Deliver us from Evil - Logan Fox Page 0,1

it was easy for him to slip away with me.

But I’m wide awake now.

Trinity is gone.

I shake loose Cass’s hand, tugging on my shirt as I step out from behind the curtain.

Zach is sitting in the armchair, smoking a cigarette.

Darkness and smoke.

“Where is she?” My voice is still raspy from sleep.

“Probably halfway to Sisters of Mercy by now,” he says, and then takes a long drag at his cigarette without looking up at me.

“She left without saying goodbye?” I inch closer as I wait for his response. Because I’m pretty sure it’s going to piss me off. And if that’s the case, I might go for his throat.

I consider myself calm. Reasonable. I think things through a hundred times before I act on them. But when I’m triggered it’s like a switch inside me flips. All that calm, all that reason…it’s decimated by rage. Like a town flattened by the shock wave of a nuclear bomb.

Zachary can trigger me at will. He’s had that power ever since I found out who he really was. I couldn’t reconcile the fact that he’d been living a normal life above us while we hunkered in the dark waiting for our next visit.

I spend a lot of time dredging up memories of the Utopia that had existed above us. Replaying them. Wondering if the sounds I’d so often heard were made by him. A patter of fast, light footsteps—was that Zach on his way to school? A faint thump—Zachary sitting down in front of the TV, eating a PB&J sandwich while he watched Sesame Street? Sometimes we’d hear voices, but only if the Keepers shouted. And then the words were usually unintelligible because they’d made sure to soundproof the basement as much as possible.

All except one. A name.

Mason.

“Didn’t want to wake you,” Zachary says.

I have no way of telling if he’s lying. He’s had years to perfect the art of twisting the truth.

Fuck. Why did I let myself sleep that deeply?

Because I was happy for the first time in a long time. And it felt good. And it felt safe. And I let my guard down.

This is what happens.

“And she said she’s going to Mercy?”

We can fetch her when we’re done with Gabriel. I know a few of the sisters who work there. Shouldn’t be too difficult to find her if she wants to be found.

Zach takes another drag before replying. “She’s an orphan. Where the fuck else would she go?”

So callous. But I knew him when he was still vulnerable. When he was still human. The first week he was down in the basement with us, he’d been crying for his mother. Begging his father to open the door and let him out. That he didn’t belong down there with the ‘other kids.’

He eventually realized he wasn’t special. Not to them, not to us. He was exactly like the ‘other kids.’

We’d been planning escape long before he arrived, but we were suspicious of each other because we were each treated differently. Cass had a regular dose of drugs to keep him warm and fuzzy while abominable things were done to him. Sometimes he even seemed to be enjoying it. Apollo only had two ghosts, and they only ever spent time with him on the weekends. Zach and I? Our Ghost treated us like scum. We were kicked and bitten and had foreign stuff shoved in us all the fucking time. We were tools—objects of pleasure for a sick man. Sometimes he would visit us together, make us watch what he did to the other one. Or he’d take us away to one of the upstairs rooms. Play us against each other. We’d get treats when we were alone with him, while our brothers in the basement starved.

That shit really messes with your head.

Other boys came and went. So many we didn’t bother finding out their names. Weak, shattered, hollow. Nameless shapes in the gloom, some of who never made a sound, despite how brutally they were used.

Some who, after a few days or a week, would stop moving altogether.

We don’t know why they brought the boys there to die. Not until we’d escaped, anyway. Then it became so clear.

A lot of things became clear after we were free.

But that would never have happened without Zachary. We wouldn’t have been able to get out of there without his help. He knew the layout of the house. He knew his parents’ schedule. And he had a solid plan. But it would take four, possibly even