Mungus: Book 1 (23 page)

             
“I guess that you’re right,” Di said, lowering his gun.

             
Di got down off of his horse and told me to stand up.

             
“I broke my promise,” I whispered.

             
“What?” Di asked.

             
I didn’t answer.  I got up and they walked me to the Cell.

              Saul was dead.  I broke my promise.  It’s my fault.  He is dead.  He is dead.  He is dead.  HE IS DEAD.  Saul has death.  He has been dead, for what?  Seven, eight hours now?  Saul is dead.  He’s no longer with us.  He has passed away.  He’s in a better place now.  I laughed.  Saul must have died.  Dying is something that he has done.  On the ground, hole in his body, mutts pulling him apart.  Saul was dead.

             
The guilt was going to kill me before thirst did.  That first day in the Cell I didn’t feel the heat much.  I was done with life, leaning over, my head in my hands.  I was wrapped in a cocoon of pain.  The guards came over to taunt me.  They threw rocks at me and called me names.  When I looked at them, though, something funny happened.  Even though I was locked behind bars, fear shown in their eyes.  They quickly shook their heads clear of emotions and hid how they felt with their laughter and taunts, but it had been there.  Fear.  Maybe something in my eyes had shown them something about humanity.  Perhaps it was something ugly, something that you’re not supposed to see.

             
Time went by and the guilt was killing me, eating me up inside.  I kept on replaying the time in my head when I had promised Saul that I would keep him safe.  I played it over like I was watching a scene in a movie.  Then, I watched him die and heard him scream, over and over again.  The image of him falling into those hungry jaws was burned onto my brain like light gets burned onto a reel of film.  I thought of the Cell and how I had feared it so much before I escaped.  At that time, though, as I was wrapped up in the fetal position in it, I welcomed it.  It made me feel comfortable to be in there.  I deserved it.

             
“Hey,” said a gruff voice.  My head was in my hands and I didn’t look up.  “I heard what happened,” the voice went on.  “Do you want to talk about it?”

             
I looked up.  Bradley was standing outside of the Cell, his thick hands wrapped around the bar.  “Are you allowed to be here?” I asked.  I hadn’t spoken since my brother died.  My voice was raw and harsh.

             
“Anyone’s allowed to be here.  You’re supposed to be an example, remember?”

             
I looked around the bars.  They were made of solid, heavy steel.  There was no way out.  “Oh yeah.”

             
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked again.

             
“Go away.”

             
Bradley stood there for a long time not saying anything.  At last he said, “I want to talk about something.  Is that okay?”

             
I didn’t answer, but just looked out over the sea of green crops, every single one selfish and stretching up to steal as much sunlight as possible.

             
Bradley laughed nervously.  “I guess you don’t have a choice.  I wanted to say a few things.  One is that,” he cleared his throat and kicked some gravel around.  “I’m sorry.”

             
I looked up at him.

             
“I’m sorry about that time when you brought Hank to Lauren’s house.  I bailed on you.  I was pathetic.”

             
“Yeah, you were.”  I spat.

             
Bradley leaned back against the metal and looked out into the sky.  “Glen killed my brother, too.  I know that he didn’t actually kill your brother, but in a way, he brought about his death.”  Bradley ran a hand through his hair.  He chuckled and wiped his face with his sleeve.  “My brother was a good guy.  He was my little brother, in stature and age.  Glen, for whatever reason, hated him.  He whipped him like he didn’t whip anyone else; he hit him like he didn’t hit anyone else…he despised my brother.

             
“One morning, after I had watched James get hit, spit on, and stomped on for ten years we were eating breakfast together outside of our hut.  We were just boys then.  I was 13 and James was 11.  Breakfast was breakfast as usual-cold slop served from a wheel barrow.  James had lost weight since we got off of the ship and he needed all of the food he could get.  Glen was a young guy then, probably 20 or so, and his dad was in charge.  Glen was just one of the guards.  He walked up and down the row of cabins while we were eating, and for no reason, when he got to James and I he kicked the food out of James’s bowl.”

             
Bradley sniffled.  “Umm.”  His voice was slow and rumbling.  “And.  And.”  He looked up at the sky before continuing.  “And I lost it.  I had had enough.  I got up and I charged at Glen.  I got one good punch on his face and then I was on the ground, Salyer guards punching and kicking me.

             
“’Stop hitting him, just hold him down,’ Glen said, and they did.  They held me down and Glen told my little brother to take his shirt off and bend over.

             
“At that point I was screaming for him to stop.  After Glen had brought that whip down twenty or so times down on my brother’s back I was silent.”  Bradley didn’t turn around, but his shoulders moved up and down with his sobs.  “He just kept whipping him, until he was dead.  He bled so much.  He whipped him fifty, one hundred, two hundred times.  He tore a hole all the way through his torso.  He was a mad man, bringing that whip down onto the back of a mutilated corpse.  Then Glen turned to me and said, ‘that’s why you don’t help people.’  He tossed his whip down in the dirt and walked away.”

             
Bradley cried for some time and didn’t speak.  I looked at his back and what he said soaked into me.

             
He cleared his throat.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “I’m sorry that I left.  I was just scared.”

             
“It’s okay,” I whispered.

             
Bradley turned around to me, his eyes puffy and red.  “The worst part wasn’t watching him die, Walt.  The worst part was thinking that I brought on his death.”  Bradley stuck his finger through the Cell at me and said with defiance in his voice, “but let me tell you something!  I didn’t kill him!  Glen did!  And you didn’t kill Saul!  You loved him.  You would do anything for him.  You didn’t kill him.  This farm did.  Do you understand?”

             
I nodded.

             
Bradley smiled and looked around at the bars of my prison.  “It took me a long time to realize that about my life, that it wasn’t my fault.  It looks like you don’t have a lot of time to figure that out.  So I thought that I would just tell you.”

             
Bradley stayed with me for a long time.  I crawled over to where he stood at the edge of the Cell and I reached my hand through the bar and grabbed his.  He missed dinner for me and just waited patiently with me in silence.  After some time I began to weep.  He put his arms through the bar and pulled me towards him.  We hugged with metal poles in between us and he began to weep too.

             
Finally, guards came and took Bradley away.  He went back into his cabin and I was left outside lying on my back looking at the stars.

             
I started to feel better.  Thirst came to me and I realized that I had a headache from being in the sun all day.  I wasn’t as numb as I had been.

             
I thought of how much Saul knew about baseball and smiled.  He had been a great person and if he had to die, he would have liked it to have been helping other people.  I chuckled to myself remembering how hard he laughed in the UV room that time while he was reading his comic books.  He bothered everyone in there, but he didn’t know; he was in his own little world.  A tear ran down my face and I stared into the night sky.  “Say hello to mom and dad for me, Saul.”

             
And I went to sleep.

16

The Sun

             
The sun was drying me out like a raisin.  I smacked my dry lips together and looked over the metal bars of the Cell.  Mixed in with the rust on the metal was dried blood.  I imagined someone going mad from thirst and banging their head on the metal until they were dead.  I wondered if that would happen to me.

             
I turned over and looked out at the fields.  I saw heads moving and dipping into the rows of green as the slaves picked the cotton.  Saul should still be out there picking.  He should still be alive.  Then I looked over Lauren’s house, standing tall and white in the sun.  I should still be reading in the library instead of shriveling in blistering summer.  I closed my eyes and tried not to think about water.  My mind went off into odd thoughts and disjointed dreams and I stayed that way for some time.

             
Something hit me in the arm.

             
I didn’t move.

             
Something else hit me in the arm.

             
“Hey!”

             
I rolled over and peaked under my eyelids.  Di and a gang of Salyer guards were standing beside the Cell.  Di was holding a canteen and with his free arm he threw another pebble that hit me squarely in the forehead.  “Get up,” he demanded.  I opened my eyes all the way.

             
“What?” I asked.  With no water in my throat my voice was cracked and dry.

             
Di shook the canteen so that I could hear the liquid sloshing inside.  “Thirsty?”

             
I nodded and gazed longingly at the canteen.

             
All of the Salyers laughed.  Apparently my thirst was funny to them.  Even though I thought that it was more than likely that they were just taunting me with the canteen, I couldn’t help but wish for it.  “Can you answer a few questions for me?”

             
“I would love to,” I said and the Salyers cracked up again.

             
“Okay,” Di said.  “What were you two doing last night?  Why were you sneaking in?”

             
I had nothing to lose, I was already going to die and my brother was dead, so I answered honestly.  “We were sneaking in to break a few servants out.”

             
“How’s that going for you, Little Salyer?” Di laughed and his cronies followed.  “And speaking of you being a Little Salyer, why is your head shaved?”

             
“I had to go to town to get,” I paused and looked down at my leather shoes.  “Some food.”

             
“And you didn’t want to get caught, right?” Di asked.

             
“Right.”

             
“That’s pretty smart.  Way to go, Little Salyer.  Here’s your water.”  Di tossed me the canteen and I caught it in fumbling hands.  I opened up the top and gulped a few mouthfuls down my throat.  An awful feeling came over me.  I turned and vomited.  Something wasn’t right.  The guards were laughing their heads off.  I walked over to the bars and threw up all of the liquid that I had just consumed and then more.

             
“It was rubbing alcohol, you idiot!” Di said.  The guards were laughing uncontrollably now.  Strings of mucus were hanging from my mouth.  I had almost no moisture left in my body and I couldn’t afford to throw up so much.  It was just speeding up the process though, I thought.

             
Di tried to talk to me some more, taunting me about my brother and such, but I didn’t respond.  When the Salyers saw that I wasn’t going to be fun anymore, they left.

             
In the distance, out on a dirt road, I saw Lauren riding on a black horse.  Behind her, Julia was holding onto her mother and bouncing up and down as the horse went.  Lauren hadn’t come to visit me once yet.  They rode along the farm and went out the front gate together.  ‘Where are they going?’ I thought.  ‘To town?  When I’m dying?  I thought that she cared about me.’

             
Feeling even worse, I fell into a sleep full of wild dreams.

“Get up!  Now!  Stand!”

             
I opened my eyes and saw that Lauren was standing before the Cell.  The black horse was snorting behind her.  She was wearing a long leather coat in the hot sun and was sweating profusely.  Her face danced back and forth in my vision and I felt like I was going to be sick again.

             
“Get up!” she screamed.  “I’m not kidding, now!”

             
I didn’t budge, but only looked at her in the face.  How had she become so corrupted in the little time that I was away from the farm?