Page 11 of Juniper Unraveling

Burying my face in Abel’s soft curls, I cry until I’m exhausted.

* * *

“Get up! Get the fuck up!”

The shouts, coupled with hard thumps cracking against the wooden frame, snap me from sleep.

I wake to bodies scrambling down the ladder, and can feel the man behind me, nudging his chest into my back. A horrid stench leaves me wanting to gag, and not even covering my mouth can stave off the urge to throw up as the putrid aroma tugs at the back of my throat.

Pushing myself to a sitting position wakes Abel, and the whimper that escapes him tells me he’s forgotten about the events of the night. The man on the other side of him doesn’t move.

“We have to go!” The gray-haired man behind me gives another nudge, but the one beside Abel continues to sleep. I shake him, and his head lolls to the side, exposing a puddle of blood and vomit on the other side of him.

Not wanting Abel to know the man might very well be dead, I scramble to my knees and lift my brother over the vomit.

“Ugh. He sick,” he says, one hand clutching the ladder, the other squeezing his rabbit.

“He’s sleeping,” I counter, noting the pallor of the man’s skin and the telling blue of his lips. Positioning myself on the ladder, with my book tucked high into my armpit, I clutch either side of the rotted wood and allow Abel to step down between my arms.

“He puketed all over.”

“Abel, watch what you’re doing. Don’t look at him, look at the ladder.”

The moment our feet hit the ground, we’re ordered into a lineup.

Two men approach, wearing long, white lab coats and black slacks that peek from beneath. One has dark hair, the other is blond.

Harsh lines in dark-hair’s face puts him somewhere in his late forties, perhaps as old as my father was, with a Roman nose and lithe build. His hair lies perfectly slicked against his head, and his posture is that of a proud man. A respected one.

The blond is slightly younger. Not as poised as the elder, but still as clean cut and well groomed. Clean-shaven and pale-skinned, neither of them look as if they’ve been forced to survive in the Deadlands.

As unbelievable as that sounds, if it’s true, then they have no sympathy for us.

My heart beats like a drum that’s off rhythm with my breathing, and it becomes a battle of quirky movements, as I try to remain upright and as stiff as all the other men lined alongside me.

This is when they’ll discover my secret. I’ll be called out and shot dead in front of everyone.

More guards stand off to the side, with large dogs that bark and growl, baring sharp teeth.

Abel’s hand squeezes mine. The dogs frighten him, as they should, since he was nearly dragged off by a coyote infected with the Dredge when he was only a year old. My father slaughtered it in front of me, and from then on, I realized a split second could be the difference between life and death.

“What about that one?” One of the soldiers points to the balding crown of the man we left up in the bunk.

My mouth opens to answer, but my nerves are rattled, squeezing my voice box to remain silent.

“Sick, I think.” Thankfully, the man who slept beside me answers.

The soldier approaches, eyeing him up and down. “Go get ‘im.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You. Now.”

He steps out of line and climbs back up the ladder to the second level. Wearing a grimace, he hoists the dead over his shoulder, and carefully steps down each rung. The tremble in his muscles is visible, even from where I stand. A patch of brown, spattered with red, trails up the backside of his cargo, where the dead guy must’ve crapped himself in the night.

When his boots hit the concrete, he spins around, and the man dangles over his shoulder, arms reaching down his back. “Where do you want him?”

The soldier taps his stick to the ground, and the man shrugs the sick one off his shoulders, laying him on the floor, before taking his place back in line.