Famished (16 page)

“Starving,” he said, finishing my sentence. “Very good, dinner. And here I thought you had forgotten about me.”

I began thrashing my arms and legs. “No. No. No.” That was all I could get out.

“There is no point in fighting me.” His deep voice came out soft, yet frightening. “That is a battle you will lose.”

Soon I found my voice and put it to good use. “Help! Someone help me!” I screamed—loud, shrill—and
 
high pitched.

A low, husky laugh left his throat. “Nobody is going to hear you.”

“Help! Help!”

“Stop it, dinner,” he teased.

Rethinking my strategy, I slumped into his arms hoping that he would think that I’d given up the struggle. Straight ahead was the open hatch. If I played my cards right, I could make it there. “You told me your name was I’m Starving. You cracked my head open, left me paralyzed, and wrote me a sadistic letter. You said you were going to eat me.” His grip was loosening. “You’re a cannibal. Oh God!” He removed his hands from my waist and I took that as an open opportunity.

I bolted for the hatch, pumping my legs as hard as I could. And I was fast. But… he was faster. He raced ahead of me, slamming both of the hatch doors shut. I tried to sprint around him but he caught up to me before tackling me and pinning me down on the ground. “Dinner, you need to calm down.”

“Stop calling me that!” I shrieked. “I am no one’s dinner!”

“Fine then, can I have a name, please?”

“Georgina,” I sobbed.

“Relax, Georgina. I’m not going to eat you,” he stated.He spoke sincerely so why did everything about the entire situation feel wrong? I blinked several times, trying to correct my blurred vision. I glanced at his face and he looked concerned. And not at all how I remembered him.

The sequence of events that took place that day resurfaced in my mind. Colin was running toward me, frightened. Then I took off running. And he passed me, ignoring my cries for help. Colin didn’t even look back. He just ran forward as a heartless, spineless coward, while the guy above tackled me, threatened my life, then bashed my skull in.

“Who are you?” I asked in a robotic tone, staring blankly ahead.

“My name is Owen Sanders.” He backed up off of me.

“And are you a cannibal, Owen Sanders?”

“No,” he announced. “I am not.”

When I saw him, out in the earthly desert, he had cannibalistic traits. The sharpened teeth, blood smeared all over him, sadistic demeanor. Looking at him now, even though he was cleaned up with his shiny skin, kind eyes, and normal clothing, he still reminded me of a cannibal. “You’re not?” I asked, warily.

He shook his head. “No.”

I sat up abruptly, almost whacking him in the head. “That doesn’t change anything. You almost killed me! And then you left me all alone bleeding and unable to move!” I snapped.

“I saved you,” he harrumphed. “You don’t know anything!”

I cackled hysterically. “You saved me. You and I have a very different interpretation on what the word save means.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Do we, now?”

I scoffed. “Yes, we do!”

He got up off the floor and stalked over to the control panel. “We’ll see about that.”

“Where are you going?” I shouted as I rose to my feet. He didn’t answer. I watched him carefully as he picked something up off the control panel. Then he walked over to me and chucked the item at me. I missed the catch and the item bounced on the floor several times before I walked over to pick it up.

“I cut your head open, so I could take that out!”

I palmed the tiny iridescent barcode that looked a lot like a computer chip. “What is this?”

“It’s a censor. It was implanted in your brain, to be used as a tracking device, among other things.”

“This can’t be from my brain. You are just feeding me a load of bull. I’ve never had one of these inserted.”

He shook his head. “That you know of.”

“I think I would know if I had a censor inserted into my brain.”

“Mark Baker is a very crafty man,” he stated. “You’d be surprised what he’s capable of. All of the children in your underground world have censors. And I assume that it’s only a matter of time before he figures out a way to implant them in the adults too. The man is obsessed with control.”

That was something that I already knew. But I still had a hard time believing that someone who attacked me had actually saved me. “Right.” I rolled my eyes. “How can you expect me to believe that? After the way you treated me out there.”

He shrugged. “Believe what you want. But, I’m telling you
 
the truth.”I opened my mouth to reply, but then I noticed the hatch-like doors shaking. Owen’s face contorted into a look of panic and he grabbed me by the shoulder. “You need to hide.”

Scowling, I pulled my shoulder away. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He gripped my upper arm tightly and shoved me through a pair of steel doors just as the hatch smacked against the marble. “Owen,” Mr. Baker called. “Are you up here?”

I rested my ear against the metal door, listening to the sound of their muffled voices. “I’m here,” Owen replied.

Mr. Baker’s feet clinked against the marble floor. “Can you bring up the footage from last Sunday please?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

I waited a few minutes in silence as Owen obviously did what he was instructed to do. I heard his fingers pounding against the keyboard on the control panel and the sound of a foot tapping nervously. “Stop there,” Mr. Baker commanded.

Then a loud slap echoed so loud that I was certain our underground colony would be able to hear. “Ugh,” Owen moaned.

“When I tell you to do something, you do it!” Mr. Baker shouted. “You were supposed to kill that girl! Now we have a severe shortage in food and guess what that means?”

“What does it mean?” Owen growled.

“That you won’t be eating for a few days.”

Barely breathing, I had a sudden urge to bust through the

doors and kill Mr. Baker myself. I had lots of theories that involved him but none of them were like this. The man was a tyrannical monster. I regretted the day that my father agreed to let his family live in our colony.

On top of that, he was feeding Owen! From our food supply! Normally, that wouldn’t bother me in the least, but when he was killing off members of the colony because of food shortages I had every right to be disturbed.

Now I knew what I had to do. I had to tell me parents. And I had to tell the Vickers family—and any other family that wasn’t involved in his little conspiracy theory. It was the only sure shot way that I could guarantee we had a chance in saving ourselves.

The sound of the metal hatch doors slamming shut snapped me to attention. Seconds later, Owen yanked the doors open and nodded for me to come out. “It’s safe now,” he said, quietly.

A deep red mark swelled on his cheek. I reached up to touch it and he backed away from me, wincing. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “Does he do that all the time?” I realized that despite everything I had been through, I wasn’t the only victim here.

Owen smiled, half-heartedly. “Only when I don’t do what I’m told. Which is ninety five percent of the time. So, yeah, pretty often.”

“So if you don’t obey him, if you don’t mind me asking why does he keep you around?”

He pointed to the television screens. “I suppose because I’m a tech genius and he can’t run this system without me.”

My eyes followed his finger and centered on the screen with mine and his picture on it. Owen was hovering above me, the rock in his hand, preparing to drop it on my head. “You were supposed to kill me?”

“I was supposed to… but I couldn’t. Same with that Monica girl. I’m not a killer. I couldn’t do that.”

Monica. My heart ached when I thought about her. “Well, if you didn’t kill her, then who did?”

Owen glanced at the television screen, then back at me. “I can’t explain everything now. There isn’t enough time. I have to get you back.”

On one of the screens, I could see the entire colony, coming together in the meeting room. “How am I going to get back? Mr. Baker locked the door to my only way out.”

Owen led me down a short hallway. I stood in the center and there was a big red button in front of me. He pressed the button and I stumbled as the floor shook and I was being lowered into the ground. “What’s going on?” I questioned, feeling uneasy. “This will drop up off in the center of the mess hall. Meet me there tonight at 11:00 pm. I’ll come for you, I promise.”

After Colin, I had a hard time trusting in anyone. “I don’t believe in promises anymore,” I said. “They always seem to get broken.”

Owen laughed. “Well, I can say this and mean it. I never break mine.”

Just as he uttered those words, the lift closed him off and blocked him from my view. Then I was going down, back into a place where I knew for certain that I wouldn’t be safe.

Chapter 18: What’s In A Name

The dead which he slew at his death we more than which he slew at his life.~Judges 16:33

Just as Owen said, I wound up on the floor in the middle of the mess hall. It was quiet and there wasn’t a person in sight. I picked myself up off the ground and brushed the loose soil from my pants. Then, I heard my mother shouting, “Where have you been, Georgina Marie?”

Oh, no. I had to think up a lie and think of one quick. “I took a nap, woke up, then went for a walk.” I hoped that she believed me. I did sound pretty convincing when I said it.

She marched over to me and grabbed me by the hand. “From now on, when you go somewhere, you need tell either me or your father. I came back to the room and you were gone. I’ve been searching the rooms for the last hour.” She tugged me through the open doorway and down the hall.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked. Even though I already knew where I was going, I couldn’t let her know anything.

“The council called some emergency meeting.”

“With all the families?”

“Yes,” she grumbled. “I told your father that I didn’t want any of us to go but he insisted.”

The funny thing was that I knew exactly what was going to happen at the
 
emergency meeting. And I couldn’t wait to see the look on Mark Baker’s face when he saw the surprise that I had in store for him.

The entire meeting room turned to face my mother and me as she dragged me through the door, yanking on my arm. I did my best not to run into anyone, weaving in and out of the people in the crowd. Mr. Baker stood on the small, dirt stage with the rest of the council members, eyeing me suspiciously. Once we got to the front, my mother pulled Frankie up from the side of the stage and tucked us both underneath her arms.

Mr. Baker waited a moment, then stepped forward, raising his arm to quiet down the crowd, that since my arrival, had broken out into a hushed roar of whispers. When I took a moment to look at him, I mean really look at him, I couldn’t see the feeble, yet authoritative man who stood before me. All I saw was a monster. A monster who plotted murder for his own selfish reasons.

Closing my eyes, I pictured the loud crack of his palm when he slapped Owen across the face. Then I focused on Frankie and several other children in the room. How did this one man have us all so fooled? I wondered when he inserted that censor into my head or any other child in the room for that matter.

Thinking of everything he had done set the rage burning deep inside of me on fire. I wanted to hurt him, but not just for myself. I wanted him to suffer for the future lies, betrayal, and pain he would cause the people of the colony. I wanted him to suffer for Monica, a beautiful, innocent girl whose life he’d stolen for the sake of his own obsession with greed and power. If it wasn’t for my mother, with her firm on my shoulders, I’d be up there already, and I’d kick that treacherous snake where it counted.

“Colonists,” Mr. Baker announced. “We gathered all of you here so you could witness the drawing of the second lottery. Two random names have been selected.” He cleared his throat and went on. “We have heard complaints from several of you last time about not being able to witness the names being drawn. While the names have already been selected, we invite you all to witness who will be breaching the earth’s surface, next Sunday at noon.” He turned to Mr. Martin. “Dale, can you bring me the box, please?”

Mr. Martin lifted the box up from the center of the small, wooden picnic table in the middle of the stage. He flipped the lid open and placed it on Mr. Baker’s outstretched hands. “Here you go, Mark.”

Mr. Baker nodded. “Thank you, Dale.”

A triumphant grin spread across my lips. Yeah, I was definitely getting my opportunity to kick him where it counted. Just in a slightly different way.

He removed the first piece of paper, unfolded it, and called out the first name, “Dylan Edwards,” he boomed. “You’ll be the next male.”

I glanced over at the Edwards family. Dylan looked proud, like venturing out into the frightening world was an initiation, a test of his manhood. His mother and sister, on the other hand, had tears streaming down their cheeks.