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Carter refuses. “Take. Me.”
“Carter,” Casey rasps, his trembling hand touching Carter’s shoulder. He tries to give Carter a smile. It’s weak. Maybe Carter would buy it better if Casey didn’t start using Carter’s body to hold himself up. “You’re gonna be okay, Car.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about.” Carter looks at the guard who had pointed at Casey, narrowing his eyes. “I won’t let you take him.”
The guard looks at Scarface, the both of them smirking before breaking out into awful laughter. The sound echoes in Carter’s chest until he feels small and insignificant. He stands his ground, though. This isCasey. He won’t let these men take him. Not without a goddamn fight.
“Please,” Carter begs, hating the way his voice cracks. “Just take me.”
Scarface comes forward, his bulging veins and wild eyes making him look like a comic book villain. Carter gulps, but he doesn’t back down. When Scarface grabs Carter’s bicep in a painful grip, Carter is insane enough to feel relief. He might be in for a world of torment, but at least he saved Casey from having to endure it in the state he is. That’s something.
That’s enough.
But then Scarface uses the grip to tug Carter off to the side so the other guard can come forward and grab Casey.
Carter panics. He forgets everything Casey taught him.
Instead, Carter fights.
He fights with everything his poor body has. He hits and kicks and screams. He catches Scarface by surprise, clawing his nails across the bastard’s face hard enough to draw blood. It leaves three angry marks opposite the cheek with the deep, purplish scar. Carter finds great satisfaction in that. He takes advantage of the man’s temporary shock, bringing his knee to his groin. When he doubles over with a grunt, Carter brings his knee up one more time, connecting with the asshole’s nose. An awful crunching sound comes from the man as bright red blood bursts from his face and splatters all over Carter’s bare skin.
Carter grins.
Then Carter is being grabbed from behind, an arm around his neck to choke him, his knees buckling with panic. He sees Casey, a third guard dragging him down the hall already. Casey looks half-asleep as he stumbles along. He sees the younger boy he had just been helping with a panic attack, now crumpled on the floor as a guard kicks him in the side. Another guard is hitting boys with a black baton, not even looking as he swings wildly.
“See what you’ve done?” the guard holding him growls in his ear, his arm getting tighter around Carter’s throat. Cries erupt around them. Screams. Sobbed pleas. The sound of boots and hands and sticks hitting defenseless skin. “Time you learn a lesson, whore.”
Carter runs out of air then, his world turning into a swirl of chaos and pain, all of ithis fault, his fault, his fault… until everything is blissfully black.
???
When Carter wakes up, he’s disoriented. Uncertain. Things are…different. He’s not in the cell. The place is too cold. Too dark. Too quiet. There aren’t bodies pressing against him, damp with either sweat or ice-cold water depending on when they last had a visit from the hose. There’s no single string light bulb from the hall illuminating their hell in a sickening yellow glow. There aren’t whispers or whimpers. No cries. No, “I’m scared.” No, “I don’t understand.” No, “They can’t do this to us.”
It even smells too good to be the cell. Instead of the lingering scent of piss and shit and vomit, the air is only damp and musty. It smells like nothing more than an old basement.
Carter rubs at his eyes, trying to see better. It’s no use. Wherever he is, it’s nothing but black. Pure black. There aren’t shades of the color, like when you wake up in the middle of the night and your eyes are adjusting. There aren’t any shadows. It’s just…dark. The kind of darkness that wants to swallow a person whole.
The kind of darkness Carter could get lost in.
Head pounding, thoughts muddled, Carter tries to piece things together. The guards had come. They wanted Casey. Carter had begged them to take him instead.
He had fought.
He had lost.
Someone was choking him.
He must have passed out.
Idiot,Carter hears Casey say inside of his mind, the boy’s gruff voice annoyed but fond.What did I tell you about fighting?
Carter hadn’t listened. He had acted impulsively. Recklessly. Not only did he get himself choked out and relocated, but he also didn’t even manage to save Casey. In fact, he made things worse, getting all the others in the cell in trouble too. He can still hear the sounds of them as they were attacked because of him.
The cold in this new place is awful. It makes his bones ache within minutes, his teeth chattering until he worries they might break.
It isn’t until Carter tries to combat the temperature by curling his body into a tight ball that he discovers something else that’s new. He has a collar around his throat. Tight. Heavy. Metallic. It’s colder than the air around him. Carter brings shaking hands up to touch it, feeling around until he finds a ring at the front. There’s a chain link attached to it. The thick, sturdy kind of chain if Carter’s fingers are telling him the truth. Stomach churning, heart in his throat, Carter uses his hands to follow the chaindown, down, downuntil he finds a matching ring like the one on his collar bolted to the floor. He feels around to confirm his fear. He’s chained down, with nothing more than a few feet of slack.
Carter tries to stand up.
