Chloe smiled. "Atta girl, Amanda. You can doit."
Time disappeared, and when the soldier called in the nextshift, Amanda fell to the ground, the bayonet sliding out of her hand andclattering on the concrete. Chloe and Rudy lifted her up by her shoulders, andtook her away from the fence.
****
Brian left his kids with Zeke and stumbled to the fencewith a bayonet in hand. His mind was clouded with grief. Sadness seemed to be apart of him, every bit as important as his hand or his wife or his children.
Thoughts of Sarah clouded his mind as he felt the roughrubber handle of the bayonet in his hand. He could see her in her dress, herbrown eyes shining in the sunlight. They had been married for ten years, tengreat fucking years. The number loomed large in his mind as he stepped up tothe fence.
He turned and looked over his shoulder to see his babieswith their backs to him. Zeke was drawing their attention away from theproceedings at the fence. They had seen too much already. Zeke nodded at him,reassuring Brian that everything would be alright. Zeke was a blessing.
Brian felt guilty for being as useless as he had been.The father part of his heart struggled with the broken part, battling back andforth. He knew he needed to step it up, reassert himself as a normal, chipperpresence in the girls' lives, but knowing and actually being able to pull itoff were two different things. It was as if he were a drowning swimmer, stuckunderneath the weight of an ocean whose waters were composed of his ownsadness. He could see the sun shining down through that ocean, but he couldn'tget there. It would just take time.
In front of him, a dead man smashed its face against thefence. Brian hefted the bayonet in his hand, and then drove it into thecreature's head, content that his babies weren't watching. The blade sunk intothe soft flesh of the dead man's eyes. The creature stiffened and jitteredaround, and the sensation of the bayonet stabbing through flesh and bone leftBrian repulsed. He wondered what Sarah would have said.
They had always been pacifists. Their children weren'tallowed to watch any movies with guns or extreme violence. They had neverraised a hand to their children, though their friends always insisted thatdiscipline was the way to raise responsible, well-adjusted children. Sarahalways countered these arguments with, "Violence is a path that leads todehumanization." And their approach to child-rearing had been acceptablein a world where the government kept them relatively safe... but now, in thisworld, Brian wondered if they had made a mistake.
Brian watched as the dead man fell to the ground, theknife dripping gore onto the concrete. His shoes stuck momentarily in the bloodthat had begun to seep under the fence guarding the Coliseum. He stepped up tothe next dead person and delivered a blow that jarred his elbow and shoulderwith the force.
It felt good, this violence. With every blow that hestruck, he could feel the ocean of sadness around him shrinking. Killing, itwas like therapy. He took his emotions, bundled them into a little ball andshot them down his arm and into the blade in his hand. Then he took the bladeand deposited those emotions into the brains of the living dead. The sun wascloser now; he could see the surface through the murky water.
Dozens of the creatures died at his hand, and he keptworking, slaying with no care for time or his own energy. Brian disappeared,replaced by a being of pure emotion, sweat running down its face, its handssticky with blood, its mind locked away in the task of killing. On the fence,Brian grew to knew the joys of violence, the pleasure of killing and taking onproblems with a physical approach. He was reborn... and then he died.
The soldiers called an end to the shift, yelling andsignaling for everyone to stop, but Brian didn't want to stop. Brian turnedaround to look at the soldier behind him, and for the first time since Sarahhad been murdered, because that's what he thought of her death as, he smiled.Then he spun on his heel, eager to remove one last member of the dead army fromthe face of the planet. He plunged the knife into the eye of a man in a leatherjacket. The force of the blow caused the man's eye to erupt, spraying cloudyliquid into Brian's own eye.
Brian stepped back, rubbing at his eye, trying to get theliquid out. It was a reflex reaction, and in his haste, he forgot that his ownhands were covered in the blood of the dead and with a single swipe of hisface, he ensured that he would never reach the top of that ocean of sadness. Infact, he was down deeper than ever.
****
The day continued, refugees taking their turn at thefence, hour after hour. Still the dead congregated, and a new problem arose.The fence was tall, but not tall enough. As the bodies piled, up the deadcontinued to climb them, trampling over the corpses beneath them. And it wasn'tlong before the tallest of the dead, could reach over the top of the fences.
Major Miller appeared from inside the arena, short, witha bulbous red face. If he grew a beard, he would look like an alcoholic SantaClaus, but his face was clean-shaven. He took a look at the situation andcalled a halt to the proceedings. To dispatch any more of the dead would allowthem to crest the fence. Everyone saw it, as did the Major.
The refugees knelt and sat on the concrete apron that wasthe Coliseum's courtyard. The Major pulled a bullhorn out and flicked it on,holding it up to his thick pink lips. "You did a good job today. Therewill be food; you will eat. But know this. If another one of my soldiers is hurt,I will return the favor to you. We are here to protect you, but
