Tom Isbell - The Prey

WE FOUND HIS BODY on a Sunday morning. Three circling buzzards, their black silhouettes etched against a blazing blue sky, clued us in that something might be down there. Down in the gullies where the foothills gave over to desert.

At the very edge of the No Water.

We thought a possum. Perhaps even a wolf. Certainly not a kid fried like an egg, stretched out in the meager shade of a mesquite bush.

He wasn’t dead, but if we hadn’t found him when we did, he would’ve been. Maybe within the hour. Then this story never would’ve happened. There’d be nothing to write about because it all changed that late-spring morning, the day we found him dying of dehydration at the edge of the desert.

He was sandy-haired, about our age, lying spread-eagled on the ground like a giant X. Red ran back to camp to tell the officers, while Flush and I turned him over. The sun had burned his face to a crisp, cracked his lips, swollen his eyes shut. Dried sweat stains marked his black T-shirt and jeans, and, oddly, he was barefoot. Barefoot in the desert! Blisters big as quarters, caked with dirt and blood, dotted the undersides of his feet.

We poured water from our canteens into his mouth. Some of it made it to his throat; the rest dribbled down his neck, carving trails in his dust-covered face.

The camp Humvees came hurtling across the dunes. The boy stirred, his eyes opening into a squint.

“He’s alive!” Flush shouted. Master of the obvious.

He mumbled something neither of us could quite make out. I bent down, stretching my gimp leg out to the side so I could press my ear close to his mouth.

“What was that?” I asked.

I gave him another slurp of water. He tried to speak, the sounds painful to listen to. Like stepping on broken glass, all crunch and scrape.

Red jumped from the Humvee, Major Karsten right behind.

“Th-th-there,” Red said, with his tendency to stutter.

“Stand back,” Karsten said. No one didn’t obey an order from Major Karsten.

Wearing desert camouflage, he marched across the sandy terrain, his boots leaving massive footprints in the earth. He knelt by the boy’s side, picked up his right arm, and examined it. There was a thick burn mark there: a ridge of red scar tissue oozing pus. Karsten inspected it a full twenty seconds before feeling for a pulse. By then, other vehicles had arrived, disgorging brown-shirted soldiers.

“Get him to the infirmary,” Karsten commanded.

The soldiers loaded the boy onto a stretcher and slid him into the Humvee like a pan of dough going into an oven. The vehicle roared back to camp.

“Who found him?”

Major Karsten was looking right at us, his anvil-shaped face skeletal in appearance. The sun cast a deep shadow on the scar that angled from left eyebrow to chin.

“We all did,” Flush said.

“Ever seen him before?”

“No, sir.”

“Did he say anything?”

Flush was about to answer but I beat him to it. “He tried. Nothing came out.”

Karsten’s eyes settled on me. I knew that gaze. Feared that gaze.

“Nothing?” Karsten asked.

“No, sir,” I answered.

His eyes narrowed as though gauging whether I was being truthful or not. “Come see me when you get back, Book. I want a full report. You LTs return to camp,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s enough CC for one day.”

Black smoke belched from the exhaust and the remaining Humvees made doughnuts in the desert before ascending the ridge.

“I saw him first,” Flush said, his pale, round body sinking in the shifting sand as he and Red plodded up the hill ahead of me. “Why didn’t Karsten ask me for a report? Why Book?”

“Do you want to m-meet with Karsten?” Red asked.

“Well, no,” Flush conceded.

“Then shut your p-piehole.”

That’s the way it was—people talking about me as if I wasn’t even there. Sometimes I felt utterly invisible. Like if I turned around and took a suicide walk into the No Water, no one would notice. I guess that’s why I buried myself in books. There was comfort there. Security.

As the heat seeped through the soles of my shoes, a sense of dread settled in my stomach. The prospect of facing Major Karsten was enough to send a wave of nausea through me. Of all the officers in Camp Liberty, he was by far the most feared.

But it was more than that—I had lied. The boy had said something. Words I alone had heard. Words that raised the short hair on the back of my neck.

“You’ve gotta get me out of here,” he said, seconds before the first Humvee pulled up. And then, for good measure, he repeated it once more.

You’ve gotta get me out of here.

HOPE BENDS HER EAR to the cave’s entrance, her body tense.

She’s convinced she’s hearing sounds. Not the noises she’s grown accustomed to—scurrying rats, the flap of bats’ wings—but something else entirely. A rustle of leaves? Something … human.

She fears the soldiers are getting close.

“Hope,” her sister whispers.

“Shh.”

“Hope,” Faith says again.

Hope motions her sister to be quiet … and then sees the reason for her distress. Lying on black bedrock, their father’s head lolls listlessly from side to side. Hope leaves the mouth of the cave and hurries to his side. In flickering candlelight, she sees his cheeks are badly sunken, his normally robust face pale as chalk. When she places a hand on his forehead, it’s scalding.

“He’s burning up,” Hope says. She turns and sees the tears welling in her sister’s eyes. Hope points to a small pool farther back in the cave. “Go soak a rag and we’ll place it on his forehead.”

“What rag? We don’t have anything.” Faith’s voice borders on panic.

While it annoys Hope that Faith can’t solve problems on her own, she’s right about this: they don’t have a thing. The last few weeks have been a desperate scramble from one hiding place to another. They’ve been forced to leave nearly all their possessions behind, burying them in remote patches of the wilderness. They’ll have no need of them once they reach the Brown Forest and cross into the new territory.

If they reach the Brown Forest.