The Wicked We Have Done (15 page)

“Stella burned alive with nothing touching her. All of the other executed inmates were killed by something, at least the ones that we’ve witnessed.”

“But we’ve only witnessed two others,” Tanner argues.

“Who’s to say that Blaise’s death wasn’t a glitch too?”

“That’s right,” Casey says. “Evalyn and I saw a flash the first night we were here. What if we were close to Blaise?”

My chest tightens. My hands shake so badly that they keep slipping off my knees. When I stand up straight, I rest my head on Casey’s chest.

This is me overreacting. Glitches that kill people can’t be possible in here. This is a certified death penalty. It’s been tested. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t accurate, right?

“Maybe we’re thinking too much into this,” Casey suggests. “We should get out of here.”

“Where?” I step away from him. “Where could we possibly go and not run into more bullshit?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know what to fucking do. I want to be safe. I want you to be safe, and no matter what, that will never happen. Not in here!” His brow scrunches up like he’s ready to cry, and then he sits on the log with Tanner, burying his face in his hands. “I’m sorry.”

There’s enough of a calm break for me to notice the shovel is gone.

The shovel is gone.

We’re in a cove in the woods, a shelter where trees curl in on us and the light shines through the leaves, sending a sparkling assortment of shapes across the ground. It’s beautiful, morbidly beautiful. I’m wondering what would happen if I lie down here and fall asleep.

If I gave up.

Would I be dragged from my slumber like Valerie was from camp? Would the trees surrounding me unfold like petals and place me face-to-face with Nick? Would the ground beneath me collapse and send me plummeting back into the cave?

“Sleep,” I say. “Let’s sleep here.”

Casey’s eyes flutter shut in defeat.

“There is nothing we can do to stop it. No place to run. And it’s nice here.”

“You’re delusional,” Casey remarks.

“You know she’s right,” Tanner says.

Casey huffs. “Fine, but we’re building a fire. And I’m eating your food.”

Tanner manages a grin before he falls back into thought.

“I’ll help find firewood,” I offer.

Casey stands and I take his hand. “We’ll go together.”

“I’m not leaving you until I’m dead,” I say, and I mean it.

“Please,” he begs. “You aren’t dying before me. I won’t let it happen.”

He can’t make that promise, not here, but I don’t say anything. With his determination, it would be pointless.

My fingers laced in his, we head out together, finding wood to build a decent fire. Our lighters were some of the things we managed to salvage from the wreck of camp. I build a fire as Casey and Tanner go through the food left over in Tanner’s bag and decide on a meal of canned applesauce and sardines. When we finish, the breeze picks up and Casey slides behind me, his legs resting on my hips, arms slinking around my stomach.

I soak in the luxury of his warmth. Tanner watches us closely.

“You were with Casey when he had his test—when he saw his father the first time,” he muses.

“Yes,” I say.

“Were you emotionally affected by it?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, but to what degree?”

I think for a moment. I acted out because I cared for Casey. I killed again for him, even though it was a man who should have already been dead. “Very much so.”

“Do you think you had the same emotional connection during his test as you did with your own test? Your own crime?”

“I’m not sure.” The question is too difficult, and I’m exhausted.

“Were the emotions you felt reminiscent of your own crime?”

Casey squeezes me gently. The wood crackles and shoots orange sparks into the twilight.

“Possibly.”

“Interesting,” he says.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“No, there’s something here,” I challenge. “What are you thinking about?”

Seamlessly he changes the subject. “Did you read through our entire contract? The one we had to sign before we entered the prison?”

“I skimmed it.” I memorized it.

“Same,” Casey says.

“Why?” I ask.

“There’s a clause stating that if the Compass Room glitches, all remaining candidates would be removed from the premises and be retried using whatever accurate information that had been gathered by the CR.”

“I remember,” I say. “So, are you suggesting that the Compass Room can’t be malfunctioning because we haven’t been removed yet?”

“Unless the engineers are still trying to determine whether or not the CR
is
malfunctioning, like we are.”

“Which means that it might only be a matter of time before this Room is shut down.”

I muse on the possibilities of what we’ve uncovered. A couple of weeks ago, the thought of a retrial was worse than the thought of death.

Casey kisses me, warm lips against the hollow above my collarbone.

I can’t say that I still feel the same way.

Our Time Outside Was Monitored.

Just like everything we did when we weren’t in our cells. The system could only afford to give us an hour a week. No one was comfortable allowing us more time in the sun, even with the fences and bars and alarms that separated us from the outside world. They never wanted us in groups of more than fifteen to keep the chaos at a minimum. The mess hall was enough.

A week before I was sent to the Compass Room, I spent my time lying on the concrete. The basketball from the near court pinged against the ground with every bounce, the asphalt beneath my head quaking.

I was in nirvana—a moment where I could have all the heat and the sun beating down on me and be so utterly safe, even if some other inmate took advantage of my vulnerable position and decided they wanted to beat the shit out of me. I was safe because I chose to be. This would be the last moment I could force myself away from fear, away from the knowing that I was going to die very soon.

I couldn’t keep my head clear for long. I had trained myself in this prison to obsess over Nick any time my mind wasn’t consumed with other thoughts. So up he popped, my entire Nick database, which was nothing more than a name and the sparse moments I had spent with him.

I obsessed about how little I knew of him—if his online absence was purposeful because he’d been planning an epic crime his whole life, and the person he’d pin his crime on would forever be doomed if there was nothing to solidify how truly fucked up he was.

No online records, no therapy visits, no prescription drugs. Just a meek mother who claimed her son had always been “a bit off.”

A bit off
proved nothing.

All I had was Liam’s and Nick’s conversation on chaos theory. My mind continued to return to it, picking apart everything within that night as if there were some secret hiding in my memory I could decode.

Chaos theory simply noted the existence of disorder within an obedient system. It justified Nick’s innate hunger to cause destruction. Why no one—his mother, a teacher, a friend, a school counselor—sensed his hunger prior to his crime, I’d never know. And this aspect was simply part of the chaos.

I was part of the chaos too. The Compass Room would do its best to make sense of my criminal urges, and if it couldn’t, then the law would do what it needed to do.

It would permanently eliminate the disorder.

11

In the morning, the fire has gone out, and I’m so cold that every joint in my body is stiff. Smoke rises from the coals, giving off some heat. It’s my back that’s freezing—my back, where Casey should be.

Casey.

With a groan, I turn over. He’s gone. Tanner sleeps on the other side of the fire pit, hood up and drawstrings cinched tight.

He probably went to pee.

So I wait, first trying to go back to sleep, but the ache of worry is too much and I can’t nod off. Minutes pass.

He got lost coming back. That’s all.

I curse under my breath. Standing, I brush off my pants. The trees are still—not even a breeze disturbs the leaves. I study the woods closely in hopes of seeing movement, or hearing footsteps.

Nothing.

Tucking my hair into my sweatshirt, I pull up my hood and start to walk.

I can ignore almost any nagging feeling long enough to assess the problem, but this time it’s dizzying, a cold prick of sweat washing over my back.

“Please,” I whisper with every step. “Please, please, please.”

Farther from camp I venture. Tanner may wake up without either of us there, or Casey may come back and I’ll still be out searching for him. But my feet don’t stop moving.

My mind flashes to the noose that dragged Valerie away from camp. What if something similar happened to him, and I was out cold?

I can’t think like that. I can’t.

A rapid breeze picks up, washing over me. It ripples through the canopies, leaves turning up their discolored underbellies.

I listen closely as the wind dissipates and a faint male voice arises, musical and calm.

A voice that doesn’t belong to Casey.

My palms ache as fingernails dig into my skin, my heart pounding so furiously that it’s making me nauseous.

Slowly, I take a step toward the opening in the rock. And another. The voice warps until it resembles something familiar, and I recognize it. I recognize that I distrust it.

Gordon.

He says my name. “I see you.”

This is so very wrong.

“Evalyn,” he sings. “Come see what I have found.”

I could run. I
could
run, but my gut tells me the stakes are too high. Like an instinct—an intuition—more overwhelming than I’ve ever felt before.

I have to go into that cave.

I inhale, overwhelmed by the rank stench of death. A light ignites, dying to a soft yellow glow. The light of a fire—of a lamp—broken by his silhouette.

“Evalyn. Come see my prize.”

I can see his prize already, which is why I step into the cave. I don’t have any other choice.

The light isn’t enough to challenge the darkness, the blood splashed over the walls, the mangled, dismembered corpses. I remember now, his crime, in perfect detail. The media called it a cult, even though that’s not really what it was. Just a bunch of psychopaths finding each other over the Internet, giving themselves a platform for living out their desires, their fetishes.

The news called them Misery Eight. So melodramatic, but that’s what fear creates. A monster with a big name. They kidnapped teens and took them to abandoned buildings, where they tortured them—bled them, until their souls gave away and their mutilated corpses were thrown in the river.

DNA on a found body was what convicted Gordon. A boy whose crime wasn’t out of passion, but sickness.

And I know why he’s lured me into his lair, with illusions of corpses strung from the ceiling, their stench proving they
must
be real. A lair with empty meat hooks draped through the air like chandeliers. Medieval weapons line the walls.

His prize is Casey.

Wrangled by chains, Casey slouches in the corner of the cave, unconscious. I bite down on my lip to stifle my scream. I won’t give Gordon the pleasure of seeing me terrified.

“What do you want?” I try to order it, but the voice escaping me is weak and petrified.

“Hmm . . .” He pats the blade in his hand against his thigh. “That’s a great question.”

“You know they’re monitoring our every move, right? Knocking a boy out and holding him captive doesn’t necessarily keep your record spotless.”

He chuckles darkly. “Oh, I didn’t knock him out. The Compass Room did it for me. Wasn’t that nice of it?”

Why isn’t he dead yet?

He’s a kid—barely bigger than Tanner. But his eyes are old, like he’s seen too much, like he’s carried an exhausting burden. Yet somehow they dance with the light of an excited schoolchild, desperate to play a game.

He motions to the hanging corpses above. “And then it created this lovely display for me to perform my work.”

Work.
My stomach lurches.

“You know this is a test, right?” I ask with a hint of nonchalance. As if I really don’t care what he’s planning. “They’re trying to see if you’re evil, and you’re stupidly falling right into their trap. You’re going to die.”

He laughs. “Oh, Evalyn. I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t think I’d last this long. And waiting patiently has never been a strong suit of mine.”

He begins to pace, meandering back and forth in front of Casey, whose head has rolled to the side. Beneath the chains that bind him, I can’t even tell if he’s breathing.

“I thought the end was near when I ran into an injured raccoon with a chain around its neck. I hadn’t seen any animals until that point, and being that a chain is my signature”—he reaches up and flicks one of the chains dangling from the ceiling—“I knew I had come to my test. I didn’t start out with people, you know.”

I swallow the bile rising in my throat.

“I was sad to uncover that the raccoon was not my test, even after I dismembered it. But finally,
finally
,
after all these shitty nights on the ground, all of this god-awful food, it has come for me, and I’ve got to tell you, they’ve done a wonderful job.”

Something cold clamps around my wrists and tugs me backward. I stumble right into the cave wall, bound to stone.

“Amazing,” he says dreamily.

I struggle against the chains, but they only squeeze the air from me, cutting my flesh.

He isn’t afraid of death. He isn’t afraid of anything.

“What do you want?” I cry, hoping this is some sort of disgusting joke. At the sound of my voice, Casey stirs and moans.

“I want to have my last bit of fun before this is all over.” Gordon makes a fist around the handle of the blade.

“You’re playing into exactly what they need to kill you.”

“No, Evalyn, they already have what they need to kill me.” He pushes his forefinger into his temple. “Right here.”

“So, that’s it, then,” my voice trembles, eyes glued to the blade he waves back and forth with every flick of his wrist. “You have no desire to redeem yourself.”

“Evalyn?” Casey moans.

“Redeem myself! Oh, you really have no idea.” He strides to Casey and stands behind him. Reaching down, he cups Casey’s jaw with one hand. Casey tries to squirm away, but Gordon holds him still, cutting into his cheek.

Drawing blood.

I try not to react. So does Casey. My mouth opens, a scream lodged in my throat. Casey cringes, but he doesn’t give Gordon the satisfaction of so much as a groan.

Gordon’s psychotic smile widens. “Oh, now, what is this? A friendship—or something more? Two felons in love. I hope he’s pulling out. Your kids will have all
sorts
of fucked-up genes.”

“You don’t have to do this,” I whisper.

“
You
don’t get it. Cute little college girl, good grades, friends. A girl who wound up in the wrong situation. I saw your prime-time special. You couldn’t pull off a stunt like that. Look at you.” He shakes his head and drags the knife, nicking Casey’s jaw. Blood streams down his neck. “People like me don’t wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were born getting off on
this
.”

He clenches the knife, driving it toward Casey’s neck.

“
Stop!
”

And then he does. He stops, inches away from Casey’s jugular, and shoots me a wicked grin. “So there
is
something here. This adds an interesting twist to our game.”

Casey’s eyes hold defeat, and then terror as Gordon shifts, moving toward me.

“Don’t you fucking touch her,” Casey warns, but his voice is stiff, groggy. Pathetic instead of threatening.

The metal binding me tightens. Gordon stands before me, lacing his fingers through my hair.

What if the Compass Room lets him kill me?

Prisoners die in jail, but this place is different. Erity didn’t kill Jace. The engineers have a way of stopping him.

They’re watching. They have to be watching.

I think of the chains anchoring me to the ground, chains that have taken on a life of their own.

Maybe I failed, and Gordon is supposed to kill me.

He rests the point of his blade on my lower lip. “Sometimes, with the girls, I force it in this way first. It’s sexier.”

“Motherfucker,” Casey growls.

I clench my teeth together as hard as I can when he tries to push it in. He clucks his tongue. “You know, the difficult ones are the most fun. Once you break their jaws, the knives slide in just fine.”

Anger bubbles in my stomach. I’m not going to play the victim. I’m not going to die afraid. I dare to speak, even with his knife on my lips. “Go ahead and try.”

He drags the knife down until I can feel the sharp point at the hollow of my throat. “How about right here, and your boyfriend can watch you choke to death on your own blood?”

Casey thrashes relentlessly.

Behind Gordon, someone tilts their head into the cave entrance. I try my damnedest not to react.

Tanner.

“Go screw yourself.” I keep my gaze trained on Gordon, but out of my peripheral vision, Tanner tiptoes into the cave and picks a knife up off the ground.

“Fine, then,” Gordon says, increasing the pressure of the blade at my throat.

I can feel every layer of skin ripping apart, feel the warmth dribble down my collarbone. Casey screams my name and the cave spins around me. I sense every individual bead of sweat that breaks through the skin on the back of my neck, my forehead.

Tanner races forward and plunges the knife into Gordon’s back. Gordon howls, dropping his blade.

And then, before Gordon even knows what’s happening, Tanner picks up a metal bar that’s half the size of him, heaves it through the air, and strikes Gordon on the head.

Gordon crumples to the ground, and the chains imprisoning me give way.

When Casey’s free, he crawls over to me and wraps me in his arms. I sit with him until I’ve regained composure. When I can stand, I walk over to Tanner, brave little Tanner, and fling myself around him.

“You idiot,” I sob.

He clutches my shirt, shivering. “I d-don’t like bullies.”

I laugh for a sliver of a moment before I burst into another fit of tears.

Casey hunches down by Gordon. He removes the hilt from Gordon’s shoulder with ease. The end is dissolved. Casey shakes his head. “Maybe we can’t kill each other, no matter how fucked up the other may be.”

I cross my arms. “Shame.”

“I could snap his neck,” Casey suggests. He may be trying to be funny, but there’s no humor in his voice.

I shake my head and look around, like I’ll suddenly see cameras that the engineers are observing us through. I don’t, though, of course. “Don’t risk your well-being for this pathetic piece of shit.”

***

We roll Gordon down a ravine.

It’s humorous and sadistic—the least we can do. He’ll be disoriented when he wakes up.
If
he wakes up.

I can only hope.

I wonder if my hateful thoughts toward him are dooming me. I don’t know what anyone would expect, though, really.

We decide it’s best to head to the only part of the prison that we haven’t traveled through—north of the lodge. At this point, we can only wander and do our best to search for food.

“Bastard didn’t get what he deserved,” Casey spits. He’s been picking blood out of his hair since we started walking. The cuts Gordon gave both of us were only surface, but on our faces and necks, they bled like crazy.

Casey hangs on to the thought of Gordon with every fiber of his being as we walk through a meadow on the brink of the groves that surround the lodge.

“He
is
sick.” I know Tanner’s not trying to validate Gordon, just attempting to remind us that he’s not all there, and probably has never been all there.

“We’re all sick,” Casey argues.

“No, Casey. He’s really sick,” Tanner says. “Does that mean that he deserves to die?”

“Yes,” Casey says.

I cringe. Casey and I committed our unthinkable crimes because we were so desperately in love with people in our lives. We felt as though we had no choice. But Gordon—maybe he was immune to the feeling of love. Maybe torturing people was the only way he could feel anything.

Doesn’t he deserve to die?

Nick deserved to die. He harbored the same twisted fetish, the same desire to create pain.

Tanner shakes his head, but drops it because there’s something up ahead. Laughter trickles through the air. Around the bend, two girls appear. They walk with a bounce in their steps, full packs on their backs.

Jace and Valerie.