The One We Feed (33 page)

“I think I
might know exactly the right person to help you.”

I breathed a
sigh of relief. Cammy would scold me for being so trusting, but I didn’t care. Anything
was better than dying alone on a bus bench.

Someone got
out of the car and came toward us. I shielded my eyes against the headlights. It
was a woman’s silhouette, and, for some reason, it looked familiar.

“What have you
found, Devlin?” she asked with a lovely lilt in her voice, a sound that could
have charmed a grizzly bear.

She stepped
out of the light and smiled at me. Golden curls, wide hazel eyes, pink lips,
and dimpled chin; she was more real than she had ever been.

“Eva?” I
sobbed. I reached for her, my head suddenly dizzy. Her hand caught my arm and
cradled me as I fell.

“I’ll take
her,” the man said. “What about this one?”

As I faded
out, Eva clucked her tongue. “She’s a big girl, isn’t she? Plump.”

Chapter
26

Awake

The rumbling of the engine and
the thumping of the tires over rough terrain brought me to. I was sprawled upon
a cold metal floor. It was dark. Voices were in conversation around me. I sat
up and looked around. There was only a little light bouncing in from poorly
sealed cracks, but I could tell I was in the back of a moving van and that
there were a few others with me. I recognized one of them from the shelter. I
didn’t know him well, but he smiled at me.

“What’s going
on, Eddy?”

He was smiling
too big to talk. Everyone was smiling. It was strange, like we were all
returning from a great big party and had all taken advantage of the same
designated driver.

I scanned the
space and found Cammy slumped against the wheel well as if she’d been tossed in
haphazardly. The truck was jerking so roughly that I couldn’t stand, but I
could crawl to her. She was still out, her face so hot that it had turned the
metal warm. I tugged on her scarves and coat, trying to get them off of her. She
smelled, but that wasn’t important. I needed to get her hot skin in contact
with the cool air.

“She’s gonna
be fine!” Eddy said finally. “My Uncle’s gonna take care of everyone. He’s a
doctor, you know.”

I frowned. “Is
that who we’re going to see?”

He nodded. “See,
he was real sick a while back. Had, like, something bad with his heart. I
thought he was dead, but he’s okay! He’s going to take care of me now!”

I smiled, but
something felt wrong. “My sister, she found me. I thought she was dead too, but….”

“Yeah,” said a
middle-aged woman with a carpet bag. “My mother found me by the old canal. I
always liked it so much. Used to go there a lot as a kid.”

I sat back
against the wall of the truck, frowning. How likely was it that all of our long
lost relatives had come at once to collect us from a miserable life? But the more
I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. After all, there were lots of
support groups out there. Maybe one of them was for relatives of homeless
people looking for their loved ones. But two presumed dead relatives at the
same time?

I pulled my
knees up to my chest and took Cammy’s lifeless hand. The truck rumbled on for a
couple hours. Eventually the conversation fell silent and eyes drooped. The
sounds of the highway rushed by us and the temperature dropped, but Cammy’s
fever did not improve.

When the truck
finally did stop, I almost didn’t believe it. My backside still vibrated, even
as I stood up. The gate was lifted, and a man in a black suit blinked up at us.

“Time to get
out, everyone.”

We were at a
gas station. Old cars in various states of decomposition were parked all
around. The expensive car was there too, but Eva didn’t get out of it.

Desert
stretched all around us in every direction, and, though I looked around wildly,
there were no other buildings in sight.

I got down. The
man took hold of my arm and shoved me toward the station, but I refused to
budge. I shook him off and scowled at him.

“Where are we?”
I demanded. “You were supposed to take my friend to a doctor. She’s sick!”

He looked at
me with such disdain that it was as if I had spoken in gibberish. “We have lots
of doctors here, but it’s a secret. I promise. Just go inside. Someone will
explain.”

I didn’t
believe him. My skin was crawling, but everyone else was clambering out,
stretching their limbs, and waving at the nice car. I tried to stay outside and
see what they did with Cammy, but the man pushed me into the grubby station and
said that they were taking her through a different entrance. I fought, but when
he squeezed my arm so hard I thought it might break, I gave up. The door shut
behind us. A narrow-faced man in a white coat came out of a back room and
walked up and down in front of us.

“Name?” he
asked the first person in the line.

“Sandra!” the
carpet bag lady said cheerfully.

“And who
referred you here?”

“Um...my
mother?”

“Excellent,”
he said.

Each person
was asked the same questions, who we were, how we’d come to be there, who had
been the one to find us. One by one, the others were admitted into the next room,
where they vanished.

I was last in
line, but when he came to me the man did not ask me the questions. He stared me
up and down with narrow eyes. I scowled back impertinently.

“You got a
problem?”

Thin brows
lifted. He made a mark on the clipboard. The outer door opened finally, and my
sister came in, followed by the well-dressed man.

“What’s the
problem?” she snapped at the man with the clipboard.

He pointed at
me with his pen. “This one’s hostile.”

“Eva,” I
interrupted, “is Cammy okay? I know they said they were taking care of her, but
she….”

Eva sighed
laboriously and pushed past the ineffectual administrator. She put her hand on
my shoulder and smiled a bit condescendingly.

“Hey, sweetie,
haven’t I always been there for you?”

I looked down
at my shoes, uncertain what I could say. I was so happy to find out it had all
been a horrible mistake that I didn’t care about how the past had actually
occurred. I wanted to hold her close and apologize for all the terrible things
I had said. I certainly didn’t want to embarrass her in front of her boyfriend.

I shrugged.

“I’ve made
sure Cammy is taken care of,” she said. “I’ll do the same for you!”

“Where are we?
Is this where you work now?”

She reached up
and began to arrange my unruly hair. “No, dear. It’s a special hospital. You’ve
been ill. Don’t you remember?”

“No,” I said
doubtfully, but then I recalled the bloody vomit and the fact that I had no
idea how I had ended up in the field where Cammy had found me. “Well….”

“See? Now, let
this man care for you. I promise it will all be fine.”

I wasn’t sure what
to think, but her smile was so angelic, and I longed to have her back so badly,
that I couldn’t refuse. The administrator wrote some things down on his board,
then waved me into the other room. It was tiny, like a closet, but there was a
hole in the floor and a ladder descending into it. I glanced back at Eva
uncertainly.

“We’re going
that way too,” she said.

I reached out
and climbed onto the ladder. The hole below was dark, but not completely. When
I reached the bottom, I found myself in another room, something like an office,
and there were several people wearing suits inside. I glanced over their
impassive faces, prepared to utter a quick soubriquet, when their mouths opened
and a noise like a fire alarm burst in on my eardrums. I lifted my hands, but
the sound shattered my nerves. My knees buckled. I gripped my head in agony,
but nothing helped. I fell onto the floor and lost consciousness yet again.

I awoke to the
sound of a screaming so shrill, it defied reason. Slammed back into my own
mind, I sat up and hit my head on a metal ceiling. My vision cleared like smoke
in a breeze. I steadied myself, leaning against the fence in front of me. I
quickly realized, though, that it was not a fence. What I was gripping so
tenaciously were the bars of a cage. Someone had taken away my shoes, my
flannel shirt, and both pairs of socks, and had dumped my body in an animal
cage.

I gasped and
slid backward. Across from me, the man in the cage was still screaming. With a
horrible turning of my stomach, I realized it was Eddy. His fingers were
twisted around the metal bars, and, with all his strength, he was pulling and
pushing, his eyes so wild that he didn’t seem human. He was bleeding from
self-inflicted wounds and seemed to be foaming at the mouth in rage.

“Please let us
out,” my neighbor whispered under her sobs, as if she too had been screaming to
no avail and had finally lost her voice. They had taken her shoes too.

“What’s
happening?” I asked her, but she just shook her head.

As I looked
around, I recognized the people from my truck ride, but Cammy was not among
them. There were others inmates, too, wearing white hospital gowns and thin
drawstring pants. For some inexplicable reason they were all catatonic, their
skin bruised, their faces blank. There were at least twenty of us, total, imprisoned
in a long white room with a table and door at one end.

Eddy carried
on for another five minutes, slamming against the door of his cage so hard that
it rocked on its base. Soon a man with a cattle prod came in and, in full view
of all of us, shocked him until he was in such pain from the spasms that he
could no longer fight. Then the man waved the prod like a cane and walked back
out, whistling.

With a feeling
of horrible, overwhelming certainty, I leaned back in the cage, no longer
wanting to figure out what was happening. Cammy was dead and Eva was not, but
she hated me enough to throw me in a cage like a kennel dog.

I don’t know
how long I lay there sobbing, listening to the others going through the many
stages of grieving, occasionally getting the cattle prod, sometimes a stomped
finger. Eventually, I stopped listening. I curled up in a tiny ball and closed
my eyes, but the overhead lights were so bright, they cut through my lids and
kept me awake.

At some point,
they came and got Eddy. He was gone for almost two hours. When they brought him
back, he looked like another person completely. His face was pale and his eyes
seemed haunted. Someone had taken his clothes and given him a hospital gown and
pants. He was dragged back in and thrown into his pen, eyes rolling back into
his skull, tongue hanging out.

His return was
met by a renewal of all the horrible sobs and screams, until they came for
Sandra. She kicked and screamed, but she was so emaciated that there was no
chance she could ever be a match for them. She wasn’t gone for half as long,
but was brought back in much the same condition as Eddy.

One by one, we
were dragged away, until I was the only one left. I sat with my knees up to my
chest, my arms squeezing them so tightly that I couldn’t breathe, looking
around me in horror. I was the only one left that remembered anything.

When they came
for me, in their lab coats and sensible shoes, sheer terror took over. I fought
hard: I drew blood. I kicked and thrashed. I punched and bit. I raised hell,
but none of it did any good. Someone hit me across the face with a heavy object
and knocked me senseless.

Coming to, I
could feel my legs dragging across the cement floor. They lifted me onto an
examination table and stripped me. I tried to struggle, but they were so much
stronger. There was a sudden jab in my arm, and all was peace.

The next day,
or perhaps weeks later, the house music began. Incessant and thumping, it went
on and on, from one song to the next, but each so similar that it was
impossible to distinguish among them. It pulsed like an extra heartbeat, until
every nerve danced with it and could no longer keep its own natural cadence. I
tried to block it out, tear strips of cloth from my gown to stuff in my ears,
but it was so loud and so penetrating that it seeped into every pore, until
silence seemed like a memory.

They did not
feed us, except to shove pills or pre-measured water down our throats. Our
toilets were a little tray in the floor of the cage, cleaned once a day. The
keepers did not speak to us, look at us, or even bother to pretend we had
spoken to them. It was as if we did not exist.

Soon, I began
to think that we did not.

Perhaps my
life had been a fabrication. I had never existed. My parents were a lie. My
home was a lie. Everything I had ever done was a lie. I lay with my face to the
metal base of my cage, staring vacantly into the corridor of our day-lit hell.

When Eddy
began to defecate on himself, they came and pulled him from the cage. He never
came back. Two days, or better said two waterings later, it was Sandra.

A new
truckload of people was brought in. I didn’t even notice them. They were like
noisy additions to the music that, even when turned off, whispered in my
thoughts. One of them reached out and touched my ankle, trying to wake me. It
wasn’t real.

Before the
recent acquisitions had been redressed, they came for me. I had been in one
position so long and starved to such a degree that it was impossible to stand. The
man sent for me, took hold of my wrist, and dragged me through the room, while
his fellow with the cattle prod shocked any dissenters.

I was left in
a room and remained, unmoving, for an eternity. There was no music in the room,
no bright light. When the door clicked open and several people entered, I was
almost lucid. I looked up at the fuzzy shapes.

A woman
crouched down beside me, took hold of my hair, and lifted my face. She let out
a sigh. “They always give in.”

Her voice
roused me. It was calming, as if I had been listening to it all my life.