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‘Did you ever play?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never?’ She squeezes my arm. ‘You have the build.’

  I don’t, and I’m not sure what she expects to gain by flattering me. ‘How did you find out about the Guards?’ I ask.

  She tilts her head. ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Sorry.’ I fake a sheepish smile. ‘Have you already told me this?’

  She waves it off. ‘No, I just thought one of the others might have. I was like you: I found the site and liked it. I subscribed to get extra content. Then I started submitting.’

  ‘Submitting?’

  ‘Yeah. Pictures, videos.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Pain,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘Other people’s. The Guards invited me to join them at HQ because my submissions were popular. You’ve seen them, right?’

  I nod, hoping she doesn’t ask what I think.

  She flashes a wicked smile. ‘Did you like what I did to the Arsonist?’

  ‘Genius,’ I say.

  She waves off the compliment. ‘Well, I had fun. What about you? Do you enjoy submitting?’

  ‘Sure.’ I pretend to ignore the double meaning. ‘So after that, you were in?’

  ‘Not quite. I had to prove that the videos were original.’

  ‘Your methods, or …’

  ‘Oh, my methods were original. But some people try to submit videos they’ve stolen from other sites.’ Zara picks up another trap and peers in at the yeast. The glass distorts her face, shrinking her nose and enlarging her eyes. ‘The Guards asked me to make one of my subjects scream my name.’

  ‘Jesus.’ The word slips out.

  She smiles. ‘I’ve made people scream that, too.’

  I want this conversation to be over. I ask straight out: ‘Hey, were you upstairs earlier?’

  I’m trying to catch her off guard, but she ignores me, staring at a log. ‘Want to see something cool?’

  I really don’t. I’m alone in the deep dark woods with a woman who gets off on hurting people.

  ‘Sure,’ I say.

  Zara picks up a stick about the length of her arm and presses the tip against the side of the log. ‘Don’t move, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, trying not to sound wary.

  Zara pushes the log hard enough to roll it over. Underneath is a snake, which slowly uncoils as she exposes it.

  I step back.

  ‘I said don’t move,’ Zara says mildly.

  The snake stops unravelling, watching us with dull eyes. Its scales are banded in black, red and yellow. There’s a lump just behind its head, like it swallowed something big.

  ‘Is it dangerous?’ I ask.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ Zara says. ‘But then the company that made the antivenin went bust. So now it is.’

  I can’t tell if she’s kidding. ‘How did you know it was there?’

  ‘I saw the tip of its tail.’ Zara holds out the stick in front of the snake’s face. The snake bares its dripping fangs. ‘Look at that. If it bit you, in minutes you’d be slurring your words and seeing double. Pretty soon you wouldn’t even be able to explain to anyone what had happened. So even if there was an antivenin, it wouldn’t help.’

  Is she threatening me? Her face reveals nothing.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry, though,’ she says. ‘This one’s dying.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Yeah. See that lump in its throat?’ Zara points with the stick. ‘Snakes can’t move when it gets cold, so they have to eat a lot before winter starts. This one left it too late.’

  ‘It looks like it caught something.’

  ‘Yeah, but it didn’t leave time to digest it. Digestion takes energy. So the food will just slowly rot inside the oesophagus, while the snake starves to death. Isn’t that interesting?’ She rolls the log back into place.

  I look around at the still, quiet forest. The cold is making it hard for me to move, too.

  ‘I need to finish burying Samson,’ I say.

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Burying him.’

  CHAPTER 21

  After a fun start, I lead to tears. What am I?

  ‘When I first met Samson,’ Fred begins, ‘he was kind of a loser.’

  Not a great start to the eulogy. Donnie looks up sharply, and Fred holds up a hand. Calm down, I’m going somewhere with this.

  We’re all standing around the vegetable patch. The harsh winter sun has melted the snow, leaving the dirt sodden under my shoes. Zara has collected some wildflowers from the forest and laid them on the dirt. There are tears on everyone’s cheeks, except for Kyle’s and mine. I’ve never been able to fake-cry. I like to think it’s proof that I’m not a psychopath. I’ve met plenty of them, and they could all tear up when they needed to.

  Maybe Kyle is the same. Or maybe he sees no reason to fake it. He looks kind of bored, staring at the grave, his right hand twitching like he’s resisting the urge to pull out his phone.

  ‘He was poor, and lonely,’ Fred continues. ‘He’d dedicated his life to helping people, and the world just … spat on him. But he kept trying.’

  This is a more flattering story than Samson himself told me, which in turn was probably more flattering than the truth. The funeral paradox—suddenly the person can no longer take offence, yet no one dares speak ill of them.

  ‘But he found another calling.’ Fred’s voice wobbles. ‘He chose to help us build a better world by punishing those who make it worse. It will be hard for us to continue this work in his absence, but he would tell us not to give up.’

  He lets this hang in the air for a moment.

  ‘Samson wasn’t religious. He wouldn’t want any prayers said over him. But Zara has chosen a song that we think he would have liked.’

  Zara steps forwards, clears her throat, and sings:

  ‘The water is wide

  I can’t cross over

  But neither have I wings to fly

  Give me a boat

  That can carry two

  And both shall row, my love and I.’

  Zara’s voice is plain and free of ornamentation. It’s as if she’s talking rather than singing, except that the words are in tune and in time. I wonder if she knows the rest of the song: Love be handsome and love be kind, gay as a jewel when first it’s new. But love grows old and waxes cold, and fades away like morning dew.

  Donnie’s face has crumpled. Tears stream down his face unchecked. Snot bubbles in his nose. I feel a pang in my chest, although I didn’t even like Samson. Donnie’s grief is contagious—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fake.

  Zara blows a kiss to the grave.

  Cedric pulls a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. ‘I’ve written a poem.’

  Donnie grits his teeth. ‘Samson never liked your fucking poetry.’

  Cedric looks stricken.

  For a moment, the only sound is the growling of the hungry dogs from behind the fence.

  ‘Fine,’ Cedric says finally. He neatly folds the poem, crouches down and pushes in into the dirt.

  For some reason, this enrages Donnie even more. His legs tense up, like a quarterback getting ready to charge.

  Cedric takes a step back.

  ‘Donnie,’ Fred warns.

  Donnie falters, as though he has a Pavlovian response to Fred’s voice. But he’s too big, with too much momentum, to actually stop his body moving. Instead, he redirects it back towards the house, his feet trampling the weeds until he barges through the back door and disappears.

  Fred shoots Cedric a questioning look. Cedric shrugs but won’t meet his eye.

  ‘Ashes to ashes,’ Kyle says. ‘Dust to dust.’

  No emotion in his face. It’s impossible to tell if he’s trying to contribute and doesn’t know how, or if he’s making fun of us.

  He doesn’t look like he needs consoling, but I put my arm around his thin shoulders anyway. He stiffens, but I feel a rush of something hard to describe—longing and grief and joy all mixed together.

  He shrugs
off my arm. The feeling vanishes as quick as the lights in a blackout.

  The Scammer and the Rapist don’t get a funeral.

  The enormous machine in the corner of the slaughterhouse functions like a giant woodchipper. Donnie is pushing the Scammer into one end. The machine spits him out the other in a grisly red mist. It sounds like the Scammer is screaming, but I know that’s just the mechanisms inside.

  Donnie seems to have cheered up. Maybe the funeral helped him purge the grief from his system. Or perhaps he’s just one of those people who’s most at peace with a job to do.

  Or maybe he’s Samson’s killer, and the grief was never real in the first place.

  Gerald, the Rapist, lies on the concrete, limbs twisted, a discarded doll. Waiting his turn. An unposed corpse is hard to look at. My conscious mind understands that Gerald is dead and feels no discomfort, but my subconscious wonders why he doesn’t adjust himself into a more comfortable position. It’s like when you see someone else get punched in a bar fight and your own nose stings. Or if you take a bite out of a hamstring, your own leg starts to ache. I’ve heard the term ‘mirror neurons’, and I think it might apply.

  It’s not just sensations; emotions too. The prisoners are all here, eyes squeezed shut or wide with insane terror. I feel their fear as their former—colleague? friend?—is shredded by hidden metal teeth. They must have seen this before. But some things you don’t get used to.

  Even through his mask, I feel Donnie’s satisfaction as he finishes shoving the Scammer into the grinder and scoops up Gerald. I feel Fred’s impatience as he waits in the corner. I feel Kyle’s gloom as he looks at the giant smear of flesh and sinew on the concrete. Hopefully because he knows this is wrong, and not because it’s his job to clean up the mess. I’ve already started making excuses for him. He’s a good kid, deep down.

  I never slept in gutters when I was homeless—there was always a better option nearby—but I sometimes dreamed that I was asleep in a gutter. I would be lying there on the sun-warmed concrete, and then I’d feel my hair getting wet and sticky. I’d raise my head to find a creek of blood crawling past towards the drain. The storm clouds would be crimson. Then thunder would boom and the sky would come crashing down.

  Now my dream has come true. It’s literally raining blood, shreds of the Scammer filling the air. I would only have to step forwards, pull off my mask and open my mouth. The Guards wouldn’t hold it against me. Their captives wouldn’t be any more horrified.

  But I don’t. Kyle is here. I can’t let him see me like that. So I stand in the corner, focus on my breathing and try my hardest not to dream.

  After what seems like a long time, the machine shuts down. Dripping sounds echo through the slaughterhouse.

  There are two empty spots now. Two chains hanging loose. One for the new prisoner. And one for me, once the new prisoner reveals that I’m not Lux.

  Donnie looks around at the prisoners. ‘You’re all filthy,’ he says, like a criticism. ‘Who wants a shower?’

  ‘I’m Hailey,’ the KKK Queen says. She doesn’t know she already introduced herself, when I snuck in on that first night.

  I don’t reply.

  ‘You’re Lux, right?’

  I don’t know how much, if anything, the prisoners know about Lux. I keep my mouth shut as we plod across the damp dirt towards the side of the house.

  I’m still wearing the mummy mask. I can feel Hailey looking at me sideways, trying to guess what I’m like underneath, and how best to manipulate me.

  Fred says the inmates usually get showers once a week, to stop the spread of disease. Apparently subscribers enjoy watching the inmates get tortured, but don’t like watching them get eaten by fungal infections. Seems arbitrary to me.

  Today they all need to wash off Gerald’s and the Scammer’s blood. Fred has given me the job of taking them out, one at a time. He acted like he was doing me a favour.

  Hailey isn’t restrained in any way. No chains, no rope. But she’s barefoot on the cold prickly ground. If she ran, I’d have no trouble catching up.

  There’s an outdoor shower around the side of the house. The pipe is rusted and the dripping water has left a brown skid mark down the wall. The plastic drain set in the concrete below has weeds sprouting from it like hair from an old man’s ears. There’s only one tap, which means no hot water.

  When this was a working farm, there must have been a water source closer to the pig pen, and therefore the slaughterhouse. I wonder why Fred never got it running again. Maybe he likes getting the prisoners out of earshot from one another.

  ‘You seem like a decent man,’ Hailey says. A weak lie, without any evidence. But she speaks with such genuineness that I might have fallen for it, if I actually was a decent man. ‘How did you get mixed up in this?’

  I can’t give her any indication that I’m not Lux. ‘How did you?’

  ‘I had a radio show,’ Hailey says. ‘Well, it started out as a podcast. Just me in my bedroom with a cheap microphone. But I got a lot of subscribers, and when I upgraded my equipment I got even more. After a couple of years a real network took notice.’

  I’ll bet. I read a description of her show on the dark web site—it was non-stop hate speech. She fawned over her guests, who included Nazis, alt-right trolls and anti-gay preachers. She told her listeners to buy all the guns they could, and to shoot anyone who tried to take them away. She also suggested using sniper rifles on doctors who practised abortions, people who illegally crossed the border and various others.

  ‘Were you already in the KKK?’ I ask.

  She chews her lip. ‘Yes,’ she says finally. She offers no further details.

  We’re standing in front of the shower now. The air is bitterly cold. Hailey starts to get undressed. I turn away, then realise she might run. I turn back, but avert my eyes. Not that there’s much meat to be tempted by. She’s been starved down to little more than sinew.

  ‘After my show got picked up for broader distribution,’ Hailey continues, ‘I discovered that not everyone agreed with my politics. I had to stop taking calls on my show because of all the rage. There were death threats in my inbox. Then they started to show up in my physical mailbox as well. These psychos knew where I lived.’

  ‘Did you start to change your views?’

  ‘I doubled down, if anything.’ She shoots a quick glance at me. ‘I mean, I get it now, though. I did the wrong thing. I’m so ashamed.’

  She utters this lie like a deathbed confession. A last-ditch effort to get into heaven.

  ‘One night I woke up to find a man in my bed. He was grinning, like a … I don’t know, a hyena. I screamed and screamed. He grabbed me. I was sure my husband would come, but he didn’t. I don’t know if the neighbours could hear—maybe they could and didn’t care. Those fuckers.’

  I shouldn’t feel sorry for Hailey. Her words hurt people. Maybe they even killed people. But there’s a line between words and actions, and someone else crossed it. I’m starting to feel like that line is a chasm.

  Naked now, Hailey turns the tap. The showerhead gurgles and sputters, then starts dribbling what must be freezing water onto her head. Her eyes scrunched, her shoulders up, she scrubs her body with her hands.

  ‘It was the guy with the freckles.’ I guess she means Samson. ‘He pushed something into my mouth. Some kind of pill. He pinched my nose and made me swallow it.’

  I remember Zara’s theory that one of the prisoners may have gotten loose and sabotaged the cameras. If it was Samson who carried out the original abductions, it makes sense that the prisoners would want to kill him. But what would be the reason to lock themselves up again afterwards?

  ‘He dragged me through my living room.’ Hailey’s teeth sound like they’re chattering. ‘The last thing I remember seeing before I blacked out was my husband, lying on the floor. I still don’t know if he was dead or alive.’

  Hailey wants my pity. I can’t let her know that she has it already.

  ‘The guy who abduct
ed you is dead now,’ I say.

  She looks surprised—even disbelieving. ‘How?’

  ‘Murdered.’ It’s dangerous to tell her this, but it might be the only way to shake loose a clue. I watch her for signs of dawning realisation. Like something makes sense to her now.

  But she just looks confused. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, implausibly. ‘I know he was your friend.’

  ‘What time did you hear the gunshot?’

  ‘I didn’t hear any gunshot,’ she says.

  ‘The house is right there. You didn’t hear anything?’

  She shakes her head, shivering in the spray.

  ‘That’s enough,’ I say. ‘Turn the water off.’

  She turns the faucet off but makes no move to cover her naked body. ‘We could just leave,’ she says. ‘You and me. They’d never find us.’

  ‘Get dressed.’

  She forces herself to look at the eyeholes in my mask. ‘I could make you happy.’

  I shake my head. ‘Get dressed.’

  Hailey slackens, as though whatever was holding her upright—desperation, hope—has vanished. She starts to cry.

  I go to put my arms around her. It’s instinctive, not calculated. Hug the cold, wet, crying woman. But she shoves me away. ‘Don’t you fucking touch me!’ She chokes on the words.

  I stand back and let her gather her clothes. There’s no towel, so she pulls them on over her damp skin. Then she totters, like a drunk in heels, back towards her prison.

  CHAPTER 22

  Blood colours the water in this sheltered bay. There’s something underneath. What is it?

  It’s hard not to appreciate the attention to detail. The van is loaded up with everything a kidnapper might need. Rope. Water bottles. Ambien. A black cloth bag. A combat knife. A meal tray, covered with a silver lid. And my hammer, strapped to the wall with duct tape. There are even snacks—what look like homemade granola bars.

  ‘Apple and pumpkin seed,’ Donnie says. ‘Samson made them.’ He blinks away an angry tear and drags the door shut, sealing me and Kyle in the back of the van. The other three Guards aren’t coming.

  I sit next to Kyle and buckle my seatbelt. Clear my throat. ‘How you doing, buddy?’