Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 by Galvin, Aaron (read 50 shades of grey .TXT) 📕

at his shoulders and hair, anything they could grab ahold of as Lenny continued prying at the lock. He ripped it off the moment the pin burst free, then flung open the door and waved them out.

“C’mon,” he cried, his voice hoarse and catching in his throat, his father’s continued mantra a constant in his mind. “C’mon. Hurry. You’re free.”

We’re Dolans . . . he thought when the first among them began to spill outside. We don’t leave others behind.

And I won’t, Pop. Lenny spied the Selkie boy still perched atop his father’s shoulders. I’m not leaving none of these here.

“C’mon!” Lenny cried louder, waving on all those hesitant to step out, almost as if they feared more Orc soldiers and retribution to come. For a moment, their fear struck the same in him also, the idea he had abandoned safety among his fellows for the sake of saving a single boy. Still, he would not turn from it. “C’mon! Get out!”

As the cage began to empty, Lenny glanced over his shoulder in search of another wave of Orcs.

What he saw was worse.

Further off, near two hundred yards away from the other prisoner cages, tucked away in a stony alcove, there were uncountable stacks made from bundles of varying colors, shades, and designs. Each bundle had been tied together by crisscrossed ropes, packing the contents together and maintaining the cube-like shape created. The bundles too had been grouped and stacked upon each other along a series of wooden, pallet-like sleds, all packed and placed along an icy field. Behind the stacks loomed an exterior wall of a frost-covered, brick building, three stories high and as long as a football field.

Despite the other caged prisoners clamoring for help and release, Lenny’s focus held not only upon the building and the bundles outside it, but that which emerged from inside the building. Lenny took a step toward the bundles and the building when he sighted a constant stream of pure-white smoke and seeming snow belching forth from the brick chimneystacks, its sides devoid of any tracing of ice that covered the lower tiered walls.

Careful . . . Lenny thought, even as morbid curiosity drew him toward the building and its bundles. Turn back. Now, before it’s too late.

Lenny Dolan could not. Not a hundred yards out, when the seeming snow landed against his cheeks and did not melt. Not fifty yards away, when he recognized and understood what the bundled tens of thousands stacked and strapped upon the pallets truly were. Despite all that his conscience warned to turn away, Lenny Dolan did not stop in his search for the dark truth of Bouvetøya and its prisoners. Not until he rounded the corner of the frozen building in search of its entry, finding a different answer altogether.

Lenny stopped in his tracks, no longer caring what lay beyond the ice-covered threshold of the brick doorway, his gaze fixated on that which seemed to stretch endlessly on to the furthest reach of the cavern. Buckets of blood . . . Lenny gasped, his mind having no answers for what he witnessed there. Tears brimming in his eyes, the cavern’s natural cold threatened to freeze and fuse them with his eyelashes by the time two of his Selkie companions found him.

Tom Weaver’s shadow enveloped Lenny as he came around the factory corner. “My God . . .” was all the elder Weaver could manage at the sight of the frost-covered fields of stone and their trenches filled with naked, frozen corpses.

More than a handful of Selkie prisoners had been left to manage the barrows, casting more corpses into the mass graves that showed no concern of body size or shape, age, gender or race. All were lined in rows and placed atop one another like stacked logs in preparation for a deep winter to come.

Another fleck landed upon Lenny’s cheek, the whispered touch tickling him as he attempted to brush it away, his fingers staining whitish-gray as he did. Much as Lenny attempted to convince himself that he knew what the inch of similar dusting that covered the trench bodies was, his mind warned that no true snow could fall and linger within a cavern, not even in the Antarctic cold.

What is this place, Pop? He wished that Declan Dolan was there to ask, or else to look too for some modicum of understanding for the hellish landscape before him.

Whether the stacked bundles of Selkie skins outside the factory, the constant churn of seeming snow pouring forth from its chimney, or the emaciated Selkie prisoners driving their wheelbarrows in endless rotation to collect and deliver more corpses to burn, Lenny Dolan recognized the answers to his question lay plainly in multiple forms right in front of him for all to see and know.

It’s a death camp. Lenny fell to his knees, gagging and vomiting until he had nothing left to spare. Bouvetøya is a Selkie death camp . . .

12

CHIDI

It’s almost done, Chidi thought, taking a deep breath, looking again on the nearly finished puzzle of translations before her. She had read several of the translated verses already, each as confusing as the next to her mind. Riddles upon riddles.

For all of Chidi’s confusion over their words, Marisa Bourgeois seemed to share none of it as her hands worked to maneuver the various pieces into a final alignment. All were neatly aligned next to individuals letters that Chidi had assigned them, each based on the portrait etchings Marisa had drawn. “What do they all mean though?” she asked. “What’s the point of them?”

“Does a compass not act as a guide, Chidi?”

“A compass needle shows the direction you’re going,” she replied. “That doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go.”

“As these words may prove for us also,” said Marisa, transcribing the alignments of symbolic cut-outs to match with the Common language letterings she and Chidi had worked out during their sea journey over the previous several days. “Still, the needle guides . . .”