Now the crowd began to stir, their collective voices steadily building to a dull rumble. Hadn't he been alone in here just a few moments before? Every seat had been empty— but Christ in heaven they weren't empty now, not by a long shot.
Emmit stood up on legs he couldn't feel, twisting his upper body to look all around him. Fear wormed its way into his stomach like a huge, frozen snake, wrapping its shimmering scaled body around his guts and constricting.
The stadium was filled to the rafters with decomposing corpses. They were slumped this way and that, falling over onto each other, some with their slack arms draped over the backs of the seats as if they were relaxing and enjoying the show, despite the fact that they happened to be dead. The bodies far off in the distance looked like crumpled piles of old, mildewed papers. As the pyrotechnics flashed and hissed up from the ring, their purplish faces flickered with the dull orange glow. Even from this distance—
Cheap seats, could only afford cheap seats...
—he could see their vacant eyes, dried and beginning to deflate but still reflecting the firelight like ancient lightbulbs. There was a corpse beside him, half sitting and half falling out of its fluid-sodden seat. Its head had fallen over to stare at him blankly, the surfaces of its eyes scratched and hazy. It was like it was watching to see what he would do next, its thin hair fluttering softly in the flow of the air conditioning.
"When is it going to..." came the child's voice again. It was closer this time, more solid somehow. Like the speaker was moving closer to the top of the invisible cavern.
Who are you?
The corpse in the chair beside him began to twitch, the muscles in its face pulling and jerking as if attached to thin wires. Then the corpse parted its lips in a sleepy smile, and a monstrous, maroon-colored millipede, bristling with wriggling legs, writhed out from between its teeth and skittered up its face. The corpse did not blink as the millipede crossed one open eye and decided that the gelatinous surface was the perfect spot to stop for a rest, crossing the eye socket like a line of living stitches. Emmit tried to scream but his throat didn't work, even as he felt the muscles and tendons tightening until he thought they might break.
"When is it going to start..."
Closer now, right up against his head with a sensation like lips softly brushing his earlobe. Someone leaning in to speak. To be heard over the cacophony of music and crowd and pyro.
Beside him, the corpse stared and grinned on as the millipede began to wiggle its sharp appendages and climb up to roost on the top of its matted, sun faded hair. A thick rope of dark liquid glimmered in the corner of its mouth, welling up like a black tear before spilling out and stretching, down and down, swinging from its chin.
Wake up I want to wake up I want to wake up NOW—
Now there was a shape in the seat beside him, a shape he couldn't focus on. Each time he tried, there was nothing there; but if he turned his head just slightly, he could see the translucent figure of a small human body beside him. The action figure began to float and dance in the air as if hoisted by a poltergeist.
The corpses in the crowd began to stir, arching their spines and struggling to stand on weak legs as their bones and tendons popped and cracked like microwave popcorn. The corpse beside Emmit tried to stand along with them, taking its insectile passenger along for a wild ride. Its stomach lunged out awkwardly with a muted crunch of spine and it struggled to its feet, arms hanging slack in their sockets and mummified head rolling back far enough to split the leathery flesh of its neck. More of the black ichor bubbled out of the fresh wounds with each strangled sound the corpse forced out. The millipede hung on to the dead man's hair by only a few legs, its shelled body curled into a U shape lined with squirming legs.
Why are they standing oh Jesus why are they standing—
Then the humanoid shape beside him spoke, and Emmit's world disintegrated; his new reality that felt more like swimming against rapids than merely existing. A strange place in time where being awake felt like struggling against violent surges of water and curds of foam, against the iron grip of icy currents that dragged him dangerously close to sharp rocks and whirlpools with no way to stop or slow down. That world became nothing more than an uncomfortable mind-itch when he heard the words the ghostly child spoke, and his memory erupted against the dome of his skull like a depth charge.
"When is it going to start, Dad?"
The corpses, thousands of them, stood drunkenly around the haunted arena. They all began to slowly clap, splintering hand and finger bones and casting a collective cloud of skin-dust into the lights. Applauding the agony of Emmit's realization that he had left his child behind.
He jerked awake, not realizing that he'd already been screaming for nearly ten minutes.
"My son!" He shouted to the uncaring ceiling, the dusty wooden planks ebbing and flowing with orange firelight and purple shadow. His voice was hoarse and ululating. "I have a son!"
The other men had all bolted upright when the screaming fit started. Muddy wackily clutched a wooden club and hoisted it above
