BATTLE CROW: CHAPTER 1
The only real cell is the one between our ears but I was too young back then to figure it out.
The days passed in a smoldering blur of blinding afternoon sun and frigid nights with the odor of human feces. The prisoners’ sweat smelled like desperation, impossible to ignore and laced with hopelessness. I hadn’t inhaled the forest air for days, and although the high desert provided some relief from the humidity, it punished us with ungodly heat.
I felt my heart racing, my eyes buzzing in their sockets. The bars of my cage had rubbed the skin raw on my lower back.
I’d grown accustomed to the sounds of horseshoes clipping against the compacted desert sand, a thin layer of silicon covering the old asphalt trails. The constant rattling of the caged bars had become a soothing friend, something to distract me from my thoughts. My focus kept coming back to memories of Asher, helplessly watching him collapse to the ground in a flurry of arrows fired by Crow soldiers.
I pulled my legs tight against my chest, clasping my fingers over my knees to hold them steady as I tried not to lean back against the rusty bars. Whoever these criminals were, they had put all of us Hydrans in a locked cart pulled by horses—an animal’s cage on wheels. One of the kids they’d captured looked at me, his blistered lips opening and his wide-set brown eyes sunken but staring into mine.
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
He leaned his head back against the iron bars, proceeding to knock his head against them repeatedly. Rust flaked onto his shoulders and a trickle of blood mixed with the sweat rolling down his neck.
“Shut up.” Even whispering those two words broke open the sores on the inside of my mouth. “You can, and you will.”
I had become a prisoner, like the others in the cart. The filthy men who captured me had pushed me into the rusty cage like herded cattle, cracking whips, cursing, and spitting tobacco in our faces. Baylock and the twins had been ushered onto another cart before setting off in the opposite direction. That was the last I’d seen of them.
An endless blue spread from one barren horizon to the other. I hadn’t seen water—in a bottle or in a lake—in days and I felt as though my soul had shriveled. In my entire life, I’d never spent so much time away from it. We’d traveled east, that much I knew based on the motion of the sun. From what I could remember of my grandfather’s stories, we had to have been in the high desert, in a land once known as Nevada. Far from home.
Home. The thought made my stomach churn with curdled hate. Corvus had destroyed our village, killed my friends, and then burnt it to the ground before sending his soldiers after us. If I hadn’t been so deep in the forest running from the Crows, I wouldn’t have been in this situation. I hated Corvus, Sandor, and all the responsible adults of the village who were supposed to protect us. I knew I’d eventually escape, and when I did, I’d be free to go anywhere. But that wasn’t the plan. I could taste revenge on my lips.
You could say hate was love moving in the wrong direction. I would destroy the Crows and set things right, making sure everyone had an equal chance at a good life. Or I would die trying.
The desert air had been extremely dry but also dusty. The dirt billowed out from the wagon wheels on the cart and I tried to suppress a cough so as to not catch the attention of the guards who had beaten other prisoners for less. But my lungs were weak, and before I knew it, I was barking with an uncontrollable fit of dry coughs.
“Ay. What’s going on back there?”
I froze and dropped my eyes as the wagon slowed to a halt.
Through snippets of conversation I’d snuck with other prisoners, and by listening to our captors as they talked, I’d figured out that they sold people for resources. They sold slaves. While the Crows had imprisoned us in meaningless ritual, these men used cages.
My eyes darted toward the men on horseback who rode ahead, their eyes hardened and their skin leathered with beards to protect their faces from the brutal sun. They had circled back around when the wagon slowed, escorted by several dogs with bald patches, sores, and yellow teeth. The beasts yelped and whined as the men snapped whips on their behinds.
The men on horseback stopped next to the guards on the reins of our cage, their restless horses sending another cloud of dust into the air. I couldn’t hear the voices of our captors; their exchange had been too low and hoarse to understand.
“…dump the dead ones. But let’s hope we don’t lose any of our cargo.”
That was all I could hear, but it was enough to tell me how much our lives meant to the slavers. Not much.
One of the men riding on the cart looked at me with dark, beady eyes as the men riding the horses trotted alongside of it. My heart began to thump a little harder as one of them cocked his mammoth-like head and studied me while running his tongue along his bottom lip. I knew the look.
“Something amiss, me deary?”
Why was he asking me? But they’d stopped for some reason, and I figured I should probably try and take advantage of it. I raised my chin and tried not to look at the dried saliva caking the wiry strands of his ginger beard.
“I need to pee.”
His eyes dropped to my breasts as his lips stretched into a shallow grin.
“Why? We ain’t gave you no water in a day.”
“Please,” I said, my voice much firmer than I felt.
He gave a grunt as one of the other Slavers trailed up next to him, younger than this guy, yet his tired snarl couldn’t be hidden beneath the wide-brimmed hat pulled down low.
“Is there a problem?”
The ginger beard tore his eyes from my breasts.
“We should stop here to let them piss.”
The younger man sneered. His gaze was the pointed fang of a snake bite, his smile the venom.
“They can wait. We’ll make it before sundown if we keep pace.”
“We’ll make it before sundown either way,” ginger beard said, his tone blunt as he ignored the glare of his companion and motioned for the others to prepare to unlock the cage.
The heels of his knee-high boots thumped against the dirt as he dismounted, his voice louder above the murmuring of prisoners who now felt entitled to urinate thanks to me. “You all have five minutes to do your business or you’re shit out of luck—and I mean that literally!”
A few of our captors laughed while they yanked on the tethered shackles and pulled us through the unlocked door. The prisoners milled about after having the chains temporarily unlocked while the afternoon sun baked us, and the guards hurled insults along with the cracks of their whips. When you’re a prisoner, modesty is a lost luxury, but I managed to slip behind a cluster of brown grass and do my business. It was when I stood that I caught sight of the prisoner with the wild eyes dawdling toward the front of the wagon.
I squinted and watched him for a minute.
With each step, his fingers twisted furiously while his hollowed eyes darted back and forth between the guards and the stretch of desert before him.
He couldn’t be thinking of doing a runner?
A hawk circled above and a hot blast of air raced across the flat, empty desert. Nothing but low sage brush and rocks from the road to the horizon in every direction. Only the sweet aroma of pinion helped to mask the stench coming from us and that damn cage on the cart.
And boom. Just like that, he was off.
I was surprised at how much ground he covered with short, choppy strides before the guards noticed. He ran ahead, in the same direction we’d been traveling, which again made me wonder just how mushy his brain had become on our long journey. I held my breath. Based on what I’d seen and how I’d been treated, this was not going to end well for that kid. Desperation dulled the senses.
“Hey!”
My heart pounded as the guards yelled and snapped into action, releasing the hounds while some of the men mounted their horses and galloped off in pursuit. It only took a few seconds for them to catch up to him. A guard had begun rounding us up and moving us back toward the cart, which was where I soon stood with the other prisoners.
We watched in silence as the kid tried to kick at the dogs who snapped at him with foamy, bared teeth. One of the men on horseback cracked his whip, catching him on the temple.
The deranged boy screamed before falling to his hands and knees. The guards circled him, each taking a club or hammer off their belts. One of them whistled and the dogs scurried back to allow the armed men to rain blows down upon the kid, pummeling his head and back, and then kicking at his ribs once he collapsed into the dirt.
A hand came up, fingers gnarled and covered in blood. Would that gesture be his final word? Just a simple sign of defiance? Submission? Reflex? The guards beat him unconscious before allowing the dogs back in the circle.
I closed my eyes to the sound of tearing flesh, grunting guards, and barking dogs. I silently begged for him to die, to escape the unbearable pain he’d suffer from those injuries for the rest of his life.
After the dogs had taken enough of his flesh to feed but not enough to kill him, the guards shackled his thin wrists and dragged his body over the hot sand to the wagon, throwing his bloody body into the cage.
The guards then turned on us, locking our shackles back to the chain and screaming at us to get back in, and that if we even thought about running, they’d let the dogs finish us off.
Not long after that stop, the cart slowed as we approached an ancient city that seemed to float above the shimmering sands of the Nevada territory. We rode beneath a faded, rusted sign.
“Nevada State Prison.”
The painted arch sat atop massive iron gates with three guards on each side. After several seconds of shouting and insults exchanged between our guards and those at the gate, it opened with a low grind that made me shiver in the dry heat. They drove our cart through then, and I’ll never forget the sound of the iron bars slamming back together, the chains being wrapped around the bars and the padlock clicking into place.
