by Kolin Wood
A plane flew low overhead, shaking the ground with its engine noise. She watched it as the trail cut a sharp line across the deep blue, remembering that she used to tell the time with those same flyovers.
Perhaps sensing some discomfort in his wife’s demeanour, Michael put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.
Grateful for the intimacy, Juliana submitted to him, resting her head on his chest. Whatever their differences in the past, there was no doubting that he loved her with all of his heart and soul. She had never met a man like him and often still struggled to believe that he could have fallen for her in the way that he had. Her doubtful past life was over now. She’d made it, and nobody could ever hurt her again. With that, she shut her eyes and drew a deep breath, breathing him in.
***
The sharp smoke caught at the back of Juliana’s throat, forcing her to cough hard. Loud noises bounced off of the walls all around and it took a few, scrambled seconds before her mind caught up to the reality of her situation. She mumbled to herself as she propped up upon her elbows, groggily rubbing her eyes. The idyllic picture of the park faded as the heavy stench of petrol flooded into her nostrils and burned her sinuses.
Shouting and screaming sounded nearby.
Memories of John—perhaps sparked by the smell of burning—ransacked her brain, raping her memories. Tears itched her eyes. Sleep had granted her some minor relief but now the pain of life crashed back in with full effect.
The screaming around her intensified.
Unwilling to risk the darkness of the empty shops and houses of the previous night, Juliana had taken shelter in an abandoned car on the road. It had been a calculated risk; to be in the open and not trapped in a building. Mercifully, the car still had the benefit of glass in most of its windows—aside from the windscreen which lay shattered like a million tiny diamonds in the front two foot wells. The glass that remained was thick with dirt and green with algae, mostly hiding her from the outside world.
Now fully awake, she dropped down from the slightly damp back seat and lowered herself as low as she could manage into the stinking, wet foot well.
It took about five minutes for the noise of the commotion to fully stop. The thick, sweet smell of cooked meat now hung in the air and caused Juliana’s stomach to rumble with hunger. She could not remember the last time that she had eaten a proper meal; something to which her tightly pulled skin paid testament.
The car was an older model—a classic for all she knew—and once she was sure that the sound had stopped, Juliana knelt up and gently wound down one of the dirty side windows, allowing a slice of a view onto the street outside.
The sun was beginning to rise in the clear sky. The dark shop fronts and entrances lining either side of the street did not look nearly as foreboding as they had done last night and, realising that she could not stay put in case the people decided to come back, she cautiously pushed open the rusted, car door and stepped out into the street.
On the opposite side of the rubbish-strewn road from where she was now stood, smoke billowed from the front of a huge building. A painted marquee of steel thrust out over the sparkling pavement. Above, the cracked and blackened signage spelled the name of some previously popular brand of clothing from back before the culling. Squinting to the sky, Juliana realised that she recognised the place as a famous shopping venue, one that she herself had frequented a few times, and she felt her heart sadden. Those few, happy years were the only ones in her entire life where she had truly felt that anything was possible.
After a quick double check that she was alone, Juliana crossed the street and stepped into the shadows under the once-grand porch way.
Inside, the building had been totally gutted. Years had passed since the outbreak of the culling had pulled the riots down upon the city; anything of even marginal use had already been pilfered or smashed and ruined beyond identification.
She peered deeper into the shadows with a squint. A cash desk sat to one side, the register smashed open against a backdrop of posters showing size-zero models in scanty swimwear. The room itself was large and vacant, empty mannequins lay in uncomfortable poses on the floor, any clothes long gone. In the centre, amid a patch of blackened carpet, a huge pile of rubbish lay smoking.
With a fluttering heart and heavy step, Juliana moved closer.
The people had been slung carelessly into a pile. Some of the visible arms were curled around legs, obviously in a futile attempt to protect themselves from the flames. The skin that still showed was cracked and blackened, and had pulled away from the bones like pork crackling, revealing bright pink flashes of uncooked flesh underneath. Most of the clothing and hair had burned away, giving no reference to anything; age or sex. All that she could tell—judging by the size of the bodies—was that the victims in view had been something approximating adults.
Juliana felt her stomach heave and bent forward just in time as the hot, acidic contents of her stomach spilled onto the floor in front of her, liberally splashing her boots. She remained bent over and wiped the stringy bile that hung from her mouth with the back of her forearm, only just managing to hold her balance.
That smell awoke my hunger?!
Her stomach contracted again and this time the tears came too, straining at her already tired glands and bringing a dull ache to the back of her constricted throat. What would Johnny have felt when they set him alight? He would have been so scared, so in pain, as the hot flames singed his hair and blistered his skin, all while he screamed her name.
Grief buckled her insides like sharp daggers and she sank to her knees, ignoring the pain as broken glass lacerated her shin. The world had taken the only two stars that had ever shone any light into her miserable life and now, on her knees in the decay, she questioned the reason for her existence.
By the time she had pulled herself together enough to make it to her feet and back out onto the street, the burning husks behind her had begun to give off an aroma more akin to charcoal. The more Juliana came around, the more desperate she became to remove herself from its vicinity. The smell clung to her, invading her pores like a second skin.
For a brief moment, she became tempted to take off the jacket and leave it behind, such was the impact of the nausea on her coiled stomach. But sense took a hold. The weather was warming up, yet the world was sharp and dangerous. Every surface in this carnage seemed broken. Glass and exposed steel decorated the majority of the landscape. One cut could mean infection. Infection with no medicine could be debilitating at best and fatal at worst.
She looked down at her shin, as the thought brought a register of pain down there. The cut was only small, much like a paper cut and ever more painful as a result, but not anything that she needed to worry about at this point.
Breathing through her mouth and pulling the stiff collar tightly around her neck, she set off again, skirting the old car that had just saved her life. As she walked, her hollow eyes scanned the ground before her with vacant commitment and her legs moved her along as though they had been programmed on autopilot. There was nothing for her there, and yet she had no idea where she was going. One street turned into another, and then another and another. But Juliana didn’t care. Nothing mattered anymore.
5
The General stepped through the gated entrance and into the chaos beyond. All around him, people were cheering and chanting, and the atmosphere was something akin to that of a festival or perhaps a lively football match. On either side of the walkway down which he was being filtered, metal bins spewed forth acrid fumes of burning plastic and rubber. The smoke hung thick and at head height to the crowd. He could feel it irritating the swede on his face, and imagined the already-filthy bandage becoming even further tainted by the muck and filth of the world. In truth, he couldn’t remember a time when the growth had not been there; its constant pain and throbbing for so long, such a consistent part of his life.
Soon, the floor trellis upon which they had been walking ended, and the ground
gave way to sticky mud once again. Nobody around him seemed to notice or care. The whole of the New Capital was a mud bath; a live and open sewer. The sheer weight of numbers meant that the churning floor was never given the appropriate amount of time to dry out. The result was a slurry-like consistency for the most part and a boot-sucking, struggle for the rest. Everywhere, the sounds of wet squelching played like a bass line to the chorus of the din. Even after the filth that the General had endured for years in the squalor of the prison, the lack of sanitary provision in this so-called ‘Eden’ stretched to new lows.
A man with no teeth and heavily glazed eyes approached from his left. With something that sounded like a grunt, the man thrust two, dented plastic bottles of a brown liquid in the General’s direction. Unimpressed, the General knocked them aside with a look which told the man not to push his luck. Behind him, rows of shacks and tables, mostly selling more of the same cloudy concoction, offered their wares to an eager public.
Ahead of him, a crudely-constructed erection rose up forty feet into the air. Beneath it, a narrow, dark tunnel, packed to the gills with people, offered entrance into the arena itself. The clamps and hinges which joined the poles together groaned, as they struggled under the collective weight of the demented crowd, and the General found himself looking up more than once in genuine concern for his own safety. Only once he was clear of the worry overhead did the General finally stop and take in the chaos before him.
Four bright lights on a single tripod floodlit an open area stretching about thirty feet, surrounded on all sides by more scaffolding. Several hundred people were busy climbing and jostling for position on a homemade system of levels which stretched five or six tiers, high into the air. Streamers of alighted paper and rubbish rained down into the open space, all but covering the ground in a sea of smoking rubbish. It was a truly apocalyptic scene.
The General looked down at his hand. The marker pen scrawl read ‘Paid - Tier 3 MJF’. The cloth ticket that he had bought only a few hours previously for an unacceptable sum of money from a guy in something meant to represent a bar, had been taken from him at the entrance, and the markings on his hand were now his only proof of payment. Not ideal in an perfect world, but in one where people drank homemade hooch more akin to methyl and ate rat meat, he assumed that marker pens were sufficiently tough enough to come by in order to ensure that there were very few people able to even try a blag. The over-handed presence of security—all carrying weapons and identifiable by the lurid green, high visibility waistcoats that they wore—would certainly offer additional reasoning.
“Listen to me, you fuckwit,” a voice next to him hissed, catching his attention. “If I get fucked on this, then so will you, I can promise you that.”
A wiry and weather-beaten older man stopped and addressed another of the luminous, tabard monkeys. The older man’s face looked harried and there were deep lines of worry on his brow. In one hand he held a long, thick length of chain, attached to the end of which sat a mangy but fierce-looking shepherd dog.
“Braydon sure as shit won’t stand for it. Either Baker wins or we all get our arses stoved in, and I don’t mean that figuratively.”
The man in the tabard shook his head. “Billy Baker is the King of the North,” he said. “He left the Refuge unbeaten in fifty straight tear ups… fifty! I promise you—he’ll deliver the goods.”
Looking unconvinced, the older man yanked on the chain and pushed towards the Pit; the dog growled and begrudgingly trundled behind.
“He’d better, otherwise we are all out of options. There ain’t a single stone that I haven’t looked under in this shit-pit—Krane took em all out. If we don’t have fighters then we don’t have fights, and you know as well as I do—that’ll end badly for everybody involved.”
The old man looked over again, this time clearly more aggrieved at the blatant eaves-dropping, and the General turned away, thinking on what he had just heard. With a small nod of the head to show he meant no disrespect, he moved away, heading towards a crowded metal staircase to his left.
A stout and angry-looking man with a large black flashlight, looked over the ticket momentarily before grunting and pointing vaguely behind himself. Once on the third tier, the General followed the shuffling line until it came to a stop, granting him a more than adequate view into the broken hole at the centre of the flaming floor.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…” the upbeat voice sang out from the squeaking speakers which sat next to the lights on the tall tripod. “WELCOME, TO THE ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIRST CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS…”
6
“FIGHTERS! READY YOURSELVES!”
An underlying hiss of static threatened to distort the familiar voice as it boomed from the Tannoy system above.
Tanner rolled his shoulders, slowly letting out the breath that he had been holding deep in the lower reaches of his lungs. The vein in his temple throbbed, causing it to itch as he looked over and surveyed his opponent.
There was no doubting it, the man that trod the boards in front of him was huge—even bigger than Krane had been. Ever since his first and last match in the Pit, there had been no hiding the fact that the search for his next opponent had stretched well beyond the usual rag-and-tag of the city boundaries. Krane, the once revered and long undisputed champion of the Pit had cast a long shadow, and his timely and seemingly easy demise some weeks before had sent reverberations of a kind never before witnessed in the New Capital. Any remaining, prospective fighters had already been dispatched. There was simply nobody left with the skill to match Tanner, and with only two fights in which to utilise him, he was under no illusion that Braydon would be pulling out all stops to ensure that the matches were as spectacular and deadly as possible.
Tanner watched as his opponent stalked him like a lion. According to the introductions, Billy Baker hailed from a long line of travellers. His family had made a name for themselves fighting on the gypsy, bare-knuckle, fighting circuit and their victories spanned back for over a century. Billy was the last remaining survivor of the Baker name and, from the look of it, he looked keen to see it reinstated back to its former glory. Whether or not this introduction was actually true remained to be seen, of course, as Tanner thought back to his own fabricated back story before his previous fight.
Billy Baker had journeyed down from an encampment in the North known simply as the Refuge. Tanner had heard of the Refuge; in fact, it had been his originally intended destination after the selling of his wares and before his subsequent drugging and forced entry into the Pit. Rumour had it that the Refuge held a manner of ‘trade relations’ with the New Capital; all under the watchful eye and ‘expert’ negotiating powers of Mr. Farringdon, of course. A wild-west town of hostility and murder, it was said to be ruled by gang law, not anything organised, and therefore it might be somewhere a man might go and carve out a fortune for himself, if only he had the gumption and the balls to walk in there and take it.
Tanner looked up into the stands for the second time. That had been his intention. This was now his reality. Maybe, if he ever made it out of the New Capital alive, he would retrace his original footsteps and make his way there to see for himself.
The bell chimed loudly and Billy Baker charged at him with an agility which seemed impossible given his sheer bulk and size. Tanner twisted on the balls of his feet, sliding under a widely thrown right cross, and stepped to a safe distance away from him.
From all around them, the screaming of the crowd invaded the four corners, causing the hairs on his neck and arms to stand up. The excited horde seethed and thronged dementedly; throwing bottles, cans, and anything else at hand into the roughly hewn aperture at the bottom of the arena. As with any fight held here, Teddy Braydon—the now very successful director of Braydon Enterprises and owner of the Pit itself—had spun a weave of magical hype around the encounter, promising them an ‘unparalleled match of blood and brawn between the marauding conqueror from the South, and the Head-hunter from the North’. The crowd ha
d lapped it up, and now, looking around at the seemingly never-ending stretch of scaffold gantries, Tanner guessed that this was perhaps the biggest audience ever to bear witness to a match thus far; it certainly felt bigger than his last one.
Turning on a dime, the man came again, a little more cautiously, and Tanner took him in properly for the first time. His dark heavily-thatched head was huge and squared off—something akin to a breeze block—with a low brow which hung over his dark, menacing eyes. His features were strong and striking; seemingly undamaged (the man had either not fought much, or else he was that good that he very rarely got hit—Tanner assumed the latter). Underneath, his bare chest was thick set with sheer God-born muscle. Surprisingly, unlike many of the ‘hard’ men of the day, he bore no tattoos. His naked arms were like the trunks of sturdy, young saplings—richly adorned with well-trained muscle—and his hands looked as big as saucepan lids.
A few feet away from Tanner he stopped, his guard high, hiding the bottom half of his face under his enormous hands. Judging from his stance—left foot forwards, right leg back and at an angle—at some point it was likely that this giant had received some kind of formal training. His now restrained demeanour certainly hinted at the same.
Tanner bounced his own hands up and down in front of him, moving them in small circles. It was a trick his martial arts instructor had shown him to do many years before and, to this day, it was one tactic which had never failed to make an impact on a fight.
Keep them guessing, never let them know where the next strike is going to go.
A small smile crept to the corner of his mouth as he watched the dark eyes of his opponent following the fists, assessing the situation with some obvious doubt.
Above them, the thump of the bass drum led for the crowd to begin to chant his name. “Tanner! Tanner! Tanner!”
