Page 33 of Ready Or Not

She waves me off. I wait until she’s done. Nothing but bile is coming up.

I need to feed her something real.

“Whenever you’re finished, I have things to do.” I tap my foot.

“You drugged me!” she yells.

I blink. “Yeah.”

“It was awful!” She whirls on me. “You can’t keep me prisoner.”

“Why not?” I cock my head.

“Because!” Rachel’s face is pale. “It’s not right!”

“It must be quite hard trying to live with what’s right and what isn’t.” I blink at her. I don’t understand why people would want to live that way. Emotions and morality put so many rules on an already boring life.

Rachel just stares at me, her face a curious void of emotion. It’s not the first time I’ve seen her go blank. The first time I saw her, I thought she might be one of us. Her face was empty, and every time she showed an emotion, it seemed rehearsed. But now I know she can’t be. She doesn’t seem to have a manipulative bone in her body.

“What are you looking at?” Rachel’s face gets red. She’s embarrassed.

Okay, definitely not one of us.

“You done puking?”

Rachel squares her shoulders.

“Good.” I snatch her up and throw her over my shoulder. “If you run from me again, I won’t be this nice.”

I don’t normally sleep in the house, but I might need to today. I drag Rachel inside, ignoring her cute attempts to claw my eyes out, and push her into the master bedroom. I don’t want to share a room with her, but given our circumstances, it’s the best way I can protect her. Manson will expect us in the barn, and this place is much easier to protect.

I handcuff Rachel to the headboard. She acts quite unhappy about the whole thing, but I don’t care. I cuff her so both arms are stretched above her head but leave the cuffs loose enough that they aren’t biting into her skin. While I enjoy pain, I want Rachel to relax enough that I can get some sleep.

Once she’s secured, I move around the first floor, setting up mouse trap trip wire alarms. I position them around the doors and windows and use fishing line so Manson can’t see. I also pull the blinds down so he can’t see where we are in the house.

I don’t have cameras set up in my place. I learned the hard way when Manson hacked them and used them to spy on me. So this will have to work. This way, if someone walks against the fishing line, it triggers the trap to snap, hitting on some bulletprimer. It’s loud as fuck. And I’ve never used these, so Manson shouldn’t be expecting them.

I bring some pillows up to the room and settle myself against the door. Rachel stares at me from the bed. She’s stopped babbling, and I can see her calculating from here. “You’re not sleeping on the bed?”

I shake my head. I don’t like beds. Too many shitty memories. Plus, I’m pretty sure Rachel’s calculating how to kill me. So I settle onto the floor with my pillows.

It’s kind of a pain in the ass to have a prisoner. This must be why Manson doesn’t keep people alive for long.

15

HOLOGRAM - Poe the Passenger

I lie in bed for what feels like hours. I think Riley fell asleep within fifteen minutes, stretched out in front of the door like a guard dog.

A confusing bubble of emotions fills my chest. I try to get out of my cuffs, wiggling them back and forth quietly, so much so that the edges of my hands get bruised and ripped. On top of that, my leg hurts.

My skin feels gross. I feel sweaty, and I canfeelthe gunk in my skin. I hated every minute of that trip. I finally feel back in control, but even though I’m in control of my mind, I’m so far out of control it’s not even funny.

I shimmy up so I can run my fingers along the pimple on my forehead. It hurts, so I pick at it while I think.

There is something really wrong with both Manson and Riley. One minute, they’re like robots; the next, they switch on emotion on a dime. They do it so effortlessly, too, and it just confuses me more. I already have a hard time reading people, but this? This is like an Olympic sport.

I want to go home. I’m fucking starving, I stink, and I want to lose myself in my bones. Even just sitting in the room looking at them helps. They’re the only friends I have that don’t judge. Plus, everything is simple and orderly when I’m in that room. I have a system for everything. The skulls are ordered by species and height. They’re all labeled with the type and the month I found them. Everything has a place.

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