Feral

Prologue

The ground was no place to sleep. If it was, then it wouldn't have been called bed, bath and beyond, as in, beyond the freaking ground. It was why cave men slept on furs, the Japanese on pallets, pirates swung from hammocks – The invention of beds for god's sake. 

Cedric Holden's cot in the Sandbox had a broken corner that jacked up his neck when he slept. Each night, behind those walls, he could feel the lice of inmates gone by crawling over his skin, sucking the blood from his pores, laying eggs across his body, the thought alone causing shivers from the memory of spindly phantom mandibles scrit-scratching hotly across his skin. His food rations, bleak at the beginning of his sentence, were cut back to the rotten scraps the Guards probably picked through with their dirty, fat fingers and tossed into a prisoner slop-bucket. They pressed him to a cell with four others that should have held two at the max. How he wished those bars could shrink down to encompass only his miniscule cot, just to have that little bit of space to himself, even if they locked it up and threw the key into the desert.

Cedric Holden missed that cot.

Everything the prison could throw at him still beat the rocks digging into his back and the chill wind sweeping across the clearing the group settled in for the night. Everything else he'd escaped. Except the worst torture of all: other people.

He rolled over for the fifth time. Now the rocks dug into his left shoulder, and the light of the full moon shone in his eyes.

Stupid Roja, he thought as he rolled over again. He couldn't settle.

The rest of the prison escapees were sleeping, the lot of them having dropped like flies as soon as they'd laid down. Lucky bastards. They'd been walking all day, barely slowing enough to rest. Cal wouldn't let them stop longer than a few minutes, enough time for everyone to catch their breath, get a swig of water, before pushing them on their endless march.

Most of them were as happy as Cedric with the arrangement, not that they were balls enough to say it like he did. He was sure they wondered as much as him how far they'd fallen, getting handed from one Roja to another in their miserably short lives.

President William Roja, the conquer of the apocalypse, their shining saviour, sent children to prison.

If any kid under eighteen broke his rules, Roja shipped them to a correctional Facility in the Colorado desert. There was a name to the place but Cedric couldn't be bothered to remember it. QZ brats, himself included, called it the Sandbox.

A brilliant idea forged by his escape partner, who left him to be caught by the Guard, got Cedric's ass shipped west. The same escape partner strutting over the sleeping bodies pretending to give a shit about their safety after breaking them out of a maximum security prison. If he'd known their plan was going to end up in this shit storm he would've let the Guard shoot him and be done with it. Years of keeping his head down, of hiding, gone to piss, all of it for nothing.

The Sandbox was hot, the other prisoners were angry and the guards didn't give a crap if they all killed each other.

It should've been hell.

Only... there was a bed in the Sandbox. Regular meals. His own space. Walls keeping the monsters on the outside. If the only downside was an itchy collar, over one hundred kids invading that space, and being slapped with a conscription sentence when the inmate turned eighteen, Cedric could, and would, have stayed down to the last second. He'd spent years trying to avoid a fate of being sold into the Military, but what a man would do for his own bed.

Then the prison walls fell one cool night in the middle of spring. When the prisoners of the Sandbox ventured outside, clutching whatever bed post or guard stick they'd stolen that could suffice as a weapon, it occurred to them all simultaneously; none of them knew what to do next. Some wanted to go back to their Quarantine Zones. Others wanted to go it alone, only to quickly remember that would be suicide.