long chain. “Thing this place needs … is entertainment.”
“Entertainment?”
“The Greeks had their theater, Bob … Romans had their circuses.”
Bob has no idea what the man is talking about but he follows along obediently, wiping his dry mouth. He needs a drink badly. He unbuttons his olive-drab jacket, pearls of sweat breaking out on his weathered brow due to the airless, fusty dampness of the cavernous cement underground beneath the racetrack.
They pass a locked door, and Bob can swear he hears the muffled, telltale noises of reanimated dead. The trace odors of rotting flesh mingle with the mildewy stench of the corridor. Bob’s stomach lurches.
The Governor leads him over to a metal door with a narrow window at the end of the corridor. A shade is pulled down over the meshed safety glass.
“Gotta keep the citizens happy,” the Governor mutters as he pauses by the door, searching for the proper key. “Keep folks docile, manageable … pliable.”
Bob waits as the Governor inserts a thick metal key into the door’s bolt. But just as he is about to jack open the lock, the Governor turns and looks at Bob. “Had some trouble a while back with the National Guard in town, thought they could lord it over the people, push people around … thought they could carve out a little kingdom for themselves.”
Confused, dizzy, nauseous, Bob gives a nod and doesn’t say anything.
“Been keeping a bunch of them on ice down here.” The Governor winks as though discussing the location of a cookie jar with a child. “Used to be seven of them.” The Governor sighs. “Only four of them left now … been going through them like Grant went through Richmond.”
“Going through them?”
The Governor sniffs, suddenly looking guiltily at the floor. “They’ve been serving a higher purpose, Bob. For my baby … for Penny.”
Bob realizes with a sudden rush of queasiness what the Governor is talking about.
“Anyway…” The Governor turns to the door. “I knew they would come in handy for all sorts of things … but now I realize their true destiny.” The Governor smiles. “Gladiators, Bob. For the common good.”
Right then several things happen at once: The Governor turns and snaps up the shade, while simultaneously flipping a light switch … and through the safety glass a row of overhead fluorescent tubes suddenly flicker on, illuminating the inside of a three-hundred-square-foot cinder-block cell. A huge man clad only in tattered skivvies lies on the floor, twitching, covered with blood, his mouth black and peeled away from his teeth in a hideous grimace.
“That’s a shame.” The Governor frowns. “Looks like one of ’em turned.”
Inside the cell—the noises muffled by the sealed door—the other prisoners are screaming, yanking at their chains, begging to be rescued from this freshly turned biter. The Governor reaches inside the folds of his duster and draws his pearl-handled .45 caliber Colt. He checks the clip and mumbles, “Stay out here, Bob. This’ll just take a second.”
He snaps the lock open, and he steps inside the cell, when the man behind the door pounces.
Barker lets out a garbled cry as he tackles the Governor from behind, the chain attached to Barker’s ankle giving slightly, reaching its limit, tearing its anchor bolt from the wall. Taken by surprise, the Governor stumbles, drops the .45, topples to the deck, gasping, the gun clattering to the floor, spinning several feet.
Bob fills the doorway, yelling, as Barker crabs toward the Governor’s ankles, latching on to them, digging his filthy untrimmed fingernails into the Governor’s flesh. Barker tries to snag the skeleton keys, but the ring is wedged under the Governor’s legs.
The Governor bellows as he madly crawls toward the fallen pistol.
The other men cry out as Barker loses what is left of his sanity and goes for the Governor’s ankles and growls with feral white-hot killing rage and opens his mouth and bites down on the tender area around the Governor’s Achilles’ heel, and the Governor howls.
Bob stands paralyzed behind the half-ajar door, watching, thunderstruck.
Barker draws blood. The Governor kicks at the prisoner and claws for the pistol. The other men try to tear themselves free, hollering inarticulate warnings, while Barker rips into the Governor’s legs. The Governor reaches for the gun, which lies only centimeters out of his reach … until finally the Governor’s long, sinewy fingers get themselves around the Colt’s grip.
In one quick continuous motion the Governor spins and aims the single-action semiautomatic pistol at Barker’s face and empties the clip.
A series of dry, hot booms flash in the cell. Barker flings backward like a puppet yanked by a cable, the slugs perforating his face, exiting out the back of his skull in a plume of blood mist. The dark crimson matter sprays the cinder-block wall beside the door, some of it getting on Bob, who jerks back with a start.
Across the cell the other men call out—a garble of nonsense words, a frenzy of begging—as the Governor rises to his feet.
“Please, please, I ain’t turned—I AIN’T TURNED!” Across the room, Stinson, the big man, sits up, shielding his bloodstained face as he cries out. His quivering lips have been made up with mildew from the wall and grease from the door hinges. “It was a trick! A trick!”
The Governor thumbs the empty clip out of the Colt, the magazine dropping to the floor. Breathing hard and fast, he pulls another clip from his back pocket and palms it into the hilt. He cocks the slide and calmly aims the muzzle at Stinson, while informing the big man, “You look like a fucking biter to me.”
Stinson shields his face. “It was Barker’s idea, it was stupid, please, I didn’t want to go along with it, Barker was nuts, please … PLEASE!”
The Governor squeezes off half a dozen successive shots, the blasts making everybody jump.
The far wall erupts in a fireworks display just above Stinson’s head, the puffs of cinder-block plaster exploding in sequence, the noise a tremendous, earsplitting barrage, the sparks blossoming and some of the bullets ricocheting up into the ceiling.
The single cage light explodes in a torrent of glass particles that drives everybody to the floor.
At last the Governor lets up and stands there, catching his breath, blinking, and addressing Bob in the doorway. “What we got here, Bob, is a learning opportunity.”
Across the room, on the floor, Stinson has pissed himself, mortified and yet unharmed. He buries his face in his hands and weeps softly.
The Governor limps toward the big man, leaving a thin trail of blood droplets. “You see, Bob … the very thing that burns inside these boys—makes ’em try stupid shit like this—is gonna make them superstars in the arena.”
Stinson looks up with snot on his face now as the Governor looms over him.
“They don’t realize it, Bob.” The Governor aims the muzzle at Stinson’s face. “But they just passed the first test of gladiatorial school.” The Governor gives Stinson a hard look. “Open your mouth.”
Stinson hiccups with sobs and terror, squeezing out a breathless, “C’mon,
“Open your mouth.”
Stinson manages to open his mouth. Across the room, in the doorway, Bob Stookey looks away.
“See, Bob,” the Governor says, slowly penetrating the big man’s mouth with the barrel. The room falls stone silent as the other men watch, horrified and rapt. “Obedience … courage … stupidity. Isn’t that the Boy Scout motto?”
Without warning the Governor lets up on the trigger, pulls the muzzle free of the weeping man’s mouth, whirls around, and limps toward the exit. “What did Ed Sullivan used to say…? Gonna be a really big sssshooooow!”
The tension goes out of the room like a bladder deflating, replaced by a ringing silence.
“Bob, do me a favor … will ya?” the Governor mutters as he passes the bullet-riddled body of Master Gunnery Sergeant Trey Barker on his way out. “Clean this place up … but don’t take this cocksucker’s remains over to the crematorium. Bring him over to the infirmary.” He winks at Bob. “I’ll take care of him from there.”
* * *
The next day, early in the morning, before dawn, Megan Lafferty lies nude and cold and supine on a broken- down cot in the darkness of a squalid studio apartment—the private quarters of some guard whose name she can’t
