The ground burned hot beneath Cleese’s boots. The sand had soaked up enough heat from the overhead lights to make the Pit’s floor a griddle. Humidity drenched everything in a thin layer of moisture and it pulled what little oxygen there was from the air and made it difficult to breathe. Cleese stood—baking beneath the scorching lights—and watched as the UD before him aimlessly wandered around the vastness of the pit.
The thing hadn’t caught his scent as of yet, but it would and when it did, it would come clawing its way after him with teeth grinding and eyes bugging out maniacally. Infectious saliva would be slithering down its chin in long, ropey loops like malignant taffy.
This one had been a woman once; kind of short and matronly. Her back was stooped and her gait was doddering, but her eyes dripped murder and her teeth gnashed together in long, expectant strokes. She walked, swaying, past Cleese and he denied the impulse to reach out and touch her. He wanted to extend this moment, to savor it.
Momentarily, he thought this was what a predator felt like as it eyed unsuspecting prey.
The woman swung around slowly, her arms swaying like a chimp. As she stumbled past, she caught a hint of Cleese’s scent on the wind. Her nose managed to snag just a ribbon of his odor and her senses honed in on him like a viper. She turned and stared darkly across the sand. Shadows hung over her sallow face, obscuring any facial features, however, her eyes burned from behind her messy, oily hair.
'HAAA-aaa…' she hissed, her breath poisoning the air as soon as it touched it. She reached out for him, slowly, as if the act caused her great pain. Her hands opened and closed, wanting to touch, wanting to hold, wanting to tear. She’d locked onto his scent now and was coming; coming fast. Her feet were tripped up sporadically by the unleveled surface of the sand, but her speed steadily increased as she lurched wildly across the pit.
Cleese dropped down into a Muay Thai crouch; chin down against his chest, hands open and loose. He rose up onto the balls of his feet and bobbed toward her. His mind instinctively clicked over to pure instinct, and having done so, it never once looked back. A right side kick knocked the dead air from the woman’s lifeless lungs. A left upward hook yielded some broken ribs. The spinning right back fist loosened her jaw. An overhand left elbow erased her nose. The woman dropped to her knees and vomited blood and spoiled meat onto the sand.
The spike was out before he even realized; the metal shimmering in the floodlights. The weapon glowed brightly as if it possessed great power within its metal. Telepathically, the gauntlet sang to him its songs of glory, of fortune, of fame. It was an oracle that radiated Truth and offered up glorious images of his future. It was, it seemed, the very Hand of God. An instrument of great wrath, it was Excalibur in the hands of a vengeful psychopath.
He reached out and twisted his fingers into the woman’s graying hair and roughly cranked her head back. She looked up at him, her eyes sinister and brimming with a foul corruption. Her mouth drew open and a blackened tongue emerged over the fencing of her ruined bridgework. Cleese slid the point of the spike into the opening of the woman’s ear and steadily pushed.
The sound of the crowd above The Pit pounded deep within his chest.
The woman stiffened against his legs, briefly grabbing a fistful of his pant leg and squeezing. Her back arched and contorted, then went slack. Her features slowly collapsed into an almost peaceful repose.
The UD’s eyes suddenly slid open, like dingy yellow roll-up shades. As her after-life winked out into an unending emptiness, her gaze tore through Cleese’s murderous rage. It was like an arrow shot through a rice paper screen. He locked his eyes onto hers and slowly—painfully—he recognized certain contours of her face: her soft eyes, her slightly upturned nose, her kind lips. As she lay there on her knees in the sand, she slowly returned to being just an old woman; hair twisted back, brain now impaled. Recognition took hold and Cleese’s mind made its own horrifying connections.
'Ma…?'
~ * ~
'Ma!'
Cleese bolted upright, panting. His heart thumped heavily in his chest and sweat shimmered in the half light across his brow. His head still reeled from the alcohol he’d drunk and his mouth tasted like someone had dumped an ashtray into it. He raised his hands to his face and rubbed them up and down.
'Shii…' he hissed into the palms of his hands, '…it.'
He parted his fingers and looked around the roof but saw nothing strange; Monk on his back, mouth open and his legs spread out, Weaver, a yard or so away, snoring and scratching at himself. Darkness lay over them all like a cape, but it was otherwise quiet.
He looked out over the compound and it, too, was as quiet as a church. The moon fell down on the grass and the blades reflected the light as silver. He stared out across the fields and saw the Holding Pen brooding in the distance. He couldn’t be exactly sure, but he thought he heard a far off moan drift across the compound.
Cleese lay back onto the roof and turned onto his side. Shifting around on the concrete, he tried to find a comfortable spot on the cold, hard surface. Finally, he pushed his back up against the retaining wall and settled in. A shiver abruptly ran down his spine and prompted him to take one more look around. Then, like a child with a favorite blanket, he tugged his jacket tighter around him and hugged it close. As his heart rate slowly returned to normal, Cleese closed his eyes against the encroaching shadows and, in time, fell back asleep.
The Cost of Killing
The repeated crunching of Cleese’s feet on the coarse red soil of the compound’s track was the only sound that broke the silence of the warm afternoon. His breath came in short rapid huffs which forced his tissues to fight one another for every molecule of oxygen. The metronome-like drumming reverberating up from his legs marked each step of his progress as he made his way around the flat oval track. He’d lost most of the feeling from the waist down four or five miles ago, his mind feeling a distinct separation from the rest of his body. His intellect floated like a balloon somewhere between a blissful, endorphin-infused reality and a torturous hell of physical agony. As he ran along, a song drifted into his consciousness and stuck there like mental gum. He wasn’t even sure what the name of it was, but the tune hammered in his brain and kept time with the pounding of his feet.
It was weird how things bubbled up in the consciousness when the body was running on fumes and it wanted to puke its guts up in the azaleas. He was just finishing up what he calculated to be his seventh mile and was feeling like powdered shit; completely drawn and drained. He silently wondered, when the time came, if his legs would obey him or keep on going and not allow him to stop. He would just continue to run around and around until his bones wore themselves down to bloody stubs.
God knew… He felt as if he’d been running in circles—both figuratively and literally—forever. Why should he stop now? As he looked down, he saw multiple sets of his own shoe prints pressed into the soft red clay. In his exhausted delirium, he thought of how he was chasing after himself; following his own tracks in the dirt. He half expected to look up and see his phantom figure running ahead of him at the furthest corner of the track.
~ * ~
Alongside the benches which sat at one side of the track, a thin man with long strands of hair hanging in front of his face stood watching as Cleese sweated his way around the track for the umpteenth time. It was warm out again today, but that in no way deterred the man. He was grateful for a chance to be out in the fresh air, away from the smell of puke and bile and blood and festering gore. If only for an hour or so, he was happy to smell something—anything—other than death.
Adamson had been at the compound for longer than he cared to remember and was beginning to wonder if he’d ever get the stink off him. He’d had a bit of that dead smell back before the world went to shit and life got
