another sense took over. Sara’s sense of smell.

Someone is cooking meat.

But Sara knew it wasn’t meat. It was something else. Her stomach threatened to tie itself into a knot.

Still, she had to follow it, because the smell would probably lead to her destination.

Tracking by smell wasn’t easy. Sara would take ten steps in a particular direction, lose the scent, and have to go back. The breeze was strong enough to mix and twist the odor, but not so strong she could simply follow it upwind.

But eventually Sara came upon something better than scent alone. Smoke.

Smoke could be followed. The thicker it got, the closer she got, and whenever the trees thinned out Sara could see the gray cloud climbing into the sky, the X marking the spot.

When she got closer, her mouth began to water, and she hated herself and her body for betraying her.

When she got really close, she saw that she wasn’t the only one drawn to the cookout.

At the sight of the first feral, Sara ducked behind an ash tree. She was still a good twenty yards away from the fire, and from Cindy’s earlier description, the girl had been only a few feet away when she lost the gun. Sara chanced another look, doing a head count.

It was tough to be accurate because of the bushes and tree cover, but she estimated there were between fifteen and twenty cannibals.

Sara didn’t like those odds. She had a bad leg and didn’t know the territory, plus it was daylight and much easier for them to see her. A chase would end in her being caught, and if she was caught…

Her stomach grumbled, and she cursed herself.

I’d just better make damn sure they don’t see me.

Sara moved slow and low, alternating her attention between the ferals and her footing. She didn’t want to step on a twig and make a sound, or worse, trip. The task absorbed her full concentration. Never before had she tried to be so precise in her movement, and never before was so much riding on her.

Halfway there and the sweat was running down Sara’s cheeks, stinging the cuts Georgia had made with the scissors.

Two-thirds of the way there and she had to stop and crouch lower when one of the ferals turned his head in her direction. Sara waited, still as a deer, her injured leg beginning to cramp up, then shake.

The cannibal didn’t see her, and she continued forward.

Three quarters of the way there, she could finally see the gridiron. It was an awful thing, like a giant outdoor grill. She tried not to look at Meadow, caught in the middle. She tried not to look at the parts the people were eating.

She looked anyway.

It was nightmarish, a warped combination of familiarity and obscenity.

It also wasn’t Meadow in the fire. Though charred, and partially devoured, Sara saw enough of the body to tell it was Captain Prendick.

That meant his boat was still here. If the helicopter route didn’t work, maybe they could sail off this godforsaken rock. But first she had to find…

The gun.

It was only a few feet away, right at the roots of a dogwood bush. Even better, it wasn’t a revolver. It was one of those guns that had the bullets in a clip, which meant it probably held more than just six.

Sara took one careful step toward it, and then she felt her ears get hot, like her body could sense that a person was staring at her.

She looked up.

A person was staring.

In fact, all eighteen of them were.

Georgia tingled all over. She felt deliciously alive, and though she wasn’t prone to smiling she couldn’t get the smile off her face.

In one hand, she gripped the bloody filet knife.

In the other, she gripped something even more exciting.

She strolled up to the Chinese man, the one called Kong, the muffled screams in the air almost musical in how they conveyed pain.

Then, abruptly, she stopped, her arm jerking back.

She tugged a bit harder, but it was no use.

Tom’s intestines wouldn’t stretch any farther.

Cindy had her eyes squeezed shut, and wished she could squeeze her ears shut as well. Of all the horrors of the past day, nothing could compare to when Georgia walked over with that knife. She was humming,
actually humming
, like this was some sort of game.

Then, without a word, she cut Tom open.

It got really bad after that.

In a perverse way, Cindy was grateful for the mouth gags. If she’d been forced to hear Tom beg, or scream at full throttle, Cindy was sure she would have lost her mind.

She peeked at Tyrone, who was also closing his eyes.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. Cindy was finally straightening out her life. She finally found a good guy to be her boyfriend. She’d kicked drugs and her sentence was almost up and she was excited to become a waitress, of all stupid things, because that’s what regular teenagers did and she so wanted to be regular.

Cindy tried to picture her parents, when they used to look at her with love instead of suspicion, tried to hear their voices rather than the voice of that horrible man giving Georgia orders.

“
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.”

Paulie Gunther Spence 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. Paulie 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.

Paulie tried to remember the procedure, those many years 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.

Paulie 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, “Get her.”

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.

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, for the first time in a really long time, 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, 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 Chinese man. 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,” Kong 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.