Chapter 1
July 51, 2335 M.E.
3:30 p.m.
The day’s third feeding began just like the two that preceded it and the one that followed. Edgar, the brutish male enforcer who specialized in bullying, beatings, and force-feeding, exited his bunk and walked across the administration area to the inmates’ kitchen, where he filled ten steel pots with water and set each of them on burners.
The five pots designated for the male inmates were marked with black, hand-painted numbers ranging sequentially from 20 to 24. The five pots allocated to the female inmates were also numbered 20 to 24, but the digits were painted in white. Every day, the numbered pots were set on the same burners, in the same order, and filled with the same amount of water. Cross-contamination of assigned foods had to be avoided at all costs; so, like the inmates, the dented, charred steel cooking vessels processed only one kind of food.
Edgar’s long black hair hung in dirty clumps; his mustache and beard were scraggly and unkempt; and his thick, gristly muscled arms were dotted with crude prison tattoos. As he worked, the only expression his hardened face could hold for more than a few seconds was a mean scowl. Preparation of the lamb was particularly annoying, as it was the only food that required brining before it was boiled. The extra step meant extra time he wasn’t sleeping or drinking, which really pissed him off. He unzipped the brining bag, rinsed the lamb off in the sink, and tossed the discolored meat into a steel pot painted with a black number 21. The other meats were easy to prepare; he opened the refrigerator, unzipped each numbered bag, and dumped the contents into their corresponding numbered steel pot.
Pork, lamb, poultry, beef, and venison were precooked, or brined, the same day they were trucked in, with individual portions refrigerated and then reheated just before serving. It was critical to ensure that each meat was cooked through before being eaten. If an inmate died from bacterial poisoning, a lot of time, energy, and money would have been wasted. Getting a replacement product up to speed with camp routine was a big pain in the ass, and Edgar was far beyond the point of being able to tolerate new-inmate bullshit.
He unzipped the numbered vegetable bags and hacked up the contents of each with a rusty cleaver, making sure to wipe the cleaver clean with a cloth before moving to the next vegetable. Although it would only take seconds, he didn’t rinse the onions, carrots, celery, peppers, and broccoli before scooping them up and dropping them into their corresponding numbered metal pots. He cooked the hell out of everything anyway, so there was no point.
Hilda always arrived at the kitchen fifteen minutes after Edgar. Since she met the supply convoys once a week, outside the fences, Edgar was tasked with cooking the meals. He was no fool—he would happily repeat the process four times every day, as long as he wasn’t risking his neck outside the fence.
She rolled her steel food cart inside the kitchen, turned off the burners, and filled the cart with the five pots marked with white numbers. The stocky, ruthless female enforcer with deep scars in her right cheek and neck went about her job wordlessly and without looking at Edgar. Although they were technically friends and had screwed many times, there was no room for conversation or politeness when they were working.
Hilda tied her long, stringy blond hair back into a ponytail, retrieved a plastic bottle of water and a steel ladle from the sink, and then rolled her cart out of the kitchen, where she headed for the south gate and further, the female half of the yard.
Edgar strapped on a stained apron, verified that he had the proper bags of pharmaceuticals inside the front pocket, and loaded the five remaining numbered pots into his cart. He rolled the cart out onto the sidewalk of the administration area and inhaled deeply, cherishing the fresh air and relative freedom he now enjoyed. At one point, what seemed like a lifetime ago, he thought he would never get to see the sky or feel grass under his feet again.
As he crossed through the south fence gate and pushed the cart across the men’s side of the yard, he thought about the first two feedings of the day and how smoothly they had gone. He could only hope this feeding was just as easy. In about six hours, he would be drunk and back in his room, a place where none of this would matter anymore.
***
4:35 p.m.
Jonah’s tired eyes watched the sickly, pale heap of soggy broccoli get larger on his plate with each scoop from the rusty ladle. He was tired of smelling, seeing, and of course eating the putrid vegetable, but the penalty for refusing to eat was a violent beating that would render his body useless for at least a full day, and he liked exercise in the yard too much to risk it. The last time he refused a meal, he lost two teeth and had four ribs broken, but at least Dr. Selleck had given him extra orange pills for the pain.
He sat patiently at the feeding table, a plank of worn wood that was loosely secured to the cell wall with cheap rivets, and counted the scoops coming out of the steel pot, hoping today’s ration was smaller than usual. A sliver of broccoli fell into Jonah’s cup, splashing into the water, making the cloudy liquid even murkier. He would have to eat that piece too. Whatever came out of the pot must go in his body, or else.
The thin inmate’s long hair was dirty blond and had a rough texture, just like his beard and mustache, both of which lacked any kind of routine cleaning and maintenance. Cheekbones poked out from his pale skin; his arms and legs were scrawny and weak. Many years of malnutrition had added artificial decades to his young life.
Edgar dug deeply into the steel pot and ladled more ugly sprouts of broccoli onto Jonah’s crude metal plate. When the scoops exceeded six, Jonah gave up on trying to count them. He could barely read and only recognized a handful of words. Numbers, on the other hand, were an otherworldly concept that made his mind cramp. He watched the grotesque material pile up, silently wishing that somehow Barry’s beef or Charlie’s lamb had been accidentally mixed in with the broccoli.
Edgar’s formidable size made Jonah’s cell shrink. Each rectangular room in the men’s barracks consisted of a narrow wooden platform that served as a bed; above the bed, in the corner of the ceiling, a haphazardly wired lightbulb that rarely worked; a hatch in the middle of the floor that, when opened, revealed a small hole through which bodily waste was disposed; the feeding table, a door with no handle; and lastly, every inmate’s favorite feature, a window.
“That’s plenty,” Jonah whined to the colossal man looming over him, annoyed at the glut of broccoli that was being served.
Edgar raised an eyebrow, surprised at any glimmer of confidence, and dug deeply in the pot. He made sure that Jonah got an extra-special piece to offset the show of disrespect. A particularly gross sprout of broccoli came up with the ladle, making a nefarious smile bend across Edgar’s face. He happily added it to the mushy green slop on Jonah’s plate. “Enjoy,” he said snidely, and banged the ladle against the pot, dislodging green and white remnants from the oversized utensil.
The hulking man with arms as thick as Jonah’s waist picked up the filthy water bottle that served the barracks’ entire ration of liquid for the day and turned to leave. Jonah gritted his teeth and cleared his throat, catching Edgar’s attention. “My pills?” he asked, irritated. With every feeding, Jonah had pills, but he had to ask every time. Pills were the only reason he looked forward to feeding time.
Edgar searched his apron pocket and produced a handful of translucent bags filled with multicolored pills. He sorted through them and tossed the one marked with a “24” on the feeding table. The number matched the black digits painted onto the steel pot of broccoli, and also the number that had been sewn into the upper-left chest area of Jonah’s gray burlap uniform. But unlike the steel pot and the number patch, the bag of pills wasn’t stained with the blood of many cruel beatings.
Jonah hurriedly gathered the bag of colored pills. “Why do I have to ask every time?”
Edgar narrowed his eyes, making Jonah cringe. “If you want ’em, you’ll keep asking.” The large man walked into the hall and deposited the pot of broccoli onto the cart. He swung Jonah’s cell door shut and locked it.
Jonah waited to hear the sound of the lock clicking into place before moving. He gently pushed himself up from the feeding table, tiptoed to the door, and peered into the hallway through a narrow, horizontally cut aperture. The prisoners referred to the opening as “the notch”; although universally used, no one could seem to remember where the term originated. Edgar and Headmaster Green used the notch to check in on the inmates from the hallway. The inmates used the notch to smell the other inmates’ food. Jonah saw the nose tip of Richard, the inmate who occupied the cell directly across the hall from him, sticking out of his door notch.
Edgar opened the lock to the adjacent cell, turned to the food cart and collected a large steel pot painted with a black number 23, and then disappeared through the open door. Jonah turned his ear to the notch and listened carefully. When a clang from a steel pot rang out, he jammed his nose through the narrow opening and inhaled deeply. From the sound of it, Richard was doing the same thing.
A faint odor of boiled beef trickled in through the door notch. Reeling from the delicious smell, Jonah took in another lungful, fantasizing about the beef being served to Barry, the inmate who shared a wall with him. Jonah pressed his hand against the door, twisted his nose in the opening, and inhaled as deeply as possible.
Barry sat at his feeding table, dressed exactly like Jonah, but his uniform patch bore the number 23. He had long stringy hair, a wispy mustache, and an unkempt beard just like his neighbor. From a few paces away, the two young men looked identical, except Barry’s hair was a shade darker.
Edgar hauled a cold, limp, discolored, and fatty chunk of beef out from the depths of the dirty pot and dropped it onto Barry’s plate. The bony inmate stared down with familiar disgust. At least it wasn’t a tail, he thought. Tails were the worst. “I’ll have pills,” Barry declared with a sniff of defiance.
Edgar breathed out, suppressing the urge to adjust Barry’s attitude the old-fashioned way, and dug into his apron. After producing a bag of pills labeled with the number 23, he dropped it on the feeding table and filled the prisoner’s cup with dirty water. Barry knew something was wrong with the pill count immediately.
“W-where’s my other orange? I get two oranges.”
“It’s those or nothing, that’s the choice,” Edgar spat.
“Can you ask? I had two oranges, one blue, one red, and four brown.”
Edgar grunted at the idiocy of such a suggestion. Ask? Eat shit, asshole. He shut Barry’s door and locked it, unaware of the noses sticking out of the notches in the two cell doors behind him.
As Edgar rolled the cart farther down the hall to Charlie’s door, Jonah withdrew his nose, knowing he could never get an adequate whiff of Charlie’s lamb or Mitch’s onions. He plodded over to his feeding table and sat down, giving in to the inevitable. He shoved broccoli into his mouth with his hands, going through the process in a semi-trance. It didn’t have a taste anymore; it was just a substance he had to remove from the plate and consume. Soon, the pile of broccoli would be gone and he could turn his attention to his pills.
After the chunks were gone, he carefully tipped the plate back and slurped up the puddle of water and broccoli remnants, making sure to catch every bit of it. He dragged his hands down his hairy face, dredging broccoli bits from his beard, then popped what he had collected into his mouth. Edgar had thrown him in the hole more than once because too much broccoli was left on his mustache and beard. When his face and the plate were both cleaned, he completed the feeding ritual by licking the plate, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, until no sign of broccoli remained.
Feeling a weight lifted off his shoulders, Jonah took the plate to the door and slid it under, into the hallway. Edgar shouldn’t have a problem when he checked it next feeding, unless the violence-prone man was in the mood to create one.
Jonah collected the bag of pills from the feeding table and brought it up to his eyes so he could double-verify something that looked very wrong. The bag held three orange, four blue, and one red. His face twisted with confusion, and he scratched his scalp with his free hand. Pinching the bag, he isolated one of the orange pills in the corner of the plastic, and looked at it skeptically. “Hmmm,” he muttered to himself as thoughts slowly coalesced.
Jonah flopped on his wooden bed, making it creak and buckle, and opened the bag of pills. He separated the red pill from the others by shaking it carefully to the top of the bag. He dropped it into his palm and then tossed it into his mouth, immediately turning his attention to the remaining pills. The red pill made his heart beat faster, made his mind sharper, and also made him antsy. Jonah bounced his leg on the ball of his foot as the pill kicked in. Once again, he separated an orange pill from the others in the bag and looked at it with great interest.
“Extra orange,” he mused quietly, his mind racing through the possible reasons. Sensations from the red pill flooded in; Jonah clenched his jaw and gritted his teeth as his thoughts sped up. Nothing at the Cydonia camp happened without a reason. Their routine had been dependable and unchanging for years, yet today he got an extra orange pill? He popped all four of the blue pills into his mouth at once. Blues didn’t do anything as far as Jonah knew, but as with his food, if he was given pills, he had to eat them all.
A loud horn bleated twice, echoing down from the distant guard tower, making Jonah scramble to his feet and hurry to the window. A grid of rusty rebar impaired his view of the outside, but the layout of the yard was so familiar that he knew every inch of it by heart. Two horns meant it was time for women’s exercise, his favorite time of day. He greedily ate two orange pills and licked his lips in anticipation of the forthcoming entertainment.
Four tired young women shambled out from behind the women’s barracks and dispersed into the yard as two pairs. Just like the men, the women wore uniforms with patches numbered 20–24. As usual, the group was down one inmate. Jonah hadn’t seen female 20 take exercise in months, ever since the last feast and her marriage to Mitch. Every day, Mitch asked Jonah if he had seen her in the yard, and every day Jonah disappointed him. None of them knew why she had vanished; the staff never explained anything to the inmates, so guesswork was their only option.
Hilda lurked in the background near the women’s barracks, carefully watching the female inmates wander along the Lines of Division. The rumor among the men was that Hilda had gotten the scars on her neck and face while fighting in a war, but Jonah never fully believed Charlie’s stories, even if he had been in the camp years before Jonah, Richard, Barry, and Mitch had arrived.
Charlie was a pale, middle-aged ghost. His number 21 patch resembled his withered body and thinning gray hair. Like Jonah and Barry, he stared out into the yard through a web of steel bars and mindlessly ate from his bag of pills. Charlie was fixated on one female in particular, the same one that all three of them were staring at.
***
4:49 p.m.
Arva was by far the prettiest female in camp, a natural beauty with smooth golden skin; long, greasy brown hair; and bright green eyes. Ironically, she was the only person in camp who couldn’t appreciate her beauty. Things like mirrors, makeup, and bathing were not words or concepts that inmates were exposed to.
She had been friends with Beth, a short, rail-thin girl with curly blond hair, since they rode into camp on a truck together years earlier. Beth had perfected the ability to make Arva and the others laugh, usually at the expense of Edith, the homely, long-faced girl with a slightly hunched back who wore number 24.
Edith’s hair was bald in patches, and that, combined with her buck teeth and pudgy body, made her an easy target of ridicule. A long time ago, Edith would fire back at Beth with whatever insults she could manage, even if they didn’t make sense, but defending herself just made Beth’s attacks worse.
Although Beth always did the talking, Edith’s hatred was mostly focused on Arva, who didn’t deserve her beauty and the stares she got from the men. Edith could cope with Beth’s mouth, but not Arva’s looks—it was a daily reminder of how hideously ugly she was.
“I hear baldy through the wall all the time,” Beth said, eyeing Edith to make sure she was within hearing range. “It’s like she’s shitting herself while she sleeps, venison-farts right and left.”
Beth mouthed several noises of digestive distress, gaining Edith’s attention. Sue, the tall girl with dusky brown skin and curly black hair who was having a rare conversation with Edith, couldn’t help but laugh.
The rotund, hunched-over girl turned away from Sue and plodded off toward the south fence, leaving the tall, dark-skinned inmate who wore the number 22 alone at the Lines. Edith couldn’t help the noises she made at night; her body simply didn’t agree with the venison she had to eat four times a day.
Arva laughed at the mocking too, but it was forced. She knew what was coming, and what she was about to risk. She turned and looked at male 24, who stared back at her through rebar. Something about him made her feel warm inside, even though their numbers didn’t match and she would never be alone with him. A smile rose unintentionally; she couldn’t look away from him.
Across the yard, inside the men’s barracks, Jonah stood petrified. He couldn’t believe it—female 21 was smiling at him, and he didn’t know what to do. He smiled widely and awkwardly, and then began nodding enthusiastically while waving his hands, as if a bird struggling to gain flight. Somehow, he reasoned, nodding and waving would help.
Edith’s jealous eyes tracked the exchange between Arva and male 24, and she didn’t like it one bit. Edith had been staring at male 24 across the yard since their numbers had been assigned, but he never looked back. Maybe it was for the best. The one and only time the two inmates had locked eyes resulted in a look of disgust from male 24, and that look almost killed her. But Edith knew one day they would be married, his mind would change, and he would stare at her—and only her—until happily ever after. Headmaster Green had promised this to her many times; it would happen just like in the storybook he used to read to them. Edith wasn’t going to let anyone, particularly Arva, take away what she had been promised.
Beth nudged Arva with an elbow, a silent reminder that they still had a plan to carry out. Arva tore her concentration from male 24, her face hardening as she deliberated over the task at hand. She carefully surveyed the yard, finding Edith plopped down on the grass by the south gate and Sue wandering along the east fence.
Hilda stood between the three groups of inmates, monitoring their activities while spinning a baton in her hand. She was carefully keeping track of Sue, who was walking parallel to the fence, eventually disappearing behind the women’s barracks. Hilda slowly walked around the dilapidated wooden building, making sure that Sue remained an appropriate distance from the chain links, and briefly turning her back to Arva and Beth.
It was time. “Arva,” Beth whispered, and motioned with her eyes.
“Come on,” Arva said. She locked arms with Beth and walked toward the north fence, using the barracks to block Hilda’s line of sight.
Edith leaned back on her hands, curiously watching her two enemies, taking internal notes on their every step just in case they broke the rules. Whenever either one of them misbehaved, Edith was always the first to tell Hilda. She smiled widely as memories flooded in, her lips tightening across buck teeth. Seeing Arva getting beaten was one of her most favorite things in the world.
As the two prisoners got close to the tall wall of chain links at the north end of the yard, Arva produced a folded piece of paper from her burlap pants and tossed it onto the men’s side of the Lines of Division, less than a foot from the fence. The two young women veered away from the drooping barrier and quickly walked back along the Lines toward the barracks.
Edith couldn’t believe what she had just seen. Throwing something on the men’s side was just as bad as stepping across the Lines of Division, a taboo act associated with dire repercussions. Her devious smile suddenly vanished as she glanced at male 24; his eyes were still fixed on Arva.
Edith was tired of fighting off sadness and keeping hope alive. She longed for her marriage feast and the chance to be alone with male 24 in the marriage hut for seven days. Maybe she would tell Hilda about Arva throwing stuff on the male side of the Lines, and they could all watch her get her ass kicked, right here in the yard.
***
4:54 p.m.
Jonah wasn’t looking at female 21 anymore. His gaze hadn’t left the spot where the object landed. He was terrified at the idea of what it could be, feared the consequences of not telling, and frightened by the newness and suddenness of the event.
The horn on the guard tower screamed out, letting the camp know that the women’s exercise was over, making Jonah jump. The extra orange pill shot out of the plastic pill bag he was holding and bounced across the floor of his cell toward the open excretion duct. Jonah dove after the pill and snatched it just before it could fall through the opening and into the sewage below. Relieved, he rolled to his back, rubbed the pill against his dirty uniform, and tossed it into his mouth. He got to his knees, closed the hatch to the excretion duct, fastened the flimsy sliding bolt, and stood up. Women’s exercise was ending, so he might as well enjoy looking at the female inmates while he could.
Jonah reassumed his usual spot by the window to catch the last glimpses of female 21’s body. The curves of her figure stirred something deep inside him, a rush of emotion that Jonah couldn’t put into words.
Sue grudgingly led the line of inmates back into the women’s barracks, with Beth and Arva following. Arva chewed nervously on her lip, stealing one final look at male 24 as she turned the corner of the building. She had endangered herself and her friends to benefit people she had never met, and was now left to wonder if the risk had been worth taking.
Ironically, she hadn’t even written the note, and neither had Beth; they assumed that the author was a former inmate, as Beth had found it wedged between a loose floorboard and the wall of her cell. After they shared the contents of the message with Sue, she agreed to help them get the note to the men by distracting Hilda. After all that planning, and with the threat of severe punishment now hanging over all three of them, she hoped the men would be brave enough to follow the instructions in the note.
Edith, bringing up the rear of the line of inmates as usual, paused at the corner of the barracks and looked at male 24. He appeared to be looking back at her, and he wasn’t revolted. On a whim, she decided to push her luck. She smiled and raised her hand, waving to him.
Jonah didn’t move; the ugly girl obviously couldn’t see the storm of anger that was bearing down on her from her flank, but he could.
Hilda’s baton crashed down on Edith’s raised hand, breaking at least one of her fingers. Crying out, Edith rolled to the ground as more pain was unleashed by the heavy baton. “What are you doing?” Hilda demanded as Edith sobbed and cradled her mangled hand. “The horn means go back inside!” she shouted and hit Edith across the ribs.
Hilda grabbed Edith by her thinning hair and dragged her to her feet. “Back to your cell, move!” Another blow from the baton drove Edith around the corner and out of sight.
Although the women had vacated the yard, Jonah knew they would soon be appearing in their windows. He leaned against the wall, his hand resting on a small metal vent above his bed. Wires from his cell lightbulb disappeared through the vent, snaking down into the unknown depths of the basement.
The extra orange pill was making him feel good—extra, extra good, in fact. He decided that he would look through the window until it was time to close the shutters.
A small insect crawled around Jonah’s hand and disappeared through the metal vent. It steadily wriggled down the vertical shaft, following the spindly lightbulb wires, diving deeper into the stinking dark that lay below the barracks. The insect quickly scurried out from the vent the moment it reached the bottom of the small shaft, fleeing sudden gusts of malodorous breath and the nearness of large, misshapen fangs that glistened with gelatinized drool.
A large, monstrous shape huddled in the dark basement next to the vent, its spotty, pale snout pressed against the lightbulb wires. It breathed in deeply, savoring the smell emanating from the cell above it. Two burning red eyes blinked open and rolled as the odor filled its senses. It caressed the vent with sharp claws that extended from three long, scaly digits, craving the taste of flavored human. But it knew it had to wait—broccoli wasn’t yet ready to be served; it needed to marinate more.
