Land of Dust and Bones: The Secret Apocalypse Book 7 (16 page)

“He has one fresh wound,” Marko says. “In
his stomach. Looks like a knife wound. It’s pretty bad. I think he’s dying. I
actually think that’s the only reason we were able to get him. He didn’t
struggle. He didn’t fight. But that’s not even the weirdest part. The weirdest
part is he’s wearing this thing, this creepy, old looking… gas mask. And the
damn thing is stitched into his scalp. I’ve seen some messed up shit in my
time. But let me tell you, this is right up there. Top five, easy.”

“You don’t know what you’re messing with,”
I say. “You don’t know…”

“No, little girl. You are children. And he
is a prisoner.
He is my prisoner
. You
all are. You are mine. Are we clear?”

“He caused this,” I say. “He caused the death
of millions… of billions.”

Marko doesn’t believe me. “What are you
saying? He made people turn into zombies?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. He created
the Oz virus. And then he released it into the world. If you don’t believe me,
go ask him yourself. Ask him!”

“I might just do that. And then, I’ll thank
him personally.”

“Thank him?”

“For turning this place into a playground.
A wonderland. There are no rules. There are no laws. No police. No enforcers.
No watchmen. We are finally free to do whatever we want. I don’t have to hide
anymore. Do you have any idea how exhausting it was… hiding in plain sight…
hiding my true self. I don’t have to hide anymore. I can prey on the weak
because I am the strong. And no one…. No one can stop me.”

Marko is in love with this world. He was
born for it.

“Do you know what they call me?” he asks.
“Well, what they used to call me?”

I shake my head.

“They used to call me, ‘Marko the Maniac’.
Do I look like a maniac to you?”

Honestly. No. He doesn’t. Not even with a
gun in his hands. Not even with a knife in his hands. He looks like the most
normal guy in the world.

He nods to himself, talks to himself, to
me. “I liked it. I always liked it. Pride. Pride in my work. In the killing.
Strange…”

He is self-aware. Hyper aware. And I
realize now that we had stumbled across an old nightmare.

An urban legend.

A ghost story.

A story based on fact and fiction, based on
whispers of truth and exaggeration.

A story about a family of psychopaths. They
would prey on the weak, the lonely. They would prey on hitchhikers and tourists
and backpackers. Transients. Prostitutes. The poor. The mentally ill. The
social outcasts. If you had any kind of weakness, they would know, and they
would come for you, they would take you.

They would take you far away.

Into the outback.

Into the bush.

Into the deep dark forest.

No need to gag you. No need to blindfold
you.

You can see everything. The face of your
captors, the face of your killers. Your surroundings. Your final resting place.

You can scream. You can scream as loud as
you want. No one will ever hear you. Not in the bush. Not in the desert.

These are stories of torture.

Of pain and suffering.

Of bodies buried in the outback, buried in
the forest, buried in barrels of acid.

You hear these stories, you don’t know what
to believe. Was it all true? Was there really someone with a hook for a hand?
Was there really someone hiding in the backseat of your car? Waiting to
strangle, waiting with a knife.

Yes.

There was.

Yes.

There is.

Even in this new world full of the living
dead, full of monsters and mechanical plagues, these urban legends, these
people still exist.

Billy returns with Ivan.

Marko pats Ivan on the back. “This is my
other little brother, Ivan,” he says, introducing us. “People who don’t know
him, they call him, Ivan the Terrible. But if any of you bastards actually took
the chance to get to know him, you’d see that he really is a very kind person.
He doesn’t like suffering. He believes in a quick kill. Really, he does. It’s
tearing him up inside that he didn’t finish off your Asian friend. Who, by the
way, is really not doing so
good
. He keeps throwing up
all over the place.”

“Kenji,” I whisper. “His name is Kenji.”

“Whatever. Don’t care what his name is.
That’s not what I want to know.”

I can’t get over how big Ivan is. He’s as
big, if not bigger than Ben. The sledgehammer he carries with him looks like a
regular hammer in his hands.

“You see, it’s because of his face.” Marko
continues, moving over to Ivan. He reaches out to touch Ivan’s face. But Ivan
flinches and turns away.

“Hey! Relax,” Marko says. “Calm down.”

Ivan stops moving. He does exactly as he is
told. Like a dog.

Marko brushes Ivan’s long black hair to the
side of his face. “You see this?”

Ivan’s face is horrifically burnt and
scarred.

“People are so goddamn superficial. They
judged my brother. Labelled him a freak, a monster. But he’s not a freak. Are
you, mate? You’re not a monster.”

Marko turns back to me. “Really, he’s not.
He’s a big softie.” Marko then holds a candle up to Ivan’s face.

Ivan backs away in fear, grunting in
protest. He moves away and cowers in the corner.

“See? He’s afraid of a little candle. Took
us weeks to get him comfortable working in this room.”

Marko puts the candle down and then picks
up Sarah, grabbing her under her arm. He pushes her face down on the table next
to me. Holding her arm out straight and flat against the chopping block.

Billy drags me off the table, out of the
way. He throws me against the wall and I collapse on the floor. “Stay there.”

“What the hell are you doing?” I ask.

“Please!” Sarah says. “We’ve told you
everything we know! What do you want from us?”

“Where is the town,” Marko asks. “How far
away is it? How many people are there?”

Sarah is silent.

“Answer me!”

“There is no town,” I say.

“That’s not what your friends told me.”

“They made it up,” I answer, trying to
figure out how the hell he found them, how the hell he captured them, trying to
guess if they were still alive. “They made it up because it’s what you wanted
to hear. We already told you the truth. We’ve been walking around. We were
holed up in an underground military installation. But the whole placed turned
bad. It became overrun. It was messed up, doomed before we even got there.”

Billy hands Marko the butcher’s cleaver.

“Why do you want to know?” I ask,
desperately trying to get Marko to change his mind, to stop him from what he is
about to do. “You’ve got a good thing going on here. You don’t need anything.”

“Don’t you lie to me, little girl. You go
changing your stories like that and I’m
gonna
have to
assume that you’re lying.”

“You don’t need to do this.”

“Something’s not adding up here,” Marko
says, thinking out loud. “And I will find out what. I know you are lying.
Believe me, I am a master at it. I’ve been lying my whole life. It’s what I do.
I can spot a tall tale a million miles away. So here’s what I’m going to do.
I’m going to start torturing you in front of one another. And sooner or later,
you will tell me the truth.”

Marko rests the cutting edge of the cleaver
against Sarah’s arm.

Sarah starts to struggle. “No! Please, no!”

“Hold her still!” Marko says.

Ivan holds Sarah down, putting his
considerable weight on top of her.

I get to my feet. My vision is still
blurry. I am still dizzy. I can barely stand up straight. I need to do
something. But there is nothing to be done. I am utterly useless. And before I
can do anything, Billy has me in a headlock, a knife against my throat.

“You have to watch,” he whispers into my
ear. “That’s how it works.”

Marko raises the butcher’s cleaver. He
brings it down with the kind of force and the kind of precision that can only
be gained by years of experience and repetition. He severs Sarah’s arm so
easily, so effortlessly, it doesn’t even look real.

Sarah screams.

She screams until her lungs give out and
she passes out from pain or shock or both.

Blood spurts from her arm, from her severed
arteries.

I don’t want to look. But I can’t look
away.

“Stop the bleeding,” Marko says to Ivan.
“We’re not done with her yet.

“What about this one?” Billy asks as he
digs the blunt edge of the knife into my throat.

“Put her with the others,” Marko says as he
cleans the blade of the cleaver. He then sticks it into the chopping block.
“Let them talk about this. Let their imaginations run wild.”

As Billy drags me out of the room, Ivan
pours a kind of clear liquid, alcohol probably, all over Sarah’s arm. He grabs
a rubber tourniquet and ties it around her bicep. He then grabs a handful of
something, a powdered, crystalline substance and uses it to seal her wound. He
then wraps her arm up with what appears to be brown butcher’s paper.

He ties it off with a bit of twine.

And this is when it hits me, when it
really, really hits me…

We are meat.

I am dragged by my hair, kicking and screaming. I am dragged down a long
hallway. My hair is still short from when it was shaved off at the New Zealand
quarantine facility. But it is long enough for Billy to grab a fistful.

And I can’t stop this. I can’t fix it. I am
powerless to do anything.

I am useless.

Sarah just lost her hand. Half of her arm.
Has she lost her life?

Billy pulls me along. I scream some more.

My throat is burning.

Marko is right behind us. “That’s right,
little girl. Keep screaming. I want them to hear you scream. I
need
them to hear you scream.”

He then steps past us and opens a door to
another room. Another prison cell. “Now, I’ll be back in about a week, all
right? Maybe longer. You’ll start to hallucinate. You’ll start hearing things
and seeing things. Don’t fight it.”

Billy throws me in.

And I am vaguely aware that I am not alone.
That there are other people in here with me.

Marko stands in the doorway and throws a
torch into the room. “Tell them everything. Spare no detail. When I get back,
you better tell me what I want to know.”

Marko turns to leave, and in the split
second before he slams the door, I see Jack and Maria and Kim.

They are so unbelievably scared.

They are terrified.

Desperate.

And I am desperate and I try and think.

Come on.

I can do this.

Think.

We need more time.

I
need more time.

I need to get this guy to stop for one
goddamn second. If he doesn’t stop, he’ll butcher us all. Torture us all. He’ll
kill Sarah right now. He’ll chop her up into tiny pieces.

Before Marko leaves, before he shuts the
door, I say, “You need to stop what you’re doing.”

I say this quietly. I say it as calmly as I
possibly can. I struggle to keep my voice level. I know that if I start yelling
and screaming, he will shut the door.

But if I am calm, if I am rational, he will
listen.

I say, “Sarah. You can’t kill her. She’s
the only one who knows where the town is. None of us know. We’ve never been
there. We don’t even know the name of the town. She’s the only one.”

Marko stops, he hesitates. He doesn’t turn
around. He doesn’t say anything. But I know it has worked. I’ve got him
thinking. He is second guessing himself.

He finally closes the door and the room
becomes so amazingly dark.

I scramble on hands and knees, searching
for the torch.

But I can’t find it.

Luckily, Kim has the torch. She switches it
on and I breathe a sigh of relief.

We stare at each other for a few seconds. I
don’t know why. Maybe just to see if this is real. Maybe to see if anyone has
any injuries, to see if anyone else has lost a limb. We don’t say anything.
Because we don’t know what to say.

What do you say in a situation like this?

I thought I’d never see you again?

I thought you were dead?

And Jack says, “Kenji? Sarah? Are they
dead?”

Kim hits her brother on the arm. “Jack.
Come on.”

“I’m sorry to just blurt it out. But I need
to know.”

“They’re not dead,” I answer. “At least, I
don’t think they’re dead.”

“You don’t know?” Maria asks. “How? What
happened? Are they hurt?”

“Yeah,” I answer. “They’re hurt. They’re
hurt bad. They’ve got Kenji locked up somewhere. Not sure where. Haven’t seen
him since…” I trail off, unsure of the time, of how long we’ve been trapped in
the Boneyard.

“Since when?” Maria says.

“How long have we been here?” I ask. “How
long have you guys been here?” I shake my head. I am so confused. So
disorientated. “This is all so messed up. I was knocked unconscious. I was
choked. I don’t know how long I’ve been out for.”

“We’ve been here for a few hours,” Kim
says. “Maybe six hours or so.”

“What about Sarah?” Maria asks. “Is she
OK?”

I take a deep breath. In my mind’s eye I
see the cleaver slice her arm clean through. I hear her scream.

And then she stops screaming…

“Rebecca?”

“They cut her hand off,” I say quietly,
ashamed that I was unable to stop them. Unable to do anything to help Sarah. To
do anything at all.

“Oh God,” Maria says. “They cut her hand
off? What… what do you mean?”

“I mean, they cut her goddamn hand off.
They held her down… on a table… a chopping block. They held her arm out
straight. And he just… he just cut her hand off with a giant cleaver thing.”

The room falls silent once again. And once
again, no one knows what to say.

“They… they are going to torture us,” I
say. “They are going to torture us in front of each other. They want to know
where the walled town is. He wants to know so they can…” I don’t know how to
explain it. How do you explain this? How do you explain that a guy, a normal
looking guy, wants to hunt and kill and torture and eat a whole town full of
people? “He wants to know where the town is so he can turn it into his own
sick, twisted playground. A hunting ground. And that’s why I told him that
Sarah is the only one who knows where the town is. I was just buying us, her
some time. I was making sure he kept her alive.”

“Plus she really is the only one who knows
where it is,” Jack says.

“Why is he doing this to us?” Maria asks.

“It’s who he is,” Kim says, accepting the
reality of our situation. “He’s been doing this for a long time. Long before
the outbreak. Long before the end of the world. He’s a serial killer, a
murderer, a cannibalistic psychopath. Right now, he’s eating human flesh
because he needs to. But believe me, these guys have been doing this for a
long, long time.”

“Wait,” Maria says. “They’re going to eat
us?”

“Yes,” Kim answers. “If we don’t get out of
here, they will. It’s the only reason we’re still alive.”

“And because he wants to know where the
town is,” Jack says.

“Did he question you guys about the town as
well?” I ask.

“Yeah. He doesn’t know for sure, but I’d
say he’s working it out. He knows there is a town of survivors, a safe haven.
But he doesn’t know where.”

I guess it was only a matter of time before
he finds it. I wonder if Sarah will tell him.

“So how did you guys get here?” I ask.
“What the hell happened?”

“He found us in the chopper wreckage,” Kim
answers.

“I should’ve shot him when I laid eyes on
him,” Jack says, echoing my thoughts. “But I couldn’t. He just looked so… so
lost. He looked worried. Afraid. He said he was looking for his brother. Said
he’d been missing for days. He feared the worst.”

“And he was completely unarmed,” Maria
adds. “Completely unthreatening. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I
actually felt sorry for him.”

“You guys had been gone for a couple days
by this point,” Jack continues. “We were weak. We didn’t realize just how weak.
Not until he got the drop on us.”

“How?” I ask “How did he do it?”

“He offered us a ride. He said we could
pick you guys up on the way. Take us as far as we wanted to go. He was going
south anyway. Looking for his brother. Said he lived in a mining site. He told
us there were spare vehicles. We could take one. All he asked in return is that
on the way there, we keep an eye out for his brother. Four pairs of eyes are
better than one, he said.”

“He was so damn friendly,” Kim adds. “We
trusted him. I mean, he was unarmed, he was alone, grieving for his lost
brother. We had no way of knowing. We drove for a couple of hours. Found a
truck. A road train. We checked it out together. And I remember feeling excited
at the possibility that his brother was seeking shelter there. That his brother
was alive. We were so damn stupid. And then all of a sudden, he had a gun. He
fired off a couple of rounds to scare us. And just like that, his mask, his
façade was gone. We saw his true self. A monster. He tied us up. Gagged us. Put
us in the back of his truck. He told us if we made any noise, he would kill us
all slowly, in front of each other. He said he’d start with our fingers and
toes. Our skin. Force us to watch.”

“Wait just a goddamn minute,” I say. “So
you were in the back of the truck, his Landcruiser, the whole time?”

Kim nods. “Yeah. We didn’t know what to do
when he picked up you guys. We could hear everything. We could hear all his
lies. But we didn’t know whether to risk it.”

“It was too dangerous,” Maria says. “He
would’ve killed us all on the spot.”

“Plus, we were gagged and tied up pretty
damn tight,” Jack says. “There was nothing we could do anyway.”

“So you were in there the whole time?” I
say, completely dumbfounded, completely in shock. “I can’t believe it. No wonder
the infected wanted to get inside the truck back at the mine site.”

“Yeah, that was scary,” Jack says. “If
there’d been any more of them, they would’ve tipped the truck over.”

“What was that all about?” Kim asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t really know. He
said he needed oil. He said he needed to check the engine. But I don’t know
what to believe anymore. We stopped at a mine site. Turned out, the place was
overrun. We were ambushed. But, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure he
set the whole thing up. He wanted to lure us in, get us on the run. Make us use
all our ammo. The weird thing is, he saved Kenji’s life.”

“What do you mean?” Maria asks.

“Kenji was attacked. He was attacked by one
of the bigger ones. It was all over him. It was about to kill him. And then
Marko saved his life. And from that point, we trusted him. He got us out of
trouble. He proved himself. But it was all an act. It was all a set up.”

“And we all fell for it,” Kim says. “We all
trusted him. And now… now we are paying the price.”

Jack gets to his feet. “This isn’t over.
I’m not doing this. I’m not
gonna
sit here and wait
to get tortured and eaten by these monsters. That is not going to happen.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do?”
Maria says. “Who knows how many people we’re up against?”

“Three,” I say. “Marko and his two
brothers. Billy. Ivan.”

“Only three?” Maria asks.

“Yeah. Ivan is a big son of a bitch. And
Billy…”

“Are you sure there’s only three?” Maria
asks, cutting me off. “I mean, there could be more. There could be a lot more.”

“I doubt it,” Kim says.

“What makes you say that?”

“These guys are freaks,” she explains.
“They’re loners. They keep to themselves because they’re incapable of living
with anyone else. They don’t fit in with society. They’re killers. They’re cannibals.”

“So what do we do?” Jack says. “How do we
get out of here? And how do we get Kenji and Sarah? We don’t even know where
they are keeping them.”

“Sarah is just down the end of this
hallway,” I say. “She’s in this building.”

“What about Kenji?”

“Not sure.”

“He has to be close by,” Maria says,
thinking out loud. She is also quickly coming to grips with our situation. “Why
would they take him anywhere else? He’s not only a prisoner, he’s food. And if
these guys really are cannibals, I’m guessing they’d keep all their food in one
place. Easier to keep track of. Easier to monitor.”

“Easier to kill,” Jack adds.

“Yeah, that too.”

Kim shines the torch along the edges of the
room and at the doorframe.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Looking for a weak spot,” she answers.
“For something we can use.”

“I doubt there’s going to be a weak spot,”
Jack says. “He hasn’t tied us up. There’s no one even guarding the room. You
know why? It’s because there are no weak spots. We’re in a place called the
Boneyard, which by the way, is in the middle of the Australian desert. So we
can scream all we want. He doesn’t care. I bet he doesn’t even care if we get
out of this room. Where are we going to go?”

“There’s razor wire all around the boundary
fence,” I add. “There’s two fences. Forty foot tall. We’re not climbing over
those.”

“Well that’s just great,” Maria says.

Kim is ignoring us, she’s still looking for
a weak spot. She is refusing to give up.

“So what do we do?” Maria asks. “If we
can’t sneak out, if we can’t climb the fences, then we’ll have to fight our way
out.”

Jack nods along. He likes this plan of
action. Fear is giving way to anger. He wants to fight. He wants to kill these
guys or die trying. So do
I
.

But how?