with cuss words.
“Get up or I’ll kick you again,” he says through gritted teeth.
It takes me a minute, but I climb to my feet despite the fact that fear makes my muscles weak and tears have filled my eyes. I’m not crying because my elbows and knees are scraped. The tears are of self-pity. Tears that no one else is going to cry for me, a prisoner in this camp, with no family and no friends.
“I need an armed guard!” Bowen bellows, making me flinch away from him. The camp shushes. After a long silence, three men reluctantly grab their guns and circle me.
“What’s the problem?” a big black man asks—the same man who opened my tent flap. Heart pounding, I stare down the barrel of his gun and wonder the same thing—what is the problem? That’s when my arms swing free, no longer fused from elbow to wrist. The guards, though armed with rifles, take a giant step away from me.
“He’s gotta do his business, Tommy,” Bowen says, shoving me forward hard. My arms flail and I barely manage not to fall to the ground again. Tommy laughs and casually swings his gun into the side of my head, and I do lose my balance this time.
“Get up, kid.” Bowen laughs, kicking me firmly in the butt. Quickly, I scramble to my feet.
With my hand pressed to my aching head, I bite my trembling lip, blink away fresh tears, and follow the sound of Bowen’s voice as he guides me to another bathroom. One with stalls and doors and toilet paper. And even though I only need to pee, I sit on the toilet a long time, letting tears stream down my face.
When I’ve gotten control of myself, I wipe the moisture from my cheeks with my hands and, hair hanging in my face, come out. Bowen activates my arm cuffs. As I walk out the door, I brace myself for a gun to the side of the head or a kick in the butt. But they don’t come this time.
I spend the day baking beneath the hot sun with my back to the wall, arms and legs fused together, head and knees throbbing, surrounded by four armed men.
Chapter 10
When the sun is low in the sky and shadows stretch long, Bowen, eyes wary, comes for me. We walk through the camp—me in front—and stop at a cold, deserted fire ring constructed from a handful of small boulders.
“Sit,” Bowen orders, motioning to a large, flat boulder a few feet from the ring.
I sit and try to stare without staring, peering at him through my tangled bangs while he stacks pieces of wood that look like broken table legs inside the ring of rocks.
Can this cruel man be the same person who lived across the street? I wonder. My butt still throbs from his kick. He sprays lighter fluid on the varnished wood and holds a match to it. Flames flare up, heating my face. I quickly lean away and Bowen jumps, aiming the remote at me, eyes wide with fear.
“No sudden moves,” he warns.
“Sorry,” I grumble, glaring at him. “The flames burned my face. I couldn’t help it.”
The guard from the bathroom—Tommy—walks over to us, something dangling from his hand. Bowen looks up and shades his eyes against the glare of sunset.
“Hey, Bowen. I caught this by the wall. Thought you might want to feed it to the Fec.” He holds out a wet, skinned carcass and grins.
Bowen takes it and frowns, then looks up at the man again. The man shrugs beefy, broad shoulders.
“Thanks, Tommy. I’ll cook it up. See how he likes it,” Bowen says.
Tommy chuckles and studies me with dark, satisfied eyes. I look away and stare at the flames eating the wood. “You want me to hang around? Just in case?” Tommy asks.
I can feel Bowen’s eyes on me. “I think I’ve got it under control,” he says. “But I’ll let you know if he starts scaring me more than he already is.”
“You just say the word, and I got your back,” Tommy says. He walks away.
Bowen slides a long metal rod through the carcass and balances it across the fire pit, turning the meat as the flames jump up to lick it, and I study him again. Aside from the dark scruff covering his lower face and framing his lips, he’s hardly changed. If anything, time has made him more handsome than he was when I’d stare at him on his front porch—even with