Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

back door of the house bangs shut. I turn and see Donnie running up the hill towards us, carrying a SIG Sauer P320.

I freeze, but Fred still seems relaxed. ‘No rush,’ he tells Donnie. ‘They’re not going anywhere.’

Donnie catches up to us and claps me on the shoulder with a big hand. ‘You excited?’

‘Hell yeah.’ My heart flutters. Why has he brought a gun?

As we reach the slaughterhouse, I hear something inside. A chorus of cracked voices shrieking, ‘Help us! Somebody, please! Help!’

I stop dead. Fred’s videos come from all over the world. I had wondered if he made some of them himself, but on the long drive here it never occurred to me that he would have live prisoners.

Fred takes a Halloween mask out of his pocket and unfolds it. It’s a witch’s face, with wrinkled grey skin, a long warty nose and white hair like spider silk.

‘I keep telling them that we’re miles from anywhere,’ he says. ‘Nobody can hear them. But they don’t believe me.’

‘Ha.’ I can hardly breathe.

Fred pulls the witch’s face on over his own, and hands a second mask to me. A vampire, with arched eyebrows and fake blood dribbling from rubber fangs. ‘Put this on.’

‘What are we doing?’

The witch stares at me through inscrutable black eyeholes. ‘The votes are in.’

I’ve never seen Fred’s website, only the videos on Lux’s hard drive. Lux himself told Abbey the site didn’t exist. Just the same, I have a sense of what he might be talking about. The dread is like quicksand, slowly swallowing me.

I pull the mask over my face. The eyeholes aren’t quite in the right places. My peripheral vision is gone. When I glance at Donnie, I find myself looking at Frankenstein. The square jaw and heavy brows go well with his thick neck.

As soon as Fred starts fiddling with the locks, the screaming stops. It’s as though the people inside can tell it’s him just from the way he unlocks the door.

The door groans as he drags it open and hits a switch. Fluorescent lights flicker on one by one, illuminating a stained concrete floor, rusting steel walls, a small space heater and a hulking machine, with a broad chute bolted to one side and a spout mounted opposite. Inside the chute I can make out jagged shapes designed to shred carcasses. I guess the machine is left over from when this was a functioning farm. Whole pigs go in one end, slop comes out the other.

Fred touches a second switch. Heat lamps come on, lighting up the rest of the slaughterhouse. It’s divided into several half-rooms, each with one wall cut away, like a movie set. There’s a fake pharmacy. An industrial kitchen. A hotel room. A cinema. A locker room. A church confessional. Some of the sets have foreign power outlets. Through one of the room’s phoney windows, I can see the Eiffel Tower.

There are three women and three men, each chained to a separate movie set. They keep their eyes to the floor, trembling as if current is running through their bodies.

I recognise some of the sets from recordings on Lux’s hard drive. Fred isn’t getting these videos from all over the world at all—he’s just making it look like he is.

Donnie walks into the slaughterhouse, hands behind his back. His footfalls are slow and measured, like he’s browsing in a furniture shop, trying to decide which sofa to sit on. The soft scuffles echo through the space. Each prisoner looks terrified as he approaches and relieved when he strolls past. Then he reaches the other end of the slaughterhouse and turns around. They all tense up again.

‘The votes have been counted,’ he says, his voice muffled.

Someone whimpers.

My breaths are hot inside the mask. I glance at Fred. He’s leaning against the wall, his face hidden behind the witch mask.

‘Scammer,’ Donnie says finally.

A man in a dirty white coat, middle-aged, Asian American, hunchbacked, starts weeping into his claw-like knuckles. There are sweat patches under his arms, despite the cold. ‘Oh, no. Please, God, no …’

Donnie walks over and grabs him by his greying hair. The man screams.

‘The people have spoken.’ Donnie raises his voice to be heard over the sobbing. ‘Scammer’s time is up.’

He doesn’t sound like he’s talking to me. I look up. A bundle of cameras and microphones are mounted on the ceiling, nestled in a web of cables. Each lens is pointed at a different set, a little red light glowing underneath.

When I look back down, Donnie has the gun against Scammer’s temple.

The chains jingle as the man raises his hands. ‘Please! Can you at least just—’

Bang! The muzzle flash lights up a sudden spray of red on the wall. The other prisoners scream. The man goes limp, and Donnie drops him. He hits the concrete floor face first. When a second shot goes through his heart, he doesn’t even twitch.

A woman in a tattered evening gown, handcuffed to the door of a priest’s confessional, starts weeping.

Fred is watching me closely. This was a test. A cop—or any decent person—would have tried to intervene. At the very least, they would be horrified. But I just stood there and let it happen. I was thinking about how to get myself out of this. It didn’t even occur to me to try to save anybody else.

‘Cool.’ I hold out my hand for the weapon. ‘Can I do the next one?’

If I was armed, I could leave. I’ve never fired a gun before, but the Guards don’t know that. I could bluff my way out.

Donnie doesn’t give me the P320. He just laughs and looks at Fred. ‘Your boy’s keen.’

Fred steps away from the wall and stretches. ‘After voting closes, sure,’ he tells me. He looks around the room at his whimpering prisoners like he’s