Flesh Worn Stone

by Burks, John

  Darius had to give himself credit, though he stopped short of patting himself on the back. He wasn’t quite sure where the words were coming from, but they were brilliant and he could see the impact in the people’s eyes. “It is a Game outside the Game, and only those who are successful here, in the Cave, will have the opportunity to participate in the actual Game.” The murmurs grew louder and the people began to understand. Only if they succeeded in surviving would they be given the opportunity to play the Game, and only through the Game could they be reborn. Once he told them, it made perfect sense, and he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it sooner. He wondered why John hadn’t thought of it. The conniving little bastard had seemed to think of everything else.

  “You’re a bastard,” Steven told him. “You don’t have any control over who is in the Game and who isn’t, and none of this scheme of yours is the will of the Castle. In fact, it’s just the opposite and you know it.”

  Steven was right, of course, but the people didn’t need to know that. How the man knew about his meeting with Jackson irked him, but it wasn’t going to change anything. He’d make changes in the Castle when he got there as well. This was all his, every last stinking bit of rotting flesh…his. He raised his hand high above his head and was tempted to shout ‘Hallelujah!’, but instead told them, “Brothers and sisters, are you going to work for your food? Are you going to strive for greatness for the Castle?”

  “Yes,” the cheer came back unanimously.

  “Are we not the people of the Cave? We are bound for greatness! That is why we are here!”

  There was a roar, and Darius couldn’t believe how easily turned the people were. In a few moments, he’d gone from staring down potential rebellion to convincing the people that they needed to work in order to trade for phony money to pay back phony loans they’d received in order to buy food that was already theirs. He marveled at just how stupid people really were.

  The line formed quickly, and people smiled as they traded their chits for the gruel. The man doing the accounting, who had been nervous and sensing his immediate demise before, was happily collecting them, laughing it up with the people. The band started, and those who weren’t eating danced. It was the biggest party he’d seen in sometime in the Cave, and he was a bit proud of himself. He’d given them purpose other than just winning the Game. He’d given their lives direction.

  Darius smiled, looking out over his soon-to-be-productive people. The Castle wouldn’t be happy, but what could they really do about it?

  “That was a good move,” Rebecca told him, from just behind him. “Brilliant, even.”

  He turned to her, smiling. He knew she’d tried to go back to Steven. He’d heard reports of their conversation. He also knew what was coming now.

  “Rebecca, my dear. How are you today?”

  “I’m hungry and Mia is hungry,” she said, about to step to the pile of bowls and get a scoop from the cauldron.

  Darius stopped her with a hand on the shoulder. “The line is back there. If you’re hungry, you should get in line.”

  “I don’t have to get in line,” she told him. “I’m with you.”

  “You were with me,” he said, stressing were. “And you could have stayed with me had you not gone crawling back to your husband when he won one more fight. Do you see how long his popularity lasted? The people have already forgotten about him and his pig. I am god here, now and forever.”

  “I’m sorry, Darius,” she said, not attempting to lie. “It won’t happen again.”

  “No, I don’t think it will, considering I’m not going to let it. Now get out of here before I add you to the pot, and take that thing,” he pointed to Mia, “with you.”

  Rebecca turned away, and the complete lack of anger on her face worried Darius for just a moment. There had always been a calculating part of her, a cold, honest woman who would do anything to protect her daughter. He respected that. It was how she stayed so calm about everything that worried him more.

  And then he remembered a popular song from before he arrived and singsonged, “I got ninety nine problems but a bitch ain’t one.”

  * * *

  Steven was alone again, in the shelter he’d constructed for the five of them. He lay back on John’s sleeping bag, trying to put the pieces of the day together and form some plan of action on what to do. That he was coldly and logically plotting the death of not only his wife, but of her daughter, didn’t strike him as the least bit odd. That he wanted the people of the Cave to eat Darius alive from a boiling vat of hot soup didn’t bother him either. These were things that needed to be done, choices he needed to make as John might say. Some people, he thought, just needed killing.

  His biggest internal debate, though, was if he cared whether he lived or not after he’d killed Mia.

  It would be simple to go out in the night and dig up the shotgun, then come back in the Cave blasting. No one would challenge him, and the deafening roar of the shotgun would be more than enough, he was sure, to drive back any who might. It would be easy enough to find Rebecca and her daughter, and he could imagine both of them headless courtesy of the .00 buckshot. But he didn’t have enough ammunition to kill everyone, and there wasn’t enough in Jackson’s shack. If he didn’t kill every person in the Cave, they would likely come after him for violating the rules. He didn’t know if he could execute Rebecca and Mia and then escape.

  So the decision came down to whether or not he cared enough to live afterwards.

  There wasn’t anything to live for anymore, he decided. He’d lost his sons, but even then, he’d still had Rebecca. Hope of them escaping together was what had driven him in those early days in the Cave. That hope had slowly eroded until it finally dropped completely off like an ocean side hill in California. There wasn’t any hope anymore, and as long as those who needed killing died, then he really didn’t care if he lived or not.

  Once everyone was asleep, he rose and quietly made for the exit to the Cage. Once outside, his head cleared of the rage and anger, and for a few quiet moments he enjoyed the night air, the sound of the waves lapping at the beach, and the dim light from the half moon above.

  He retraced the thirty-seven steps from the corner of the Cage to where the shotgun was buried and dug it up, unwrapped it from the plastic garbage bag, and then made sure it was clean and loaded. He sat in the middle of the Cage, enjoyed a simple meal of MREs, and sipped from a bottle of water, all the while staring at the hundreds of years of graffiti staining the cliff face. It took him a long time to see Amanda, Cassandra, and John’s names on the wall, all freshly etched there, and he wondered how he could have missed them on his weeklong exile to the Cage. It took him several moments to realize that the names weren’t those of people who’d arrived at the island, not in the same sense as someone passing through a truck stop might write that they’d been there along with a date, but a record of the dead. The cave face told a story of everyone who’d ever been killed in the Game. He stood and solemnly nodded to those lost souls, vowing vengeance for them as well, slipped the backpack onto his shoulders, and started back into the Cave, intent on ending Mia’s life.

  But he stopped before he made it through the Gate and looked in the opposite direction of where he’d been exploring his last few nights in the Cage. The entire place was still a mystery. He had no idea if it was an island or just an out of way place. He still wanted to know more about the men in the Castle before he died or escaped, and wanted to know more about how the Game was run. It was nothing more than sheer curiosity. What sort of men pitted their fellow men against each other? What sort of men would have an old woman cut off both of her hands and then feed them to her? Worse, what sort of man would condition the old woman to like eating her own hands, to think of it as some glorious step on the path to redemption?

  The thoughts of murder and revenge danced logically around with the curiosity of exploration. That he was fantasying about murder, about the look on his wife’s face when he took her daughter’s li
fe, no longer even bothered him. He didn’t even think about it as right or wrong anymore; it was simply something that needed to be done in the most efficient, yet bloodiest, form possible.

  His curiosity got the best of him, though, and he decided that he could put off brutally killing the little mute girl one more night. Instead, he turned down the beach and headed north from the Cage, the opposite direction of where he’d gone previously. He kept the shotgun and backpack in case he ran into someone he shouldn’t.

  The mountain never sloped down like it did at the other end of the beach, and it was miles before he found anything besides endlessly perfect beach butted up against a sheer cliff face. Eventually, though, he started seeing signs of human habitation. There were empty beer and soda bottles scattered about, and booted footprints. There was an old cobblestone path along the cliff face, half buried in white sand. After he’d followed it for another half mile, he found it led to a large concrete dock.

  He was disappointed, though, when he found there was no boat of any kind, no ship docked there, thought the dock looked big enough to handle a large one, say the size of a cruise liner. There were large roll-off trash containers he recognized from back home. The big dumpsters were hoisted up onto a truck with a hydraulic wench and carried to a landfill, dumped, and returned. They were most common at construction sites where large amounts of debris were likely to be generated. He climbed up on one of the three and saw it was loaded to the rim with garbage from a cruise ship. Recognizing the prize from the Game made him hungry and he quickly found some half-eaten dinner rolls without too much mold as well as an orange.

  The truck for moving the containers was just off to the side of the dock next to a huge fuel tank. Steven scrambled to it, hoping there would be a license plate, a company logo…anything that would help identify where in the world he was. The truck was plain white and dirty, though, and missing all its glass windows. The glove compartment yielded nothing but sand, and there wasn’t a license plate anywhere.

  He stood back and chuckled. What did he expect from these people? They hadn’t been doing this for over five hundred years only to slip up and give away some details of their existence in the glove compartment of a garbage truck.

  An asphalt road led away from the dock and up a ravine through the canyon. It was lit with street lamps, but he was wary of stepping into the light, less someone see him. He wouldn’t solve the mystery of where the Cave was, though, from the dock, so he carefully began making his way up the winding, one-lane road, sticking close to the rock sides.

  He was out of breath and sweating profusely by the time he finally reached the top of the mountain and the road’s end. He kneeled down and used the shotgun to steady himself, working a bottle of water free from the backpack with his other hand. The water was warm, but what water from the Cave wasn’t? Up ahead he saw a small adobe building with a multitude of satellite dishes and weather monitoring equipment. He stuck to the shadows and crept towards it. It reminded him of the famous old Spanish missions in San Antonio, Texas, constructed of white adobe with grand sweeping arches and tall windows. The windows were plate glass and depicted various scenes from the Bible, including the birth and death of Christ. The building was very old, and Steven had no doubt the original tenants of the Game, some five hundred years back, had constructed it. It stood in stark contrast to the multitude of satellite dishes and antennas around it.

  The walls inside were packed with electronics that he couldn’t identify, the thousands of blinking lights giving the interior of the room the appearance of a lit Christmas tree. There were dozens of television panels, and on them he could clearly make out the Canyon from many different angles. There were also a few showing the inside of the Cave and the hundreds of sleeping residents. Still staying low, he followed the outline of the building and found the masses of wires and cables leading out and away from the building. There didn’t seem to be anyone inside, but he didn’t want to risk it, so he followed the cables instead.

  Several hundred yards from the buildings, the cables split and ran in multiple directions. He kept following the center mass, and within another hundred yards found steps leading down into the mountain. They led into a series of manmade tunnels that split off in every direction. He picked one randomly and followed it until it ended at a steel door set in the rock. Opening the door and cringing at the ancient sound of steel on steel, he stepped down into one of the skyboxes overlooking the Canyon. There was no one present, but the trashcans were full of beer cans and food containers. The one-way mirrored window offered a perfect view, though, and he could visualize the fights and atrocities below, some prospective fans cheering here in the box while drinking beer and eating popcorn like they were at an MLB game. In the center of the skybox was a camera pointed down, and he guessed that’s what all the cabling was. These cameras all fed back into the main building, and then were broadcast to who knew where.

  He explored the entire complex, finding four more skyboxes and then the throne room. He sat in the stone throne, looked directly at the camera, and tried to imagine the man who’d sit there during the Game and decided if an entire village ate or went hungry. What sort of man could sit in that chair and decide if people lived or died in the name of a sporting event? He fantasized about the man being there, right then, and wondered how loud the shotgun would sound in the narrow confines of the stone-walled room. Next to the camera was a simple console with a keyboard attached. Reading from the menu on the main screen, he knew at once what it was. There was a drop-down menu to select a person’s number, a place to select the action, be it kill, rape or self-mutilation, and then more drop-down boxes to select more numbers. Tacked to a bulletin board next to the console were dozens of photos with numbers stamped across the bottom. Everyone had their eyes closed in the pictures as if they were sleeping, and he recognized many of them. There was one of Darius, his wife, John…he picked the one of himself off the board and stared at it. It must have been taken right after they were abducted, he thought, as he was still clean-shaven and his hair had yet to grow into the wild mess it was now. In the waste bin next to the console were dozens more, the man he’d killed in the last Game on top.

  The room next to the control center was larger, open to the air above, and reeked of years old garbage. There was a path big enough to back the big roll-off truck down and it ended at a hole in the ground large enough for the truck to dump its contents. In the hole, a hydraulic ram would push the garbage forward to the steel doors that he was finally seeing from the other side, and into the chute where the citizens of the Cave would pick it up off the ground. Since they never heard the truck, he guessed that the garbage was dumped in advance, and then, if the Game went as they’d wanted, pushed out later.

  In the entire complex he hadn’t found one person, but he knew they had to be somewhere. There had to be people to run the cameras and maintain the fancy electronics. He also suspected spectators were shipped in to watch the Game, considering the amount of garbage in the skyboxes. And that meant there had to be people there to tend to the guests. He figured there had to be at least a dozen men and women somewhere in the area that worked on the Game, and yet the entire complex was deserted. Exiting the complex of tunnels, he found another pathway that ran just beneath and behind the rim of the canyon. It was deeper than the lip of the Canyon like a parapet on a castle. The path led around the canyon, widened where the machine gun posts sat like dutiful prison guards watching over their charges.

  He stopped at the first machine gun nest. The gun was ancient, of a WWII variety, and hadn’t been fired in decades. The barrel was rusted but covered with black spray paint. He tried the action on the gun, but it wouldn’t move, then burst out in laughter when he saw it wasn’t loaded anyway. Their guards, the demon machine guns watching above, not only wouldn’t function if they had to, but didn’t have any ammunition anyway. He wondered if there were any guards watching during the Game. How would any of them know for sure?

  The rest of
the machine guns were in exactly the same shape, if not worse. The path didn’t look like it had seen use in a long time as sand, blown in from the beach, covered everything. He didn’t think about his footprints in it until he’d made his way all the way around, but by then there wasn’t anything he could do about it. It didn’t matter, though, he thought, because he’d have already killed the girl and died himself by the time his footsteps were discovered. And even if they did find them, what exactly were they going to do about it?

  He left the path and made his way back through the tunnel complex, exiting the place and standing in front of it, trying to figure out where the people where. There had to be another location, somewhere close by, where the spectators would stay while at the island. It would have to wait for another night, he knew, as he saw the sun peeking over the eastern horizon, reminding him he had to get back to the Cave.