Article 5 (Article 5 #1)(85)

Back upstairs, Delilah used a key hanging on a thin metal chain around her neck to open the door.

The man inside was curled into a ball on the back side of his bed. He wore a canary yellow jumpsuit and rocked back and forth pitifully, muttering something to himself.

“Food,” Delilah said, laying the tray on the opposite side of his bed.

She shut the door, and marked the checkbox beside MEAL on the clipboard hanging from the handle.

In the next room, a man with olive skin leaned against the wall, biting his nails.

“You got a blanket or something?” he said quickly. “Oh. Hey there,” he added when he saw me. I stared back at him curiously.

“Food,” Delilah said again, leaving the tray on his bed.

A guard passed by, heading down the stairs.

“Where’s he going?” I asked Delilah.

“Rounds. They walk the halls every thirty minutes.”

“It seems like there should be more security for a jail.”

She shook her head. “This is a small detention center. Only holding cells. Temporary stays. It’s minimum security. The prison’s in Charlotte.”

Delilah was very matter-of-fact.

“Hope you have a tough stomach,” she said.

“Why?”

“Now it’s time for the real cleanup.”

I followed her to a storage room, which held supplies. Bleach. Gloves. Prisoner uniforms. Towels. Blankets. I thought she would grab one for the man in the cell, but she did not. Instead, she retrieved a deep laundry cart with a metal cover. Then we headed toward the third occupied room, the one holding the soldier who had just completed trial.

I looked at his clipboard. In large letters was written one word: COMPLETE.

There was a fleeting moment where I remembered a conversation between Rebecca and me at the reformatory. Sean had told her that he had heard the term complete used for the Article violators. That was when I’d na?vely thought my mother had been sent to rehab.

I knew when the door swung open why Delilah had asked me about my stomach.

The man before us was lying twisted on the narrow bed. His knees were stacked on the mattress while his shoulders faced the ceiling. His brown hair was still tangled, and a bruise still blackened his pasty cheek.

But he was now dead.

My mind conjured an image of the man who had starved in the square. How thin and fragile his body had looked. How I assumed he had fallen asleep, when really he had wasted away.

This was different. This man looked dead. Not peaceful. Not sleeping. But ashy and cold and tortured, as though his mind had been taken by death before his body was ready. I knew then why people close the eyes of the dead. Those lifeless globes tracked me like the eyes of the Mona Lisa.

I took a step back before my knees began knocking. Within seconds, my whole body was shaking. I couldn’t stop staring at the dead man. My brain morphed his face into Chase’s face. His dark, probing eyes gone dim. If caught, this would be his fate.

Even now, I didn’t want Chase to die. I hoped he was far away. That he’d run once he’d found me gone.

Delilah heaved the body into a seated position. I felt the bile scratch up my throat. Deliberately, I swallowed. She rolled the body sideways into the laundry cart, and it thudded against the metal base.

I felt ill. I forced my mind to focus. To magnetize some semblance of strength.

“You still upright?” Delilah asked as she pushed the cart down the hall, the opposite direction of the stairs.

She wasn’t looking at me, but I nodded, trailing behind her slightly. I watched my feet, one after another. It was the only thing I could focus on without vomiting.

“It helps if you don’t think of them as people.”

Yes. I imagined that would help.

At the end of the hallway was a freight elevator. It was black and greasy and had poor lighting. She pushed the cart inside, and I tried to tell myself that there wasn’t a body within it.

We got off at the bottom floor and exited through an unguarded door, which Delilah unlocked with the same key from around her neck. She pushed the cart down a narrow back alley until we reached a high fence with rolls of barbed wire cresting its ridge. There was a gate there, manned by two soldiers in a guard station. They saw the cart and let us pass without a second glance.

“I guess they know what we’re doing,” I observed.

“You gonna help?” Delilah asked as she began to labor. I slid beside her, checking my nausea, and grabbed one side of the slick metal handle. Together, we pushed the cart up a steep asphalt embankment lined by flat-topped hedges that curved around the back side of the station. I was sweating by the time we reached the top.

A single cement building, flat and square, came into view. It was surrounded by lovely drooping trees, a contrast to the black factory smoke puffing from the chimney. The air reeked of sulfur. The driveway arched into a teardrop before the entrance.

“Just over to that door there.” Delilah pointed. I helped her push the weighted cart to a side exit with a canvas shade awning. She rang a buzzer. Then, without waiting, she walked away.

“We just leave him—it—here?” I asked.

She nodded. “The crematorium.”

My stomach churned.

They took my mother somewhere like this. I was flooded with so much horror I could barely stumble behind her.

The sickness numbed, and I was able to follow Delilah weakly back to the highest crest of the hill. Here she paused. I tracked her gaze, feeling my feet stabilize under me for the first time since we had entered that third room.