Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

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