by Burks, John
Looking up, he saw the glint of steel of one of the cutlasses, a cutlass he’d provided the man. This wasn’t fair and he tried screaming at them, reasoning with them…he tried to threaten the men holding him down, his right arm outstretched at a right angle to his body. They wouldn’t listen, they didn’t care what he said. He watched in horror as the cutlass was raised in the air and then screamed out in agony as it came down, connecting with his arm in the bicep, between the shoulder and the elbow.
Unfortunately, the man hadn’t bothered sharpening it and it was still dull. It took a half dozen more swings to separate the arm, but Darius had only been conscious for the first three.
* * *
Steven watched Darius struggle with serious satisfaction. The man had most literally gotten what he deserved and, when he was awake later and eating his own flesh, Steven would enjoy that as well. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if it was his wife instead of Darius. Or her daughter, but her daughter couldn’t be selected. She didn’t have a number. He was unsure of the people’s cheers, though, unable to decide if they were happy the dictator had been taken down a notch or that another Game had been won and the potential for dinner was there.
He didn’t have long to think about it as another set of numbers popped up and he instantly recognized his own next to the letter K. Jackson had struck, he knew, though he wondered how he’d gotten a message up to the people in the Castle. He wondered, as he stepped forward without any signs of hesitation, if he’d agreed to return the shotgun if he’d be in this Game right now.
He raised his arms above his head like a champion and tried to look confident, though he figured that Jackson was arranging someone for him to fight that would have no problems killing him. After his last Game, he had no doubts that whoever it was would be prepared for a rage-filled, lightning quick attack like he’d executed the last time. He’d have to think of something different if he hoped to survive. He pretended to be a gladiator, shouting at the crowd, but inside he felt like a little kid who was afraid to drape his feet over the bed less some monster hauled him away.
Minutes passed and no one showed. Finally, one of the newcomers, the Asian man, was shoved forward, his sleeve rolled up to his elbow, exposing the fresh tattoo of numbers matching the billboard. The man was scared, confused looking, his eyes darting around so frantically that Steven assumed his wife, like Rebecca, had paid her trip to the Cave with his life. The man’s wife was crying in the sideline, looking pretty authentic, but Steven didn’t buy it, and wondered how good the sales pitch could possibly be to sell your husband into slavery.
Steven strode to the man and took him by the hand. “I’m really sorry about this.”
“I don’t know where I am,” he pleaded, gasping for breath. “I don’t know what happened to us and I can’t find my asthma medication. Can you help me?”
The man looked at him with pleading eyes, and he finally understood. Jackson hadn’t sent someone he’d be able to kill without issue; he’d sent an innocent for Steven to murder. He’d sent someone that would bond him to the Game…someone he really, truly knew was innocent. He was no better than anyone else on the island, but that didn’t matter to Steven. He already knew that. In fact, once he’d murdered the child, he’d be a million times worse. “No, I can’t help you, but your pain is about to be lessened.”
He hit him hard in the face, busting his lip and knocking out a tooth. The Asian spat it out and screamed, “Why are you doing this? I didn’t do anything to you.”
“I know,” Steven said, hitting him again, “and it isn’t your fault.” He hit him twice more and the man stumbled backwards. “You didn’t do anything wrong and you surely didn’t do anything to me. You are truly innocent in this.” He kicked the screaming man in his side as he tried to crawl away. “I’m glad you’ll never know what your wife did to get you here.” He stomped the man’s gut then and the crying and wheezing Asian’s eyes bulged wide. “Not only are you innocent, your being here, right this very moment, is a signal to me to conform.”
The Asian, surprisingly, managed to turn over and crawl towards his wife, who was being held back. She screamed in agony watching the fight, and Steven was sure, or at least he hoped, that she now regretted her decision to come to this place. “They think that your murder will make me one of them, ruin my innocence, so to speak, but they’re wrong,” he said, kicking the man and once more flipping him over onto his back.
He squatted down on the man’s heaving chest and caressed his hairless cheek. He leaned down and whispered, “This really will hurt you more than it will me. See, I’m past the point of caring. I’ve already sold my soul to the devil.”
He drove his fingers into the man’s eyes, repeating what seemed to be the easiest way to kill a man on his back, and was genuinely thankful when he finally quit squirming. His wife never quit screaming, though, and he’d remember that scream until the day he died.
Chapter Thirteen
The Marking ceremony was subdued, at least for Steven. There was no clear-cut leader to speak to the masses, and everyone kept looking at him for answers. He didn’t have any, but walked straight to the dais. The knife was there, next to the cauldrons, and he picked it up and cut his own head as best as he could, giving himself four marks. Darius, still unconscious, was dragged forward, and Steven cut his head, returning the favor of the last ceremony, feeling the bone scrape under the dull blade with some satisfaction.
“You did good, Steven,” Rebecca told him, stepping up to the raised stone platform. “I…I can’t believe you’ve made it to four marks. One more and you can get out of here.”
“I don’t have anything to say to you, Rebecca,” he told her, trying not to be obvious as he looked around for her daughter. This wouldn’t be the best place to kill the little girl, but it would work. Most of the people of the Cave, who were queuing up to eat, would see it. They’d kill him afterwards, but the look of horror on his wife’s face would be well worth it. She wasn’t there, however, and he was sure Rebecca suspected some foul play on his part.
“Steven, we have to get pass this thing between us,” she said. “We have to heal our marriage.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he asked, aghast. “You think that murdering my children is something to get over like having a fight over paying the bills or something.”
“I can give you more children, Steven, and we have Mia.”
And if she was here, he thought, I’d kill her in front of you. “I don’t have any use for you and your daughter, Rebecca. I don’t have any use for you. You need to leave before I do something we’d both regret.” He couldn’t imagine where she’d be hiding the girl in the Cave. Besides the plastic garbage bag and cardboard walls, there wasn’t exactly a lot of privacy. He supposed she could be hiding in one of the many shelters but didn’t know how to go about searching them to find out.
“She’s your daughter too, Steven,” Rebecca said. She was deadly serious. “Why can’t you love her?”
“You are fucking crazy,” he said, starting to walk away when one of Darius’ men stopped him.
“Hey, boss, what do we do with the haul?”
The man pointed behind him to where workers were hauling in the bounty from the Game. They were piling it up neatly near the cauldrons. The people of the Cave weren’t tearing into it, and many were forming up in a line, wooden chits in hand, to get their evening meal.
“I’m not your boss,” Steven said evenly. “Darius is, as far as I know.”
“But he’s out of it, man, and he’s lost way too much blood. I think we might be eating on him tomorrow night. No, you’re the next in line, man, what with those four marks on your head.” The big Hispanic man in front of him rubbed at his chin. “I gotta be honest here, man. I never thought you’d make it this far, but now that you have, you’ve got my respect. And I’m going to have to remember that eye deal next Game I have. That works good.”
“I don’t really care abou
t your respect, hombre,” Steven said, noticing the unexpected sarcasm in his own voice. He did feel powerful, though. As twisted as Jackson’s sales pitch about the Game was, the man was right. He did feel reborn. He wasn’t afraid of the man standing in front of him, who looked like he’d just walked out of San Quentin Island.
“I didn’t mean any offense,” the man said, looking down in shame. “I…we just need to know what you want to do for the evening dinner.”
Steven couldn’t believe the man was scared of him. How could someone like that fear a skinny account manager who’d never been in a fight in his entire life until he arrived at the Cave? The feeling of power was tempting.
“Where are Darius’ chits?” he asked the man and was directed to the small cubbyhole under the wood and bamboo throne. There were hundreds of them inside, along with other odds and ends that Darius thought important. There was a small pocketknife, a flashlight, as well as a roll of actual hundred dollar bills. He didn’t bother counting the chits but just a cursory glance led him to believe they represented millions of imaginary dollars. He took two handfuls, walked to the ever-burning cooking fire, and tossed them in. The crowd around him gasped and one man even tried to reach in and grab them as they burned up quickly, scorching his hand as a reward.
“That crap is over with,” Steven said defiantly. “How long had you gone, before Darius and John, without having to pay for what you needed? This food isn’t his; it wasn’t Johns. That stuff over there on their table,” he said, pointing to Ernie and Max, who were doing a brisk trade after the Game as people prepared to pay for their evening meal, “that isn’t theirs. All of this is yours, it always has been. Despite whatever sick fucking place this is, you people always took care of each other here, in the Cave. Forget these chits ever happened.”
The people looked at him strangely, unsure as how to react, unsure if this was some sort of trick or not. “But Darius said the people in the Castle…”
Steven cut the man off. “Darius is full of shit. The people in the Castle don’t give a rat’s ass about you people working for imaginary money. All they care about is the Game. Darius lied to you to keep you in line. He liked keeping you under his thumb.”
There was a murmur among the people. Most didn’t believe him. “Look, all of this is bullshit,” he told them. “Living like this, eating the flesh of others…it doesn’t have to be this way. This island has food. There are coconuts, bananas, pigs…all sorts of fish in the ocean. You don’t have to eat each other to live.”
He could hear the word island repeated over and over again as the people talked about what he’d said. He was sure that the vast majority of people didn’t realize they were on an island, much less an island filled with food to eat. “You don’t have to play this Game. There’s nothing the people in the Castle can do to make you kill each other. You are a free people.”
“The machine guns!” someone blurted, and there was a round of ascent.
“They’re rusted and destroyed. I’ve seen them. The entire operation is fake. You people are the ones that keep yourselves here. You are the only guards in this prison.”
“They’d kill us if we didn’t do as they say,” another said, and dozens more agreed with him.
“How? At best, there are just a few of them here. There are hundreds of you.”
He thought he might be close to swaying them and had a silly fantasy of them all lining up at the dock, waiting for the cruise ship to arrive to offload its garbage. Then they’d all march on, as one, and return home. The Cave and the Game would be forever destroyed. He could very well kill a half of millennia of evil here, this night, in one fell swoop. But before he could prod them anymore, an alarm sounded.
It wasn’t the alarm for the Game, and Steven had heard it only once in his entire time in the Cave, and that was on the day of his arrival. He gasped, imagining one of the newcomers racing out of the Cage’s gate, and took off in a sprint to the tunnel. He couldn’t get into it, though, as it was literally packed with people already pouring through to kill whoever it was who had tried to escape. Steven knew it was one of the newcomers and screamed at the people packed in the tunnel.
“Don’t let them kill her,” he said, suspecting the Asian wife had been the one to bolt. “Don’t let them do it.”
They didn’t hear him and he didn’t know why he cared anyway. The people were more likely than not going to die anyway in this place. At least the woman wouldn’t suffer more than a day or two of agony as the tribe kept her alive to eat slowly, as was the custom. Minutes passed and he still couldn’t push his way through the tunnel when the flow turned and the people started pushing their way back out. He stepped to the side and watched as they brought her out. Her delicate skin was bruised and bloodied, her face a mass of puffy lesions and scrapes. They’d broken her legs, just below the knees, and the bones poked out of her skin. The woman was, thankfully, passed out, but he knew she’d wake up once the cutting began.
“Why did you do that?” he demanded of the people. “Why in the hell would you do something like that?”
He suddenly felt a large hand clamped around the back of his neck, then was shoved roughly up against the stone wall. One-armed Darius leaned into his ear, his breath hot on Steven’s neck. “They did it because she tried to escape. They followed the Rules. And since you’ve been out of the damn Cage, you broke the rules as well. Welcome to the pot, asshole.”
Steven struggled against the man’s choking grip, his hand big enough that even from behind his fingers laced across his throat. Finally he got his feet up to the wall and pushed backwards hard enough to dislodge Darius’ grip on him. Standing and choking as he gasped for air, he stared at Darius.
The man’s arm was tied off in a tourniquet, but blood still flowed freely. A crusty blood trail led from the new mark, courtesy of Steven, down his nose. He looked wild and angry, worse than normal. “These people can follow the Rules, Steven. They know what to do in order to survive.”
“They’re not going to follow you now, Darius,” Steven said. “I’ve set them free.”
Darius turned to one of his men, who stood like a startled rabbit, his face rife with confusion. “What the hell are you looking at? Go start fucking collecting for the evening meal.”
“But he said…”
“I don’t give a shit what he said!” Darius bellowed. “And all you fuckers,” he said, looking at the people who’d stopped what they were doing to watch the confrontation between Darius and Steven, “get back to fucking work if you want to eat tonight.”
Many stood still, staring in disbelief at Steven and Darius. “Did you not fucking hear me? Get the fuck out of here!” His screams were loud enough to kick people into motion. “You see, Steven? I’m still in charge here and these people, if nothing else, obey the guy who makes the Rules, and as long as I’m fucking alive, I make the Rules. Got it?”
“Fuck you, Darius. You’re insane,” he said, but the words carried no strength. One insane man calling another insane meant little. None of this mattered, in the end, and all this was doing was delaying the death of Mia.
“Well, let’s see how insane I am after you spend a week in the Cage. Carry your ass out there and think about your crimes, idiot boy.”
Steven couldn’t help but to laugh as he turned to the tunnel to the Cage. Sure, he though, punish me with freedom. He’d just admitted he’d been all over the island, and Darius, in his pain and delusion, didn’t even realize he’d walked right out of the Cage. Why he hadn’t had him killed on the spot for breaking the rules was pretty obvious. His hold on the Cave was tenuous, at best, enforced mostly by the visage of a bleeding dictator. As angry as he looked, no one had the nerve to stand up to him, but if he killed Steven in front of everyone, that could very well be the proverbial straw.
No, he figured that Darius would come for him in the Cage, at night, while everyone slept.
Too bad he’s going to die first, Steven thought, as he made his way to the Cage and fr
eedom.
* * *
He sat for a long time in the sand, trying to get his thoughts straight as he waited for the sun to set. He was a mass of mixed emotions, tittering on the brink of going absolutely insane. There were too many influences pulling at him, too many people that needed to die in order for the wrongs to be righted. Something had to be done about Darius and his grip on the people of the Cave, but even if he were killed, Steven wondered, would that change anything? Would the people, if offered freedom, take it for themselves? The Rules were so ingrained in their behavior and day-to-day life, he didn’t think they’d be able to walk away from any of it without actually having won the Game.
That, however, was less important than his primary goal. Rebecca had to be punished, and the only way to do that, to retaliate in kind and exact the sort of vengeance his soul screamed for, was to kill Mia in front of her. It was the clearest thought in his head, the fundamental reason for his existence. It was the only reason he even bothered breathing. The higher implications of freeing those in the Cave were but passing fantasies.
The setting sun had lost its luster, and, for Steven, it was just a sign that nightfall had arrived. His plan was simple. He was going to go in, find the girl, and take her. None of the other issues mattered anymore. The people of the Cave didn’t matter, Darius didn’t matter…none of it did.
