by Kolin Wood
The beam above cracked as he threw another, much harder punch, into the compacted sand. Try as he might to simplify it all in his mind, there was more at stake. The feelings, however, were so foreign to him that they sat like oil on top water, slick and concentrated, unable to be diluted or mixed in. The woman, Clara. Without him, she would never make it out of the capital. He had to survive, if only to ensure that she lived. This much he had promised to himself.
The bang on the door came again but this time it was at the small, green gate at the back of the building. This one was lighter, so quiet in fact that Tanner barely heard it above the noise outside.
Fury balled his fists tight. Braydon was still yanking on his strings, summoning him like a lost puppy.
He charged at the door, already feeling the effects of the thick jacket as sweat sprung on his chest and arms. With a rough yank he tore the door open, ready to tune up whoever it was that had dared to act as messenger for the man that he hated more than any other on the planet.
But the sight that met him caused him to stop firm in his tracks. Instead of one of the red-nosed, tabard wearing guards, the person now stood before him was smaller, dressed all in black and wearing a full face mask. Looking down, he noticed the barrel of a gun aimed up at his chest and his face curled into a sneer.
“So this is how it’s gonna go down, huh?” he said as realisation set in. “Braydon is too pussy to even let me back in the ring again? Figures.”
The would-be assassin took a slow step back as if measuring the shot. Tanner opened his arms.
“Go on then,” he said, “Do me the favour.”
But instead of pulling the trigger, the person reached up and pulled off the mask.
“What…?” Tanner’s mind stumbled. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Clara stepped back in towards him and lowered the gun. Her face was red and her entire head looked wet with sweat.
“They sent somebody to the house…” she said, slightly out of breath.
“The Fez?” Tanner asked, but he already knew the answer. He glanced down at the gun in her hands and then back up at the blood spots covering her face. “Did he hurt you?”
Clara swallowed and then shook her head. “No. I’m all right.”
Questions bombed through Tanner’s brain.
“How did you even get in here?” he asked.
At this, Clara managed a smile. “I can be very persuasive,” she said with a final deep breath, nodding down to the knife handle sticking out of her jacket pocket.
Tanner nodded, confused but relieved. “Braydon…”
“Intended to use me as a bargaining chip,” she interrupted “To ensure you would forfeit the fight, but your friend it seemed, had other plans.”
Tanner felt his eyes narrow and his blood pressure rise. Once again the rules of the game had changed. With the Fez now dead as well, Braydon would never let Clara leave. On top of that, he’d never intended to let allow Tanner to win the fight anyway. He’d been a fool to believe otherwise.
“We need to leave now,” he said, reaching for her shoulder.
He squeezed her gently and she winced painfully as she rolled her shoulder away from him before standing resolutely again.
“I know,” she said. “But first I need to pay somebody a visit.”
Tanner looked at her, noting the intensity that burned in her eyes.
“You know we’ll never reach him, don’t you,” he said.
Clara shrugged. “I got to you, didn’t I?” she said as she turned towards the exit behind.
Tanner could already see that her mind was made up.
“It’s suicide,” he said, knowing deep down that his efforts were fruitless. “And Braydon?” he asked, “You think he’s just gonna let you walk in there… bold as brass as if nothing has happened… and kill another of his men? Clara…”
This time she stopped walking and turned to face him, her eyes searching his for something, understanding maybe. When she finally did speak, she looked away.
“Look, Tanner, there’s something you need to know,” she said, unable to look him in the eye. “My name is not Clara, its Juliana… Juliana Braydon.”
Tanner froze mid-step as his mind struggled to process what she was saying.
Juliana remained quiet as her eyes found his again. They were deep and sad, reaching out and imploring for him to understand.
“But… Why?” he said finally. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Juliana’s shoulders dropped and she looked away again.
“Because I wanted you to take me with you,” she said.
“And why would that have changed anything?”
Juliana shrugged. “You want to kill him.”
Tanner opened his mouth to speak and then promptly closed it again. His hate for Braydon ran deep for sure. Would it have made any difference to how he felt about her if she had told him the truth? If he was being honest then he was not so sure. But now that he did know, surely the advantage of the surprise was his to use.
“I still want to kill him,” Tanner said finally.
Juliana nodded and looked away again. “I know.”
“Well then, I guess we both have reason to try,” Tanner said, wiping a strand of hair from her face. “But this is gonna get nasty.”
***
The gates leading to the fighters holding cells were closed, leaving a sparse patch of ground beyond almost pitch black with shadow. Luckily, for now at least, it afforded Juliana and Tanner the freedom to move from one cell to the other without drawing any attention. The makeshift band of bass and broken horns had sparked up some rowdy tune and the thump of the feet on the scaffolding, sent reverberations down through the earth which Tanner and Juliana could feel through the soles of their boots. It sounded like the crowd were growing restless.
The two guards who had been charged with the responsibility of ensuring that nobody enter this back area, now lay in a heap in the shadows to one side of a small outbuilding, their bodies only partially covered in a sheet of dirty tarpaulin. Upon a quick inspection, Tanner was saddened to see that one of the dead was none other than the young boy that had cut the bonds on his wrists that first night in the pit. Sad eyes bulged in their sockets, blankly staring up into the night sky above.
“This one was okay,” Tanner said, pulling up a corner of the tarp to cover the boy’s face, which had taken on a bluish hue.
Behind him, Juliana shrugged.
“Sorry, I didn’t stop to ask him,” she said, sarcastically.
Tanner nodded; in this brave new world the colour of the flag sewn on your arm mattered.
He looked up. Juliana was stood staring at a closed door on the front of a building nearby. To one side of the door lay a pile of stinking metal trays surrounded by a stack of bloody buckets.
“What is it?” Tanner asked without thinking.
“He’s in there, isn’t he?”
It took a few seconds for the question to compute. He looked at the buckets then up at her face once more. The cannibal, the one that raped and spared her during her ordeal within the prison was chained up somewhere inside.
“Yes, he is,” Tanner replied, now aware of the importance. “But they’ll be coming for us soon. We have to get moving now, or we stand no chance.”
Around them the sound of the riot filled the space like flooding water. Juliana remained, her eyes focused on the door.
“I can’t let him live,” she said after a pause. “Not after what he did to those girls.”
“He let you live,” Tanner said, regretting the words as soon as they left his mouth.
Juliana turned on him, her teeth bared and her eyes dark.
“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” she spat.
For a moment Tanner thought that she might hit him, such was the hatred creasing her features, but after a few tense seconds of staring she turned away from him.
“I didn’t mean it like it sounded,” he said.
&
nbsp; He watched her take a deep breath.
“So, will you help me to do it?” she said, after a pause.
Without answering her Tanner bent down. At his feet lay the bodies of the two dead guards. Ignoring the looks on their pale faces, he roughly searched each of them in turn, eventually standing with a bunch of keys dangling from the fingers of one hand. He smiled, hoping to placate her, while holding the keys in her direction.
With a nod, Juliana wiped the end of her nose with the back of her hand and a sniff and reached out to take them.
“Thanks,” she said.
Then, without smiling back, she turned to face the door.
28
Inside the room it was completely pitch black. The stench that escaped when Juliana opened the door was like she had just stumbled upon a mass grave of rotting bodies. It hung on the air—thick, meaty and diabolical, worse than anything that she had ever encountered before. Her empty stomach began to turn flips as saliva flooded her mouth. The dried blood on the sleeve of the thick, army jacket scraped against her nose as she pressed it over the lower part of her face, but the gesture was hopeless as the sickly reek permeated the fabric, causing a terrible taste to form on her tongue.
Behind her, Tanner struck a match. Its luminance barely penetrated the sheet darkness, offering only the faintest glimmer of the walls to the front and sides of her. For a moment, she didn’t move as she allowed for her eyes to adjust to her surroundings.
The room was small and the walls had been painted black.
Juliana took a step forward, allowing her foot to slide as the ground felt slippery underfoot.
It took a moment before the realisation hit; the buckets outside, the terrible smell. The colour pressing in on them was not black paint—somebody had been throwing blood into the room. Gallons of it.
Fighting the urge to vomit, Juliana turned to face Tanner, whose face was only partially lit from the bottom making him look evil.
“Braydon,” he said matter-of-factly, as if this one word explained everything.
She supposed it did.
Cold dread crept up her arms bringing gooseflesh.
What sort of a monster has he become? she thought.
A faint noise from the corner of the small room farthest from her caused her to raise the gun.
“Shit!” Tanner said as the match went out, immediately encasing them in darkness.
Droplets of sweat gathered dirt and turned to grime as they rolled down her face. Her finger tightened on the slippery trigger. So badly, she wanted to simply unload the contents of the gun, but something inside was stopping her from doing it.
“My pocket,” she said in a whisper. “Right side. There’s a lighter.”
Tanner stepped in close and she felt a hand searching in the large side pocket of the jacket.
“Got it,” he said, and with a click, the room appeared again, this time with a little more definition than before.
Slowly, Juliana spun on the spot, training the gun before her, searching the darkness.
A pile of damp cardboard lay pushed up against one wall, half painted in the same black as the rest of the room. Some kind of makeshift guttering system had been rigged from the ceiling, funnelling down a series of dark pipes into a large bucket at its base. Several empty bowls lay on the floor at her feet.
A large, dark shape filled the corner opposite.
One Six Four she thought, as apprehension snagged her guts.
With the thick stock of the gun pulled tightly against her shoulder for steadiness, Juliana took another carefully felt step closer. There was no way that she could risk losing her balance on the untrustworthy floor. Behind her, Tanner followed, bringing the light source with him. Every step increased her field of vision until she was close enough to make out the shape before her. Somebody lay hunkered down against the wall. The definition and shadow of the muscles told her that they were at least partly naked. The flicker of the flame imbibed a glutinous, dark shine to their skin.
Juliana felt a hand on her shoulder as Tanner moved in close behind her. Even though she was armed with a gun, she was glad to have him there.
“Juliana,” he said, as if he had been reading her mind. “We have to go.”
She ignored him and took another step closer.
Some kind of hood or mask, wet with blood, covered its face. A thick rope of chain lay coiled on its lap, the other end of which attached the things hands to a thick buckle on the wall.
Good, Juliana thought to herself. The sight that it was safely chained to the wall settled her, but only a little.
Careful to maintain a safe space, she lowered the barrel of the gun directly into its midsection. She didn’t know much about guns, but what she did know was that the shotgun in her hands was designed for maximum coverage and devastating up-close damage. By aiming low into the bulkiest part of its body, she might not kill it immediately, but she would take it down nevertheless.
Adrenaline thumped through her, making her breaths even more erratic and brisk.
“Go on; do it,” Tanner said again.
Juliana felt her pulse spike.
The people that she had killed so far, Donnie, Barrett, and even the two guards outside, had been fight-or-die situations, more reflex than thought. But this… This felt more premeditated; almost like an execution.
She thought back to the night the General had fed her to him. He had left her in his cell, alone with those dark, pitiless eyes, surrounded by the remains of disembowelled bodies. She had pleaded with him then, begged the thing to leave her be. She could still remember the sting at her shoulders as her smock was torn roughly from her body.
Her eyes narrowed and her fingers tightened around the gun.
“Remember me, mother fucker?” she said, annoyed at the slight wobble of her voice.
Even now—when she was holding all of the cards—being this close to the monster still scared her like nothing she had ever encountered before.
“Look at me!” she screamed, now uncaring of who might hear her. “LOOK AT ME!”
The thing at her feet began to move.
Juliana took a small step backward, but kept the gun pointed at the thickest part of the shadow. The chain rattled as it stood and Juliana found herself holding her breath. The thing continued to rise until it was fully standing. Its broad shoulders painted a thick and sturdy picture of shadow against the slightly lighter, top half of the wall behind. Its head hung down so that its chin lay against its chest.
The gun felt heavy in her hands as she readied herself for the boom. The desire to shoot was strong; so strong, in fact, that she felt like screaming. But she needed to see its face. She had to show it that she had won.
With the stock pulled back into her shoulder, Juliana twisted her body so that she could manage it with only one arm.
“Juliana, don’t!” Tanner said, gripping her upper arm with a gentle hand.
But Juliana wouldn’t listen to him. She couldn’t. She shrugged away from his grip with more gusto than she had intended. The rifle began to weigh down on her single arm and the barrel wobbled under the strain.
“Just kill it!” Tanner said, more urgently this time. “Braydon will be along any minute… We don’t have time for this shit!”
With a shaking hand, she reached out and took hold of the top of the hood. The stickiness of it made her grimace. Gore squished between her fingers as she gripped hard enough to turn her knuckles white, and pulled.
The hood came away easily revealing a pale face and a thick, thatch of hair. A pair of eyes stared back at her, their whites burning brightly.
Her throat tightened as she dropped the hood to the floor and pulled the gun level with both hands once more.
But Juliana did not pull the trigger.
She looked at him, studying his eyes, her mind confused.
For they were not the same red, demonic eyes that she remembered; the ones that haunted her nightmares and stared at her from the dark corners when she was
awake. They were white and clear, scared-looking, yet still strangely familiar. Suddenly realisation hit her like a lightning bolt.
“Doyle!” she gasped, almost dropping the gun to the floor as the eyes before her closed and the body dropped away into the darkness.
***
The cold dampness of the bricks brought shivers to his back as Tanner stopped to catch his breath. The mud, once again thick now that they were back out in the main body of the capital, felt heavy on his boots and he banged the heels on the wall in an effort to clear some of the weight.
Juliana’s large, serrated combat knife, hung loosely in his hand. He brought it up to examine it in the light from a fire barrel. Its blade was dull and speckled with dried blood. A knife of this size was more than enough to make him lethal to anybody but the most highly skilled of men, and since the Culling he had not met many that measured up. The gun he’d left with Juliana. The tight confines of the Capital lent themselves to such a weapon. Trained or not, it would be hard to miss with a shotgun.
“Doyle!” Juliana said, her voice as loud as she could make it without shouting.
Tanner glanced down.
Struggling for breath, slumped at her feet lay the man that Juliana had since decided was not the cannibal. Apparently, Doyle was one of the guards from the prison, but he had seen the light and been instrumental in her escape.
Tanner watched as a thin string of bloody drool fell from his bottom lip. He was barely a man; no older than his early twenties. His entire body was covered in a thick skin of drying blood. It had coagulated in thick swathes on his hair and filled his ears, drying in glutinous lumps at any place on his body where there happened to be a crevice or a fold. At first glance, it would be forgiven for thinking that the man had been flayed alive.
He pictured the stack of bloody buckets on the floor and wondered where they might have gotten so much blood from. There were more than enough broken, drunken, and homeless bums around who nobody would miss to ensure a regular quota of fresh claret. The twisted bastard. For the price of decent theatre, he was sure that Braydon would spare no expense.