Justice (Chapter Seven)

Chapter Seven
The van sped across uneven roads. In the half-light, I kept my eyes down. I didn’t want him to think that I was interested in conversation; in fact, I fully intended to remain silent for the entire journey. I imagined the bugging devices hidden, waiting to claw yet more confessions from the air.
The interior of the van was painted red; a bloody cave harbouring the dregs of humanity. We sat across from one another; an umbilical cord of fear our only connection.
Isaac kept his mouth shut too which made me think that maybe he wasn’t as stupid as I’d first thought. His body odour mingled with the musty smell from the damp interior; his once white overalls were plastered in meat-counter stains and his face was a ruptured jigsaw of abuses. He tapped his foot against the metal floor, knocking out some repetitive bass-line over and over again. I did not compromise my decision to avoid all interaction by telling him just how bloody annoying it was.
Although I couldn’t tell for sure, I thought that we’d been travelling for at least three hours, but I had no way of knowing in what direction we were heading. Mum had said something about the compound being near Birmingham, but three hours out from there and we could be anywhere.
Fake Finger was not a skilled driver. The van swayed and lurched like a palm tree in a tropical hurricane; every turn seemed to come two seconds too late for the corner. More than once, my skull made contact with the steel interior and, my hands being cuffed, I was unable to brace myself.
Yesterday, I’d waited in the basement cell. I’d stared at those red walls for so long that spiralling shapes, like double helices, danced across my retinas. Mum hadn’t come back. I'd waited and waited, but her battered handbag never appeared. And Greg hadn’t crept through the door to inform me that he’d fixed everything with his mates upstairs and that we were on our way home. Rather, it was Fake Finger who'd come for me.
On impulse, I’d leapt up from the red, plastic stool to face her. She’d circled me. I’d refused to turn my back on her. Her arcs had become ever tighter, her black eyes burrowing into mine, until I’d found myself backed into a corner, my face meeting with the punching fist of Sense embroidered onto her bright orange uniform. She’d raised her prosthetic finger and clumsily looped it in small circles. I did as I was told; I turned around, putting my hands out behind my back. The click of the cuffs hit every wall. Then, I’d felt her face against my hair; felt her mouth opening to breathe me in; felt her nuzzle her nose against the back of my neck...
She'd marched me up to the desk where Isaac had been sentenced by the grey mouth. I’d expected to see Mum, or even Greg, waiting there. But no. I accepted that it was probable that I was about to have my own encounter with Sense’s orifice of judgement. I took a breath and waited. Instead, Fake Finge whispered something indistinguishable to the grey haired Red on the desk and he’d nodded before stating,
“Clara Knight. Your sentence has been passed. You will leave this compound and you will be escorted to Darkmoor.”
He’d looked down at the paperwork in front of him and had continued with his slow filing.
“But where’s Mum? I’m supposed to be getting out. Haven’t you spoken to Greg? Where’s my sentencing? You haven’t even brought the mouth up. You can’t just send me off somewhere.”
He didn’t even look up from his papers crowded with red type,
“Sense is not obliged to converse with Parasites. There is no discussion.”
Fake Finger had smiled while my internal organs twisted in rage. With rigid steps, she’d taken me along an unfamiliar corridor and into a pen that made my previous one seem like a Sultan’s palace. The door was shut.
Under a mire of filthy water that encroached halfway across the floor space, the drain gurgled. My gulf of putrid liquid lapped against the white tiles, depositing a tidemark of brown matter- a ridge of scum demarcating my living area. The red walls were peeling – reams of flayed skin tearing apart to reveal green, fungus-ridden patches. The reek and grime quickly got to work entering my nostrils and pores; I felt the black particles gathering. Crouching on the only dry patch and trying to convince myself that Mum was coming to get me, I rested my head onto my knees.
That night, on that floor, I’d cried and thought of Dad. I went back to the last day I’d seen him, before he’d gone to the woods. He’d kissed me and told me that he loved me. He knew what was coming for him, but he'd gone anyway. The tiles exuded cold into my body: I pushed my eyes shut and urged my mind to recall the feel of Dad’s hand holding mine, the firm grip, the rough textured skin and the warmth. I feared losing that memory more than anything they could do to me here.
The van jerked to a halt. Darkmoor was as its name suggested. The doors opened to reveal a castle-sized building made from what appeared to be black marble. It stood alone in a sodden and isolated moor. It was bare apart from some depressed gorse and the odd stone tor. The Red, a woman in her twenties, pulled us from the darkness, cuffed us to a black metal rail and walked over to the driver’s side of the van.
Isaac and I stood in the slanting drizzle. My spine screamed as I tried to unfurl it.
The front facade of Darkmoor was enormous, a black, Gothic cube crushed into the bleak landscape. Its sheer, windowless facade stood like a wall of shining black ice. Two side towers stood slightly apart from the main cube, to the East and the other to the West, linked to the main building by narrow bridges. Each bridge was coloured the deep red of Sense - enclosed, arched tendons hooking their way onto the tower walls. The towers shot skywards, injecting veritcal shards of Onyx into the gloom; as the marble curved, it gradually morphed into two giant fists battering against the evening sky. As a flock of birds flew past, I urged them on in case one of those fists should open and crush them all to bones and gore.
To the right of the main cube, wooden outbuildings, painted thick black, stained the horizon. I could see Parasites leaving them, marching in orderly lines, an Orange at either end, towards a side door in the main building. The distant humans in white overalls looked young and they looked thin. Too thin.
Clinging to the wooden outbuildings, a labyrinth of wire cages spread across what must have been an acre of land. These inhabitants did not look thin and they stared back in our direction, beady glares covering the distance to where we stood. They grouped against the wire – a brown tumour of pure aggression.
“Little girl, if you feel like running here, I wouldn’t bother.”
Breaking my rule, I shot back,
“Little boy, the state you’re in, I’d get a lot further.”
“Not just Alsatians they’ve got in there. Pitbulls, Tosas, Agentinos –used to fight them. You wouldn’t get half a mile. They’d rip off your…”
My neck snapped to one side. It was only by watching the Red’s closed fist thump Isaac in the head that I realised what had happened to me a fraction of a second before. My face throbbed and my mouth filled with blood where traitorous teeth had gouged down.
“Don’t talk scum.”
“Real nice lady you are, take you out to dinner if you play your cards right. Like a woman with a bit of fight in her.”
The young Red’s knee vaulted into Isaac’s stomach and he went down. For good measure, she kicked him in the small of back,right into his spine, unable to disguise the relish on her face. Isaac folded in pain. I felt my whole body tense and my breathing quicken. The slobber globule left my mouth. It found its target. She turned to me, wiping the wet smear from her cheek, and raised her fist.
“Don’t.”
The voice was sickly and hushed. The blow never came.
Fake Finger stood before me.
From behind her, stepped a small, blonde girl dressed from head to toe in orange.