Burlap

34 - Was It A Dream

Hunger pangs drove me from sleep early the next morning. Gray light, a sign of dawn’s approach, filtered through the mold and filthy film layering over the single window. My stomach rumbled, demanding the daily gruel it’d become accustomed to. But, did the residents ever receive food? They had to. The man who’d bitten the face of the nurse had been locked away up here for months. The only other possibility my fuzzy mind could conjure was far too horrifying, even for what I’d already seen. Sure, I’d heard of the Donner Party — almost everyone had. But the idea of experiencing cannibalism firsthand fell to my shoulders with much more weight than hearing about it.

Even Power shuddered at the unwelcome image of residents eating other residents, so I shook my head and opened my eyes in an attempt to banish the unpleasant, early morning thoughts.

Dozens of mutated torture victims stood in my room again, but this time, they all stood facing away from me. A sea of pale, zombified people in dirty, threadbare clothes spread themselves out across the area, all facing the eerie doorway on the other side. I squinted at the mass, confused by the situation. The day before, Marcie and I had already come to the wary conclusion that the residents meant us no harm, but I was far from anywhere close to trusting them.

Pushing myself up on my elbows, I began to sit up, only to stop at the distinct sound of shoe-clad footsteps approaching from down the hallway. Adrenaline picked up speed, humming in my veins and waking my groggy brain as I froze, on alert for an escape route if need be. I moved to kneel, hunkered down behind the bodies of my fellow inmates. The steady tapping of walking shoes got closer, revealing a second set of quieter, but still shoe clad feet. None of my new ward mates moved a muscle, except to sway back and forth ever so slightly at random intervals. Was that due to hunger? Or perhaps whatever medicines they’d been pumped with to keep them sedate and under control?

The two people coming down the corridor stopped in the doorway to the room we were all in. I held my breath, the temporary silence making the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention. With movements so tiny I almost didn’t notice them, the residents closest to me closed in together, forming a solid wall separating me from the people on the other side. Whoever it was couldn’t see me, but I couldn’t see them, either.

“I know she’s here, my pets. Step aside and I won’t take one of you to my playroom today,” Shilling’s cold voice rang out across the room, loud and domineering.

None of the residents moved, keeping me sheltered from his sight.

He huffed, shoes squeaking against the moisture gathered on the cold floor. The same cold floor that was slowly making my kneeling knees numb.

“Fine,” he quipped after a moment of unwavering silence from his steadfast victims.”Paul, choose a resident to take with us today.”

My heart thudded angrily against my chest. Yet another innocent person, taken and hurt, because of their loyalty to me. Why? I was nothing special. Nothing worth someone giving their life over. I wasn’t worth what they’d done to Marcie, and I wasn’t worth whatever he planned on doing to tho poor unfortunate soul Paul chose.

The young woman Paul grabbed from the mass of people might have once resembled me in the loosest definition possible. Most of her hair was long and brown, like mine, and through the purpling bruises and disturbing gaping hole where her nose should have been, I could see that her skin tone might have once been a golden olive, like mine. I committed her appearance to my memory, guilt swimming in my gut for her sacrifice. Taller than me, with pus filled lesions covering one arm and chunks of muscle ripped from her other. Her blue eyes, like everyone else’s, were dead and showed no hint of fear even though she struggled against Paul’s ironclad grip. I slammed my own eyes shut, memorizing every detail about the young woman I could in a private show of grateful reverence.