'Cleee… sssssss,' Monk moaned. 'Kiiii. Meh…'
'Fuck…' and tears came anew. 'Monk…'
Monk crawled arthritically across the sand, painfully prostrating himself before Cleese like an over-whipped dog. He continued to keep his head down, but reached up and grasped at Cleese’s hand. At first, Cleese was reluctant to let him take it, but he figured that he’d be able to yank it back if Monk fell back on instinct and tried to bite. At least that was his hope.
'I can’t, Monk.' Cleese hissed, and the dam that held back his reservoir of tears finally broke completely free. 'Not you, man… Not you.'
Monk slowly raised his gaze and looked Cleese dead in the eye. For a moment, Cleese was dumbfounded by how ravaged his friend’s face was. His gaze was rheumatic and the enamel of his teeth looked stained and pitted. It broke his heart to see Monk like this; beaten, dragged back to life and now abandoned to be ingested by the Pit.
Hadn’t he worked hard enough or long enough for them here?
Couldn’t he, of all people, be spared this indignity?
Monk slowly reached up, his fingers fumbling at the gauntlet on Cleese’s arm. He stared and never broke his gaze from Cleese’s, but his hands moved with a clandestine secondary agenda. His fingers ran over the metal like a blind man reading Braille.
At first, Cleese thought he’d been wrong and his friend’s need to feed was going to win the battle for his soul. For a second, he was sure Monk was going to try to take a bite out of him, but finally, he felt his friend’s fingers touch the release mechanism and pause.
Monk stared intently at Cleese and repeated, 'Kiiii… Meh… Cleeessssss!!'
Then, Monk pressed down on the metal latch.
The metal spike sang out of its sheath.
Monk slowly looked up at him with dead, pleading eyes and released his grip on the gauntlet. They were the same eyes Monk always had, only now, the pupils were milky and clouded over.
'Cleee… ssssss. Kiiii… Meh… '
Monk reverently bowed his head and offered up the nape of his neck. Cleese looked up and away, into the light, and lovingly slid his fingers into Monk’s hair.
Now, he too asked of the Light that same question, the one that The Dead seem to always be asking, but never had answered.
The moment hung in the air like the body of a suicide; soulless and as heavy as the sin itself. The Light… as always, kept its thoughts to itself.
Cleese slowly raised his right hand as if it weighed a thousand pounds. He gently placed the tip of the spike against the small indentation at the base of his friend’s occipital bone. Oddly, Cleese flashed on the mental image of an old woman wearing a boxy coat standing in an elevator long, long ago. The memory of the taste of bubble gum flitted across his tongue. The image of two young boys—one wearing an eye patch and another with a turtleneck raised impossibly high—flashed across his mind’s eye. A small, well of dark blood pooled where the tip of the spike cut into Monk’s greasy skin.
'Ye.. ssssss,' Monk whispered. 'T’aaang… yooooo…'
Cleese stood silent for a moment and looked around the pit. His mind reeled back over all that he’d seen and done since stepping off that fucking helicopter so many, many months ago. He thought of how his life had changed—both for the better and for the worse. From where he stood now, it had once looked a hell of a lot better.
The league had fucked him and fucked him hard, that much was sure. They’d treated him like shit since the beginning and, despite the money and the supposed affluence, that had never changed. He saw that all too clearly. The sickening part was that they’d expected him to just bend over and take it all… and he had. God help him, he had. Willingly. He’d always thought that his soul could never be bought, but he now knew he’d been wrong.
He knew it could…
He could even tell you the exact amount on his fuckin’ price tag.
And to think… They’d fuckin’ set him up—
But in the end, here they all were. Together.
Monk, treated like dirt for years and then retired before he was ready, he’d been thrown away unceremoniously with little to no fanfare much less respect. He’d been discarded without so much as a thought or kind word. But even that was not enough for these motherfuckers. No, they’d knowingly sent him off to be killed in some rat-fuck farm league where, as everyone knew, safety was never a high priority.
And what did he get as thanks for years of loyal service?
His reanimated corpse was sent back into the pit to fight some more.
And then there was Chikara… Yeah, that particular wound was still far too tender to poke at. Her memory was one that would haunt him, he knew, for the rest of his life.
One look into Monk’s eyes told him everything he needed to know.
He was outta here. Gone like the fuckin’ wind.
The League could, if they were very quick, kiss his lily-white ass.
They’d taken far too much from him to sit still on this one. There was just way too much pain and far too much loss for him to just kick back and forget everything that had happened.
Both to him and to the ones he loved.
And besides, now he had a bankroll—and a sizeable one, at that. He’d been very cautious and had surreptitiously stashed away as much of the money as he could get his grubby little hands on. He’d been careful to continually move it around, never letting his wealth rest in any one place for too long. It had all been stashed in enough different places and in enough different countries that no one—not even those knuckle-fucks Masterson or Monroe—could find it.
And speaking of Masterson and Monroe…
There were two scabs Cleese didn’t mind poking at now that this was all said and done. Those two fucktards needed to know a bit of the pain he now felt. They needed to feel a bit of the same loss. Cleese was sure that he’d only need to think on it a bit and some version of a fair and sensible adjudication would occur to him. Soon, it would be payback time for them… and payback was a righteous and vengeful bitch.
Cleese returned his gaze to the back of his friend’s head and closed his eyes.
'You know what, Monk?' he said in a hushed tone.
He slowly opened his eyes and took a long, slow look around the pit for what he was sure was to be the last time. He saw the bodies piled about him, the blood spattered sand, and the cameras behind the glass. He smelled the copper-tainted scent of spilled blood and ichor. And as the sound of rhubarb rained down on him from overhead, he smiled.
'Let’s go home, Pal,' he said with a sigh. 'Let’s you and I go home.'
Cleese closed his eyes and ran his hand through his friend’s salt-and-pepper hair. He gripped it and gently pushed his head just a little further forward. For a moment, the world seemed to go silent, and in the soundless void, the memory of his dead friend’s voice echoed:
'Abso-fuckin’-lutely…'
And Cleese drove the spike home.
Hegira
Weaver stood alone outside of the stadium, alternately breathing in the cool night air and sucking hot smoke
