Meritorium (Meritropolis Book 2)

by Joel Ohman

  Orson crammed the helmet onto Charley’s head and stepped back for a quick appraisal. “Not too bad, actually.” He came forward again, flipping the visor down and rotating the cheek-guard flaps inward. He nodded. “There, that’s as good as you’re gonna get.”

  Grigor handed Charley a small, light shield and a dirk for close-quarter combat. “You want these, I’m guessing? Whatever you have planned—be careful. Remember, the goal is to calm things down, not stir up even more conflict.” Grigor lifted a warning eyebrow.

  Charley grinned, only his chin and mouth visible beneath the visor. “Will do.”

  Orson shook his head. “Oh, here we go.”

  “Well, you better get going.” Grigor nodded over his shoulder to where the unconscious guard lay underneath a heap of tattered bedding. “I’d estimate you have about ten minutes before you need to make sure you ditch that armor and are nowhere near it.”

  “Got it, thanks.”

  Charley took a deep breath and turned toward the percolating crowd. Beads of sweat were already bubbling up on his forehead. There was minimal padding on the interior of the helmet, and the metal rotated freely over the dampness of his slick hair, sliding and slipping from side to side.

  He jammed his hand down on the top of his helmet, avoiding the plume that jutted rooster-like straight into the air. He forced himself to walk in what he hoped was the confident manner of a soldier, but he felt ridiculous—and now wasn’t sure this idea was such a brilliant one.

  It was too late to go back now. The crowd was parting to let him through; every eye, both Circumcellion and Low Score, turned toward him.

  Charley came to a stop, directly in the middle of the no-man’s-land between the two groups. There was a hush. Even the prophet ceased speaking and turned to face him.

  “Attention!” Charley lowered his voice a timbre, lifting his arm into the air. “It’s time to prepare to enter the arena. You will be going in shortly.”

  He turned toward the Low Scores. “Please move back toward the fence.” Hesitantly at first, the Low Scores, conditioned to follow orders from authority, walked back to the fence on the far side.

  He turned to the Circumcellions. “Please move b—”

  “Stop,” the prophet interrupted, jutting his own scrawny arm straight into the air. “Why do you presume authority that only belongs to God?”

  Charley faltered. The wild eyes of the prophet unnerved him. Even with the visor hiding most of his face, it seemed as if the prophet could see inside not just the helmet, but his soul.

  The prophet raised his voice, a slight quaver echoing across the pen. “Hear this, all who trample on the needy, and enslave the poor of the land, dealing deceitfully with false balances, buying the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—you.” He pointed a bony finger directly at Charley. “You will perish in the rubble, the rocks will consume you!”

  Charley took a step back, just one in a chain of mistakes he felt he had made since awakening. The pronouncement had unnerved him. The prophet was pointing at him because he was wearing the armor; the prophet couldn’t really be talking about him. But suddenly, Charley didn’t feel so certain.

  The prophet stepped closer.

  Flustered, Charley attempted to regain his calm. “Silence! Move back calmly against the fence as we prepare to enter the arena.”

  The prophet continued speaking as if he hadn’t even heard Charley. “The end has come. The songs of the arena shall become wailings by the end of the day.” The prophet took another step closer, this time followed by his band of Circumcellions, buoyed forward by the fervor of their leader’s speech.

  Charley’s hand drifted down to his dirk.

  For the briefest moment, Charley understood what it must have been like to be a guard in the System. He even felt a slight pang of sympathy; when in uniform, facing a potentially explosive encounter, uncertain, scared—maybe even after all of the training—you react just like any other human. You do what you can to protect yourself.

  Charley unsheathed the dirk.

  A collective buzz crackled in the air, a sound like a wasp’s nest. In the background, Orson let out a sharp string of expletives that carried above the rising drone of the Circumcellions. Charley lowered his hand, but it was too late; Charley realized belatedly that once you draw your weapon, you can’t exactly just put it back and expect things to go back to the way they were.

  “You lover of violence, you come against us with your weapons of steel, thinking that you can force us to do your evil will, but you cannot.” The prophet took another step toward Charley. “We do not fear death by your sword.” His eyes shone brightly. “We welcome it.”

  Charley knew he had misjudged the situation, perhaps fatally: how exactly was he now to take on a mob of religious zealots who actually wanted to die for their cause? Charley fought the urge to turn his head toward the sound of Orson’s cursing, hoping that they might come and help, but he forced himself to look resolutely ahead.

  A strapping man pushed his way past the prophet and ran up to Charley. He spread his arms wide, butted up into Charley’s personal space, and jutted out his neck. “Kill me now. I am not afraid to die. Just kill me now.” He slammed himself against Charley’s chest, his arms flailing.

  Up close, Charley’s eyes widened in recognition. Without thinking, he blurted out, “Carter? What the—what are you doing here, with the Circumcellions? Why aren’t you with Marta?”

  Confusion rippled across his wan features, but squinting closer at the narrow eye gap in the visor, Carter blinked rapidly. “Charley? Is that really you? What in the blazes are you doing in that armor?”

  “Never mind that. Why aren’t you with Marta?” Charley tried to keep his voice low.

  “Marta.” Carter spat out the name. “She booted me out, was going to try to sell me, but I escaped, and ended up with this lot somehow.” He looked over his shoulder at the Circumcellions behind, who were watching their encounter closely. “It took some doing to convince them I was one of them.”

  “So that’s what you’re doing? You don’t really have a death wish? Because I could accommodate you.” An evil grin twisted Charley’s mouth beneath his visor. “I’ll help you earn their trust.” Pivoting his shoulder like a striking snake, Charley whipped the flat of his blade against the side of Carter’s head, and then kicked him in the stomach, using his heel to knock him back on his rump. Charley thought he deserved at least that for his part in their enslavement.

  Striding to stand above Carter, he got an idea. Lifting his dirk above his head, as if to plunge it down into Carter’s heaving chest, Charley’s voice boomed out. “I will grant your desire to die as a martyr.” He extended his sword straight out toward the other Circumcellions. “I will give each of you the sweet bliss of death you so richly desire. But …” He lowered his blade slightly and looked directly at the prophet. “How do I know that once I have killed some, the rest of you won’t change your minds and decide to avenge their deaths?”

  The prophet began to speak, his wily eyes darting back and forth. He was quickly drowned out by the clamor of the other Circumcellions, each trying to prove their commitment to the cause with shouts of “We would never! We seek death! Grant us death now!”

  “Good!” Charley’s voice carried across the pen. “Then let us bring chains that we may bind you so that I can make sure of your promise. Then I will grant you the bliss of death by my sword!”

  The prophet’s eyes bulged. He licked his dry, chapped lips furiously, seemingly at a loss for words. The Circumcellions surged forward. “Chain us! Let us prove our commitment—we rejoice in the binding of chains!” Two Circumcellions began to self-flagellate themselves with a length of chain. “Bind us now so that we might prove our resolve and be freed by death!”

  “Sit down!” Charley commanded.

  Turning quickly, Charley motioned to Gri
gor, Orson, Hank, and a cadre of other Low Scores who were already gathering chains, slave harnesses, and other instruments that had been used in their capture and transport into the pen.

  Charley pointed at the Circumcellions, now seated on the ground—all except the prophet. “Bind them!”

  The prophet’s knobby knees bowed outward. He shifted back and forth, swaying side to side, as if unable to decide if he should sit and join the others. His commitment to the cause appeared now to waver. Charley grunted in disgust. Like many cult leaders, the prophet’s loyalty to the cause, when peeled away to its rotten core, was revealed to be really just a commitment to himself.

  “I said sit!” Charley took two quick steps forward, treading on Carter in the process, and then pushed the prophet to the ground.

  Before the prophet could scramble up, Hank had already begun looping a length of chain around his skinny waist. Wisely, Orson stuffed a balled-up old shirt into the prophet’s mouth and quickly subdued his gaunt and emaciated body.

  Grigor walked by Charley and spoke quietly out of the side of this mouth. “They’re all tied up.” He hesitated. “You aren’t really going to kill them, just sitting there like this, are you?”

  “Nope,” Charley said, trying to make his voice sound flippant to mask the jolt of surprise from Grigor’s question. He wondered if Grigor really thought he was capable of the mass execution of a bunch of seated innocent people. He thought back to some of the horrific things that he had done and wondered what he was capable of. Who exactly was he becoming: someone out to protect the innocent by zeroing the System or someone intent on revenge at all costs?

  “Okay …” Grigor said, his face still inscrutable.

  “Do you have anymore of that candy?”

  “What?” Grigor asked, taken aback.

  Hank had walked up. “They’re all restrained.” He looked at Charley, his nose wrinkling up. “What’s the matter with you, Charley? Now is not the time to have a sweet tooth.”

  “Not for me, you idiot.” He turned to Grigor. “Please?”

  Grigor extended his massive bear paw of a hand. Charley sheathed his dirk; prompting shouts from the Circumcellions bound on the ground, and accepted the candy from Grigor. Just one of Grigor’s enormous handfuls of candy filled both of Charley’s cupped hands.

  Charley rubbed his hands together, crunching the hard candy pieces together into a fine, sugary dust.

  A smile began to play on Grigor face. “For the ants?”

  Charley smiled in return. “Yes. The Circumcellions will still want martyrdom in the arena, I’m sure, but I think after an hour or so on the ground with the ants, they might be a little more prone to want to die fighting anyone in armor.”

  He walked to the seated Circumcellions and began sprinkling the candy dust on the ground in a circle surrounding them. Some of the less steely-hearted Circumcellions began to shake visibly, as if Charley was a witch doctor preparing a sacrifice.

  Charley shook his head, trying not to laugh. He snaked the candy dust in trails extending outward like spokes, and then with a stream of muttered gibberish in his best imitation of what he guessed a spell might sound like, he smacked his hands together and poofed the remaining candy dust into the air above the Circumcellions.

  Watching the fine saccharine-sweet grit float like a softly descending cloud, Charley took a step back and admired his handiwork.

  Orson looked at Charley and nodded his approval. “The ants will be swarming in no time.”

  “Yep.”

  Grigor looked over Charley’s shoulder and whispered. “You need to ditch that armor right away. That guard will wake up any minute, and the others will be patrolling over here soon.”

  “Over here.” Hank gestured to a curtained shanty that someone had constructed as a rough privacy barrier for a makeshift toilet.

  Quickly, Charley walked over, and disrobed as circumspectly as possible.

  “What do you want me to do with the armor?” Hank asked.

  Charley stretched his arms wide, basking in the early-morning sunrise. It was already scorching-hot; he was glad to not be wearing the armor anymore.

  “Charley, the armor?”

  Charley smiled, the corners of his mouth twisting to expose his canines. He was definitely fully awake now. Today he would see the czar face to face for the first time, and he would give him what he had coming.

  For Alec.

  He walked away from Hank, calling out over his shoulder. “Put the armor on Carter.”

  It was a day for revenge.

  CHAPTER 14

  Don’t Leave Me

  Charley stared at the ground, forcibly trying to calm his pounding heart. He took a deep breath and looked up, but it caught in his throat.

  A pinprick of light, growing larger as he walked forward, illuminated the end of the tunnel. The sounds of the arena pulsated back to him, rippling along the tunnel like a current of frenetic energy that threatened to sweep him up and carry him away.

  His fingers tingled; he fought the sudden urge to draw a weapon, before remembering that he had none. For the sake of the reenactment, Charley and the rest of the Low Scores were totally unarmed—with the exception of Grigor, the stolen dirk hidden in his boot. Charley agreed that their solitary weapon was best utilized by Grigor, both for his expertise and because of people’s reticence to search him all that thoroughly.

  Ever since being herded from the pen, none of them had uttered a word. In the tunnel behind them, Sven, Rico and his other new friends, followed by the other Low Scores from the pen, were eerily quiet. Charley felt as if he had lost a friend, but it’s not like Charley could have helped what had happened to Sven while Charley was captured. He knew he needed to say something, but each of them had bigger things to worry about, so he just kept walking silently, leaving Sven to his newfound companions.

  No one would say it, but everyone knew. This wasn’t a reenactment. It was an execution.

  Charley walked toward the ever-expanding, ever-threatening light at the end of the tunnel. The other tunnels housed Carter, the prophet, and the rest of the ant-bitten Circumcellions, the Meritorium Honor Guard, scores of animal combinations, the other contestants in the Venatio—in fact, all those who had survived until this, the last event. Based on what Hank had seen earlier, Sandy was still alive, and given her unaltered status as High Score, likely stood the best chance of them all for surviving the day.

  Charley understood that one of the tunnels also contained the czar, the creator of the System. The thought of revenge for Alec spurred Charley on. He quickened his pace, his mind racing.

  The czar might think that he could implement a method for quietly ridding society of the unwanted—the disabled, the poor, the helpless—but Charley would not quietly look the other way. Evil done in the dark must be brought into the light. Today, the czar would pay a public price for his sins.

  Heat flushed up Charley’s neck; they were almost to the mouth of the tunnel. The roaring of the arena felt like it threatened to swallow him whole. Even standing next to Grigor, Orson, and Hank, he could hear nothing but the crowd. Not wanting to be blind-sided by a warrior, wolverator, or worse lying in wait on either side of the tunnel, Charley sprinted the last few steps out of the tunnel and into the arena.

  The blazing noonday sun blinded him, and he squinted against the glare. He swiveled his head from side to side. His eyes failed to adjust to the light, unless they just playing tricks on him.

  All he could see in either direction was water, its depths seeming to go down forever. The arena floor had been strategically retracted and filled with water from the immense aqueducts below. A sense of vertigo overwhelmed him; his feet shifted on the sand and he swooned, his knees buckling, before Grigor’s strong hand hoisted him up.

  He was standing on a narrow sandbar hardly wider than his shoulders. On either side was deep, da
rk water that lay smooth as black glass. The ominous stillness unnerved him.

  The sandbar pathway led to the center of the arena, where it expanded into a manmade island—a mountain of volcanic rocks that jutted into the air, the summit large enough for the final battle.

  There was only one way to go: forward.

  Hesitantly, he took one step, then another. With every footfall, the sand cascaded down on either side of the slender walkway, slipping and sliding into the placid water, disappearing into the depths with a burble. Something about the stillness of the water gave Charley goose bumps; the way its surface was so preternaturally calm, yet underneath unfathomably deep, sent a warning prickle up the back of his neck. The glassy patina of the halcyon exterior was like a shell threatening to crack open and birth something of unspeakable terror.

  The lizard part of Charley’s brain screamed a warning. It wasn’t something he could describe so much as he could feel, like someone was watching them. He quickened his pace.

  Not that there weren’t already many people watching him. It didn’t seem possible, but the decibel level of the crowd ratcheted up another notch. It wasn’t the eyes of the crowd on him that gave him pause; it was something else entirely.

  Something big.

  He could feel it in the vibrations of the arena, in the buzzing of his ears, in the blood rushing to his head. He could feel it in the tens of thousands of miniscule sensory inputs firing electrical pulses to his overloaded brain synapses. He could feel it in some deep, primitive part of his being: the part that had kept his ancestors alive, long before his father’s father’s father had walked the earth, a time of saber-toothed danger by land, flapping winged danger by air, and spiky serpentine danger by water.

  From the periphery of his vision, he saw something move.

  He turned, as if in slow motion, Grigor colliding into his back. Falling to one knee, he twisted his neck toward the spot he had seen movement.