Flesh Worn Stone (8 page)

“I don’t know if you want to dig through that mess, but I’d appreciate the help. I don’t want to eat human, just yet.”

“They ate Cassandra last night,” Amanda, her eyes still blank, said. “And it was like a Thanksgiving Day feast.”

John put his arm around her shoulder. “I know it’s hard, Amanda, but try to imagine that your friend, in her death, helped feed these children.”

Amanda pulled away from him in disgust. “You are one sick fuck, aren’t you?”

Ashamed and shocked, John said, “I’m sorry, I was just thinking that…”

“Stop thinking. Stop thinking for me,” Amanda said, storming off. Several nearby people laughed and giggled at the exchange.

“You think this is funny?” Darius bellowed.

“You’re damned right, skippy,” a toothless hag said. “Newcomers are almost as much fun as the Game.”

“Fuck you,” John spat in disgust and it was the first time Steven could remember him cursing.

“Calm down,” Darius ordered. “Anger isn’t going to get us anywhere here. In fact, I think we need to save that energy for the Game, if we’re going to survive this.”

“What is this ‘we’,” Steven demanded. “I don’t know any of you from Adam. As far as I know, you could be the reason my wife and I are here—some sort of sick, twisted fucking game rich boys play.”

“I’m not rich. I work at a damned grocery store, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, buddy,” Darius said, the bile in his voice rising, “but we’re all in this together. You can go your own way if you want. I don’t care. But we have a better chance of surviving if we stick together.”

Steven wasn’t so sure. “What’s the point of surviving? They took my boys from me, they took everything.”

Rebecca stared up at him with a touch of sadness. “You still have me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, instantly feeling guilty and going to her side. She shied away from him, standing and taking Mia away. He watched them go and felt a wall of tears threatening to crumble over him. “You see?”

“There is always revenge,” John said calmly and seriously.

“What?”

“If nothing else,” he repeated, “live for revenge.”

* * *

Steven wandered the Cave, watching the people go through their daily motions. Had he not seen the Game, not seen these people eat the girl who’d arrived with them, he’d have thought they were normal, despite the conditions. It would have been easy to maintain that illusion. Children played between the shelters, danced naked in the small pools of water, and generally were as mischievous as children were. Adults cleaned what they could, which wasn’t much, washed clothing, and prepared what little food they’d managed to scavenge from the food drop. Life went on, despite the Game.

It all could have been normal, even happy, and he might have maintained that silly notion had he not stumbled upon the tannery. An old man and woman, maybe husband and wife the way they argued, worked the human skin from the meals. Racks of it were strewn around their area, along with clothing and shoes produced from it. The area stank even worse than the rest of the Cave, a byproduct of the vats of boiling skin and bones.

The old woman was smoothing out a section of tanned human skin on a table made from wooden planks and plastic buckets. The old man hovered above her like an angry Catholic school nun.

“Damn it, Erma, you’re doing it wrong. Twenty-five years and you still muck it up every time you do it.”

“Why am I doing it at all? This is your job.”

“My job is telling you what my job is. Your job is to obey. Remember, that’s what the vows said. Love and obey and obey and obey.”

“I don’t think that’s what the vows said,” the woman said, letting the section of skin drop to the stone floor. “I’m pretty sure they did say, however, that you need to piss off.”

“Piss off? Really?” the man said. “You’ve been spending too much time with the Englishmen again.”

“The Englishmen, at least, are polite when someone is trying to help them out.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Then why did you ask for it?”

“Hello?” Steven asked meekly, not really wanting to get involved in the conversation, but wondering, as he stared down at his filthy bare feet, what he’d have to do to get a pair of shoes.

“Oh, hello there,” the woman beamed. “You’re one of the newcomers!”

“I guess the jumpsuit gives me away.”

“Every single time,” the older man said, coming around the table and sticking his hand out. “I’m Glenn and this is my longtime, eternally happy wife, Erma.” He pointed to the woman, who stuck her tongue out at him. “What can we do for you?”

“I…you’re talking to me. Hardly anyone will talk to us.”

“The Rules are the Rules,” Glenn said, agreeing. “Not a lot you can do about it, but not actually a lot they can do to me. Who else is going to make their stinkin’ shoes?”

“You don’t participate in the Game?”

“No, I’ve never had the honor of being called,” Glenn told him. “I have to be happy with just knowing that more winners wear our clothing and shoes than anyone else.”

“You’re the only ones who make clothing?” Steven asked, perplexed.

“Yep,” the old man laughed. “I guess you could say we have a monopoly, if such a thing exists in the Cave.”

“Well, what do I have to do to get a pair?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.” Glenn told him. “We make them for free.”

Steven picked one up to look at it. The sole of the shoe was tire tread glued and sewn to the human leather top. As he turned it over, he could make out the slightest remains of a tattoo, a heart surrounding the word ‘Mom’. He shivered involuntarily, but knew if he didn’t find something to cover his feet they were going to be cut to hell and, in this cesspool, infected quickly. “Do you have something in a ten or eleven?”

“Oh no,” Glen laughed, taking the shoe from him, “you can’t have one now.”

“You said they were free.”

“They are free, but only to those with a mark,” he said, pointing to his forehead.

“So I have to win a Game before I can get a pair of shoes?”

“And then there’s the waiting list,” Erma put in. “There’s a back order, you know?”

“A back order?”

“Sure,” Glen told him, “along with the pieces of leather armor for the two- and three-timers, the other pieces of clothing…there just isn’t a ready supply of leather for making shoes, though it looks like we’ve got quite a bit more since yesterday, huh, Erma?”

“The Castle bless us, yes.”

“So how long is the back order?”

“At least a year, maybe more. Come back and see us when you win a game and you can order a whole outfit, if you want. That’s not to say you’ll ever actually get any of it,” he said, laughing. “But you can order anything you want.”

Steven left the workshop in disgust, and, ironically, stepped on a fist-sized rock and cut his foot.

* * *

Amanda hadn’t heard John’s comment to Steven, but revenge was all she could think of as well.

Amanda Gordon’s life had been relatively simple, as simple as an American girl’s could be. Born to middle class parents and loving parents, Amanda had grown up on Houston’s west side, not in the most affluent neighborhoods, but in neighborhoods not yet touched by the curse of gangs and drugs. She’d been a Girl Scout, a cheerleader, in the Honor’s Society, and played high school basketball. She’d done everything expected of her, and then some. She’d graduated in the top ten percent of her class and had college paid for by scholarship.

She’d done nothing to deserve this, she thought, and Cassandra had most certainly done nothing to deserve being eaten alive, stored like that for later use like she was some sort of Quickie Mart. She couldn’t get the look on her friend’s face just before Rebecca had put her out of her misery off her mind.

She doubted that she’d ever forget that look. She doubted she’d ever forget the absolute pain in her friend’s face.

Amanda envied the strength she saw in Rebecca. Through the tears and sorrow there was something else there, she knew. There was a spark that, for whatever reason, the others didn’t see. She’d have to get close to the woman, she knew, if she wanted to survive.

The others she didn’t really care about. She wanted Darius just as dead as Cassandra was, but John and Steven were two bumbling male idiots in world filled with bumbling male idiots. They were, at least for the moment, harmless. She’d known both their types in the world before the Cave and she considered herself a great judge of character. Steven was a loving dad and husband, one of those rare types that actually were what he seemed on the outside. She could see him and Rebecca at the park, sitting on a checkered tablecloth with a picnic basket, maybe sipping on wine, while watching their sons play. She was sure that, like her own parents, they were the stereotypical good Americans.

John Hussein, on the other hand, seemed nice on the face of things, but was ultimately a spoiled rich kid. She’d known quite a few like him from River Oaks, Houston’s premier neighborhood. They always had money that their parents, or even grandparents, had earned and expected life handed to them on a silver platter. They were sly, wearing a camouflage suit of politeness and education until they were all-too-ready to show their fangs. John always seemed so concerned, yet she knew there was a monster lurking just under the surface. She could see it in his eyes.

Darius on the other hand, she was sure, was a garden variety criminal. He was a man who, by virtue of his sheer imposing size, had little to fear from physical confrontation. She thought the story of him running a grocery store was laughable, the crisscrossed scars on his face telling another story entirely. She’d seen those scars, that night in Club Zero, as she and Cassandra danced with him, even touched them, running her fingers down the long crevice while her hips moved in sync with his, Cassandra dancing behind her and her hand doing much the same. On the dance floor, she didn’t care who a person was. It was as close to sex as you could come without actually having intercourse. The blaring music, the people moving as one…and Darius had played the part well with both of them.

Later, in the van with the other men, he’d had on a mask but she could still tell it was him. When he was on top of her, thrusting with his mule dick while the other men laughed and Cassandra screamed out, she knew it was him.

“Please,” Cassandra had whimpered during the multiple rapes, “it wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

She’d blown off the resemblance before she’d been taken off the beach, but now she wasn’t so sure. Had Cassandra known something of what was coming? Amanda tried to shake the thought, along with the stricken look on Cassandra’s face before Rebecca killed her, from her mind.

It wasn’t possible, she thought. My best friend in the world wouldn’t do that to me.

But what did she really know about Cassandra Mills? They’d met their first year at Rice University in Houston and hit it off like long lost sisters. Cassandra had come from similar roots—middle class parents that were maybe not wealthy, but well off. She’d only met them once, when she’d gone home with Cassandra for the holidays, but they seemed just as nice and well adjusted as her own parents. There didn’t seem to be any dark secrets, no axe murdering sideline hobbies or drug addictions, and the two had spent nearly every free moment of their freshman and sophomore years together. There was nothing that she could think of to indicate her friend had known about this situation in advance.

And yet she’d said it twice—
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

She sat down near a pile of rubbish, exhaustion and fear and panic overwhelming her, and sank her head down between her knees. She didn’t know what was going to happen to her or if there was even a way out of this place. Rebecca didn’t know how she would survive in the place. Nothing in life had prepared her for it.

The only thing that she knew, for sure, was that Darius was somehow responsible for her and Cassandra being here and that meant the man had to die

* * *

John watched Steven stomp off, searching for his wife, and wondered why the man was here.

“He’s not going to make it here,” Darius told him. “He doesn’t have the fire you need.”

“Steven does seem to lack passion,” John agreed. “Yet I can understand his emotional state.”

“Things are tough all over,” Darius said, nonchalantly. “He can get over it or he can die. That’s just all there is to it.”

“That’s pretty harsh, Darius. The man lost his children. They were killed right there in front of him while he listened. I don’t have children, but I can’t imagine that being any sort of pick me up.”

“None of that matters,” Darius told him. “Nothing about where we came from or what we were matters here. They could have butt-fucked the Virgin Mary while snorting coke off Mother Theresa’s ass in front of him and it just doesn’t mean shit. You can either get with this program, learn to adapt and survive, or you can fucking die.”

Darius’ tone bordered on rage and John couldn’t help but wonder if the man had two voices. There was one that he used in front of the women, soft spoken, demure. And then there was this one, showing the hint of rage and anger that sat just under the man’s scared black skin.

“I take it you have some experience with situations like this?”

A strange look of recognition passed between the two men.

“Yes,” Darius said calmly, his tone returned to his first voice. “I’ve got some experience in something like this.”

“I was being facetious,” John said. “I mean… how does one have experience with cannibal savages unless they’ve spent time in some Amazonian jungle?”

“Prison…prison is sort of like this, without the cannibalism.”

“Oh,” John said, unsure of how much to ask the man. “I’m sorry.”

“There isn’t anything to be sorry about. You didn’t put me in jail and you didn’t put me here.” He said the latter with conviction, “I spent ten years in Huntsville,” he told John, referring to the prison just north of Houston, Texas where the state executed death sentences.

“You…you were on death row?”

“No, but maybe I should have been.”

Again, John was unsure if he should pry or not. He decided to let it alone and give Darius the time to tell him, if he so chose.