Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

As I get up to leave, I glance back at the voting results. All those people, so desperate to watch Thistle die.

When I click on her name, it gives me more details. The usernames of everyone who voted for her, and how many times they voted—users can buy extra votes, apparently. Some of them have spent hundreds of dollars to kill Thistle.

The number of votes per user field looks editable. I click it, and change a one to a zero.

It works. Thistle’s section of the pie chart shrinks from 71.22 per cent to 71.13 per cent.

My jaw drops. I can save her right now.

But only if I condemn one of the others.

I look at the chart. Five prisoners. Whose head should I put on the chopping block?

After Thistle, the Pedo has the most votes. But he’s not here. And Cedric told me that Emmanuel Goldstein, the fictional anti-mascot, was rumoured to be a child molester. Maybe the Pedo doesn’t even exist, in which case the Guards can’t kill him on camera.

The Terrorist, Amar, is ranked third. I click through to find the people who voted for him, and I quickly give one of them five hundred extra votes.

It’s enough. Now the Terrorist has 63 per cent of the vote, and Thistle’s share has shrunk to 28 per cent.

I exit back to the screen I started with and step away from the computer. I tell myself I didn’t just kill Amar. I’m going to get him out of here tonight. I’m going to get them all out.

Right?

After I unearth the corner of the bedsheet, it takes all my strength to lift the rest of it off Samson’s body. Wet dirt is heavy. But it does a great job of preserving the dead.

Exposed to the air, bodies go rotten fast. Decomposition starts four minutes after death. Internal organs begin turning to slush after only a day. The body bloats within three. Bloody foam leaks out the nose and mouth. It’s extremely unappetising.

But Samson has been both chilled and compressed. Other than the colourless skin and the clods of dirt in his hair, he looks the same as how we found him in bed on Tuesday.

I look around. Zara went into the house a few minutes ago. Donnie’s in the slaughterhouse. No sign of anybody else.

I lift Samson out of the hole and quickly fill it in. Anyone walking past would only think an animal had been scratching around here, if they looked. And no one ever does.

I drag Samson out of sight into the trees, then I strip off his clothes and examine him. He’s pissed his pants, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he died scared; bladder muscles relax even after a peaceful death. Most people who appear to be in good shape are not, once you get their clothes off. That’s the point of clothes—to hide that gut you wish was flatter and those pectoral muscles you don’t have. The most beautiful person you know probably looks ridiculous under all that silk and nylon. But Samson is a rare exception. Splayed out on the forest floor in front of me, he looks like da Vinci’s drawing of the man in the circle.

I roll him over. There’s an extra lump of bone at the back of his skull, probably from looking down at a phone too much while his skeleton was still forming. A couple of childhood scars; nothing recent. If Donnie had crushed Samson’s hand around the gun and twisted his arm upwards, forcing him to shoot himself, there would be signs. Squeezing his limbs, I can’t feel any broken tendons or dislocated joints. There isn’t any bruising, either.

I take the kitchen knife off my belt, but hesitate. If I cut him open, I might lose control. And Thistle is barely a hundred yards from where I’m standing. She can’t see me, but knowing she’s there makes me want to do better.

Can I really waste all this meat, though? Usually only a few parts are thrown out, like the bones and the brain; eating brains can give you Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human equivalent of mad cow. This time, the whole thing is—

Wait. Back up. The brain.

When I first saw the scene, there were hints that Samson had been shot with something other than the gun in his hand. There was no exit wound, which was unusual for a firearm of that calibre. If I can dig the bullet out of his brain, I can prove my hunch.

I bash the handle of the knife against the side of Samson’s head. His skull cracks on the fourth try. I grab his hair and peel away some of his skin to expose the fractured bone, and then pull it apart like an Easter egg. This is not how a real autopsy would go, but it will get the job done.

I unplug Samson’s brain from his spinal column with a wet snap. All of Samson’s memories and opinions and feelings are stored in this lump of grey flab, inaccessible forever. I can see the little hole where the bullet went in, but other than that, the brain seems largely intact. Not typical. If there’s no exit wound, that normally means the bullet ricocheted around and around the inside of the skull, shredding everything. Maybe Samson’s brain was unusually dense.

I peel the two hemispheres apart, stretching the membranes until they pop. There’s the hole again, where the shot exited the right hemisphere and entered the left. I pull apart the left hemisphere, looking for the bullet.

It’s gone.

Someone got here first. Someone with more finesse than me—and probably a long pair of tweezers. They removed the bullet. If I hadn’t smashed the skull, I might have seen scrape marks around the edges of the entry wound.

A bullet that didn’t match the gun would prove Samson was murdered.