“Like us,” Page added. “Nobody wants us to live either.”
Tyler put her hands on Page’s slender shoulders, “But not because we eat other people, Darlin.’”
“You knew all this about them before and you still let us walk in there?” Harrison was suddenly in front of Adela with his finger in her face. Gone was his understanding from earlier. He had faced their danger head on and could no longer be patient with Adela. “You let us walk in there blindly without even a hint that there could be danger?”
Unprepared for Harrison’s attack, she blanched. “I had only heard rumors before! I had not… I could not have known that they lived there or that we would meet them! How could I have known?”
“I don’t know!” Harrison shouted. “We know nothing about you! Not a thing! Except that you knew about those… those… those psychos and didn’t tell us! And that they hit all of us, knocked us all unconscious except for you!”
Adela took a step back and Vaughan jumped in to settle the situation.
Vaughan stepped in front of Harrison and gripped his biceps, “Chill, Harrison. Chill out for a second. She told us she had thought they were rumors… myths.”
Harrison looked at him wide-eyed and horror-stricken. “They didn’t tie you up, Vaughan. They didn’t wrestle you to the ground with six men and roast you. You have no idea what that was like.”
Vaughan winced, “You think it was easy for me to know that I couldn’t stop them from taking you? You think I wanted to sit in that room and imagine how they were going to serve you up? That was hell for all of us. Even her.” His arm swept wide to include Adela.
Harrison’s eyes flickered over to her. She had pressed both hands against her mouth in an effort to keep them from trembling. She shook her head in fast little bursts as if begging him silently to let this go.
“I did not know,” she promised him with a low, broken voice.
“Okay,” Harrison said, although he sounded very far from okay. “Okay, I’m done.” His gaze flashed back to his brother. “I’m freaked out, but I got it out. I’ll stop.”
Vaughan pulled Harrison into a very rough hug, crushing him against his chest. I heard muffled promises from both brothers as they showed uncharacteristic affection for each other.
The tightness in my chest eased a bit and my heart finally slowed down.
“How’s the baby?” I asked as my friends continued to get over the nightmare of those tunnels. We should probably all have been more desperate to get away from this place, but it was hard for all of us to wake from such a debilitating fear.
Besides, dawn had just been pulled from slumber and these early hours seemed safer than most.
Haley rubbed her small belly with two hands and let out an audible sigh, “Finally moving. He had been so still… I had been worried. But since I sat down and stopped my activity, he seems to have picked up his.”
My heart rate slowed down just a pinch more.
“I feel there is more to tell you,” Adela announced after Harrison had moved a short distance away. We looked at her expectantly. “I know where we are.”
“Good,” Vaughan assured her.
She shook her head again, in her signature way. Her chin jerked in short, stunted little movements that made her black hair bounce around her shoulders. “It is not good,” she said. “This is the place where I am from. This is my home territory.”
Vaughan held up his hands. “I don’t understand. Do you want to go-”
She interrupted him to tell us, “They catch people. They feed them to the Dead. They… they are… they, how do you say…”
“Slavers,” Hendrix put in. “They’re slavers.”
“Si! That is the English word for it. They turn people into slaves.”
Tyler let out a frantic laugh and summed up our situation, “Out of the frying pan, straight into the fire.”
Chapter Four
With cannibals behind us and slavers in front of us, we did the only thing we could that would ensure our survival. We rested.
Vaughan gave us the order of the watch and instructed us to wake the next person when we absolutely couldn’t stay awake anymore.
After hours of wandering through the dark and a nighttime of escaping cannibals, we all turned out to be a little bit sleepy. Not even the fear of what we had left to face could conjure up enough adrenaline to keep my eyes open.
Our watch shifts were done in pairs and quickly. We went through three cycles until our bodies finally felt rested enough to handle a couple hours at a time.
We stayed in the shade as much as we could and ignored the other dangers to our health and survival. Sleep came first, even my body could agree to that.
When I awoke the third time, my wrists throbbed where the leather bonds cut them. I looked down, only to flinch in disgust. They were badly cut and bloodied. The flesh at the base of my hands had swelled and bloated beneath the crimson streaks. I pulled off the leather strap, still attached to my left wrist, and chucked it into the copper mine.
Infection, I thought. I was definitely going to get an infection. The back of my head still throbbed and my ribs ached. My muscles felt stretched and brittle, like dried out rubber bands. I needed a bath.
And I was so hungry I had stopped feeling hungry. Instead, a permanent nausea took up residence in my stomach and refused to let me think about anything else.
I had the most ridiculous thought of wanting to go home.
But where was home? And even if I got all the way back there, I knew there would be nothing left for me. There was no such thing as comfort anymore. I wouldn’t be able to lock myself in my bedroom and dive under my covers.
This was my life. This, for better or worse, was home.
After every one had gotten up and proved that they could still move around, Vaughan decided we should leave.
“We can’t go backward,” he declared.
Was that a metaphor for my life?
We climbed out of the copper mine. It took some time since there was no straight way up. We exited beneath the shadow of the watchtower. A paved parking lot stretched out beneath us and a highway snaked through the Mexican wilderness.
“Can you help us stay away from towns?” Vaughan asked Adela.
Her face scrunched as she prepared to deliver bad news, “I think that would be worse.”
“I don’t trust you,” Vaughan told her casually. We all knew that he didn’t, but apparently that was a surprise to her. Her pretty face blanched and she waited for his edict, for what that meant for her life. “Give me a reason to trust you. Keep us safe.”
Some understanding returned color to her complexion, but determination finished the job. “Okay,” she agreed quickly. “I will show you the safest way.”
We made our way across the parking lot and to the side of the highway. Adela chatted with Vaughan at the front of the line while we all watched her carefully.
Page’s arm slipped through mine and she admitted, “I like her.”
“Adela?” I whispered, smiling down at her. When she nodded, I admitted, “Me, too.”
“But you don’t trust her either?” Page pressed.
“No, I can’t. And you shouldn’t either. Not until we know more about her.”
Page nodded slowly. “Okay,” she said.
“Just stay close to your brothers and Haley, Tyler and me.” I slid my arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to my side. “You’ll be safe that way.”
She blinked up at me, squinting against the sun, “What about Miller?”
I tucked my chin down and looked over at him. He had more energy than most of us, but I chalked that up to his age. He walked at the edge of our group, constantly looking over his shoulder or over at Page and me or at his sister. No one place could hold his attention for very long.
“Just your brothers for now.”
“Why not-”
“Page,” I whispered more sternly. “Give Miller a little bit of space for now. Please.”
r /> She swallowed thickly, “Fine.”
“Thank you.” I knew it took a lot for her to listen to me and even more to obey. She and Miller had a special bond and I knew she was part of the reason he was still able to keep it together. But after the things he had said in the tunnel… after confessing some of his secret truths… I just couldn’t let her be alone with him right now. He had some more healing to do.
My heart jumped in my chest, but I forced my mind to finish the thought. Miller wasn’t safe. His confession had left me cold and feeling unsafe. He was only a child right now, but he would grow into something more.
He could become a man like the Parkers, who had taken over raising him.
Or he could become confused like Kane.
Or he could become his father.
As much as I loved Kane, only one of those options was acceptable to me.
I decided to hold off on sharing anything with Hendrix or Vaughan though. I could be overreacting. I had certainly been murderous enough by the time we stumbled out of there. It had been in the middle of a very terrifying moment. Maybe they were just words or immature fears that he had been trying to grapple with.
I held Page closer to my side. I wouldn’t share my concern just yet, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t do everything I could to protect Page, to protect all of us.
Adela had started to explain some of her territory. It was run by a man named Raphael. Her people wore green armbands, the same as the Zombies that had chased us into the mine. Hers was one of the bigger territories, stretched out over multiple towns. Communication was awful between villages, but Raphael still managed to keep their allegiance.
Most of that was due to his Zombie army. As we had seen, the Feeders down this way were more advanced. Adela shared that they had been taught to track. They could recognize their enemy by colors and their prey by sight.
“How?” Vaughan demanded. “How do they control them?”
“They feed them,” Adela had said. “They feed them humans.”
I thought back to the Feeders we had known, how they constantly hunted, constantly searched for their next meal. I pictured the starved Zombies in the halls of that school. Matthias had caged them like Diego, and probably like Raphael, but he had not fed them. He had not worked for their allegiance.
“And the slaves?” Hendrix asked her.
“Slaves are bought and sold in my home village. There is an auction every week. Wealthy men come to bid. There are not free men any more. Only slaves and slave owners.”
“How is wealth determined?” I asked, but I was pretty sure I already knew.
“By the number of slaves you own or your resources. A water source on your land is a sought-after asset or maybe livestock or the number of Dead that you keep. Raphael is the… general. There are six other land owners in his territory. Each of them has Dead to fight for them. Each of them has numerous slaves.”
“Where do they find the people to feed their Dead?” Vaughan asked, using Adela’s terminology.
“The slaves,” she explained.
“Raphael is more powerful than Diego?” I asked, anxious to put that particular monster far behind me.
She shook her head quickly, “No. No, not more powerful. Raphael has only six men that he can use. Diego has… what is the word… armies, armies of men. And he also has Dead. Raphael has many dead, but only six men. The rest of his territory consists of slaves.”
“How can he buy and trade slaves with only six men?” King asked. I hadn’t thought of that question, but now I was curious.
“All territory leaders come to trade,” she told us. “There is always peace at the auction.” When she said “peace” her hand flattened in front of her and tipped side to side as if indicating that peace was a relative term in that context.
I could only imagine.
“How are you not a slave?” Harrison asked with demanding skepticism in his harsh voice.
She turned to look at him, meeting his eyes with a lifted chin and squared shoulders. “I was a slave. Until two days ago.”
I swallowed around a sudden lump in my throat. Oh.
She whirled back around and focused on picking her way over the uneven terrain. We were following the road, but staying away from it.
“Diego bought me directly from Raphael,” she told us. “I cost him much.”
King barked out a laugh. “Who do you think we can take from Raphael?”
“What are you talking about?” Vaughan demanded, impatient with his brother’s morbid sense of humor.
King glanced at all of us. “We took Matthias’s kids and Diego’s prized slave. If we really want to keep up our record of pissing off every evil dictator between here and Canada, we’re going to need to steal something very valuable of his and make sure he knows it was us.”
“Shit,” Vaughan groaned, running a hand over his face.
We looked at Adela with a new light now. We could understand her plight, her desperation to get free from something as evil as Diego. I didn’t know Raphael, but I imagined he was as bad as all of the others.
Especially if he fed humans to Zombies.
“Adela, do you know anything about further south?” I asked while holding my breath. “Is everything as bad as here?”
She glanced over her shoulder at me. “Southern Mexico? Or Guatemala? Donde?”
“Farther. Peru? Or Colombia?”
She shook her head, “I do not know. I have not seen anyone from those regions in many years.”
I thought I would feel deflated after that, but my hope stayed the same. She hadn’t offered good news, but she hadn’t given me bad news either. Besides, it was yet to be seen if we would live through Mexico.
“Look,” she exclaimed all of a sudden. She ran over to a group of cacti and grinned at us. “Look at these!”
We did. They didn’t stand out as special to any of us.
“What are they?” Harrison asked blankly.
“Dinner,” she grinned. “This is dinner.”
My stomach growled as if on cue. “You can eat that?”
“Well, not exactly like this. But if we…” she trailed off and searched the landscape.
I took the moment to check out why these prickly plants were any different than the others we’d been passing for miles. They were shorter than the ones we walked by yesterday and their heads were rounded, almost flat. If the cacti yesterday were the supermodels of the desert, these were their short, funny fat friends. These were the ones with personalities.
“We need a…” Adela made a sawing motion with her hands. “We need to cut the tops off.”
We patted our pockets as if expecting to find the knives that we had kept close until recently. Then we too searched the ground as if something might pop up from the ground.
“We cannot grab them,” Adela went on. “They will hurt us.”
Obviously. “What about a stick or something? How soft are they?”
Adela narrowed her eyes, “No… maybe?”
“We don’t have a choice,” Vaughan sighed. “How can you turn this into food?”
“We…” Adela was very fluent in English, but she did not have all of the words. That much was clear when she started pretending to punch at a cactus. “We do this to the middle. It is like agua for us and also food.”
I tilted my head and looked at the cacti in a new light. Was there meat on the inside? We could apparently mash it up to hydrate and feed us? That was worth exploring.
We stayed there until twilight, working on getting the top of the cacti without seriously injuring ourselves.
The first part of the day was spent looking for tools that had potential. We tried a long piece of wood, but it wasn’t nearly strong enough to saw through the thick cactus. Next, we tried throwing things at the group of them.
That also didn’t work. Finally, Miller came back with a large, round, flat rock. The edges weren’t very sharp, but it was big enough that we could hack away at the plants without stabbin
g our hands with the prickles.
Hendrix and Vaughan spent some time trying to sharpen one side of the flat rock. Then we took turns chopping at the cacti.
We were surprised when it actually worked.
By the second cactus, we learned to chop off the prickles first, at least on the top part, and then remove the part we planned to eat. This made it easy to handle after it had been removed.
We found other rocks to mash the middle and attempted to polish them on the insides of our shirts before we touched them to our food. Eventually we resigned ourselves to the fact that this cactus was going to taste a bit like dirt.
While the boys finished chopping the rest of the cacti, Tyler, Adela and I got to work on pounding the middle to a pulp. It was very physical work and not as easy as I expected it to be. My arms ached and my core muscles felt like I’d pushed them through a serious Pilates workout. Sweat dripped down the back of my neck and dotted my forehead.
The only thing that kept me motivated was the promise that I could eat something if I kept at it.
By the time we sat down in a circle to share our makeshift bowls of cactus soup, all of us were more exhausted than ever.
We sat there silently, waiting for more instruction. Should we just dig in? Could someone pass the salt?
Vaughan grinned at us, “Dinner is served.”
I leaned toward Page, my cactus sharing buddy, and nudged her with my elbow, “You first.”
“Nuh-uh.”
I dove in to set a good example and eventually convinced Page to join me. I didn’t think about the taste too much. I didn’t need to. Once the first bite of something nourishing hit my stomach, I couldn’t eat it fast enough. It was by far, one of the best things I had ever eaten, simply because I knew I wouldn’t die of starvation today.
Tomorrow was a different story, but hopefully our path was paved with edible cacti.
The mood in our group relaxed some. We had survived cannibals, which was a new feat for our little group. And we had survived another day. We even shared a meal together. My throat felt less likely to burst into flames and my head had cleared some. The headache had dissipated with food and hydration and time lapsing from when I had the back of it bashed in.