Chapter 18 #2
I grabbed a piece of burlap, wrapped it around my hand, and reached down to pick it up by the scruff of the neck. It weighed almost nothing.
The rabbit kicked feebly once, then dangled from my hand, panting. White showed all around its eye, though it didn’t seem to be focusing on me at all. I fancied I saw a ripple through the skin of the warble.
Now what?
I had never even killed a chicken for dinner. I steeled myself, waded to the far corner where the water was deepest, and held it under the surface of the water. It struggled briefly—very briefly—then went limp.
It must be a better death than having your guts bitten out. I knew that was true. It made no sense that my vision was going blurry.
I held it down long after I was sure that it was dead, because I wasn’t sure if I could do this twice. The warble began to pulse more frantically, squirming as it too drowned, and I gritted my teeth and kept holding the poor limp body underwater until nothing was moving at all.
“I’m sorry,” said Saul, as I laid the sodden rabbit on top of the others.
“Yeah,” I said. I scrubbed at my eyes with my sleeve. I was being foolish. “It’s fine. It’s not fine, but … it’s fine.” I took a deep breath. “They’re trying to feed you, aren’t they? The flies.”
Saul nodded.
“How? Why?”
“I believe they figured out that I was starving to death.”
I shook my head. “No … I mean, how? They’re insects. Some of them feed their own young, but feeding you? Why would they do that?”
“Because they don’t want me to die, I assume. Much as I might wish to.”
I paused. “Oh. That’s why you want them to stop, then.” Silly me, thinking that it might be because it was horrible to bite into a live squirrel.
“Yes. They feed on me and now they feed me, but I don’t…” He trailed off and began coughing, a dry hack as if something was trapped in his throat.
“Can’t you just … not eat what they bring?” I asked, when he had finally quieted.
Saul sighed. “If you were dying of thirst and someone poured water in your mouth, could you keep from swallowing?”
It seemed to me like there was a significant difference between swallowing a mouthful of water and eating a rodent down to the backbone, but what do I know? All I could do was offer him my extra biscuit, and he’d already turned that down.
“It’s just that what they’re doing makes no sense.” I started hacking at the hole again. “Wasps lay their eggs in caterpillars so that the larvae have something to eat, but they don’t start feeding the caterpillar.”
“And I’m the caterpillar?” Saul gave another clicking chuckle. “These are … special, I think.”
I paused for a moment. Certainly they were enormous, and I hadn’t looked too closely at one. Were they a different species than the ones I’d drawn? Something that showed unusual behaviors?
It wasn’t hard to imagine Halder hearing of a strange new species and deciding to test it out on someone he despised. Someone that had been in his power. If he’d shot Saul and Saul hadn’t died outright … yes, I could see that.
“Did he ever say anything about them? About the species?”
Saul’s lips twisted. “He might have. I can’t say that I was always in the most receptive mood to listen. I know he kept bringing new ones down. Most of them died, until finally some didn’t. But even if they weren’t special before, they are now.”
I started digging again. I was becoming very fond of this hole. When I got out of here, perhaps I would give up being a naturalist and just dig holes for a living.
No, I probably wouldn’t, because even now I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Special how?”
Saul was silent for a few minutes. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. I hit another rock and started prying at it, but only succeeded in bending the edge of the pan.
“They’ve fed on me,” he said at last, clear reluctance in his voice. “I don’t know what that would do. It doesn’t usually happen that way.”
It was my turn for silence. The rock was at least the size of my head. I excavated around the edges, turning those words over in my mind, trying to make them fit, and eventually gave up. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“It changes things. They’re different now, I think. They grow faster, anyway.” He said something I didn’t quite catch, that might have been “same as us,” or “shame on us.” One of the two, anyway.
“That smacks of Lamarckism,” I told him primly, getting my hands around the rock at last. I braced my foot on the wooden board and threw my weight against it.
The rock popped loose unexpectedly and I dropped it, because the alternative was to have my fingers smashed, and fell back into the water with a splash.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Cold water spread through my skirt and my drawers. I stood up, slapping futilely at my dress. Saul snorted with laughter.
“Thank you,” he said, as I attempted to wring out the soggy folds. “This is the best entertainment I’ve had since Phelps lost hold of a chicken a few months ago.”
“So glad I could amuse,” I said coldly. I was starting to think that Saul Gregor wasn’t the nicest person.
On the other hand, being wired to a table for a length of time that was almost certainly not a year couldn’t be good for one’s personality.
“So the chickens were for you.” I had been pretty sure, but it was nice to have confirmation.
“Yes.” His amusement faded. “Halder figured out that birds were better than animals for his purposes.”
I had a pedantic urge to lecture him that birds were also animals and the word he wanted was mammal, but I squelched it. “What purposes?”
“Keeping me alive. Barely.”
I had no idea how either one was keeping him alive. I pictured him biting into a chicken instead of a squirrel. No, the feathers would get in the way, wouldn’t they? Although the fur should have as well … “What’s the difference?”
My skirts were as wrung out as they could get, which arguably gave us something in common. My drawers stuck clammily to my skin. I felt unpleasantly as if I had wet myself.
“Oh no,” Saul said softly. “Halder won’t win that easily.”
“Huh?” I looked up, but he had pressed his lips together and turned his eyes to the ceiling.
Fine. Be that way. I tested the board again with my shoulder, and thought I felt a very slight give, but now the damn rock was in the way, and it was too large to fit through the gap. I cursed under my breath. Saul continued to say nothing.
I was not going to get angry. I wasn’t. You don’t get angry at people who have been imprisoned and tortured.
You just don’t. Even if they are being weirdly cagey about things that might be important.
They are obviously not responsible for acting oddly under the circumstances, and getting angry is counterproductive and …
oh. Hmm. I had apparently just knocked a chip out of the pan by bashing it against the rock. Hard.
“You may be exactly what you say you are,” said Saul abruptly. “But Halder has been trying to pry things from me for a long time, and I haven’t … I think I haven’t … told him anything. If putting you in here with me is his way of trying to trick me, I’m not falling for it.”
It was the hesitating “I think I haven’t” that made my anger fall back and slink away in shame. God only knew what Halder had done to him, and if I thought my delirium had made me an unreliable observer, how must Saul feel?
Besides, what would knowing do to help me? It certainly wouldn’t get us out of this shed any more easily.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” I said. “Unless you know a better way to dig.”
“Sorry.”
I scraped out more dirt and dumped it atop the dead animals. It occurred to me that this had to be quite recent, because Phelps would surely have noticed the growing pile of corpses. “So they haven’t been feeding you long,” I said. “The flies, I mean.”
“No. Not long.”
I scrubbed at my face and only barely stopped myself from tearing a hole in the netting trying to scratch. “Maybe it’s more like ants and aphids than caterpillars.”
Saul turned his head to look at me. The flies had settled again, but he didn’t seem to notice and I pretended not to. “Ants?”
“Some ants keep aphids. Ant cows. They feed the ant cows and then the ant cows excrete a substance that the ants eat.”
“I don’t know if being an aphid is much better than being a caterpillar.”
“I’d much rather be an aphid. The aphids aren’t being devoured from the inside out.”
Saul stared at me. His eyes were pale green in the lamplight, and their expression was suddenly so cold and empty that I realized just how supremely tactless my statement had been. I began to stammer out an apology when the door to the shed slammed overhead.
Both our heads jerked up. I thought, No, wait, it’s too soon, the lantern hasn’t burned down, it’s still daylight—and then Phelps came down the stairs, saw us both, and shouted, “Get away from him!”