Roulette
Chapter Seven, "North of the Thirty-Six " by Michael Kelley
The weather was getting hotter with every passing day. We were able to find little food in the surrounding hills, and the initial burst of adrenalin that had let Rufus escape so quickly at first had vanished. He dragged behind me when we were on the move, and when we stopped to search for food; he would lay and moan in pain.
I was incredibly confused, and I had let my body get out of shape in the last fifteen years. I felt hurt, I didn’t understand what Schmidt was trying to accomplish. I also couldn’t understand how his name had briefly turned to Mitch for a while during the last few days.
Rufus’s lack of energy and willingness to talk made things even harder, and the days seemed even longer.
The experiments were a pretty bad time in my life, something I rarely talked about or even thought about. I though I had moved on fairly well, I just thought of it as bad luck and tried to forget about it. I began to wish that me and Rufus were still back at home, content with boring lives, drinking beer and hitting on ugly girls.
I was certain that Schmidt and his angry, muscular friends were still looking for us, probably knowing that we were injured and making bad time getting away from them. I was pretty sure they would kill us if they found us, and I felt like we were just biding our time. On the fourth morning in the sandy California hills, I woke and decided to let Rufus sleep while I went to go hopefully find some food and water. His broken ribs had swollen and become so uncomfortable that he looked like he was going to go crazy. I had bled the wounds last night, cutting the swollen skin around his ribs with my small pocketknife. I was surprised the men who had tied us up hadn’t taken it away, but I was thankful to have it. The swelling around his ribs went down, but I was afraid that he would become infected.
My nose was also fairly swollen, and the lack of clean water (the ‘creek’ we had followed into the hills was raw sewage, which eventually disappeared underground) made it hard for me to keep it clean. My aching nose just made the situation a little worse; it made breathing harder and I coughed up bloody mucus fairly regularly.
On this morning I climbed to the top of one of the nearby hills, risking being spotted by anyone who was looking, to try to get an idea of where we were. The sun was rising to my right, meaning the ocean was to my left. I could see the beginnings of the city several miles away, we hadn’t made good distance. Maybe Schmidt knew where we were the whole time, and was hoping we would die without help. Maybe he was just letting us suffer for a while, until he led his men to us.
I eventually found a few bushes of the small black berries we had been eating while out in the hills. I took off my shirt and intended to use it as a bucket to carry the berries back. I would worry about water later. I spent probably half an hour in the bushes, until the shirt was full, and made my way back to our pitiful camp. We had found a dirty, old tarp our second night out, and had been using it as a tent and also to collect water ever since. We had managed to get a fire started last night, but it had burned out by now. I sat down near Rufus, and began to divide the berries up. An unnatural stillness sat in the camp, I could sense some one else’s presence, but couldn’t see anyone. It was that stillness that alerted me, and told me I needed to leave the camp quickly. I didn’t know what I expected, but I scurried from the camp and into the brush nearby. I began to wonder if I was crazy when I heard footsteps and low voices. It was the same large man as before, the one who had kicked my nose in, and another even bigger man I had never seen before. The larger of the two men was wearing a ridiculous sun hat, the kind of thing your mother would wear when she was pulling weeds.
They talked for a few moments in Russian, and I managed to make out little snippets of what they were saying. My already limited Russian was very rusty. They seemed to be happy but not surprised at finding our camp. The larger man with the hat would go back and get the others, and the man from the house would stay at the camp, waiting for when I came back.
The larger man shuffled back into the hills, and I would need to act quickly if I was going to do anything. I had a slim chance of being able to stop the one guy that remained at our camp, but I would have no chance against the whole group. From my position, I could see Rufus still in the tent, either unconscious or pretending to be. The Russian was walking around not really doing anything: stoking the fire and itching what seemed to be a rash on his chest.
I waited until he came a little bit closer to my hiding spot, and when he turned his back I charged him. I practically had to jump on the man’s back to get a stab at him, but I caught him by surprise. My small pocketknife was out, and I jabbed the small blade repeatedly into the man’s temple and eyeball. He fell onto the ground, screaming, and I rolled off his back and gave him a hard kick in the jaw, and he collapsed in silence. I slowly managed to drag his two hundred fifty pound body into the tent, next to Rufus. I went through the man’s pockets, looking for a possible weapon, and found a knife twice the size of my own.
I had no plan, but I felt the blood rushing through my body, and I felt more confident. I left the man’s body in the tent, and kicked sand over the blood spots he had left when he fell. I could hear voices approaching again, and made my way to a hiding spot. Schmidt appeared, along with the man in the sun hat and two other large men. One of them carried a large hunting rifle over his shoulder, like a hero in a bad eighties movie.
They weren’t concerned at first, they were yelling to the dead man in the tent to stop spooning with Rufus. When they got closer, the realized something was wrong and went into military mode. One of the men ripped the tent down, the other with the rifle took a knee and aimed his weapon menacingly towards the fields to our west. The man in the sunhat was throwing Rufus around like a rag doll, screaming at my incoherent friend.
Things weren’t looking good, I hated to abandon Rufus, but I could be of little help to him now. I turned, and there stood Schmidt, swinging a large branch at my head. He had started swinging one second too late, and instead of catching me off guard and hitting me the instant I turned, he had given me one second to react. I ducked and shouldered him hard in the stomach, knocking him down. In a moment the man who had torn down the tent was on me. Adrenalin burned in my system, and I was furious. Maybe it was the events of the last few days, the starvation and thirst that I had never experienced before. It might have been the confusion of my past, combined with the confusion of just seeing Schmidt in his modern state, trying to kill us. It even might have been sexual frustration and the boredom from my terrible job building up inside of me. Either way, every pain and negative feeling my body was experiencing at that moment came out on the man charging at me through the underbrush.
He was much larger then me, but was headed up hill while I was going down, and I had more speed. I jumped on him, and he fell backwards, smacking his head on the rocky ground. I pummeled his featureless face with hard punches, until my knuckles were as broken and bloody as the man’s face itself. I heard a shot, but felt nothing, and began to smash the man’s skull into the rocks. I heard another shot, and I wouldn’t have known I was hit if I hadn’t seen it. It looked like a movie, and I felt nothing. All at once the pain and feelings came back, and I collapsed.
I woke up, and I must have only been out for several minutes because my bullet wound still bled freely and my hands were battered and broken. I was thrown on the tarp next to Rufus’s body. From what was left of his head; I figured that the first shot fired, that I originally thought was intended for me, was actually a point blank shot at poor Rufus. I felt pretty numb, my wounds hurt, but emotionally I wasn’t really feeling anything. I didn’t care if I had just cost Rufus his life, or that I was seconds from death myself. Our lives had been taken years ago, after the experiments ended.
Schmidt came and stared at me. He had just finished a call to someone else, asking for a few quads to carry some deer back. I could only imagine he meant me and Rufus.
“Winston. You dumb bastard. I’m sorry you guys had to end this way. Orders are orders.” He wiped sweat from his forehead, and spit at the ground. “We were all that was left. They started those experiments seventeen years ago with two hundred and fifty participants. They began to kill everyone off, realizing that the experiments were accomplishing nothing, and costing too much. I had been doing side talks with the leaders for a while before the last night you saw me. They wanted me for leadership, and they wanted you guys out. I convinced them to let you off, change your names and hopefully be happy with a new life. I knew you had a brain, and that eventually it would come back. We are starting them over; the experiments, and cant have any survivors from the last round. I’m sorry, Winston.”
He pulled out a large revolver and fired it into my skull. The shot echoed off the hills for miles.
“Orders are orders.”