Chapter 45 / On The Property | Tales of Desolation

“What the hell did you do?”“One of them tried to climb the fence and got…”“You chased them into the electric fence? Were you shooting at them, too?”“We thought they were Hunters…”“They’re children!”

Everything was blurry when I first woke up. At least the bag was off my head. My wrists were tied. No. Not tied. Bandaged. So were some small cuts on my legs. I was on a cot in a small room. There was light coming through a broken window. The kid was asleep on a cot next to me. A man and a woman were arguing outside.

“There was a Hunter on the property,” the man said, “not just driving circles around us like they’ve been doing for the past…”The woman laughed. “And so you thought those two malnourished kids were with him? You thought they were, what, throwing their bodies on the fence to short it out? The Hunters are using kamikaze children now?”“You sit in here and laugh, but we’re out there everyday with those fuckers taking potshots at us from the road.”The woman stopped laughing. Her voice was cold. “Each one of us has a job to do.”“You want gas to feed the generator so bad, maybe you should try going out with us. You wouldn’t last one fucking night.”

My wrists weren’t tied. My ankles weren’t tied. And the door wasn’t bolted, it was even open a crack. Idiots. I raised myself off the cot and crept to the kid’s side. I wanted to shake him and say, “Let’s go,” but I couldn’t. He was so pale and still and small.

I heard the man in the outer room leave and the woman moving around out there. My boot knife was gone, but there was a long shard of glass on the floor beneath the window. I picked it up and crept back to my cot. I clutched the shard under the thin blanket. And waited.