Fresh Flesh by Todd Russell

about your families?"
    Dick shook his head. "The convicts chosen for
this experiment don't have families. At least family that cares
what happened to us. Our families are distant memories. We were
easily thrown away."
    Jessica tried to imagine any human being ever
being deemed 'easily thrown away' and the concept only saddened
her. She couldn't imagine being that dispassionate about another
member of the human race to think that discarding them somewhere
alive but dead to the rest of the world was any kind of good idea,
much less a humane experiment.
    When Jessica looked back up a minute later,
Dick continued.
    "After two very short weeks we were flown in
groups of five to this island. I'll always remember watching
America slide away beneath me. It was then that I was executed,
Jessica. You know, I was actually more scared about coming to this
island than dying. Death would have been quick."
    "The island looks very different from above.
I can't get the unusual image out of my head. It looks like a. .
.face. I know that sounds strange but it does."
    "So we parachuted one-by-one when we reached
the island. I don't think even one of us parachuted without two
hands pushing us first. Everybody knew there was an island below,
but nobody knew what the island was like. Fear of the unknown.
That's the worst, I say, fear of the big question mark."
    "Out of twenty-seven, only nineteen
parachuted safely to the ground. Three men got their parachutes
tied up in the trees and hung themselves. Three were too scared to
pull the rip cord. Two just. . .never made it. We figured that
maybe they landed in the ocean somewhere, panicked, and drowned.
But nobody ever saw them again."
    "So we started out as nineteen, eleven years
ago. Oh, we were quite a bunch too. You would never have been able
to believe that most weren't raving lunatics. To this day, I think
I'm the only convict sent here who isn't insane—or hasn't been
driven insane since arrival. My sanity test was extensive, and if I
had acted like some of the others here I can't see how I would have
ever made it. It's like I said before, they didn't want the people
selected to come here being declared insane. Like part of the
experiment was to send criminally insane away from psych wards and
here instead."
    "Maybe one of the convicts killed some
politician's family member in some terrible way? Maybe that's how
this got started," Jessica said.
    "You might be on to something there," Dick
replied. "Anyway, we were equipped at first with only what we had
in our backpacks. Some of the men brought pictures of women in
their lives. Some brought magazines to, um, jack off. Most brought
personal mementos. But everybody brought knives. We were allowed to
bring knives. I know, crazy, huh? We didn't get the knives until we
were on the ground, of course, and by separate drop. I'm sure they
were concerned that we'd use the weapons to try and escape."
    "After the first week we were down from
nineteen to twelve. I often wonder if the government knew that this
would happen to us. Back there, we were all robbed of dying at a
date and time we knew was coming. And here we formed our own penal
colony. One convict chewed off his fingers before finally slitting
his wrists. Several tried to swim for it. But swim for what? We
were all told that the closest island—our closest link to
civilization—is over four hundred miles away. But several swam
anyway. And they've never returned since."
    "We were all equipped with enough food to
last for the first month. They explained to us that a plane would
come every six months or so to drop us 'necessities.' Water namely,
since we can't drink the ocean water and, as you've already
learned, there is limited fresh water supply on the island. We
would have to learn to find our own food. They wouldn't guarantee
to keep feeding us."
    "So far the drops have provided things like
matches and sometimes around holidays, we've thought, they will
drop a pig or a cow. We need to dress