Storm of Locusts

Chapter 23

Aaron decides he does indeed want to be rich. He pockets the needle and pulls a ring of keys from his belt, deftly finding the one that opens our cage. Turns the lock and I’m swinging the door open before he’s even finished. I’d never been in a cage before and I can’t say I cared for the experience. Don’t think I’ll do it again.

Aaron lets me pass and then turns back to Rissa. Gives her a little bow as he holds the door open for her. She returns the gesture with a predator’s grin. He reaches out and takes her hand. Kisses her knuckles. “An honor, Ms. Goodacre,” he murmurs.

I have to stop myself from gagging. “Really? Ms. Goodacre?”

“No reason we can’t be civil,” she says, giving me a fuck-off kind of smile.

I want to point out that ten minutes ago Aaron was willing to cut her into pieces and sell her liver to the highest bidder. But I don’t. Instead I say, “Be civil all you want. Let’s just get out of here.”

And that’s when we hear it. Voices coming from the stairwell. Two men at least, maybe more.

“Were you expecting backup?” I ask, tense.

Aaron goes rigid. “No. Everyone’s supposed to be at the auction. No one’s allowed in the Reaping Room when there’s prisoners.”

I scan the room, looking for weapons. Four metal tables, way too heavy to lift. Bare bulbs hanging in intervals from the ceiling. Meat hooks. And along the wall, medicine cabinets. I hadn’t really noticed them before, but now that I have, I’m guessing they are full of surgical equipment. The kind one might use to remove organs.

“Fuck!” Aaron hisses, striding for the door. There’s a small window at eye level. He hunches down to peek through, looking up the stairs. “You’ve got to be shitting me.” He runs a shaky hand across his head. “What are they doing here?” He claps his hands together sharply. “Think, Aaron, think.” He looks up, eyes bright. “Quick, back in the cage.”

“Like hell,” Rissa says for both of us.

“If you’re out, the jig is up.”

“There is no jig.” I walk to the closest cabinet. Slam my elbow against the flimsy lock and it comes open. Sure enough, sharp metal gleams back at me in deadly little rows. I grab what looks like a scalpel, careful not to cut myself. Slip two razors on long handles into the places where my throwing knives usually go.

“What are you doing?” Aaron whisper-shouts at me. “These are my buddies. You’re not going to chop them up.”

“Watch me,” I say, tucking a particularly ugly blade into my sleeve.

“No!” he says, grabbing at my arm. I shake him off, give him a look that’s frightened braver men than him, and he backs down.

“Okay, all right, all right.” He paces the floor. “Rissa!” He hurries to Rissa, who’s resting her butt against one of the steel tables, eyeing the meat hooks above her thoughtfully. “You’re the sane one in the girl group, am I right?”

“I heard that,” I say.

“Can you talk your friend there into getting in the cage? I won’t lock it, and we already have a deal, right? You know I wouldn’t go back on a deal. Not with Cletus’s sister. But let me see what my buddies want. Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe they can walk away, eh? Before it gets violent.”

Rissa crosses her arms. The voices are getting louder, laughing and joking as heavy footsteps come down the stairs.

“What do you say, Maggie?” she asks me, leaning forward a bit. “Should we give them a chance?”

“Or,” I say, shutting the cabinet. “We could just kill them.”

Aaron groans.

“I thought you were turning over a new leaf,” Rissa says to me. “Trying not to kill people.”

“I was, but that was yesterday. Today, with the whole captured and drugged thing? I’m feeling pretty aggro.”

Rissa gestures to Aaron like there’s nothing she can do.

“Unless,” I say, cutting off whatever he was going to say next. “Unless you help us find Ben.”

“Sure, sure, whatever you want. Let me—let me open that door and I will help you with your Ben, no problem.”

“Okay.” I look to Rissa. “Okay?”

“You armed?” she asks.

I nod, a feral smile leaking from my lips. “I’ve even picked out a few for you. I know you prefer a gun, but it’s good for a woman to learn to use a blade.”

“That’s nice, Maggie. I appreciate you thinking of me.”

“No reason I can’t be civil, Ms. Goodacre.”

Aaron’s dancing from foot to foot, sweating. If I weren’t convinced we were going to have to fight our way out of this place in the next sixty seconds, I’d laugh. But instead I saunter over to the cage, and Rissa follows. Aaron starts to close the door, but I stop it with my foot. Hold out my hand. He slaps the key ring down in my palm, so I move my foot and let him close the door.

“Now lie down,” he says, eyes darting between us and the door. “So it looks like I drugged you.”

We can hear that Aaron’s friends have arrived, so we don’t argue. Rissa and I hit the concrete. I fling an arm out to cover my face, but I make sure I can see the door. Aaron practically sprints for the stairwell, slapping the bright lights off as he hits the wall. He catches the knob and pulls it open just as two men barrel through.

“My brothers!” he shouts, overly friendly. “What are you doing here?”

Aaron’s friends freeze. The one in front, a big guy with an unkempt beard and a broad sloping belly, stutters out, “A-Aaron. We thought you’d be up at the auction with everyone else.” His eyes dart around the room, clearly looking for something, someone. Us. But the dark has rendered Rissa and I into indistinct lumps. “Bishop sent me down to check on the prisoners.”

The other one laughs nervously. “Oh yeah, same. We were just checking.”

“Funny,” Aaron says in a voice as empty as the Malpais. “He didn’t mention he was sending you two down. In fact, I was supposed to dose them and lock them up for the night. You know the rules.”

His friends exchange a look. The bearded one shrugs, shoulders slumping in defeat. But the other one, fair-haired and lean, isn’t willing to give up so quickly. “So, listen, Aaron,” he says, leaning in conspiratorially. “We heard they were women. Young ones. Pretty ones. And you know how it is. We don’t get to see a lot of those. We just wanted to take a look.”

“While they’re knocked out cold?” Aaron asks, finger against his chin like he’s confused.

His friend stares a hard moment and then lifts his hands. “You got us!” he says, exasperated. “We’re men, aren’t we?”

“Virile men,” Beard agrees.

The blond shoots his friend an annoyed look before turning back to Aaron. “So maybe we want to do more than look. But what’s the harm? They’re scheduled for Harvesting tomorrow. They won’t care because they’ll be dead.”

Something changes in Aaron’s posture. A subtle thing. I recognize it only because I know a fighting stance when I see it. A relaxing of the shoulders, a shift of his weight as he bends his knees. “Pete,” he says, his voice a degree colder than it was before, “please tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”

Pete takes a step back, clearly not expecting his friend’s reaction. “We know the rules, Aaron, but what’s a little rule bending between friends?”

“They’re just women,” his bearded friend says. “And strangers at that. Who cares what we do to them?”

“It’s a sin. Especially because they are strangers. Especially because they are women.”

Pete exhales, loud and exasperated. “Get over yourself, Aaron. If you think about it, we’re doing this trash a favor—”

It happens so fast I almost miss it. One minute Pete’s standing in the threshold of the door, hands braced on the doorjamb. The next he’s got a needle protruding from his eye.

Pete screams, clawing for his eye.

Aaron grabs Pete’s head, drives it down into his knee, forcing the needle farther into the socket. He twists Pete’s neck and the scream cuts off abruptly. He throws Pete into the room, and his body slides awkwardly across the tile, clearly dead.

Aaron’s other friend stares in shock. But not for long.

He swings, a blade hidden in his hand, slicing open Aaron’s face right above his eye. Aaron staggers back, cursing. And his friend takes off running. Not back up the stairs, a death trap, but across the room to the exit door on the far end.

Aaron looks up. He’s bleeding, blood dripping into his eye, blinding him. He wipes at it ineffectively, trying to stanch the flow. He’s not going to catch him.

I move.

His friend doesn’t make it ten feet before I’m tackling him from behind. He hits the tile, face-first, me on his back. I grind my knees into his shoulder to hold him still. Grab his hair and have a surgically sharp blade at his throat, all Honágháahnii fast.

“Shhhhh!” I whisper in his ear. “Or I cut your throat.”

“Cut his throat,” Aaron says, coming up behind me with Rissa. Blood streams down his cheek in rivulets, following the lines of his scar, spattering onto his white double-breasted.

I say, “I thought they were your friends and we weren’t supposed to hurt your friends.”

Aaron presses at the wound on his forehead. “I thought so, too, but they’re not friends of mine. Did you hear what Pete said? What he and Wyatt had planned?”

Wyatt whines under my hand, and I pull his hair a little tighter to shut him up. “I heard. Not very original. I’d be more impressed if they were sneaking down here to steal our kidneys or something.”

“Teeth,” Rissa adds. “You all could use some better teeth than this silver crap you got filling your mouths.”

“I don’t abide rapists,” he says with such vehemence that I turn all the way around, shifting to drive my knee into Wyatt’s neck just because I can.

“I can’t say I care for them myself, but that sounds personal,” I observe carefully.

Aaron stares at me. He lost his aviator’s cap somewhere along the way, and his hair trails down his back in a long line, the sides of his head completely shaved but for the strip of hair down the middle. He looks wild, fierce in a way he didn’t before. But his eyes are bright and wet. Hurt. He blinks white lashes at me, the look on his face answer enough.

I sigh, conflicted. “I’m trying not to kill people,” I explain. “It’s a new thing I’m trying. I mean, I know I said all that stuff before . . .”

He takes a moment before he nods. “Then I’ll do it.”

I look over at Rissa. She’s watching Aaron, head tilted, evaluating. I catch her eye and she shrugs. Clearly not our problem.

“And murder’s not a sin to you?” I ask. Not that I’m interested in whatever flavor of religion Aaron seems to be so strongly devoted to, but I am curious.

“Those who disobey, even in thought, are deserving of death.”

“That seems harsh. We could just lock him in one of these cages.”

Aaron seems to think about it. “There is a punishment Bishop decrees that is short of death for those that are tempted by lust.”

“Fine. Do that.”

Aaron nods once, flicking blood across his white jacket.

I slam Wyatt’s head down against the concrete. Hard. He grunts, dazed.

I stand up, hand the blade to Aaron, and step back. “He’s all yours.”

Aaron stands there, blade in hand. Unmoving. I’m worried he’s in shock until he opens his mouth and says, “You know the rules and you chose to break them. You know the punishment.”

Wyatt moans, a sound that sends a tremor through the room.

“Just kill me,” he wails.

But Aaron is unbending. “Choose, Wyatt.”

“I—I can’t!”

“I take your tongue or I take your balls. Choose.”

Rissa’s eyes widen. I grab her arm and pull her toward the stairwell door, Wyatt’s pleas for death trail us, growing more hysterical. “We’ll wait out here,” I call back. We sidestep Pete’s body to clear the entrance.

“Don’t take too long!” Rissa says as I close the door.

The lights of the stairwell are stark and the air is warm compared to the temperature in the lab, but I still feel cold. “Holy shit! Who are these people?”

Rissa doesn’t say anything. Just climbs a few stairs and takes a seat. She’s still got the thoughtful look on her face.

I frown. “What is that look? Oh no. Don’t tell me you like him.”

She glances up, surprised. Blushes under the bright lights. “He’s interesting,” she admits.

“He’s some kind of religious fanatic.”

“Believing in sin doesn’t make him a fanatic.”

“He’s in there right now butchering a man he called his friend five minutes ago.”

“He doesn’t like rapists. That seems like an excellent quality to me.”

I exhale some of the adrenaline from Honágháahnii, shake out my arms. “Don’t ever say I have bad taste in men again.”

She snorts. “That was my mom, not me. Although I still think Kai—”

The door opens, and we both turn. Aaron comes through, gently closing the door behind him. He’s cleaned up. Traded his bloodied white jacket for a new spotless one. The cut on his head has a crude bandage on it that the blood has already begun to soak through.

“You’re going to need stitches for that,” I say, gesturing toward the wound.

“I can do it,” Rissa offers. “It will only take a minute. I’ve got lots of experience sewing people up.”

Aaron looks up at us, tears caught in his lashes. “I’m sorry you had to see that, ladies.” His whole demeanor has changed. He’s a different man than the one that swaggered into the room earlier.

“I’ve seen worse.”

I want to ask her where and when, but I don’t think I want to know.

Aaron holds his hand out, offering up a bottle of superglue and a spray bottle of Bactine. “I think glue will do the trick. It’s not deep.”

Rissa frowns but takes the bottle from him. “I’ll try it.”

“I just don’t like a needle so much,” he says, without a hint of irony. “Bad memories, you understand.”

I don’t, but whatever. Aaron’s obviously a man with a collection of nasty stories, none of which I need to hear to believe that this place is a hellhole and the sooner we’re all out of here the better.

Aaron lets Rissa clean his wound and apply the superglue. We wait a few seconds for the glue to set, and then Rissa gently wipes Aaron’s skin clean. “Good enough,” she says, giving her work a critical eye.

“Then let’s go,” Aaron says, his voice subdued. “I’m done here.”