Vasilov sent a text. Samson is history, my boy. The only name I hear in this clubroom is Thor!
And Nemesis, I presume, Ink wrote. What a day this had been!
Yes, Nemesis too, and Calliope, who gave Maenad the first true fight of her career! Many names are being spoken, but Thor is spilling from lips wherever I turn.
Even if Thor lost his second match tomorrow, Samson’s death had been eclipsed. Ink sent thanks up to God as he settled in for the night outside the stalls. The aisles didn’t quiet very quickly. Everyone was too excited from the events of the day, and some were still giggling about the torn-off pants at the children’s melee. He pretended to sleep and just listened to the cheers and gasps and laughter, the angry clangs of a man who was cleaning up his belongings and those of his dead fighter’s, and preparing to go home in a huff. People didn’t understand how much their display of good or bad sportsmanship mattered when they lost. Even if the manager who had slugged another in a temper had a champion above all the rest one day, people would remember what he had done today at the Games. And talk.
“Oh, honey, he’s sleeping,” a woman whispered. Ink pulled off his black out mask and blinked at a woman trying to lead a disappointed boy away from Thor’s stall. Both were wearing backstage passes. Calling them back, Ink waved off the mother’s apology and gave the excited boy the autograph he desired so badly that his little body was trembling. Eight or nine, stick thin and not a scrap of muscle on him, he looked through the bars to Thor in worship.
Another fan. Another two fans, because the mother would remember that Ink had been kind to her puny young son. The boy asked shyly if he could peek into the locker room and Ink got up at once to unlock it and show him. When the two of them left, the kid had stars in his eyes.
What if someone tried to shoot Thor while Ink was asleep? It was all he could think about as he sat down on his cot. Then he took out his wallet. He couldn’t justify wasting money on extras, but this was a necessity. He never skimped on those. Removing sixty dollars, he went in search of the nearest security guard. The kid was strolling around one aisle over. He looked about seventeen or eighteen, more pimples than skin, and nervous about his authority. Sixty big ones was probably what he made as a guard after six hours of work.
Just as Ink was about to greet him, the guard lit up and said, “Good show! I couldn’t believe it!”
“Thank God you’re not an Ares fan,” Ink said. Slipping the folded twenties into the guy’s palm, he lowered his voice and added, “Seriously, I’m getting some totally black looks from people. Are you working through the night?” He glanced at the kid’s nametag. “Brian?”
“All the way through it. I just punched in.”
“Could you take some extra passes through my aisle, just check on Thor tonight and make sure he’s okay?”
Brian counted up the bills and said, “Sure, man!”
“That would be great. Good night.” Ink returned to his cot and fell asleep, the pimply guard standing watch nearby.
Chapter Seven: The Second Match
He woke up anxious in the morning, but Thor was unhurt in his stall. The atmosphere in the stables was much calmer since no one was readying for pictures, and quieter since some people had packed up and left when their zombies died or were injured in the melees and matches. An email had come in as Ink slept with the list of second matches for men in the 20-35 category. Thor was paired up with Dog of Tartarus, and Ink allowed himself to feel hopeful that his zombie might pull off another amazing victory.
Dog of Tartarus was good, but not great. He had been fighting for two-and-a-half years now, a solid middle-of-the-road performer. Never had he fallen in a melee, but rarely had he made it to the final battle with the top five contestants either. And now he didn’t even take those drugs to bulk him up! Ink skimmed his history and liked what he saw. Thor had a chance. But even if he lost, there was no shame. Dog of Tartarus had a great manager in Matthias West. The fellow was young, but he hadn’t fallen under the sway of the training fads like starvation and warm-up fights like so many young managers did. When Dog of Tartarus had gotten beaten up pretty badly in his first match at the Arctic, Matthias pulled his place from Filo to give him time to heal. That was a good move, a hard decision, but one that Ink would have made. Others would have pressed on and fought him anyway at Filo, unable to pass up the fun of a competition, and risked injuring the fighter so badly that he couldn’t go to the Games. But you had to see the bigger picture.
So Dog of Tartarus was in top form today. But he was no Ares, especially without any dope, and Thor had ended Ares in no time at all.
There were four other pairings in the email. Nemesis was going up against Fightin’ Titan, and the hapless Son of Zeus didn’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell in the ring with Dionysus. Cauldron of Fire and Bow Down Before Me were evenly matched and also looked fairly similar, so the audience was going to have a hard time telling one from the other. Lastly, Zombie Jesus had his second match against Volcanus. Those matches started at eleven.
It was only eight now. The 36-50 adult male category was having its matches first, and after that would be the women in the same age group. At half-past nine, the younger women would fight. And then, once the younger men had their turn, the stadium was just playing host to random bits of silliness in the halftime elderly competition, magicians and singers and other nonsense until it was time for the brawls.
Backstage passes were from eight-thirty to ten-thirty this morning, and then all through the afternoon. Nadia appeared to festoon Scrapper’s stall with streamers and balloons. There were scratches across her face, shallow but still visible under her cosmetics. Ink was sure that whatever she had gotten them for, they had been richly deserved. The cuffs were off her wrists. She hung up a sign announcing the boy’s status as Prince of the Games. But there was nothing princely about Scrapper at the time being. He was just a battered zombie boy in a stall, standing by his water trough like he’d spent the night trying to dump it and was trying to figure out why it hadn’t worked.
Nadia didn’t say much to Ink, and Ink didn’t say much to Nadia although he was tempted to ask how the job search was going. Seen any Help Wanted signs lately? But she was soon tangling with a stadium employee who insisted that she drop the balloons to a lower bar so the light wasn’t blocked. After a lengthy argument, he threatened to cut the ribbons and she acquiesced, but only long enough for him to go away. Then she started picking at the knots to raise the balloons again. Once they were up where she liked them, she changed into her barbarian queen outfit, minus the handcuffs, and sat on a chair outside the stall.
People showed up with their passes. Ink cleaned off Thor and answered the questions while Nadia tried to skim off some of his audience for herself. “Do you know who’s in here?” she asked two preteen girls at the periphery of a crowd. “The Prince of the Games!”
But they wanted to see powerful Thor, the zombie who had brought down popular Ares, not a four-year-old boy with piss dribbling down his legs. The children’s melee was old news today. As they admired Ink’s fighter, people chatted about the young women going up to fight, laughed about the elderly halftime show, and checked times on the brawls. A boy piped up, “Mister? Does he ever get scared?”
Ink clasped Thor’s shoulder and said firmly, “Never.” And that was amazing to a child, a person who could not feel scared in such a very big and scary world. An unauthorized vendor swept in to sell purported clips of Thor’s hair, and an email from Ink’s phone to security dispatch was answered in less than a minute. Two guards showed up to escort her out. She protested all the way down the aisle that she was just trying to make a little money, and steeping the hair in tea would imbue the drinker with zombie-like strength. Sure, that was exactly what Thor’s lice-ridden hair would have done. Another unauthorized vendor in the show circuit years ago had done something similar with zombie dung, used it as a fertilizer and sold the tea leaves. The craziest part was that some people had paid for it. A
hundred dollars for six grams! The man had been banned from shows eventually, but he persisted in selling it on a website until the Health Department shut him down.
Had Samson lived and won the Games, legitimate vendors would have besieged Ink for authorization to use his zombie’s likeness in clothing, action figures, and product packaging. Not clips of hair, or God forbid, his shit. Ink had had some good deals already, but it would have gone wild! Taken him from making thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands, because in his pocket would be a percentage of every sale. Managers could get rich fast that way, but they had to have a champion first. Samson had almost been there, just one step away, and already it had begun to trickle in with dolls and posters.
If Thor survived the Games, as incredible as that sounded, if Ink could parlay his amazing, two-dollar zombie into a champion and keep him alive for a few years’ worth of shows, that would be a lot of extra money for doing essentially nothing but signing his name on the dotted line.
That made him dream. He’d build a stable of forty fighting zombies, fifty or sixty men and women, and always have someone new clawing his or her way up to the top as someone else was taking the inevitable slide down. When you only had one or two decent zombies, their losses hurt like a bitch. When you had the wins and losses spread out among dozens, the bottom line wasn’t so affected by a death or some other failure. Nothing he ever did would shoot him up to the Hodgings’ level of fortune, but he didn’t need to be obscenely wealthy. Wealthy was enough.
“I miss the girl show,” a man said wistfully over his cell phone as Ink signed autographs for a fresh clutch of children and adolescents. “Used to dress them up all pretty, parade them around at halftime like it was Miss Zombie America.”
“Dad, that’s so sexist!” his daughter cried. In her early teens, she was wearing a Maenad T-shirt. There was nothing pretty about the lips spread in a snarl, the blood dripping from her mouth and a slash over her breasts. Fingers extended and nails out to scratch, she was a warrior. Not a princess.
“How’s Maenad doing today? Has she fought yet?” Ink asked.
“You can knock her down, but you can’t knock her out,” the girl said with pride. So it was a better day for Cantine. “You got any women fighters?”
“We’ve got a prince,” Nadia offered.
“Yes, I have Medusa,” Ink said.
“Maenad kicked her ass at Filo,” the girl smirked.
Ink matched it. “Yes, she did. And once Medusa gets her healed ass in the ring, she’ll be looking for payback.”
Enjoying the bandy, the girl said, “She won’t ever get it.”
The father was still staring at his cell phone, where a replay of a women’s fight was going on with screeches and cracks of fists. “They used to do a swimsuit competition back when I was a boy. The twelve best went in a calendar.” Another crack rang out from his phone. “Now they’re just like men.”
As Ink scribbled the last autograph for the group, the Maenad girl said, “The pendulum swings, Dad. Maybe it’s the guys’ turn to be in swimsuits.”
The father forgot the battle and looked up in dismay. “I don’t want to see that!”
They began to move away, Ink waving to the little boys who were squealing over their autographs and straining to catch one last glimpse of Thor. The girl was still harassing her father. “I’m going to buy you that calendar. Twelve Months of Mr. Zombie America. So then you can see what it’s like to be objectified.” No one took any notice of the Prince of the Games, except for a toddler girl who clapped at the balloons.
“Goddammit, get the fuck out of here!” a man shouted in another aisle. “Security! Security!”
Ink was alarmed as four security guards went dashing by. But it turned out to be harmless protestors. They were led past Thor’s stall, four middle-aged fools with duct tape over their lips and DO WE NOT ALL BLEED printed in red on their T-shirts. This sort of thing happened at every event, and the Games drew even more of them with its popularity. And these people had to be what happened when those know-it-all college kids who lived off Daddy’s credit cards grew up! Daddy still hadn’t cut them off to make their own way in the world, so they were here making trouble for lack of anything else to do.
Stiff-backed, Nadia came over to peer through the bars at Thor. “I don’t know why everyone is ignoring Scrapper to stare at that thing.”
“That thing survived the men’s melee,” Ink taunted. “That thing won his first match. That thing is hot shit.” If that thing made it through his second match and to the brawl, Ink was guaranteed to win a small amount of money. Only the top dog got the million dollars, but second and third would get twenty and ten thousand respectively, fourth would get five thousand and fifth would get three.
“I spent a lot of time on this costume,” Nadia said grumpily. “And no one ever got to appreciate it in the ring because the children’s melee started so suddenly.”
“Fame is so very fleeting,” Ink said. She knew that he was being sarcastic, and stomped away to pout. If Ink could only go back in time to the day the two of them had met, he’d shake his younger self and then dump ice water down those hot pants.
Thor and Dog of Tartarus were scheduled as the last of the second matches. Once his fighter was ready, Ink felt comforted at the heavy security presence and went upstairs to watch the other ones. Dionysus and Son of Zeus had just been delivered to their marks as the announcer chattered over the speakers. Only the Dionysus fans were listening, and there were gaps in the stands. The melees and the brawls were the favorite items on the agenda. After a while, the matches all started to look the same.
Constanzo was watching from the clubroom. Ink watched him through the binoculars from the stands. The man wasn’t intent on his champion as the match readied to start. Sipping from a drink, he had his eyes out to the sky. Then he checked his watch and looked into the clubroom. Had Ink murdered an opponent’s zombie to better his zombie’s odds, you could be damn sure he would be watching the ring. The grumpy geezer’s disinterest made Ink question his suspicions. Did Constanzo care that much if Dionysus lost? So insanely much that he would murder to help his chances at the Games? Constanzo had made plenty off the zombie over the years, and would make plenty more in renting out his body for many years to come. Dionysus was a good-looking dude and a little more proficient in the sack than most zombie males, according to a rumor that Jackie had passed along to Ink.
It began. The Greek god Zeus had fathered many sons, but this Son of Zeus in the ring was one of his less impressive ones. Transforming into his usual pinwheel of randomly thrown out fists, he absorbed a hard blow to his gut and kept on slugging. Dionysus couldn’t get too close without getting clobbered. He backed away, Son of Zeus coming after him, and backed away a little faster. Son of Zeus slugged at the air, still going along at the same pace. Punch, punch, kick, kick, punch, kick, he wasn’t marking his opponent and perhaps there was something wrong with his vision. Zombies were just as prone to being near-sighted or far-sighted as the general population. If that was the issue here, Son of Zeus compensated by doing this, punching and kicking at every blur and smear he could see. That was one of the things that made the elderly melee so funny. They couldn’t see, they couldn’t hear, some could only hobble, but they hated each other with every inch of their withered, white-haired bodies and vengeance would be theirs. Take that, Grandpa!
The manager for Nemesis was watching at the bar nearby. Ink moved his binoculars. Yes, those features were just so strong and unfeminine! Strong features like that looked good on a man, but for a woman, it was a tragedy. She was a veritable Amazon, tall and sturdily built. Some of the guys around her at the bar were shorter than she was. There was no levity in her eyes to watch the match, only seriousness that was out of place when neither opponent belonged to her. She had a lovely shape though, and rich brown hair in a French braid. If she were to let that down, if she would smile, it would help to soften her features. One of the men spoke to her and she brushed him
off in total disinterest, even though there wasn’t a ring on her finger.
Something about her was still bothering Ink. It was her face, something in her sort-of-but-not-quite-pretty face that unsettled him. People coming into the stands blocked his view of her and he turned away.
What a good year for newbies it was indeed. Ink had never heard so much as a whisper about this woman’s Nemesis, or Ultimate Hades either until the Games, and their managers were new to the scene, too. The one who had owned the late Ultimate Hades had gone home. He had gambled and lost, bringing a good new fighter to the hardest competition. Too eager. He should have started with the little Nuveen show in early autumn. Now he was out whatever he had spent on that zombie, and it was likely quite a lot. If the woman who owned Nemesis were smart, she would cede his second match to Fightin’ Titan and rest on her laurels. She had made her entrance, and it was a splash. That could be what she was planning as she watched Son of Zeus and Dionysus, again ignoring the guy who wanted to talk to her. Ink looked up her name in his phone. Adrasteia Sophoclei. That was a mouthful. It sounded very Greek, but she didn’t look particularly Greek. Just an everything-European mix like Ink was himself.
In the ring, Dionysus was playing with Son of Zeus, letting him catch up in his flailing and backing off again. Then Son of Zeus delivered a roundhouse kick to the breeze, and squinted around for his opponent. Behind him, Dionysus charged. They went down to the ground and everyone cheered at the scuffling. Rolling around like kittens, they clawed and scratched and thumped on each other. Then Dionysus pushed Son of Zeus into another roll and fell on his back to pin him there. Trapped, Son of Zeus wriggled around futilely at the great weight holding him down. Dionysus banged Son of Zeus’ face on the ground, and as his victim wriggled even more pathetically, pressed his head to the dirt and began to crush it there.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 56
