For some reason, a couple of the men huddled around the fire found this hilarious, laughing heartily and sounding to Emmit like a crew of salty old pirates, perhaps discussing making this new landlubber on their ship walk the plank.
The warm air inside the tiny cabin was full of the rich smell of cooking meat. Emmit took a moment to look around at his surroundings as the other man finished roasting their dinner and came to sit in a circle on the floor around him, joking and laughing with one another as they tore into their chops. He had never gone to summer camp or joined the scouts as a kid (it had been much too expensive for him to do very many extracurriculars) but now he imagined it was a lot like this, although much less terrifying. Summer camps and overnights in the woods, those were back in the real world, where dead people didn't get up and move.
The fire filled the cramped room with a flickering orange glow, casting their shadows across the walls and floor. They melded together into one shape like a fence composed of darkness, giving the bare walls (which were made of simple cut logs with the cracks in between packed with what looked like mud and tatters of clothing) a decidedly creepy look. There were no windows, and the crooked fireplace and stone chimney looked dilapidated and hastily built, yet somehow sturdy. There was a warped shelf mounted above the fireplace, supported by several smaller logs that formed triangles on its underside, and on top of it was a small wooden cup filled with twigs. Toothpicks, Emmit thought.
Emmit was impressed that Roy had been able to build the little cabin out of absolutely nothing, probably making his own tools before construction had even started. It was rustic and kind of charming in its own way. But knowing what was prowling the woods outside and feeling the uncomfortable closeness of all these strange, cackling men around him, men whom Roy himself had branded as criminals, made Emmit feel suffocated and claustrophobic. He was trapped. It was death outside, but strangling to be confined inside. The cabin would keep him sheltered and alive, but it also felt wrong. Haunted somehow. It was like shacking up in a mausoleum.
Roy finished eating and then tapped his wooden bowl against the floorboards four times, the sharp sound commanding attention like a judge's gavel. The other men stopped talking and looked to him obediently as if they were his dogs, eagerly awaiting orders.
"We're going to bring our newcomer here up to speed, men. You all remember what it was like when you arrived. His memory hasn't come back yet, but he passed the initiation and I vouch that he's clean."
"What did the Link accuse him of?" Said a handsome black man, and Emmit recognized him as the owner of the smooth, intelligent voice he had heard earlier. His hair and beard were growing shaggy and unkept, but his square jaws and dark, piercing eyes made him striking, nonetheless. The black man steepled his fingers and brought them to his chin as he listened attentively. Emmit noticed a deep scar gouged into the flesh of his left cheek, a short straight slash, like a Roman numeral I.
"He's a bank robber," Roy replied mellowly, as if telling him nothing more exciting than what Emmit did for a living. There were a few poorly disguised chuckles from the other men. Emmit smirked.
Yeah, I know, he thought. A scrawny little guy like me robbing a bank. Hardee-har.
"I don't remember doing it and I don't remember why, but... I guess I had a good reason," Emmit said.
"It'll come," Roy said reassuringly. "Now I need you to prepare yourself, because what you're about to hear won't be easy to process."
Emmit nodded, repositioning his body to sit Indian-style and lacing his shaking fingers together. He felt like a sick man at the oncologist's office, about to be told that the cancer was terminal and inoperable. He began to clench his jaw and swallow repeatedly, a nervous tick he had had for as long as he could remember. He tried to prepare for the blow.
Roy gestured to the small crowd of men.
"We all have our theories about where we are, but none of us knows for sure. Personally, I believe we've passed into another dimension. A tear in the fabric of time, or something like that."
Emmit could only stare at him naïvely.
"I'll give you an example. Who is the current president from your time?"
Emmit had to strain his brain to remember who was currently occupying the White House. Again, he saw the image of the oily gears locked in place, grinding against each other in a vain effort to move. Images finally began to surface like pieces of shipwreck debris in a cloudy sea: the president is a man... he is overweight... he is not highly intelligent...
He envisioned an orange-skinned man with pursed lips and hair that looked like bleached cotton candy, and then it came to him as if someone had flipped a light switch inside his skull.
"Trump," he said doubtfully. Then he nodded and repeated himself with more certainty. "Yeah. Donald Trump."
The other men, Roy included, erupted with uproarious laughter.
"The guy that fires everybody?!" Squealed a balding man who sported a small tuft of gray hair in an infantile cowlick on the center of his scalp. His right arm was folded against his chest like a featherless bird wing. It looked horribly misshapen, zig-zagged like it had once been badly broken and not set properly. The fingers on that hand hung limp and useless. "You're fired!" As he threw his head back to laugh, Emmit saw that the man had a maximum of two teeth left, and
