Flesh Worn Stone

by Burks, John

  “It was Cassandra,” Rebecca said softly. “Amanda is an innocent. One of the few.”

  “That’s pretty fucked up that the people they pick for me to rape are already on the way here. They had to know the problems.” He paused, looking for the right words. “I mean, there are some sick sons of bitches running all this.”

  “It’s their way,” Rebecca told them. “They don’t just feed on the violence of the Game, they feed on our souls. They are evil, vile people, but what they do…it works. If you leave this place, you leave reborn, unafraid of anything in the world outside. You leave here a god among men, and though they don’t know you’ve won five Games, they can look at you and see something is different. People can tell, as I’m sure John could with his father.”

  “It was before I was born,” John replied. “But yeah, he takes no shit from anyone, ever.”

  “And you, Rebecca, how is it you know so much about this place? How did you get here?” Darius asked, half suspecting what the answer would be.

  She held up her hand and wiped the grime away from the numbers tattooed between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. 12345. “I’ve already won five Games.”

  Darius nodded. “I figured that. Why don’t you have the marks on your head?”

  “That’s something new,” she answered. “Something that Block started doing after I left. I think it’s silly, but there’s nothing you can do about it. This is how we used to do it. This is how we recognize each other on the outside.”

  “So you’re wealthy beyond your wildest dreams,” John asked. “A winner of the Game and all its glory.”

  “There is money,” she said solemnly, nodding. “I’ve never wanted for anything once I left…”

  “And what did you do, to be allowed to return?” John asked.

  “Why in the hell would you?” Darius demanded, thinking his question was the most important of all. “You won it all, the money, the glory…what could possibly be worth coming back to this hellhole for?”

  Rebecca nodded at the girl sitting silently at her side, the little girl who always smiled but never said a word. “She’s my daughter. They told me I had to win five more Games if I wanted her back.”

  “And your payment?”

  “My payment was higher than any of yours could ever have been. Not only did I give them Steven, I gave them his sons.”

  * * *

  Steven’s first night in the Cage was more therapeutic than punishing, cathartic even. He lay on the sand, watching the stars, and enjoyed the sounds of the ocean lapping at the beach. There was a peace here, something so different from the chaos just a few hundred feet away, through the tunnel and inside the Cave. He was able to sleep without the hundreds of people around him, the crying and the laughter, the stink of all those unwashed people, and it more than made up for the twinge of hunger and thirst, which he was fast becoming used to anyway. That his wife was nowhere near was starting to become commonplace.

  Throughout the second day, with the sun blazing down from above, he was sure he wouldn’t make it to the third without some sort of help. The tranquil nature of the beach at night turned to the fearsome oven of a desert. He wanted to think Rebecca would help him, but the way she’d turned away from him when he was being dragged out—he just wasn’t sure. He thought the worst possible thoughts about her, thinking she’d latched onto Darius for survivals sake, but when he really thought about it, he couldn’t blame her. Their marriage didn’t actually mean a lot out here, and if she were to survive, she’d have to do whatever it took. He was, essentially, useless to her now, and he knew it.

  He got excited that second night when Amanda appeared, but his heart sank when he saw two men were carrying her, her face even more bruised than after her Game, her eyes distant and vague like a zombie from a Romero movie. They dropped her next to him, and then left without saying a word.

  “Amanda?” he asked, shaking the girl’s shoulder, trying to rouse her from her catatonic state. “Amanda, what happened to you?”

  The girl wouldn’t answer, and Steven suspected she’d been beaten badly. He hadn’t heard the roar of the crowd during a Game, easily heard over the mountain from the Canyon, and wondered how and why she’d been harmed. Could she have done something wrong, committed some transgression that warranted a beating so bad she looked like she was in a wide-awake coma? Her blue jumpsuit was in complete tatters, the inseams of both legs split open, making it look like an awkward dress. Her inner thighs were covered in mud and dried blood, and there were multiple cuts up and down her legs. She’d been raped as well, he figured, and again wondered what, outside of the Game, she’d done to deserve this.

  There was nothing he could do for her. He had no water to give her, no food. He rolled her onto her side, trying to arrange it where her blank eyes stared out at the ocean at least, so that if she vomited she wouldn’t choke on her own bile. He didn’t want her to die.

  Or did he?

  His survival was lying on the sand in front of him. Amanda’s corpse would provide enough food for him to make it through the week, and then some. If she were dead, he could live, and he knew that, in her already bruised and battered condition, there would be little they could do to prove he’d killed her. And they most certainly wouldn’t blame him for eating her after. They wouldn’t know if he killed her. He could just tell them she died from her wounds, and they already knew just how bad those wounds really were. His stomach groaned in agreement, and the sight of fresh blood trickling through a cracked scab on her stomach made him even hungrier.

  He could do this, he thought. He could kill her. Wasn’t that what was expected of a resident of the Cave? All he had to do was wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze until she stopped breathing. He didn’t think he’d even have to squeeze that hard. She was half dead now. If he could close her eyes…

  He flipped her onto her back again and sat, straddling her chest. She looked up and thorough him, a slight haze over her eyes. His pulse quickened and his heartbeat reverberated through his whole body. This was power, he thought, this was what the men felt during the Game. He could do anything he wished to this girl, rape her, kill her…eat her without killing her. And there was nothing she could do about it. He touched her throat with his hands and shuddered.

  And then he dry heaved until he couldn’t, falling from her chest.

  “What the hell am I doing?” he asked aloud, thought there was no one to hear him, much less answer. “This isn’t me.”

  He didn’t want to be one of the animals that roamed the Cave, a sub-class of men that he was hesitant to even call men. He didn’t want to be a monster like Darius or Block, not only killing to survive the Game but relishing it. He couldn’t become that.

  That’s not what his boys would have expected of their father.

  There was only one way out of this, he thought, feeling the now mostly healed incision on his abdomen. He had to get rid of that chip if it was the last thing he did.

  Chapter Nine

  Ernie and Max nodded nervously in agreement with everything John said as Darius stood behind him, testing the sharpness of the steak knife on the bench. It wasn’t that it was sharp at all. It was just a plain wooden-handled steak knife that had been accidentally thrown in with the cruise line’s garbage, nothing lethal, but he knew he looked lethal standing there with it in his hand, twirling it around as if it were Excalibur in the hands of King Arthur. That a couple of Block’s men, already on the payroll with a wad of John’s chits, stood behind him, spears at ready, only served to heighten the two shop owner’s tensions.

  “I understand,” Ernie said. “You will be the originator of the chits, the Bank of the Cave, I guess, and all our monies will be deposited with you.”

  “That’s correct,” John said smugly. Having muscle at his back had really done a number on his confidence level. “For a small fee.”

  “I don’t know that I’d call fifty percent small,” Max said, and Darius could tell the man, the bigge
r of the two, was angry. He probably wanted nothing more than to stand up and take that knife from Darius, but he knew he couldn’t. With the support of some of Block’s men, the tides had changed.

  “I don’t guess we really care what you’d call it,” John told him. “From now on you’ll pay us for your product, which we’ll make sure you get plenty of.”

  “You can’t do that,” Ernie blurted out. “The dump is the Cave’s. You are allowed to take what you can carry and even go back for more, if there is any.”

  “That will be changing. There’s no reason the haul shouldn’t be managed so that everyone has every opportunity to eat and prosper from it,” John said, and Darius thought he sounded like a politician, spinning bullshit into gold. “Most of it is wasted as it is, and that is just unacceptable. We have to make the supply out last the demand, or until the next Game, which I’m sure you know can be quite some time.”

  “You can’t do that. The people won’t stand for it.”

  “That’s funny,” John told him. “You want to protect the people even though you’ve already been bilking them through the dry spells. Make up your mind.”

  “We provide a service,” Ernie said nervously. “And we help people.”

  “And we’re going to help you help them, just as we’re going to help you. We just want everyone safe and secure,” John said, but Darius knew what the man really wanted. He wanted a handle on the chit situation in case anyone actually did make it to his father with them and caused an embarrassment. Still, Darius admired John in his negations. He really was in his element here, and he thought that the man’s father might be proud if he could see his son now.

  “You’re not going to do shit,” Block said from behind them, and Darius wondered how long the man had been there, listening. He hadn’t gotten to enough of the Samoan’s men yet, and most were hard to bribe anyway. They consisted of two and three markers, so they pretty much got the first and finest of any food there was. He didn’t know if he had enough manpower to effect the coup he planned. If it came down to a straight up fight between the two groups, if he could even rely on the few men he’d converted, Block still had the numbers, and no amount of street fighting trickery could change that.

  “Block,” Ernie said, happy to see the man, “these guys want to take over my business. They’re like the fucking mafia.”

  “You can shut the fuck up, too. This chit crap wouldn’t have gone anywhere if you hadn’t opened your damn little stand. Now not only do we have hungry people in the Cave when there’s fucking food, but now I have to have a girl executed for stealing. This is your fault, more than his, Ernie. No one would have given these stupid little chits any credence if you hadn’t first. Now everyone wants them, thinking they are going to be rich or something if and when they get out of here.”

  “Block,” the man said, looking as if he were about to cry, “I’ll shut it down. You can have everything. We didn’t mean to start any problems…we just missed our shop back home.”

  “Shut up,” Darius ordered, stepping between the two men and then turning to Block. The big Samoan was as angry as he’d ever seen him, which was good. When he was angry, he made mistakes. “You don’t have any right to interfere here, Block. There aren’t any rules being broken. Trading is allowed, and using these chits is just that…trading.”

  “They are worthless pieces of wood with a number carved in them. The wood is more valuable for starting a fire than it is for trading.”

  “But the people assign value to them,” John interrupted. “Just as you do back home with paper money. It really isn’t any different.”

  “Money back home is backed by gold,” Block said. “Yours is backed by nothing.”

  “No, it isn’t,” John told him. “And it hasn’t been backed by gold for a good, long time. It’s backed simply by the credit of the government and the ability to control the supply of the money.”

  As soon as he’d said it, Darius could tell he regretted it. Block caught on fast.

  “And you want to control that supply here, so you control the people. I won’t stand for it. And as far as I’m concerned, this is over. Finished. The chits will be rounded up and destroyed.”

  “Not only do you not have the right,” Darius told him, “you also don’t have the manpower. I hold all the cards. Your men are turning away from you and the people support me. They support the right to earn their keep. There isn’t anything you can do about this.”

  Block laughed, which Darius hadn’t expected. “Really? You hold all the cards? Well, I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

  He turned away, still giggling, as the bell for the Game sounded.

  “Come on,” Darius said, dragging John away, “we’ll settle this later. And you,” he said, pointing to Ernie, “either get on the bandwagon or get run over by it.”

  * * *

  Steven wasn’t sure what would kill him first, the starvation or the hunger, and he suspected Amanda, her chest heaving as she struggled to breath, would be gone long before he would. He’d tried using the girl’s remaining clothing to shelter her face from the blistering sun, reflected back up by the white sand, but it had done little to help. Her previously pale skin was red and blistered, and he wondered, again, how she still lived.

  When the three men entered the Cage, scooping up Amanda, he thought it might be to save her. But one looked at him and said, “Get up. It’s time for her execution and everyone has to participate.”

  “What did she do?” Steven said, standing as quickly as his weakened state would allow, not caring about Amanda as much as he did about getting something to eat and drink in the Canyon.

  “She stole.”

  “And the penalty for that is death?”

  “There is only one penalty.”

  Steven quietly followed the men through the warren of tunnels leading into the Cave, and then into the canyon. He managed to scoop a handful of water from a muddy puddle on the ground, and he was sure his stomach was going into revolt over the foreign invader. He managed to hold it down and fell into lockstep with the people heading into the Canyon.

  His skin was blistered and sunburned, and he was weaker than he’d been since waking up on the beach that first day. It didn’t take the body long to start breaking down without the bare minimum of sustenance, especially water. Though he’d heard this wasn’t a Game, just Amanda’s execution, he hoped that there wouldn’t be a follow-up Game, or, if there was, he wouldn’t be involved. He’d surely die from any combat right now, and could easily imagine being raped as he’d raped the old man.

  The three men dragged Amanda into the center of the Canyon where Block waited, hands on his hips. Steven was left alone, so he wandered into the back of the crowd, looking for more of the muddy pools of water to sip from.

  There was no celebratory mood in the Canyon that day, no cheering for the Gladiator cartoon. The air was laced with hunger, and, if not shame, then pity at the coming event. Most people evidently knew what was going to happen and shuffled their feet, looking at the ground or into the distance as Block spoke.

  “Brothers and sisters, today is a sad day. One of our own, a Game winner even, has stolen from us. She attempted to take the very food that would feed us through the drought between the Games, intent on feeding herself instead of the community.”

  There were a few groans from the crowd as most knew what had happened. Many thought that Ernie and Max were the real thieves, hoarding their food like they did and only parceling it out in trade. Many thought that it just wasn’t right or fair, but if Block didn’t do anything about it, there was little they could do. Even Block looked uncomfortable in describing the event as they had happened. But he had to follow the mandates of the Cave for the sake of the community. Still, he looked like a politician trying to spin the truth to a more palatable taste.

  “Amanda came to us, dead in her soul, a nothing, an outcast from the outside. She was well on her path to rebirth and redemption in her Game, and, in ret
urn for that great favor, she rewarded us with cowardice and thievery. Her punishment is nearly done now.”

  The three men tied Amanda, spread-eagled, to four stakes driven into the mud and stone. She was still in her catatonic state and didn’t react in the least. Steven figured that was probably a good thing. He didn’t know if he could stand her screaming right now. Block stepped up to her and kicked her violently in the ribcage. Her body shuddered with the momentum, but she didn’t cry out. Steven hoped she’d stay unconscious until she died. Block’s men stepped up, one at a time, and kicked her as well, and then a line of people from opposite the cavern filed by, each man, woman and child kicking her. It was like an assembly line, slow and emotionless. No one took any pleasure from adding their assault to the girl’s death, but it was their way and the rules had to be obeyed.