The Headhunters Race (Headhunters #1) (2 page)

More people stream in while I try to hold on to second position. The room is noisy as allies murmur about their strategies. I see the Greenies walk in and take up position at the end, where there’s no crowd. They’re going to learn fast that looking for the easy way isn’t going to cut it. I’m already being jostled when I whistle and wave at them. The woman catches my eye and nudges her husband. They make their way toward me, the man sweating, the woman wringing her hands together nervously.

A pang of sorrow sweeps over me. And guilt. It’s not fair they’re here. It’s not fair that any of us are here, but there’s something about the way the woman spoke of my mother, even if she said I killed her, that has softened me. They must have known her even though I don’t remember them. I’d like to know what that relationship was, to get a little bit more of her to hold on to. To keep me going.

They stand behind me, four prisoners back. I wave them forward, but they’re hesitant to move closer. I don’t blame them. I remember the first day I tried that. I came out with a bloody nose and a black eye. “You’ll never get anything back there,” I yell. I barely hear myself when I say it.

The person behind me takes the opportunity to elbow me. I lose my bearings for only a millisecond before I elbow the woman right back. She buckles over and I give her a good shove, and immediately wave the Greenies over again. The husband races forward with his container. I think he understands the urgency of obtaining sustenance when you can get it.

His wife hangs back, looking like she might break into tears any second. The lesson her husband is about to learn will be hard to bear. She’ll be tending to his injuries tonight.

The swell of chatter gets louder. Out of the corner of my eye I see the war at the top has begun and McCoy is in the middle of it, grabbing prisoners and flinging them away like rag dolls. There’s a lot of yelling and cursing and, above it all, I can hear McCoy pardoning himself for being so rude. The first couple of times he did this I thought it was funny. Until I realized I could use his moronic apologies as a signal to prepare myself. McCoy’s strategy is to wait almost until the last second to barge his way to first position. When he starts apologizing, I know the slopfest is about to begin.

I turn to the Greenie. “Get ready. Hold your ground and push forward no matter what.”

The hatch opens. The yelling and screaming and screeching in the room explode in my ears. I try to block it out, to focus, because now is not the time to go home empty-handed. The crush of people forcing their way to the trough presses me into the man in first position. He jabs me in the gut. I return the favor with a knee to the back of his thigh. The Greenie behind me grunts in pain. He’s out of breath, and for that matter so am I, trying to maintain hold on my place.

Prisoners push and pull, shove and kick, jockeying for position, scrabbling for the trough to get their portion. Someone behind me grabs my hair and tries to yank me back. Greenie slaps the snot out of her and sends her tumbling backwards. He’s getting the hang of it.

Finally, I smell the revolting odor of slop sliding down the trough toward us. It’s what I imagine a rotting cow smells like. It’s disgusting, but it’s all we get. The man in front of me battles it out with the man opposite him. He gets a healthy scoop and clears out as fast as he can while I thrust myself forward to claim his position. Someone shoves me from the right, a man on the left backhands me, but I focus only on dipping my pot into the lumpy soup. “Give me your container,” I say to the Greenie after I manage to get ours three-fourths full.

He doesn’t even hesitate to hand it over, which surprises me. He’ll need to be a little more careful about doing that with anyone else. While I hang on to my share and Greenie keeps prisoners away from me, I fight the next person across the trough: a middle-aged man with a scar across his nose. I use the container to bash him out of my way, so I can get the Greenies a share. Somehow I’m able to get their container completely full. I’m not sure how and I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it because I can already feel the tenderness of the bruises forming on my sides. I turn and hand it to him. “Hang on to this!”

We plow our way through the prisoners behind us, Greenie in the lead and me following in his wake. For a first-timer, he didn’t do too badly. But we’re not safe yet.

Once we’re out of the crowd, we find Greenie’s wife, eyes wide with terror, standing against the wall. She runs toward us. “Thank God you’re okay,” she says to her husband.

“We’re not out of the woods,” I say. “The prisoners will steal that right out of your hands or kill you if you don’t keep your eyes open.”

Just as I say it a fight breaks out in front of us. A gang of prisoners surround two men trying to make their way into the hall of the East wing. Both men have knives drawn, but so do the thugs. I nod the Greenies toward our wing. “No eye contact with anyone.”

Husband Greenie nods and I lead the way out. I catch sight of McCoy ahead of us, wondering why it takes him so long to get his slop when he’s in first position. He’s always just ahead of me. Sometimes I think he waits so he can taunt me about how slow I am. It’s like I can never be better, or quicker, or wake up earlier than he does.

We make it to our wing safely. The Greenies, who tell me their names are Jim and Martha, thank me and head off to their cell while I bounce into our little alcove all jubilant. It kind of feels good to help someone other than Zita. To be thanked and appreciated. To be the recipient of happy smiles and gratitude. But then I hear Verla’s voice in my head and her sound reasoning flattens the moment.
Keep to yourself. Once you show kindness, people WILL take advantage of you.

I close my eyes to block out her words. But I know she’s right. I won’t let it happen again.

Zita divides up the slop between the two of us. We eat in silence. I’m so hungry I have to remind myself to chew. A piece of meat, at least I think it’s meat, gets stuck on my crooked tooth. I’m trying to pull the long shred out when Zita starts cracking up at me. So I give her a show, grinning like a lunatic, as Verla would say, and bobbing my shoulders up and down with my hands on my hips. It’s a good laugh.

“I hate this tooth,” I say, picking out the stubborn fiber.

Zita grunts. “I think it’s your best feature.”

I roll my eyes and force down the rest of my food, tossing odd bits into my bait bag for hunting. If you can call it that. The insects and rodents have been eerily absent the past few days, until the spider.

Zita takes my dish. I grab my bait bag and gulp down more water. “I’m going out to hunt.” It’s never too early to start thinking about food since it might be days before we get slop again.

Zita nods. She knows I like my space too. I head out through Boom and McCoy’s room and try to avoid eye contact.

“The signup sheet for the race has been posted,” Boom says behind me. He says it all quiet-like. With eyes wide my whole mission instantly changes. The race is the one way we can escape this hell hole of a prison. I can hunt later but there’s no telling when they’ll pull the signup sheet down. Sometimes the guards leave it up for a day. Sometimes only hours.

I nod even though I don’t turn to acknowledge him and scurry toward the main center. I’m thankful it’s quiet when I arrive. Everyone else is semi-fat and happy after the slopfest.

Forty-eight spots are already filled when I take a look at the sheet. I’ll make forty-nine. Even as deadly as the race is, I’m still surprised more prisoners don’t run it. After all, you earn your freedom if you bring back Gavin or his head. And if you don’t win first prize, at least you get upgraded to the leisure prison for your endeavor.

I scan the list, curious to see who of the other two hundred prisoners has signed up. I recognize a couple of people everyone stays clear of: Kurt, the young mahogany-skinned hothead Zita thinks she’s in love with, and the gray-bearded old guy everyone calls Squint. Rumors say both have killed citizens of Water Junction. I’m not sure I believe it though. No one here was sentenced to life because they’re robbers or killers. Not initially anyway.

I finish running down the list and find that none of the other names are familiar. I add my name to the list. “Avene” is all I write since I don’t remember my surname. I was only five when my mother married Governor King, and I refuse to use his.

Now that I’m signed up, I add working out to my chore list. With so much to do I don’t waste time getting back to our quarters. Zita scurries from Boom’s fire as I enter. She thinks I don’t see her and when I get into our alcove, I pretend I didn’t. She knows I like for us to keep to ourselves, but it’s not really a sixteen-year-old’s place to tell a twenty-year-old what to do.

I pull my pouch from over my head, lay it on our table, and then drink handfuls of water to hydrate for my workout. When I turn to head out, I’m startled to find Zita standing at my back, her eyes wide and her smile even bigger. I notice her hands are behind her too. That’s when I remember it’s been about six months since we’ve gone through the ritual I know she’s about to thrust on me.

“I have a surprise for you,” she says.

I was right. I swallow hard and smile, even though my lips are quivering. Zita knows I hate surprises, but she insists on springing one on me every once in a while. She thinks because she studied nursing with Doctor Schultz, who has a psychology degree and a medical degree, that eventually I’ll come around to them. I tell her I won’t. She knows King said similar words to me right before he threw me in prison. “What kind of surprise?” I ask. My heart pounds like thunder in my chest. A cold sweat forms at my brow.

She brings her arms around and holds up an old plastic orange-and-blue bottle. Almost like a baby’s bottle, only I know these were used by adults a decade ago, before the Kill Plague. My mother used to call them sports bottles. “Thank you,” I say, reaching for it. “I’ll use it when I hunt.”

Zita is beaming now. “And you can use it when you work out.”

I go to our water source, an old sink Verla confiscated from one of the latrines, and fill it. “Yes. It’s perfect,” I say, grateful that once again I held myself together and I’ll have a reprieve from any surprises for another six months.

I let Zita know I’ll be working out in the room a few cells down. She looks like she wants to talk but nods instead. She knows training for the race is important. Zita has no interest in the race herself. I’ve tried to talk her into it multiple times, but she always tells me she doesn’t have it in her for a death trek. I can see her point. The sheer length of the journey is enough to scare most people off. Not to mention defending yourself against other prisoners and the cannibals, if you should be so unlucky as to meet up with one.

The cannibals are what scare me the most. My mother used to tell me if the previous governments of the world had prepared better, we’d never have had a Kill Plague that wiped out eighty-five percent of the human population. And in turn, people wouldn’t have had to resort to cannibalism, and we wouldn’t have “fend for yourself” societies where self-appointed leaders reign over their cities and towns in whatever manner they find befitting. Like King, who decided of his own accord that he should take his father’s place, the last elected Governor of our state, when he died of a stroke several years ago. But we do have self-appointed leaders, and worse, cannibals, and even though they scare me, I think I can fight them if I have to, or outrun them.

I reach the cell I use for daily conditioning, skirting around the tires as I make my way to the corner. I stretch first and then start with pushups since I despise those the most. The signup sheet said the race is in three days. I have to push myself. Losing is not an option. The race is not easy. Not everyone is cut out for it. It’s why I don’t push Zita.

I continue with squats, move on to sit ups, and when I’m finished, I do my tire drill. One day I found six small tires stacked inside my workout room. There’s not much use for tires anymore. Water Junction only has a couple of working cars since obtaining gasoline is rare and no one in Water Junction has figured out how to convert other bio sources into fuel yet. Most of the cars were torn apart for their metal anyway, to reinforce homes against cannibal attacks.

I’m not sure how the tires got here, even though I have my suspicions, but I decided to put them to good use. I stacked them in the middle of the room in pairs and use them as an obstacle course. I take a breath and jump into them like I’m playing hopscotch, leaping into each from one end to the other until I’ve gone back and forth twelve times each way. I’m worn out by the time I finish.

After about a five-minute breather, I make myself run in place. I have one hundred and fifty-three miles round-trip. Through dense forest. Over a dry, hot desert. The race must be completed in nine days. Otherwise, the guards that accompany each prisoner are permitted to kill us. Nine days isn’t much time. King’s reasoning is he can’t afford to leave the town unguarded for too long.

When I’m certain I’ve run for more than an hour, I take a break. I walk the hall to allow my pulse to normalize before I gulp down the bottle of water and head back to our alcove. This time I catch Zita and McCoy together, outside our rooms. I grunt and walk past them into our alcove.