But until today, most of these little rumbles have been private affairs.
Today, the latest melee breaks out in broad daylight, right outside the food center, in front of at least twenty onlookers … and the crowd seems to fuel the intensity of the fight. At first the onlookers watch with revulsion as the two young combatants pummel each other with bare fists in the freezing wind, their inelegant blows full of spit and fury, their eyes ablaze with unfocused rage.
But soon something changes in the crowd. Angry shouts turn to whoops and hollers. Bloodlust sparks behind the eyes of the gallery. The stress of the plague comes out in angry hyena yells, psychotic cheers, and vicarious fist pumping from some of the younger men.
Martinez and his guards arrive right at the height of the fight.
Dean Gorman, a redneck farm kid from Augusta dressed in torn denim and heavy-metal tattoos, kicks the legs out from under Johnny Pruitt, a fat, doughy pothead from Jonesboro. Pruitt—who had the temerity to criticize the Augusta State Jaguars football team—now tumbles to the sandy ground with a gasp.
“Hey! Dial it down!” Martinez approaches from the north side of the street, his M1 on his hip, still warm from the fracas at the railroad shed. Three guards follow on his heels, their guns also braced against their midsections. As he crosses the street it’s hard for Martinez to see the fighters behind the semicircle of cheering onlookers.
All that’s visible is a cloud of dust, flailing fists, and milling onlookers.
“HEY!!”
Inside the circle of spectators Dean Gorman slams a steel-toed work boot into Johnny Pruitt’s ribs, and the fat man keens with agony, rolling away. The crowd jeers. Gorman jumps on the kid but Pruitt counters by slamming a knee up into Gorman’s groin. The witnesses howl. Gorman tumbles to his side holding his privates and Pruitt lashes out with a series of sidelong blows to Gorman’s face. Blood flings across the sand in dark stringers from Gorman’s nose.
Martinez starts pushing bystanders aside, forcing his way into the fray.
“Martinez! Hold up!”
Martinez feels a vise grip tighten on his arm and he whirls around to see the Governor.
“Hold up a second,” the wiry man says under his breath with a spark of interest glittering in his deep-set eyes. His handlebar mustache has come in dark and thick, giving his face a predatory cast. He wears a long, black duster over his chambray shirt, jeans, and stovepipe engineer boots, the tails flapping majestically in the wind. He looks like a degenerate paladin from the nineteenth century, a self-styled gunslinger-pimp. “I want to see something.”
Martinez lowers his weapon, tilts his head toward the action. “Just worried somebody’s gonna go and get his ass killed.”
By this point Big Johnny Pruitt has his pudgy fingers around Dean Gorman’s throat, and Gorman begins to gasp and blanch. The fight goes from savage to deadly in a matter of seconds. Pruitt will not let go. The crowd erupts in ugly, garbled cheers. Gorman flails and convulses. He runs out of air, his face turning the color of eggplant. His eyes bulge, bloody saliva spraying.
“Stop worrying, grandma,” the Governor murmurs, watching intently with those hollowed-out eyes.
Right then Martinez realizes the Governor is not watching the fight per se. Eyes shifting all around the semicircle of shouting spectators, the Governor is
Meantime, Dean Gorman starts to fade on the ground, in the stranglehold of Johnny Pruitt’s sausage fingers. Gorman’s face turns the color of dry cement. His eyes roll back in his head and he stops struggling.
“Okay, that’s enough … pull him off,” the Governor tells Martinez.
“EVERYBODY BACK OFF!”
Martinez forces his way into the huddle with his gun in both hands.
Big fat Johnny Pruitt finally lets go at the urging of the M1’s muzzle, and Gorman lies there convulsing. “Go get Stevens,” Martinez orders one of his guards.
The crowd, still agitated by all the excitement, lets out a collective groan. Some of them grumble, and some launch a few boos, frustrated by the anticlimax.
Standing off to the side, the Governor takes it all in. When the onlookers begin to disperse—wandering away, shaking their heads—the Governor goes over to Martinez, who still stands over the writhing Gorman.
Martinez looks up at the Governor. “He’ll live.”
“Good.” The Governor glances down at the young man on the ground. “I think I know what to do with the guardsmen.”
* * *
At that same moment, under the sublevels of the racetrack complex, in the darkness of a makeshift holding cell, four men whisper to each other.
“It’ll never work,” the first man utters skeptically, sitting in the corner in his piss-sodden boxer shorts, gazing at the shadows of his fellow prisoners gathered around him on the floor.
“Shut the fuck up, Manning,” hisses the second man, Barker, a rail-thin twenty-five-year-old, who glowers at his fellow detainees through long strands of greasy hair. Barker had once been Major Gene Gavin’s star pupil at Camp Ellenwood, Georgia, bound for special ops duty with the 221st Military Intelligence Battalion. Now, thanks to that psycho Philip Blake, Gavin is gone and Barker has been reduced to a ragged, seminude, groveling lump in the basement of some godforsaken catacomb, left to subsist on cold oatmeal and wormy bread.
The four guardsmen have been under “house arrest” down here for over three weeks, ever since Philip Blake had shot and killed their commanding officer, Gavin, in cold blood, right in front of dozens of townspeople. Now the only things they have going for them are hunger, pure rage, and the fact that Barker is chained to the cinder-block wall to the immediate left of the locked entrance door, a spot from which one could conceivably get a jump on somebody entering the cell … like Blake, for example, who has been regularly coming down here to drag prisoners out, one by one, to meet some hellish fate.
“He’s not stupid, Barker,” a third man named Stinson wheezes from the opposite corner. This man is older, more heavyset, a good old boy with bad teeth who once ran a requisition desk at the National Guard station.
“I agree with Stinson,” Tommy Zorn says from the back wall where he slumps in his underwear, his malnourished body covered with a significant skin rash. Zorn once worked as a delivery clerk at the Guard station. “He’s gonna see right through this stunt.”
“Not if we’re careful,” Barker counters.
“Who the hell is gonna be the one plays dead?”
“Doesn’t matter, I’ll be the one kicks his ass when he opens the door.”
“Barker, I think this place has put a zap on your head. Seriously. You want to end up like Gavin? Like Greely and Johnson and—”
“YOU COCK-SUCKING COWARD!! WE’RE ALL GONNA END UP LIKE THEM YOU DON’T DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!”
The volume of Barker’s voice—stretched as thin as high-tension wire—cuts off the conversation like a switch. For a long stretch, the four guardsmen sit in the dark without saying a word.
At last Barker says, “All we need is one of you faggots to play dead. That’s all I’m asking. I’ll coldcock him when he comes in.”
“Making it convincing is the trouble,” Manning says.
“Rub shit on yourself.”
“Hardy-har-har.”
“Cut yourself and rub blood on your face, and then let it dry, I don’t know. Rub your eyes until they bleed. You want to get out of here?”
Long silence now.
“You’re fucking guardsmen, for Chrissake. You want to rot in here like maggots?”
Another long silence, and then Stinson’s voice in the darkness says, “Okay, I’ll do it.”
* * *
Bob follows the Governor through a secure door at one end of the racetrack, then down a narrow flight of iron stairs, and then across a narrow cinder-block corridor, their footsteps ringing and echoing in the dim light. Emergency cage lights—powered by generators—burn overhead.
“Finally it hit me, Bob,” the Governor is saying, fiddling with a ring of skeleton keys clipped to his belt on a
