The
House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos
Sunday August 29, 12:43
A.M.
Time Remaining on
Extinction Clock: 83 hours, 17 minutes
The compound was never silent. Even here in
the middle of the night there was noise. Cries of the jungle
parrots, the incessant buzz of insect wings, the rustle of leaves
as the breeze pushed its way through the palms. And the
screams.
Eighty-two crouched in the dark and tried to
remember if he had ever heard real silence here, if there was ever
a time when someone wasn’t shouting, or weeping, or screaming. He
was sure there must have been times, but he couldn’t recall. It
wasn’t like living at the Deck. Sure, there were screams there,
too, but not all the time. Eighty-two had watched a lot of TV-even
regular stuff he downloaded from satellite feeds-and he knew that
hearing screams was not part of ordinary life.
Then again, he already knew he was a
freak.
After he’d snuck out to recover the stone,
Eighty-two had climbed back into his bedroom so that he’d be there
for the midnight bed check. When the nurse and guard-there were
always two of them-were sure he was in bed and asleep, they closed
and locked the door. That left him four hours until the next bed
check.
Eighty-two lifted the corner of his mattress
and removed a small tool kit. The cover was part of a leather work
apron he’d picked out of the trash, and the individual tools were
things he had collected over the last two years. None of them were
proper tools, but each of them was carefully made. Eighty-two was
very good with his hands. He had learned toolmaking by the time he
was ten and had even assisted Otto in making surgical instruments
for Alpha. It wasn’t something the boy enjoyed, but then again
there was almost nothing he enjoyed. Toolmaking had been a thing to
learn, and Eighty-two never passed up an opportunity to learn
something. He believed that his willingness-perhaps his
eagerness-to learn was one of the reasons Alpha hadn’t let Otto
kill him.
Alpha had hopes for him. Eighty-two knew
that much, although he didn’t know what those hopes were or why
Alpha held on to them with such aggression. It wasn’t out of love;
the boy knew that much from long experience. There were a lot of
other boys at the Deck, and Eighty-two had seen Alpha’s mood change
from approval to disapproval of many of them over the years.
Alpha’s disapproval was terrifying. Six weeks ago, Alpha had made
Eighty-two and a dozen other boys sit and watch as One Thirteen was
fed to Isis and Osiris. One Thirteen had not been clever enough at
numbers, and his hand sometimes trembled when he held a scalpel.
Alpha had been very disappointed in him.
Eighty-two used a pair of metal probes to
undo the lock to his bedroom door, slipped out, and relocked the
door. Then like a ghost he drifted along the empty corridors of the
main house and along an enclosed walkway that led to the
guardhouse. Twice he passed crosswalks that had cameras mounted on
the wall, but he kept to his memorized timing schedule and no one
saw him. To get to the House of Screams he had to pass through the
guardhouse or go outside-and that wasn’t likely with the dogs out
there. From his window Eighty-two had seen four of the dogs-two big
tiger hounds and a pair of some new breed he didn’t know and didn’t
want to know. No thanks.
The guardhouse smelled of beer, sweat, sex,
unwashed clothes, and testosterone. Eighty-two would love to have
doused the place in gasoline and tossed in a match. Or thought he
would. It was easy to think of doing that because the guards made
him so mad.
But could he ever do that? Take
lives?
He knew he was expected to. He knew that
soon he’d be asked to. Told to. Made to.
God.
He slipped inside and hid in the shadows by
the door, watching the rows of beds, listening to the
snores.
There was a sound to his left-soft and
weak-and he edged that way. It wasn’t a male sound, not a guard
sound. He thought he knew what it might be.
She was there, lying on the floor in a
puddle of moonlight.
The female.
She was naked, knees drawn up to her chest,
head half-buried under her arms. Her red hair was sweat soaked and
tangled; her hunched back was crisscrossed with welts. Belt marks,
with cuts here and there from the buckle. Eighty-two recognized
them.
Carteret.
The female shivered despite the heat. The
boy could smell urine and saw the glint of light on a small puddle.
The female had wet herself. Either too afraid to move or too hurt,
she just had wet herself. Eighty-two felt his heart sink. He knew
that when Carteret woke up and saw the mess he would hurt her some
more.
There was an expression Eighty-two heard in
a couple of movies: “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” That’s
what the female must have felt. What she must feel now. There was
no way to be right, to act right, to do right, in the eyes of the
guards. Even obedience was sometimes punished. It was all about the
punishment, about the breaking of the will. Eighty-two knew this,
and he knew why it was important to Otto and Alpha, why they
encouraged the guards to do whatever they wanted to the New Men.
Especially when other New Men were watching.
The female opened her eyes and looked at
him. The naked clarity of her gaze rooted Eighty-two to the spot.
Her eyes searched his face and he could tell that she recognized
him. Then her gaze shifted away toward the cot where Carteret
slept, lingered for a moment, and shifted back to the boy. Slowly,
being careful of her injuries and not to make a sound, she raised
her hand, extended a finger, and touched it to her cheek. Then she
drew the finger across as if wiping away a tear. Eighty-two
instantly recognized the gesture-it was what the two male New Men
had done after they’d seen him wipe away a tear after the female
had been beaten.
Eighty-two’s mouth went dry. He reached into
his pocket and removed the black piece of volcanic rock and held it
in a shaft of moonlight so she could see it. Her eyes flared wide
in horror and she cringed, but Eighty-two shook his head. He closed
his hand around the rock and mimicked throwing the stone at the
sleeping Carteret. Eighty-two then pretended to be struck with a
stone and reeled back in a pantomime of cause and
effect.
The female’s eyes followed his actions and
he was sure she understood what he meant, but she slowly shook her
head. Fresh tears filled her eyes and she closed her lids and would
not look at him again.
Eighty-two watched the female shiver and he
wanted to do something, but he made himself move away. He felt
ashamed for scaring her and furious that she would not fight for
herself, not even when Carteret was helpless. There was a sound
like cloth tearing behind Eighty-two’s eyes and the shadows
dissolved into a fiery red around him as rage drove him suddenly to
his feet and he raised the rock high above his head, muscles tensed
to hurl it at the guard’s unprotected head.
Eighty-two had never wanted to kill anyone
or anything before. Not truly.
Until now.
But he didn’t. His whole body trembled with
the effort of not killing this man. It took more strength than
Eighty-two thought he possessed to lower his arm.
Not yet, he told himself. Not
yet.
There was other work to be
done.
He forced himself to move away, but as he
did he saw the female watch him. She didn’t plead with her stare;
there was no flicker of hope that he would rescue her. All
Eighty-two saw was a bleak, bottomless resignation that came close
to breaking his heart.
Anger was a burning coal in his mind. He cut
a final glance at Carteret’s sleeping, drunken, naked body sprawled
on the bed, and Eighty-two forced himself to put the stone back in
his pocket.
Not yet, he told himself again. But
soon.
He made it all the way to the end of the
guardhouse and undid the lock and slipped into the House of
Screams. Eighty-two had a plan, but it was a dreadful risk. He had
tried once by sending the hunt video.
There was one more thing he could try. But
if he got caught.
He did not worry as much about his own
skin-he never expected to grow up anyway. Most of the other boys
were already dead by the time they were his age. He had to be
careful so that he could do something about
Carteret.
Eighty-two made it to the House of Screams
and slipped inside, evading all of the cameras, and found what he
was looking for. A laptop sitting on a technician’s desk.
Eighty-two had seen it yesterday and hoped it would still be
here.
Eighty-two opened it and hit the power
button. It seemed to take a thousand years for the thing to boot
up, but when it did there was a clear Internet connection. He
licked his dry lips and tried not to hear the deafening pounding of
his beating heart. He pulled up a browser page, typed in the
address of Yahoo, logged into the same e-mail account, and set to
work. He was halfway finished composing his note when he saw that
the laptop had a built-in webcam.
For the first time in weeks, Eighty-two
smiled.