Torn Apart (17 page)

“
Rest,” the old man said. “Tomorrow
we will reach the docks.”

There wasn’t much else to do so we slept. Not surprisingly, we were
both asleep within minutes. We were both sleep deprived and we
hadn’t slept in an actual bed since we spent the night in the
farmhouse.

It was heaven.

But unfortunately, I did not get to sleep for
long. Sometime during the night, the noise of the boat’s engine
woke me up. The engine was working overtime.

A few minutes later, I thought I could hear two
men speaking.

Two men.

Who?

Was it Ben?

I sat up and moved over to the door. I reached
out for the handle. It did not turn. The door was locked. I held my
breath. Alarm bells began to ring inside my head. Why did he lock
the door? What the hell was going on? As far as I was concerned,
this could only mean one thing.

We were prisoners.

I clenched my fists.

I wanted to punch through the door. I wanted to
walk up there and demand an explanation.

“
This can’t be happening,” I
whispered. “Not again. Not now.”

I moved over to Maria. “Psst.
Maria.”

No response. I shook her arm. “Wake
up.”

She blinked her eyes open. “Huh? What’s going
on?”

“
We’re trapped. The son of a bitch
has locked us in here.”

She was still half asleep, still groggy. “Maybe
he did it as a precaution. Remember what he said about the
soldiers? And the General?”

“
No. This is bad news. Being locked
up means we’re prisoners.” I walked back over to the door. “Come
over here. Listen. There are two men talking. It’s the old man and
someone else.”

“
Is it Ben?” she asked.

“
I don’t think so.”

We put our ears up against the door and
listened.

“
Can you hear them?” I
asked.

“
Yeah. I hear them.”

Two men. They were saying awful, violent
things. Things about the General. More rumors.

“
We are running low on food,” the
old man said. “Running low on potentials.”

“
We can use the brunette, but the
blonde is too valuable. She needs to be secured. The General will
have to let us back into his circle now. He will let us
live.”

The voices trailed off. We could no longer hear
them.

Suddenly the boat accelerated. The engine
roared. We were nearly thrown off our feet. The boat was now moving
very fast.

“
What the hell are they talking
about?” Maria asked.

“
I don’t know,” I said. “They said
they wanted to hand you over to the General.”

“
I’m not entirely sure I want to be
handed over to the General,” Maria said. “It sounds like he’s lost
his goddamn mind. There’s no guarantee that he even wants to make
an anti-virus.”

Maria was right. If we delivered her to the
General, what’s stopping him from killing her like he’s killed
everyone else? Did he even want to make an anti-virus? Did he want
to stop the plague? Or had he lost his mind? Was he too far
gone?

I had a feeling it was the latter.

The engine of the boat continued working over
time. It was loud.

“
You’re right,” Maria said. “We have
to get out of here.”

“
And then what? Swim for
it?”

“
I don’t know. Maybe we take over
the boat. Mutiny, so to speak.”

“
To do that, we’ll have to take
those men as prisoners. Or kill them.”

“
First things first,” she said. “We
need to get out of this room. And then we need to get
Ben.”

I looked around the room for something we could
use to break out with. Maria tried the handle. When she realized it
was locked, she tried pushing the door, then she barged it with her
good shoulder a couple of times. But the door was solid. It didn’t
budge.

I picked up a fire hydrant off the far wall.
“What about this? We could use it to smash the lock.”

“
What if they hear?”

“
If they hear us, they’ll come
looking and we’ll have to get the jump on them somehow. Maybe we
could use this to hit them in the head? But we can’t stay in here.
Staying in this room is a dead end.”

“
OK,” she said. “Do it.”

I used the fire hydrant to smash the lock,
using it as a sort of battering ram. I busted the lock and smashed
the door open. It made an incredible noise. We slowly stepped out
into the corridor. We waited for a few minutes to see if anyone
came to investigate. But no one did. The noise of the engine
must’ve drowned out any noise we were making.

There were four rooms below deck. There was one
door directly opposite our room. And one to our left at the end of
the corridor. To the right, were the steps that led upstairs, to
the dining room and the cockpit, or driver’s cabin, or whatever the
hell it’s called. There was another door, another room behind the
stairs. There was also a trap door that led down, maybe to the
engine room.

No sign of the old man or the man he had been
speaking with.

“
We need to find Ben,” I
whispered.

Maria nodded.

We checked the doors. The room at the end of
the corridor was unlocked. It looked like the captain’s room. It
contained a bed and a desk. I guess this is where the old man
slept.

All the other doors were locked. And there
wasn’t enough room in the corridor to use the fire hydrant to smash
the door. No room to swing. The corridor was too narrow. But Ben
had to be inside one of them, I thought.

“
We need to find a key,” I whispered
to Maria.

She nodded. Pointed up the stairs. If there
were keys, they would be up there. We both knew it. I handed the
fire hydrant to Maria so she had something to defend herself with.
We slowly made our way up the stairs. We carefully looked around
the room. I couldn’t see anyone. As far as I could tell, this part
of the boat was deserted.

The dining room table was empty.

In the kitchen area there was a large pot on
the stove. The old man was cooking something. Steam rose from the
pot, filling the room.

We crouched in the dining area and weighed up
our options.

Another set of stairs led up to another level.
The driver’s cabin. The bridge.

The boat slowly turned.

I pointed up the stairs. “Someone is up there,
steering the boat,” I whispered.

“
Maybe they are both up there,”
Maria said.

This gave us some time to look for the keys. We
searched the benches in the dining room, and all of the
cupboards.

We found nothing.

I moved to the rear of the boat. Maria’s NBC
suit was no longer hanging up. It was gone. I saw the large fishing
hook, resting on top of the industrial sized ice box.

A weapon.

From my position on the rear of the boat I
could see up to the bridge. The windows were dark and grimy.
Covered in dirt and maybe salt. I could just make out the shadow of
a man. Odds are, the keys to the rooms were up there. The old man
probably had them on him.

This was no good.

I returned my attention to the large fishing
hook. At the very least, we might be able to use the hook to break
open the locked doors, I thought.

I tapped Maria on the shoulder and pointed over
to the hook.

She nodded.

I stayed low and crawled over to the ice box. I
grabbed the hook. I was about to take it back to Maria so we could
briefly discuss whether we should attack the old man, or if we
should use the hook to break into the rooms. But then I noticed
that the padlock on the freezer box was unlocked.

I don’t know what came over me. But I couldn’t
resist.

Something the man had said earlier, “We could
use the brunette.”

Use? What did he mean?

I needed to know for sure.

I needed to know.

I opened the box.

I held my hand up to my mouth and held my
breath.

I had to look away. And I had only looked for a
split second, but what I saw would be forever burned into my
memory.

I saw arms.

And legs.

Human.

Chunks of meat.

I ran back to Maria, hunched over. I felt
dizzy. Nauseas.

She looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “We need to get Ben first. And
then we need to kill these guys.”

“
What?”

“
I’m serious. It’s us or them.
They’re messed up. They’re eating people. We need to kill them.
They were talking about food before. They were talking about eating
us. Well, eating me.”

“
Eating us? Like
cannibals?”

“
Yeah. This is messed
up.”

Maria was shaking her head. She didn’t believe
me.

I dragged her down the stairs, back below
deck.

I jammed the hook in the door of the room that
was directly opposite our room. I used the hook like a crowbar and
pried the door open.

The room was empty.

A narrow bunk bed.

A desk.

A computer.

We moved over to the desk.

It was covered in paper.

Some of the pages were bounded
together.

The cover page read:

‘
Swarming Behavior of
Infected’…

Another one titled:

‘
Hunting techniques/behavior of
nano-virus’…

More papers titled:

‘
Mutations of Oz virus and
Accelerated Growth’…

‘
Project Salvation’…

All of them had been written by Doctor Michael
Hunter.

“
What does this mean?” Maria
asked.

“
I don’t know. Maybe this guy likes
to keep himself informed.”

We left the papers and moved to the
next room. We pried it open with the fishing hook.
We finally found Ben.

He was lying down on a bed. He was hooked up to
an intravenous thing. A bag of blood was hanging from a hook. Lying
next to Ben was another man. He was unconscious. He had no legs.
They had been amputated above the knee, about mid-thigh. He had no
arms. They had also been amputated. Above the elbow, close to the
shoulder. He was the source of the blood transfusion. He was giving
life to Ben.

I dropped the hook and ran over to
Ben.
I felt his forehead and checked his
pulse. He was alive.

He slowly opened his eyes. He already knew we
were in trouble. “We need to get out of here,” he
whispered.

Yeah. He already knew what was going on. They
had given him a blood transfusion, not because it was the right
thing to do, but because it was better for his muscles. For his
meat.

They wanted to keep him fresh.

If I had to guess, I’d say this is why they had
kept this poor man alive. They had cut his legs off. And his arms.
But they had kept him alive.

Ben stood, ripped the intravenous tubes out of
his arm, blood spurted onto the floor. He pushed me
aside.

“
Hey we need to be quiet,” I said.
“Take it easy.”

But then I turned around and saw why Ben was so
agitated.

Standing in the doorway with a gun pointed
directly at Maria’s head, was a man who I’d never thought I’d ever
see again.

A man with one hand.

A man we left for dead in the morgue of North
Sydney hospital.

Doctor Hunter.

Doctor Michael Hunter.

“
You cannot leave,” he said. “No one
leaves the boat.”

Maria and I were marched up the stairs at gun point. Ben was
handcuffed and locked inside the captain’s room. For a second I
thought Doctor Hunter was going to shoot him and throw him
overboard or something. But then I realized they wouldn’t do that.
It would be a waste of food.

We were led to the back of the boat.

The engines were fired up. It sounded like they
were struggling. And then I noticed why. The Boat was pointed up
stream. It was fighting the current.

Water was rushing past the boat, towards a
massive waterfall.

The old man pointed to the waterfall. “The
water is rushing. It is moving fast. If you try and swim, you will
drown. If you don’t drown, you will go over the falls. Your bones
will be crushed. And then you will die.”

The old man still had the bottle of rum in one
hand. A gun in the other. The bottle of rum was nearly empty. He
must’ve been drinking all night.