Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

out loud when I’m hungry. ‘No. I said I need help carrying the body.’

When the police came to the motel I worked at, they found the suicide note and matched the handwriting to Holden, the occupant of the room. The devastated widow, Melanie, confirmed that he had attempted suicide once before. But she said she had thought he was doing better.

The police guessed Holden had leaped from the Fred Hartman Bridge, which wasn’t far away and was ‘popular with jumpers’. They told Melanie that it was likely the body would never be found.

The bathtub was immaculate.

CHAPTER 16

What happened to the cannibal who arrived late to the party?

Donnie is the strongest, but he doesn’t volunteer. In the end, it’s me and Kyle hauling the body out towards the slaughterhouse. I’m holding the legs, Kyle has the shoulders.

Carrying a body is harder than most people think. It’s not just the weight—about two hundred pounds in Samson’s case; it’s all the joints. Limbs have a way of flopping around, like the corpse is trying to stop you from dragging it away. First-timers often stop to double-check that the person is actually dead.

Kyle doesn’t check.

‘Has this happened before?’ I ask.

‘Here? No.’

‘Somewhere else?’

‘Some asshole brought a gun to my school.’ Kyle is panting as we carry the body towards the slaughterhouse. ‘He shot six people, but only one died, so it barely made the news.’

‘And you ended up carrying a body?’

‘The shooter’s. He wasted himself with his last bullet. We weren’t a hundred per cent sure he was dead, so we carried his body to the closet and barricaded him in. Didn’t matter. He was totally dead.’

‘That must have been traumatic.’

‘Nah.’ Kyle puffs up his chest. ‘I didn’t even know any of the people who got shot.’

One of Samson’s legs jerks unexpectedly. The folded bedsheet over my shoulder slips down. I pause to readjust.

‘Offing yourself rather than going to prison, that I get. But this?’ Kyle looks down at Samson’s cryptic expression.

‘He and I were messaging each other a few weeks ago,’ I say. ‘He sounded a bit beat up about his parents and how they still wanted him to pursue medicine. But he didn’t sound, you know, suicidal. Just pissed.’

I don’t know if Lux actually exchanged any messages with Samson. But now that both are dead, I can pretend the friendship was strong and use that to infiltrate the group more effectively.

‘I guess he was lying to all of us,’ Kyle says. ‘Figures.’

‘Figures?’

Kyle dumps his end of the body next to the slaughterhouse door. Samson’s skull cracks against the concrete foundations.

‘Well, everybody lies, right?’ he says, and looks me up and down. I don’t think I’m imagining the suspicion in his voice.

‘Fred tell you that?’

‘Just life experience,’ says the seventeen-year-old. ‘You reach a certain age and you realise that everything your parents and teachers and the government told you was bullshit.’

I unfold the bedsheet and we roll Samson onto it. There wasn’t room to do this on Samson’s bedroom floor. The snow and dirt speckles the sheet, like a salt and pepper rub on a chicken breast.

Kyle fishes two masks out of his pocket. A mummy, the bandages made of rubber, and a vampire. He tosses the mummy to me.

‘I want to talk to the prisoners,’ I say, as I put the mask on.

Kyle frowns. ‘Why?’

‘Someone might have heard the gunshot. They might know what time it happened.’

‘Why does it matter what time it happened?’

‘I just want to know.’ It might help me figure out who killed Samson and why. I can’t eat all the Guards if one of them might be on my side.

‘Well, okay.’ This time Kyle lifts Samson’s feet, and I get his cold, stiff shoulders. ‘While you’re in there, pretend like you won a competition.’

‘What?’

‘Every month there’s a “lottery”.’ He does air quotes. ‘We pretend to select one of the subscribers to come to a secret location and—’

‘I know. But why would a subscriber want to know what time the prisoners heard a gunshot?’

‘We can edit out the actual question.’ I can only see Kyle’s eyes through the vampire mask. ‘We do a lot of editing. Just pretend with your body language, you know?’ He mimes looking around with awe, like he’s at the Louvre, then he gets out the keys. I didn’t see Fred give them to him.

‘I thought you never knew your father,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘You said your parents told you bullshit. But—’

‘My mother told me a lot of bullshit. Like, for example, that my father was a lawyer.’ Kyle unlocks the door. ‘On my sixteenth birthday I requested his name. Tracked him down through the donor service.’

‘I thought you had to be eighteen.’

Kyle ignores this. ‘When I met the guy, he did have a law degree, but he said he wasn’t my father. Told me he’d never donated sperm. So either he was lying, or my mother was, or both.’

Kyle drags open the slaughterhouse door. The metal shrieks across the concrete.

I stare at Kyle. ‘Your father was a sperm donor?’

He raises a finger to his lips. The prisoners can hear us now.

I follow him inside. Nobody is screaming or crying this time, but everyone seems to be on edge. Last night one of their number died. This morning, a new Guard fed them. In between, they saw someone sneak in here and sabotage the cameras. They don’t know it was me, but it was something different, something outside the pattern they’ve been trapped in for however long, so they’re acting different.

Kyle looks around. ‘Quiet in here today.’

The silence stretches, like drool beneath a dog’s chin. Kyle shrugs. ‘Works for me.’

We carry Samson into the corner. The indifferent way Kyle handles the corpse reminds me of