Trapped (A Ticci Toby Story)

Chapter 5- Decay

An overcasted sky in the early dawn.
Our breaths hung in the air as we rose from the cellar and followed Tom to the sea of leaves.
The sky had cried tears after Tom drug me back into cellar.

Thick and heavy tears that left indents soil under my bare feet.
dispite the fresh and dewey mist that clung to the rows and rows of fully mature crops, there was a smell of something indescribable made my breath catch in my throat.
Strong,
Potent,
Unwavering.
I couldn't find the source of it all.
When I looked out over the field of leaves and soil, all I could see was the life dripping with rain water. Not the death that made itself known by the smell it forced itself into our senses.
The smell was out of place around the perfectly plump roots that bulged from under the soil.
My mouth watered and my stomach made a noise at the thought of food.
Only one meal a day.
I sighed and clutched my stomach tightly, trying to stop it from groaning inside.
I watched Jane.
I watched her body move unnaturally as she eased herself to the ground. It was as if each movement was a straining task for her.
This was pain.
I knew this was pain.
Jane was in pain, and I knew it was because of me.
Jane found me over her shoulder and give me a sympathetic look. Her jade eyes brightened with worry and saddened with understanding of my starvation.
I dropped my arms and straightened.
She gave me sympathy and I hated her for it.
I knocked her only meal onto the floor last night.
I carelessly took away the only sorce of life she had. Her delicate body so starved, weak, she never commented on my selfishness or complained about the hunger that must be killing her right now.
She deserves it more than anything.
I'm so sorry.
How dare she care so much.
You're dying! Why aren't you doing something?
She wants me to feel this way. She's cruel.
Why won't you fight? You have to try and survive! Why are you giving up?
She doesn't care.
I can't watch you go.
I don't know you!
This isn't fair!
Her eyes were torn away from me when Tom pulled a ring of keys from his pocket.
The jingle of small metal keys scared her-terrified all of them.
I watched them.
I watched them all drop down on their weak knees.
One by one they began digging at the earth with their bare hands.
No tools, no gloves, nothing.
Obedient, subordinate, tired machines.
This is wrong.
I see Tom move on the corner of my eye and I find him facing me.
I'm the only one standing. The only one who isn't crawling down on my hands and knees to please him.
My heart is pounding against my chest with hot rage.
His worn eyes dared me with twisted desire.
He wanted me to disobey him.
He wanted to have the reason to hurt and punish me for each undeserving breath I took.
He wanted to finish what we started last night.
But that was just it.
My hatred grew just as strong the longer I see him.
The longer he is alive the more I want him dead.
I wanted to hurt him. I wanted strangle the life out of him for taking me away. I wanted to kill him for what he was doing. I wanted to beat his stoic face in until there was nothing left.
But I can't.
I couldn't.
I needed to stay alive for her.
I clenched my jaw tightly and forced my eyes down .
He would take my life with the advantage he gave himself.
He made sure I was helpless, useless, broken when he disabled my dominant hand.
This was how he was going to break me.
To tame me into submission. Eventually when I'm just as weak and defenceless as the others, I will have to depend on him to keep me alive.
He will hold my life in his hands and take it away or abuse it whenever he pleased.
Like a holy game.
I closed my eyes tightly, destroying any pride I dared to hold onto and walked over to the others.
As long as I am breathing I will never be tamed.
I just needed time to heal. To plan.
I'll give it my all.
Maybe I'll have a chance.
Maybe my efforts will be in vain. Maybe I will find myself in Tom's hands.
So be it.
I rather die than to waste away in their mercy.
I could feel the weight of his mocking satisfaction on my back as I sank down next to Jane.
I sunk my fingers into the mud.
My broken hand bent uselessly against the ground and my other hand was only able to create three straight valleys just above the surface where my fingers pulled up the mud.
Jane snuck a hurried glance up towards Tom, who was now preoccupied with opening the shed to the left of the field, and reached under my arms to the small hole I was attempting to make.
Her fingers slipped into the mud in a cupping motion and moved the soil away from the base of a plant.
The anger that held onto me quickly melted away at her nearness.
I watched in awe as her skillful hands dug up the earth, quickly doubling my hole in size, until the white of a large purple root was exposed to me.
A turnip.
She was showing me what to do.
Harvesting, unearthing, pulling the mature vegetable from the ground.
But I didn't dare look at her.
I was frozen.
She grabbed the top of the root and began pulling it free, but her brief nearness was taken away from me when Tom dropped something in the shed.
I remember how to breath in her absence.
She quickly began to work on her own space.
I heard a small sniffle across from me.
I sobered and looked to the others around me. They were in the process of or already pulled their own turnips from the ground.
It was the youngest who caught my attention.
I studied how the boy rapped his small hands around the stock and root of the plant and tugged and wiggled it until the earth finally let go of the life it gave.
He almost fell backwards from the release, but quickly steadied himself on his hands and knees before moving onto the next.
Was this my life now?
I looked down to my own plant and dug around the turnip with the only hand I had until the root stuck out enough for my hand to grab onto.
I could hear the turnips snap and crunch as I pulled it from the ground, leaving behind a snug hole in the soil.
"whoa..." I whispered in amazement. I was completely in awe.
Something so dark and ugly, something we used to dispose a delicate creature in, could mother something entirely new from nothing. Something that gives life back to the living.
I studied the turnip and the ground until I was interrupted by the sound of a thump and a quick low humming sound behind me.
Tom was tossing out empy buckets and troughs down the rows of crops where we worked.
The children gathered the vegetables in their arms and shirts and hurriedly padded to the nearest container when they dumped their hard work into.
That's how it was for the next few hours.
The gray light turned to a warm glow and our breaths became a soft kiss of mist against our lips as the sun heated the air around us.
We dug the roots up from the ground moving further down the row until there was nothing left but disturbed earth and broken stocks.
Every now and then I would see Jane or one of the three children carry a pile of white and violet in their baggy shirts and dump it into the nearest trough.
That was the closest thing to a break they received.
Tom drifted around us, watching us, overseeing our work, and becoming bored after awhile.
"Hey!" a loud whisper came from across from me after Tom left to go fix something in the shed. The voice came from a young boy who was only a year or two older than the youngest one. His olive skin was dark with mud and bruises and his small sholders stuck out sharply from the cut sleeves of his olive green T-shirt. "Did you thee Tom's face? Did you do that?"
"uh..." I was completely taken aback by this. I caught him staring and grinning at me a handfull of times throughout the morning, but I didn't expect him to actually say anything to me.
He didn't wait for me to gather my thoughts.
"that's tho cowl! You have a bruise too! But I think yours is cowl! You look like a pirate!" he smiled excitedly, exposing his missing front teeth.
Jane was the next to speak. "Marco! Don't encourage him!" she scolded.
"Well it'th true!" he resorted then turned back to me. "When I'm aths big aths you, I'm going to beat him up too! But way better than you did!"
"Marco--!" Jane started, but a new voice cut her off.
"Don't be an idiot! You're going to get yourself killed!" a girl about the age of fourteen glared up at me through her blond hair. Her features were sharp like the others, but different in a way that told me she always had sharp features. "I don't know how you got away with it, but some of us were killed for much less. What makes you so special?"
I stared at her. I wasn't sure what to make of this. I wasn't allowed to talk to the people in town, but it didn't matter because no one ever tried to speak to me.
Not with masky and hoodie around.
No one complimented me or snapped at me the way these two did.
With Marco's amazement and the girl's anger, I was lost with mixed emotions.
The potato I was working on snapped in half in the ground with a crunch.
I jumped at the sound.
Jane quickly reached over and helped me bury my mistake out of sight.
"what did they do?" I asked.
It was jane who answered.
"She tried to send an S.O.S out into the public with the vegetables we harvested. Cheryl found out and... We didn't see her after that."
"Yeah!" Marco's turn "Her name was Jenny! She carved 'help' with her fingernail like thith!" Marco raised his index finger and moved it in a writing Motion. "Then someone saw it when they were about to buy it and they told Cheryl!"
"No they didn't, stupid!" the girl snapped "Cheryl found it when she was loadin' the truck! I was there!"
"Enough, Alex!" Jane's voice was firmer and stronger than I have heard it before. I forced back a smile. "I know you're upset, but you can't keep acting like this. Toby didn't know about jenny or why he's here, he was just scared."
This didn't ease Alex's anger.
"Why are you defending him?" Alex threw down a potato. "You should hate him as much as I do! You're going to die because of him! Why--" she choked on her words and dropped her head with the sudden weight of her emotions.
An unwelcomed silence quickly settled over us.
I sat up slowly from the hunched over position I've been working in and stared at Alex's closed off face.
"What... What are you talking about?" I didn't realize i asked until after i said it.
I wasn't expecting to feel so cold by this news. I didn't even know why I cared.
The thought of being alone in that cell, the way Jane must have been for so long, made my blood turn to ice.
Alex wipped her tears away angrily and glared up at me.
"You are sharing her room, right? There's only four rooms. Five of us. Janes' been here longer than any of us, she's almost eighteen. there's no room for her anymore. Why else would they shove you in with her?"
"That's not--" Jane started. Alex cut her off once more.
"Don't say it's not true! I'm not an idiot! You can lie to these two." she gestured to the two young boys with a muddy hand.", but you can't lie to me! I'm tired of just sitting here and letting you take all the hits!"
Tom approached the shed door and our heads dropped back to the field.
He must have heard us arguing out here, but didn't want to put the energy in to making us shut up.
Not like he needed a lot of it.
"What are we supposed to do without you?" Alex was the first to speak, despite her back being toward the shed. Her anger was broken down by hopelessness and it left her a shaken mess.
Jane looked away and we were left in another silence.
I numbly pulled my pile of potatoes into my solid black shirt and stood to dump them in a bucket a few steps away.
The air was so dense I was looking for any excuse to leave.
Was this really my fault? Were they really going to lose Jane because of me? Did my mistakes not only ruin my life, but took another as well?
I hesitated long enough to attempt to swallow the welt in my throat and paused long enough to gain a least some of my strength before I turned back to the others.
"spt!" Marco spat the moment I climbed back down to my knees.
I looked at him. "Hey, Toby. Tham ith trying to get your attention."
I looked at the little boy next to him. Sam held his hands tightly to his chest with his round black eyes gazing up at me.
"He doesn't talk," Marco clarified. "I call him tham tho."
"I thought it was Max." Alex put in drily.
"I like tham better."
"You can't just change his name like that."
"Yeah-huh!"
"No you can't!"
"Yeah-huh!"
"Jane!"
"I already tried to tell him, Alex."
I wasn't listening anymore. The child's eyes flicked down to the dirt in front of my knees.
I looked down and found something white partially sticking out of a clump of mud.
I slowly reached down and picked it up.
It was small, light, a signature shape.
A human molar.
I looked back up at Sam in alarm. He untangled his hand from his tight hold over his chest and pointed at the compost peaking out from behind the shed.
I quickly dropped the tooth and wiped my hand over my pant leg, smearing mud across my Jeans.
"It's Max's turn--"
"tham!"
"whatever!"
"Tommy~!" Cheryl sang as she slammed open the back door of the forest green farm house.
The life from their eyes disappear behind terror and they dropped back down to the dirt. They began to dig faster, efficiently with scared hands, at Cheryl's arrival, but I couldn't bring myself to touch the mud that already caked my hands.
Can they do that? Use children as compost and sale the produce to people?
My hands shook as I imagined working through the remains of Jane's body. I couldn't help thinking about Marco, Sam, and Alex's body being thrown into a pit to be eaten away by the mud.
I'm now trapped in there, alive, suffocating in the smell--the darkness-- they, my family--couldn't find me if i was dirt.
Maybe in a distant future they would walk over the remains of my body, ignorant, unaware, unknowing.
Only way to be at peace.
There was no peace here.
Jenny and the countless children whom they killed were thrown into the foundation of this farm.
"Oh, look at them! Aren't they wonderful children? Don't you just love them, Tommy?" Cheryl was saying. "They would do anything to please their mother! I believe--"
The bodies of the children I am now sitting on.
Bits and pieces,
Parts and limbs,
Lost lives, grieving parent's.
Lost children and grieving souls.
A sharp snap of a long potato stopped cheryl's spew short.
Everyone froze and all eyes landed on sam. The small child held a half of a sweet potato above the ground. The other half remained stuck within the earth.
Sam's lip quivered as he stared up at Cheryl, who looked as if she'd been slapped, in horror.
Cheryl threw down the coffee she had been holding and stormed toward Him.
Jane was on her feet, trying to stop Cheryl from reaching him.
"His hands are too small-- accident! It was an accident!"
"Four months! Four months it took to grow my little babies!" Cheryl was saying, hardly noticing the weak young girl trying to stop her.
Tom clutch the hammer in his hand tightly and moved towards his wife.
Towards Jane.
In that moment I was on my feet. My mind was primal and crazed with rage.
"Get away from her!" I shoved Cheryl back and pulled Jane away from them, away from danger, away from him.
Tom caught the woman against him and moved her aside with a quick shove of his over sized arm.
There was no one in the way of us now, no one to stop us from getting what we wanted.
We wanted blood to fall.
We wanted death.
Hunter vs. Hunter
Tom swung the iron hammer with a inraged growl. The single tool in his hand on a single path wasn't a problem to dodge and take ahold of.
I made the mistake of grabbing the tool with my unusable dominant hand. He grabbed my blistered arm and twisted it away from the tool in attempt to immobilize me with pain. I took that moment to use my other hand the shove back of the weapon against his face. His head jerked back with the force and he stumbled back
one,
Two,
Three
steps before he regained himself.
I needed as much space as I could get to regain myself and take hold of my role. I refuse to continue to be on the defense. I was going to make him pay.
Tom raised the hammer again to charge and swing and I braced myself for the attack. I dared him to attack me, to give me access to the weapon. I just needed to get my hands on that hammer. A tool was all I needed to get out of here, to get them all out of here.
But right before Tom swung Cheryl stepped in front of him, her pale wrinkly hand against his huge torso.
Tom stopped the hammer still in the air.
His sholders rose and fell with enraged huffs and his dirty bared teeth were coated with blood that streamed in thick rivers from his nose.
I watched him, the rage within me causing my breaths to come out just as heavy breaths.
"that's enough, dear." Cheryl patted his chest. "I am quite alright, wonderful in fact! Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!"
Cheryl dropped her hand from his chest and grabbed Jane's hand gingerly with both of hers.
"oh, my sweet sweet child! I am so proud of you! So so very proud! You have won him over faster than I have dreamed! I'm so proud of you my sweet little thing!"
Jane's terrified eyes landed on me.
What's happening?
They asked. I didn't know.
"You deserve a reward! You and boy will spend much needed quality time together!" Cheryl stopped and looked over to the other wide eyed children in the mud. "GET BACK TO WORK!" she screamed at them in a shrill voice. They instantly tore their eyes away from us and began tending to the last of the potatoes and the many more sweet potatos.
Cheryl carefully led Jane to the cellar hatch against the back of the farm house. "Tommy, love. Bring him here." she said without turning around.
I didn't need Tom's help. I was going to follow her regardless if she wanted to or not.
Tom slammed a hand down on the back of my neck and led me back down into the collar.
We were going to spend some 'quality time' together.
Much needed quality time.