At that moment, Mr. Baker was the least of my concerns. My first and major concern was the fact that I might never see Owen again. “Do you know where you’re going?” Perhaps it wouldn’t be too far. If it wasn’t that far, then that would make us being able to see each other doable.
His violet eyes pierced my chocolate ones, full of uncertainty. “I don’t know. I just know that Mark made it clear to me that wherever he goes I have to follow.”
The last sentence he spoke made me furious. Where was his free will? Did he always intend on being Mr. Baker’s little puppet? And did he honestly think that he wouldn’t be doing the same kind of things somewhere else as he did here? “Do you always do what he tells you?” I asked, crossing my arms and tapping my foot.
He smiled, seductively. “Not always. I kept you alive didn’t I?”
I blushed. “Yes.” The sight of his smile always made my heart flutter—like the exciting feeling a kid would get when they got a present they had been longing for. “But, he treats you so badly. And on top of that, he’s an evil, evil man.”
Owen looked down and took both of my hands in his. He gently brushed his thumb against my skin and spoke sweetly, “I’m not going to disagree with you on that.” He lifted his head and looked into my eyes. “But, I’ve known Mark Baker for years and he does have some redeeming qualities.”
“Ha!” I spat out. “Like what?”
He smirked. “Do you know that I’m a child prodigy? I graduated high school when I was twelve years old. College at seventeen with my Masters in technology and PhD at eighteen in Nuclear medicine.”
He traced my jaw line with the tip of his finger. “I’m sure you’d believe it if I told you Mark Baker didn’t raise chickens for a living.” Oh, I definitely believed that. There was no way Mr. Baker’s obsession with control and tyrannical ways came from raising chickens. “He and I worked together for the government on a string of top secret projects. And everyone in our division had an alias lifestyle. Me, I was a pizza boy.”
I laughed. “You can’t be serious.”
He nodded. “Would you expect your neighborhood pizza boy as a secret government official?”
“No. Not at all.” I tried to picture my neighborhood pizza boy. His name was Barry, he always smelled like stale cigarettes, and he always had this dumfounded look on his face.
Owen went on. “After the asteroid hit, and the earth and human population slowly began to die, I was left without a home, without food, and without hope—just like a lot of others who, unfortunately, are now bones lining the sides of the road.
“Then, one day Mark Baker found me, sick and dying of starvation, lying on the side of the road. And he took me in. He promised to keep me fed and alive, as long as I helped him with some of the things he wanted me to do.”
In that moment, I felt for him, I did, but there are some things a person shouldn’t agree to, whether they are rotting from starvation or not. “Owen, do you know what you’re doing? If you’re as smart as you say you are, you’d see that whether he saved you or not, what you’re doing for him is wrong. It’s criminal!” Placing both of my hands on his shoulder blades, I looked him dead in the eye. “How many more people have to die for loyalty?”
He rolled his shoulders, pulling away from me. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
I furrowed my brow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you’re one of the lucky ones. You live trapped in this little bubble of a society, eating every day, two or three times a day. I’ve seen people bite off their own fingers to feed themselves. I’ve felt my organs shriveling up inside of me because of my lack of nourishment. I’ve felt my bones through my skin while my exterior wasted away.”
I glared at him incredulously. “Do you mean to tell me, that you think I haven’t witnessed or felt the devastation of The Great Famine?”
“You haven’t.”
“You don’t know anything,” I growled. My mind instantly reverted back to those two little boys, the ones who cried day and night for their mother. I gulped hard, trying to erase the thought. “I’ve seen a lot more than you think I have Owen Sanders, and I can tell you this, I’d rather starve to death with my dignity than live with a belly full of food doing someone else’s dirty work.”
Owen narrowed his eyes. “You say that now, but have you ever starved?”
“I’ve gone days without eating,” I shot back.
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Well, then,” I said sarcastically. “Enlighten me, genius.”He bit his upper lip and shook his head. “Starving to death is a slow, torturous, and agonizing process. First, every ounce of fat and muscle on your body melts away. You become someone different, someone you didn’t think you could be, snapping at people, resorting to violence, and losing your sanity. Then, your skin cracks from dehydration and you develop multiple diseases because your body is so weak that your immune system fails to fight them off.
“Finally, your organs begin to shut down. One. By. One. If you’re lucky you’ll die after the first one goes. If not, you’ll be forced to endure weeks of pain—like the intestines being ripped from your body whole.” My mouth dropped open and I gawked at him. Nobody had ever fully explained it to me that way. “I’ve been there,” he went on. “I’ve been on death’s doorstep. And I can name at least a hundred other people who have done exactly what I did. Hell, they would have done exactly what I did to lick the crumbs off someone’s plate. So forgive me for choosing life instead of an agonizing death.”
I shook my head. Even though I thought that maybe, he made the right decision time. There was no excuse for him still doing everything Mr. Baker commanded him to. “How long do you think Mr. Baker is going to keep you around, knowing that you’re letting the people he wants killed, go? Owen, that is something you really have to think about. Are you willing to murder another human being—an innocent human so that you can eat? And if you say yes that would be the most sad, pitiful, and selfish thing that I’ve ever heard.”
He looked down at his hands. “Well, technically, I’m not the one who’ll be doing the killing.”
“Owen,” I snapped.
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t. Mark controls all of the cannibals in this area.”
I couldn’t believe that he was still trying to…
Wait… “What?”
“Mark controls all of the cannibals in this area,” he repeated.
“What do you mean ‘controls’ them?”
“He operates them. He put computer chips in their brains that allows him to control them.”
This was startling news. And I couldn’t stomach it. I was starting to feel queasy. I didn’t want him to tell me anymore. Every time he revealed something new felt like a bomb going off inside of me. “Are you trying to say that the cannibals aren’t real?”
“Oh, no, don’t get me wrong, they are definitely real. I’ve seen the real ones up close. But the ones around here, yeah, they are like cyborgs. Mark used to operate them from the control panel upstairs.”
“He controls who they eat?”
“Well, most of the time. The chip in their brain can be turned on and off from the control panel, but Mark is the only one who knows the code. He would never tell me what it was.”
“The ones you were with?”
“Yes.”
The next question was stuck in my throat. I almost didn’t want to ask it at all, then, suddenly, I blurted out, “Did they kill Monica? Did Mr. Baker make them kill Monica?” I flinched, expecting him to say yes quickly.
“No. They didn’t.”
“But she is dead, right? And she was killed.”
Owen nodded. “Yes to both. She is dead and she was killed, but not by the cannibals.”
“Then by who?”
“One of the decayed ones.”
“No…” I cupped my hands over my mouth when I thought of Monica enduring hours of torture, her limbs being hacked away, before she was finally eaten alive. “That can’t be.” I almost wanted him to say that a cannibal consumed her. At least then I knew she would have been given a merciful death. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“How can you be sure?”
Owen looked away from me and didn’t meet my gaze. “You don’t want to know.”
