Someone walks up behind me.
The ice thaws, and I turn to see my own gun belt in the hands of a middle-aged soldier. This belt only has one revolver. The leather is cheap and plastic-looking, something you’d get at a costume shop, and the gun is so obviously fake. They didn’t even bothered to remove the orange cap at the end of the barrel. The soldier starts putting it around my waist, moving my cuffed hands out of the way. I turn and see the empty look in his eye, this is a man who doesn’t care what the hell happens today. Maybe I can use that to my advantage. “Good luck,” he says, and walks back to the entrance we came through. Him and his partner pull a barred door across the threshold, locking me in here with piles of dirt and a madman.
I turn back, look down at the gun belt. I barely feel it around my waist. It must weigh about two pounds.
“Jupiter! Jupiter! Jupiter!” some of the crowd starts chanting.
With the belt clasped and my fake pistol hanging from my hip, I smile to the crowd and a small section of them start screaming louder. I look for Darlene or Abby or Norm, even Herb, but all I see are faint shapes and outlines with the floodlights distorting their features.
Feedback from a microphone.
I cringe, my heart taking a great leap inside of my chest.
“Quiet! Quiet!” Spike says. He is standing on his throne of bones, his hat tipped back so he can see each and everyone of his people.
The crowd’s noise begins to simmer down to a faint drone — faint enough for me to hear my heartbeat hammering.
“Those of you who cheer, why do you do so?” His Southern drawl is gone. He sounds normal, maybe even educated.
“Because you’re a dick!” someone shouts, but who it is, we’ll never know. A few people answer that voice with cheers. One of the soldiers behind me chuckles.
“Quiet!”
They do this time, completely — perhaps sensing how unstable Spike is. After all, he has two guns, and they have none. If he just starts firing into the crowd…
“Now, y’all gathered here today because we gonna bring a traitor to justice.” The fake accent is back and worse than ever, amplified by the microphone.
This is answered by a few cheers. Not many. Things aren’t looking too terrible for me. He wouldn’t kill me in cold blood, not with more than half the crowd on my side.
“Strike that,” Spike says, “Traitors, plural.”
I feel my blood pressure rising. The pain in my head and the wound from the bullet graze starts to throb with my heartbeat.
“Jack Jupiter is no hero. Jack Jupiter is one of the Carnivores and so is his ragtag bunch of assholes.” Spike lowers the mic, expecting the crowd’s reaction, and boy, does he get one. A domino effect of gasps ripple through the crowd.
“BOOO!” someone shouts. “Kill him! Kill him!”
Okay, odds are no longer in my favor. Not a big deal. I can still dig my way out of this…I think.
“Yes, it is true,” Spike says, sweeping his hand out to the crowd. The lights are really growing hot now. I’m sweating, shaking, you name it. I really don’t want to die looking like Woody from Toy Story.
“We all know the Carnivores are ruthless.” He takes his hat off, holds it on his chest, says, “Rest in peace to the Chekov family. We all know about that, I don’t think I need to remind y’all about how the Carnies ate them for dinner.”
The row closest to me is full of people bowing their heads. Some of the others stare at me as if I am the devil.
“Jack Jupiter here took part in the robbery two days ago in Sharon. Y’all know the one I’m talkin ‘bout, the one which coincidentally killed Mel Francis and Dan Carnegie. Now we ain’t got no medicine, and Sharon is lost. Can’t step foot there without gettin shot at by Carnivores.” He flips his hat back on his head, grimaces at the crowd. “Now, I don’t know ‘bout y’all, but I get pretty bored all cooped up in here like chickens in a cage waitin to be slaughtered! I lose sleep thinkin there’s bastards like Jack Jupiter and his gang killin our people and takin our medicine and food just because they can! I think it’s time we get some revenge.”
The crowd erupts.
“Bring him here!” Spike shouts.
One of the soldiers walk up behind me and nudges me forward. I don’t hesitate. With the crowd booing and jeering, I am no longer frozen. There’s a time and a place to freeze, and this is not it. I walk, Spike’s screwed-up face getting closer and closer.
He holds a hand up. The soldier’s grip around my arms squeezes me tighter and I stop.
Spike looks away from me with his blank, dark eyes and scans the crowd again. “See, I’m fair. Jack Jupiter has a gun on his hip. So do I. We are going to do it like they did it back in the day. Back in the Old West. Whoever’s fastest on the draw walks away the winner. I’m gonna show each one of y’all here tonight that ain’t no carny a match for me.”
The crowd cheers again. They love this stuff. I can see it in their eyes now that I’m closer. It’s funny that when the world goes to shit, the people go with it.
“But first we’re gonna have fun with Jack Jupiter.” Spike cocks an eyebrow, “I mean, after all, he could win the shootout. Not likely, but possible, right? So we gotta get some of that sweet revenge, don’t we?” He looks to one of the dark tunnels in the circle where the microphone’s cord disappears to and he motions to someone I can’t see. “Bring ‘em out! Bring ‘em out!”
I look on with wide eyes, knowing exactly who he is talking about.
They are in cages like animals. The cages are on wheels. Each one of them has a burlap sack over their heads like I had, but they are not cuffed. They are too beaten for them to fight back. That much I can see.
“Darlene!” My breathing speeds up. I feel like I’m looking down on this terrible situation, helpless.
“Jack? Jack? Jack!” she screams. “Help me!”
“Many of you have heard about the rumors of what goes on in Dr. Klein’s lab. I’m going to tell you the bulk of those rumors are untrue,” Spike says, the accent gone. I wonder if he consciously does this or if it’s just a sign of his insanity. “One of them is true. We are working to develop the zombies into soldiers for your protection, and so far our efforts have taken great strides in the right direction, but without test subjects to use our experiments on, we will never know. As is common in all experiments, there are failures. But here in Eden we still have use of ‘em.” A smile splits his harsh face in half. “Tonight we find out if that’s true!”
The crowd is quiet. They are as stunned as me.
One of the soldiers shifts uncomfortably to my right. I don’t see him, but I feel him.
Butch walks the dirt between the cages. He looks at me.
“Let them out,” Spike says.
Butch takes keys off of his belt, and starts jimmying the locks.
“Now before y’all get squeamish,” Spike says, “remember these are the same people who massacred our own in Sharon, the same people who may be the reason your mom or dad or husband or wife dies from a fever or a bad cut! Even your kids! Remember, people! Remember!”
With that, he drops the mic and sits down on his chair, which is not actually made of bones — not human bones, at least — but ivory instead.
First, Norm hits the dirt, a dust cloud billowing around him. He struggles to get up to his knees. As he does. Butch rips the burlap sack off of his head. My heart breaks looking at my older brother’s face. It is swollen and blue. There are cuts crusted with blood. One eye is shut completely. Still, just like he did back in the interrogation, exploding zombie head room, he smiles with a few missing teeth.
Abby is next. She kicks and bucks, eventually getting out herself. The soldier guiding her grows impatient, his face snarling, and he throws her. She falls, not as hard as Norm but pretty hard.
“Fuck you,” she seethes.
The soldier just smiles.
Behind all of this, Spike cackles like a witch.
Last is Darlene, and the rough way Butch t
akes her arm causes me to lunge forward. The soldiers behind me grabs my cuffed wrists. “Uh-uh, Hercules,” he says.
“Jack!” Darlene says, but she sounds so distant.
I’m pulled up to my feet.
The crowd is growing restless, the heads and bodies are constantly shifting from foot to foot. They want blood now. The preliminary matters are too boring. They think they are cooped up chickens, when really they are safe behind these walls, they are blessed.
Butch takes the sack off of Darlene’s face.
She tries to run over to me. No luck. Butch holds her back.
“Murderers!”
“Kill them all!”
I see Spike leaning in his chair like the class clown. He is smiling, his hands up, fingers waggling to the crowd, urging them on.
Keep it coming, c’mon, let ‘em hear it, his face says.
“Jack, I love you,” Darlene says.
“I love you, too,” I say. We stare at each other for a long moment, the crowd buzzing all around us.
“How cute,” Norm says, snickering.
Butch sucker punches him, a spray of blood escapes his clenched teeth, and he falls to his knees on the dirt.
I lunge again.
“When are we going to kill these sons of bitches?” Abby asks.
Smack.
She is backhanded by a portly man wearing the soldier attire. A stream of blood falls from the corner of her mouth, and she looks at him. “I’m going to remember that,” she says. And she will. I know what she’s capable of, but seeing someone hit her brings my rage back.
The portly man just laughs.
Spike picks the microphone back up. “You know, I’ve punished him once already.” He looks to the soldier holding me. “Uncuff him and put his hands in the air! Make him bow down to me!”
The soldier uncuffs me, the pressure vanishing sweetly. But he grabs my hands hard and thrusts them up hard enough to make my shoulders pop. I try not to let him do it, but I’m overmatched. Bowing to Spike makes me want to vomit, but I do.
To the soldier, Spike says, “Bring Jupiter below my feet, and don’t let him look away.”
The soldier nudges me.
“Now bring my babies out!” Spike says.
Butch seems to grow a shade paler. I see the beads of sweat standing out on his forehead in the sickly light blazing above us. He motions to a couple of his posse near the tunnel.
The crowd goes silent.
There is a terrible buzz that fills the air. In the darkness a red light flips on, the color of the devil, the color of blood.
Dirt starts to shift below our feet. In the middle of the arena, it looks as if a great worm is trying to break through to the surface. The ground shakes. Feedback whines from the microphone, but not loud enough to drown out Spike’s mad cackles.
My heartbeat is thrumming in my ears. Darlene looks to me. Norm is too dazed. Abby is trying to stay balanced.
A cage raises from an opening in the dirt floor. Gears and pulleys whine and grind. The top of the dome comes first, its polished metal gleaming. Then comes the rest. The bars are thick, the surface area is large, and the amount of zombies inside is shocking.
It stops and settles, clouds of dirt puffing up around its steel beam underside.
For a second, everything is normal.
The crowd doesn’t make a sound aside from a few people asking each other what the hell is going on.
Like a warning siren knifing through the air, I hear it, that noise that only used to be in my head but is now inescapable. I am not imagining this. As much as I wish I was, I’m not not seeing zombies milling about in a cage that seems to materialize out of nowhere. I’m not not hearing the groans and moans of the dead.
Forty-Two
The crowd goes fucking bonkers. Really, it’s like their favorite baseball player just hit a walk-off grand slam to win the World Series. Have these people never seen a zombie before? No way. The dead are everywhere. Sure, these walls and gates and crazy bastards with AR15s might keep the hordes out but the people had come from somewhere, some overrun city, right? I’m not crazy to think that, am I?
I curl my fingers into fists. The very reaction of this crowd, who I felt bad for at one point being at the beck and call of this crazy, Brooklyn cowboy, pisses me off. They are no different from the beasts on the outside and the beasts in this pit.
“Yee-haw!” Spike shouts. “That what you want? You’re damn right it is!”
The crowd roars again.
“Bring Jack closer to me. We are both gonna wanna see this in all its excruciating glory.”
I am jolted off my feet and dragged toward the cage. I glance behind me before the soldier snaps my head back, and I catch the flinty eyes of Spike. There’s evil in those eyes, malice. It’s as if I’m staring into the face of the devil. He grins wide, sits back in his chair and grips the arms while a small group of camouflaged-wearing jackasses begin struggling to move the platform, their faces turning beet-red, sweat gleaming from their foreheads.
Meanwhile, the crowd goes crazy again.
Me, well, I do what any man in my position would do, any man who is getting dragged to a container full of starving zombies, I go slack, let all my weight fall to my knees. I picture a rock breaking the surface of a pond, sinking, sinking, sinking. I picture a dog on a leash at the vet’s office pulling in the opposite direction of that glass door with the doctor’s name stenciled on it.
Sadly, the soldiers aren’t having any of that, and as they kick me and yank me, the crowd only grows louder.
“Bring the others,” Spike says from behind me.
Coming from my left is Darlene, Norm, and Abby. They are fighting, but not with much luck. We are vastly outnumbered now, and it’s not like before. On the outside, we’re always outnumbered. There were seven billion people on this planet when the disease hit, and I remember hearing reports of an almost ninety percent communicability, which means there’s a possibility of over six billion dead people walking this earth. You’re always outnumbered, man, I just never thought I’d be outnumbered inside these walls.
Darlene offers me one last look of despair as she passes by, and she’s so close I can almost smell the sweetness of her skin.
Jack, she says. I don’t hear it over the roaring of the crowd, but I do read her lips. Jack, I love you.
“Bring ‘em closer,” Spike yells. Even with the microphone picking up his voice, I can hardly hear him. But I feel the rough hands pushing into my back. My heels dig into the dirt, making small divots. It’s no use. I feel the opposing forces giving.
The zombies look up with their rotting faces, their hands clenched on the bars. I see one with a missing index finger, just like Norm. There is another without eyes, and it looks so weird without the glowing orbs in its face — somehow more dead.
“See that?” Spike says. “This is what you get for messing with Eden. This is what you all get!” This is no Brooklyn or Old Western accent. This is the accent of a man who’s frayed rope of sanity has snapped a long time ago.
“Throw them in, and make Jupiter watch his friends and his lover torn to pieces,” Spike says.
The crowd cheers. They all stand up, the bleachers beneath their feet creaking, their eyes widening.
The soldier’s grip on my arms is sweaty. It’s a hot night in Florida.
Darlene screams out as she is the first dragged to the zombie cage.
“No!” I scream.
“Yes! Yes!” Spike says. I see him jumping up and down out of the corner of my eye like an overexcited puppy. “Kill them! Kill them all!”
We stop at the base of the platform, about ten feet from Norm and Abby, farther from Darlene who is at the cage’s retractable door. The crowd is now on tiptoe, shielding their eyes from the blazing floodlights.
Butch leans over and says in my ear, “I take it back. Tony was lucky. He got off easy. No torture, hardly any pain. These ones….eh, not so lucky. The girl’s are always the worst. They screa
m and scream their damn heads off…”
He drones on, but I don’t hear him. All I can do is look at Darlene, the woman that I love about to be thrown into a cage full of zombies while a screaming crowd cheers for her death.
No.
That’s it. Fuck this.
It is not hard to make a move against Butch because he is not expecting it. He is scary, he has weapons and a killer instinct I cannot begin to comprehend, but he does not have what I have going for me.
He doesn’t have stupidity.
Yeah, that’s right, I just called myself stupid. And as I rip my arms out of his sweaty grip and he and his soldier’s mouths turn into shocked Os of surprise, I can’t help but realize how utterly dumb I am.
But it all happens so fast.
A soldier clears a path in the dense forest of dead limbs and snarling faces inside of the cage with what looks like a six-foot animal catch pole. Another has Darlene by the hair and throws her in. What’s even stupider, as I shove my way past Butch Hazard and the younger soldier who I met in the locker room, is that I go in after her.
And the crowd goes wild.
Forty-Three
The first thing I hear after I hear Darlene and me hitting the metal floor and the sounds of the curious snarls — as if these zombies’s prayers were answered and fresh meat materialized from the heavens — is Spike saying, “You idiots! You imbeciles!”
One of his pistols cracks the night air, seemingly splitting the atmosphere in two. The crowd’s screams momentarily quiet. The zombies turn their heads toward the sound of the shot, giving me a moment to scramble up from the floor. My head is thrumming and Darlene is a crumpled ball behind me, but we are relatively unscathed.
“Darlene, get up, c’mon!” I say. I’m scrabbling at her like a dog trying to find a bone he buried in the dirt. “Please! Get up!”
She starts to move. Slowly, but she’s moving nonetheless.
From my vantage point I can see the citizens looking on with eager eyes. Salivating. Wanting the kill.
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