"Ok… Good enough. Well, I can hear the start of our new fighter’s music, so let’s go back down onto the sand for his entrance and the beginning of this match."
I’m having a weak moment
A moment that may not end
Lonely in my own… skin
~ * ~
The thing Cleese noticed instantly as he stepped out onto the sand was the heat; the heat and the light. Both were a lot more intense than they’d been in the Training Hall. They were absolutely overwhelming. Jeez, it felt like he’d stepped into a sauna standing out here beneath the bright lights; all that heat and air that felt so heavy as to be barely breathable.
Everything is changing
Everything seems changed
As if quietly replaced by something soulless
The music he’d given the sound guy was pulsing through the sound system. Its deep, synthesized beat throbbed seductively throughout the stadium, rattling those in attendance right down to their molars. Its effect was something he’d pondered long and hard over. The pounding rhythm was at once infectious and menacing.
He walked out onto the sand in quick, bold strides, timing his movements so that they would be more or less in synch with the beats of music. He figured the crowd would like it and he wasn’t wrong. When he got to the center of the ring, he extended his arms (as Monk had suggested during the last of their training sessions) in a Christ-like pose and held it. Then, slowly, he turned in a tight circle so that the crowd could all get a good look at him.
Burn it down
The crowd out in the darkness erupted with a thundering applause which growled up from the floor and soared over all of their heads like a flock of angry vultures. It was a roar that, momentarily, made his guts pound and his head swirl.
What happened to the spirit with all its endless strength?
Did they swallow him up and put me in his place?
Did I grow within my shadow or simply melt around myself?
The human put back on… the… shelf
Yeah, Baby…
Looking up at the throng overhead and the television cameras pointing at him, Cleese wondered if this was what rock stars felt like as they stepped onstage. It was like a drug and he instantly understood why people worked so hard to be here in the spotlight. It was instantly addicting. Enjoying himself, he decided to play it up a bit to see how far this crowd would follow him. He wanted to see how much adoration they could rain down upon one man.
Burn it down!
Cleese looked the fighting space over as he continued slowly turning and saw that this Pit was very different from the one he was used to. The sides of this arena were not scarred metal but a clear, bullet-proof plastic; like hockey glass only thicker. Manning their cameras like gun turrets, the crew could be seen through the stuff even though the panes of acrylic were tinted slightly to cut the glare. It was a perfect six camera shoot of what could only be described as televised mayhem.
I have seen through the eyes of the opposition
The one who defines my failure
At touching that place in the heart
Where emotions bow their heads in wonder
You have encountered me
Familiar with my immediacy
In a wisp of melody
A neglected phrase unexpectedly heartfelt
In this world I may tap you on the shoulder
Cleese spun lazily to a stop and stood quietly, head hanging down, as if in prayer. His posture was, as previously planned, like that of a Corpus Christi. Hell, if these people were going to treat him like Jesus, he might as well look like him. With a grand solemnity, he raised his arms over his chest, crossing one over the other at the wrist. He was careful to make sure that his right hand—the one with the gauntlet—was on top.
Ignite
Burning down your Effigies
Ignite
Burning down your Seems of Change
He stood still a moment longer and waited. The music seemed to hesitate: its beat stalling in the air overhead like an airplane just before it crashed. The crowd hung there right along with it, anticipating his next move. He could almost feel them above him, leaning forward in their seats anxiously awaiting whatever he next had in store for them. With an almost silent snort of contempt, he let them hang there, twisting in the wind. Abruptly, he flexed his right wrist and the spike slid out with a vicious metal on metal sound and locked into place.
Ignite!
As soon as the spike appeared, the crowd went crazy. The weapon materialized on the back of his hand as if by magic. The fact that it did so in perfect time with the ending of the song was icing on the cake. The throng’s feet aggressively kicked at the backs of the chairs in front of them and stomped against the concrete floor. Their hands came together in a deafening din of approbation. Their voices made great whooping sounds which pulsed and contorted in the air.
They were, for that one, single moment, a mob united in their furor.
"Whoa-ho, Bob. I didn’t see that comin’. The crowd here is on their feet and they already love this guy. Let’s see if he can live up to the promise of that entrance once the first buzzer sounds."
Prima Nocte
The buzzer went off a lot sooner than Cleese expected. His nerves jumped from a stoic calm to full blown panic and back again in less than a heartbeat. His muscles went suddenly slack and he began, as an old friend of his used to say, "shaking like a dog shitting pizza." Then, just as quickly as it had started, the feeling was gone and a sense of absolute tranquility returned to him. The entire episode took only a second and then it was over.
The crowd overhead in the darkness whooped, the lights flashed in his eyes, spindles suddenly turned, and it was Showtime! He had planned and planned for this moment and now that it was here, he felt as calm and focused as a diamond cutter.
Cleese lowered himself into an open-legged stance and quickly surveyed the pit from a crouch; immediately assessing his situation.
Out of the eight spindles that made up the Pit, five had something inside them. At stations One, Four and Seven swayed disoriented UDs. At Eight and Three, there were magazines of bullets, each one of them sitting like twins of salvation.
Thankfully, the other three spindles appeared empty.
The crowd up in the stands hunkered down into their seats as all eyes were directed in anticipation toward the center of the pit. Wives gripped their husband’s arms just a bit tighter. Fathers hoisted their sons up onto their shoulders so that the youngsters could see what was about to occur. The children’s faces reflected their parents’ unashamed blood lust.
The three UDs stumbled out of their spindles and wandered around the sand looking pie-eyed toward the bright lights overhead. They seemed utterly mesmerized by it. Like moths before a flame, they floated drunkenly toward the illumination and reached out their hands plaintively. Their dead mouths clambered and slopped drool as they tried to respond to whatever it was that the light whispered to them.
The Dead had seen a bright light like this once before—in the time of their resurrection, back when they’d first posed their question—why? Each one of them dimly remembered the Light and what it once murmured to them, what it had once promised. They’d denied its allure before and there had been, quite literally, hell to pay. Now, as these dead folks stumbled across the sand and reached up for the Light, they once again asked of it their question: Why? Why have we been denied our eternal rest?
And, this time… The Light answered them.
Cleese fell out of the overhead glare and landed on the sand between the UDs at positions Seven and Four. He pivoted and moved fast toward Seven who was the largest and most fearsome of the trio. He figured that once he had his hands on him, he could use the thing’s stumbling body as a shield to protect himself from the others.
Cleese reached out and slapped the dead man (late thirties, bigger than the others, squinty—as if he’d lost his glasses and couldn’t see, a savage gash had been torn across his lower b
elly) across his blood-stained mouth with his gloved hand. It was a risky move, but Cleese felt confident that the Kevlar glove would protect him from the thing’s biting force should it come to that. The hide made a seal of the glove and turned the man’s infectious mouth into a more or less moot point. In a move he’d liberated from aikido, Cleese twisted the dead man’s head around on its axis, directing him toward Four (teenage male, stoner build, chest showing signs of a shotgun blast). The controlled man careened and stumbled, but basically went where he was pointed.
By this time, Four had caught a whiff of Cleese on the breeze and was coming on pretty fast. His eyes bugged out from the depths of their sunken sockets and their violent intent was pretty obvious. As the kid came at him, Cleese pushed Seven in his direction. The stoner swung his arms in a windmill fashion, nails scratching at Seven’s face and torso. The boy flailed his arms blindly, gradually becoming more and more agitated as his assault yielded no worthwhile results.
Seven, for his part, had yet to realize where he was, let alone what was going on. His eyes rolled around and were just visible over Cleese’s hand. Beneath his glove, Cleese could feel the thing’s mouth moving.
Suddenly, Cleese pulled Seven closer and cruelly manipulated his head. A couple of crunching sounds later and the dead man’s body twirled to the ground; its neck having been cranked to an impossible angle. With its spinal cord irreparably damaged, the thing’s skull sat oddly askew atop the pole of its neck. The UD’s body collapsed to the ground and lay motionless, its limbs spread out like a broken star. Only its eyes moved within their sockets as it lay in the soft sand.
The crowd voiced its approval at the spilling of First Blood with another thunderous ovation. Their roar was deafening and the sound had begun to get more than a little bit distracting. Funny how things change.
Four, who continued to reach out across an obstacle that was no longer there, stumbled forward in two great, sloppy steps. Cleese ducked inside, spun under its grasp and hit him twice with powerful rights to the chest. He followed up by coming across with a quick yet powerful left cross.
Four’s head snapped around like a sprinkler.
Cleese continued doling out the punishment with an underhand blow directed at just below the kid’s sternum. He spun away from the collapsing corpse and stood back to assess his handiwork.
Four wheezed once, twice, and then collapsed to its knees. It tried to draw a coarse, stuttering breath into its lungs, more out of a dimly remembered habit than from any biological need, but that seemed to be something it just couldn’t manage. As its milky eyes roamed the ceiling, it blew a crimson bubble out of its left nostril.
Cleese quickly knelt down behind Four, his chest to the UD’s back. He hooked his chain-mailed right arm under the wounded thing’s armpit, and secured a hand hold on the back of the kid’s neck. He tugged the zombie’s head downward until its chin rested firmly against its chest. Putting his full weight behind it, Cleese flopped forward onto the sand.
Four’s neck snapped like a branch.
Cleese rolled forward and then up and onto his feet. He stood under the light for a second and he tried to catch his breath.
This isn’t so bad…
He walked over to the immobilized Seven. The man lay there, prone in the sand, eyes darting about like marbles set loose in his skull. A frustrated expression danced across its features as it tried to move its incapacitated body, but the connection had been severed by the sharp edges of its fragmented vertebrae. Despite the thing’s body’s damaged condition, the UDs’ jaws continued moving wetly, chewing at the sand beneath it as if it were flesh.
Cleese gazed up to where he imagined the heart of the crowd lay and smiled. He raised his right arm slowly and—with a flick of his wrist—the spike flashed into the light. He moved to where the UD lay and impaled the corpse’s brain with a single downward stroke. He drove the polished steel into the flesh at the back of its skull where the spine met up with the Occipital Bone. The spike’s insertion made a wet, crunching sound. Once the head’s eyes went blank and vacant, he slowly pulled the blade back out again. Blood ran in dark rivulets down the chrome spike as it was withdrawn into the gauntlet.
The crowd predictably roared its hearty approval.
Man, I got this shit knocked.
Cleese regained his footing and once again stood fully erect. Menacingly, he scanned the pit. Behind the thick glass walls, he caught sight of the television cameras and smiled for The World. He could just make out the guys who were running the cameras and could tell that they were going crazy: all shouting, waving their arms. Pointing.
Cleese momentarily wondered what all the fuss was about.
His left arm unexpectedly rang out in a painful pinch. He quickly looked down and saw One (a little girl—maybe eight or nine, her hair mussed, eyes wild, a ragged, open wound that ran across her chest, over her shoulder and down her back) had her teeth clamped firmly around the meat of his forearm. Drool ran thick and syrupy down to his wrist as her jaws worked against the chain-mail-covered flesh. She looked up at him with a mixture of hatred and hunger in her little eyes.
Shit, this was only a kid. Younger than even the stoner had been and he’d been fucking young. Hell, she was nine, if she was a day. Dressed in a torn and soiled pinafore, her head moved back and forth from side to side as she gnawed greedily on his arm. Her cold hands gripped him at the wrist and the elbow and, for a moment, she looked as if she was working on her first Thanksgiving turkey leg.
Cleese’s stomach made an oily, gurgling sound.
The crowd sat silently, expectantly, for this was an important moment in all Cherry Matches: the moment when every first-time fighter made his decision to kill. It was a choice made not out of necessity, not out of self preservation, but out of pure, raw vengeance. It was largely held that even if a new fighter did make the kill, he could be so demoralized that he made mistakes later in the match and mistakes always proved fatal.
Killing a child—zombie or not—was where a lot of fighters drew their moral line.
Cleese looked down at the kid as she hungrily gnawed on his protected arm. He tried to imagine what she’d been like back when she’d been alive: her first birthday, her first steps, her first bicycle. She’d been called "daddy’s girl" by someone, no doubt. It was all too easy to imagine her mother saying that she had the eyes of an angel.
Now, those eyes were cloudy and refused to stay still in their sockets.
The girl’s mouth worked against the metal of the chain-mail, grinding and biting, while her eyes danced to their own silent tune. Finally, her attention managed to focus on something cold and oily-smelling that had been pressed into her limited field of vision. It was hard and pointed and pushed forebodingly against her turned-up nose. She tried to make her eyes see the thing, but it was difficult and her vision just wouldn’t stay still. Her corrupted brain knew that it was something she’d seen before, but she just couldn’t recall when or where or even what the invading thing was.
Then, a sound was heard that helped her to remember.
Cli-Click!
Cleese felt the Beretta jump in his hand before he even realized he’d pulled the trigger. To be honest, it surprised him just as much as it had the crowd in the stands. 19,939 people jumped in their seats as one and then exuberantly let out another explosive cheer. The sound came down like a torrential downpour, drowning out even the sound of Cleese’s heart beating in his ears.
The whites of the little girl’s eyes were washed away by an internal explosion of blood. Her milky gaze pierced Cleese’s own and then she let out a long, gurgling snort. Smoke swirled up from one nostril in a looping curlicue of bewilderment. Those eyes, now set free, rolled up toward Heaven and returned home, back to the angels.
Cleese’s bullet sheared its very violent way through the child’s nasal cavity, turning bits of bone and meat into secondary projectiles and churning what lay beyond into paste. The slug ricocheted wildly within the confines of her skull
and quickly carved her reanimated brains into mush. The back of her head immediately exploded outward, throwing blood and grue into the air and splattering it like a Rorschach drawing across the sand.
Cleese watched with a sudden sense of detachment as her little, fragile body briefly teetered and then dropped to the ground like a felled tree. It was as if, having already pulled the trigger, his compassion for her evaporated in a red mist of apathy. He felt nothing as he watched her body crumple to the sand. His lack of sentiment, much less guilt, toward killing this child troubled him more than anything he’d encountered thus far in The Pit.
The stadium crowd was still on its feet, screaming and applauding, their din rattling the timbers of the building. Instinctively, they sensed that a new champion was in the making; someone who could make good on the promise of communal redemption that the Octagon held. Having eradicated the first round’s dead so effectively, they now knew that Cleese was somebody worthy of their love. He was someone that they could revere.
Ok that sucked… that really, really sucked hard.
Cleese dropped to his knees, now somehow out of breath and bowed his head. He blindly reholstered the Beretta, the metal squeaking into the oiled leather. As the crowd above showered their adulation upon him, his attention focused on his fingertips as they swam hurriedly over his forearm as he searched for any signs of injury.
No blood. No wound.
Hot shit, he was ok!
He was all right. He’d made it.
He smiled and felt himself begin to relax.
And then the buzzer sounded for the second round.
No Flesh Shall Be Spared Page 28
