Torn Apart by James Harden Read Free Book Online

need to get Maria first,” I
said. “She is all that matters. We need to get down
there.”
    I pointed to the trap door.
    Ben was already moving, one step ahead. He
pulled up the chain that was attached to the trap door. He looked
at the man hole.
    He shook his head. “No good. Need a password.
And we can’t ask him. Dead men tell no tales.”
    “ So what now?”
    He moved over to the ditch of severed hands. He
started looking through them, tossing them aside.
    “ What are you doing?”
    “ Looking for a key.”
    “ A key?”
    “ Yeah.”
    He picked up a hand that looked less dirty than
the others. Fresher.
    He moved the fingers back and forth.
    “ Now what are you doing?” I
asked.
    “ Checking for rigor mortis. The keys
have a time limit. This one is still fresh.”
    He moved over to the pole and moved the hand in
front of it. “It’s a scanner,” he said. “Reads the
barcode.”
    He scanned the barcode on the wrist of the
severed hand back and forth. Nothing happened.
    “ So the barcode is the key,” I
said.
    “ Bingo.”
    “ Wait, don’t you have a barcode? On
your wrist? I saw it.”
    He showed me his wrist. The barcode was gone.
It was replaced with a messy scar. It was inflamed and swollen.
“Someone took it. Need to find another one.”
    The barcode was the key, I thought to myself.
The dreadlocked woman in the creek bed, she had one. Ben had one.
And someone took it. Someone cut it off his wrist. Someone who knew
they needed a key.
    He kicked away a few hands. Found a small
square piece of fabric or sand paper or something.
    “ Well, look what we have here,” he
said as he held up the small rectangular piece of
fabric.
    He held it up to the sunlight. And that's when
I saw what it was. It wasn’t a piece of fabric. It wasn’t a piece
of sandpaper.
    It was a piece of skin.
    A piece of skin with a barcode tattooed on to
it.
    “ Wait, what is this place?” I
asked.
    He showed me his forearm again. It was burnt
and disfigured. He showed me how the square piece of the skin fit
into place on his arm. “This is the Fortress.”
     

Chapter 10
    “What?” I asked in disbelief. “This is the Fortress?”
    “ Yeah.”
    “ Well, where the hell is
it?”
    “ It’s underground.”
    “ Underground? The whole
thing?”
    Ben nodded.
    This is why the dreadlocked woman and why Ben
had said we would never find the Fortress. It was hidden. Off the
grid. It was underground.
    “ And what the hell is that?” I
asked, referring to the square piece of skin.
    He showed me his forearm again. “My barcode. My
access code. This should work.”
    “ Who did that to you? Who cut it off
you?”
    “ Don’t know. I woke up. I was
bleeding from my arm. I was bleeding bad. Tried to stop it. But
several veins and the artery had been cut. Had to burn them to seal
all the vessels shut.”
    “ Burn it? With what?”
    “ A blowtorch.”
    I shook my head. I could not even imagine the
amount of pain that would cause. Taking a blowtorch to an open
wound? Voluntarily? It made me feel sick just thinking about it.
But I suppose the alternative was bleeding to death. Sometimes I
got the feeling that Ben was a machine or a god or maybe he just
didn’t feel pain the way normal humans did.
    “ Who the hell would do that? Who
cut, who…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
    It was too much.
    Someone had severed all these hands. Maybe
hundreds. Someone who knew they needed a key, the barcode, to get
inside the Fortress. There were so many hands.
    Was it the crazy soldier? Or was it someone
else?
    “ Where are the bodies?” I
asked
    Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know.
They’ve either been eaten. Or they have turned.”
    “ Eaten?”
    “ By the nano-swarms. By wild dogs.
The fact that there are no bones here suggests maybe the
nano-swarms got to them. Or maybe someone buried them or hid them
somewhere else.”
    He was cleaning his own piece of skin,
carefully brushing the dirt off. He moved over to the pole